Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  So, the Will had been found by the boys among Sylvia’s things at Campden Hill Square. Not by Jim, by the boys. That was why he had had to act on its discovery, and make the false copy of it and send it to Emma. Had he found the Will and not bothered with it, had he put it on the fire, it would certainly not have altered anything. He already had the house, the boys, the wherewithal. But when the boys found it he had to act, because they were bound to mention it to someone in the family. So, he altered Sylvia’s Will to suggest that she wanted him to be their guardian. Revealing its existence to Dolly made him seem open-handed to her, when in fact, as his fraudulent transcription shows, he was being quite the opposite.

  He needn’t have worried. No one in the family much cared.

  * George Bernard Shaw.

  * As if ‘unattached’ was a point in his favour.

  * So, at least their aunt Margaret was a presence in the boys’ lives.

  * These are, in fact, seven large sheets in Sylvia’s hand, and five in Barrie’s copy.

  PART V

  1910–1921

  Michael, Daphne and Uncle Jim: ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’

  A most beautiful person... dressed in skeleton leaves’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Looking for Michael

  Michael was 10 when Sylvia died. His time had come. Ten was the age at which George had been Uncle Jim’s favourite and is the time when a boy is at his most beautiful, if he is to be beautiful at all, the beauty special because it is ephemeral. Michael was the most beautiful of the brothers, the image of his mother, and dangerously vulnerable to Uncle Jim. Denis Mackail was there in 1910. He knew both the child and the man:

  An orphan at ten. Not wax for Barrie – not by any means – but you can steer or lead little boys of ten in a way that you don’t do afterwards. The spell is still irresistible when it chooses, and here is the boy – quick, sensitive, attractive, and gifted – who is to be everything else that the magician most admires. There is no cloud between them. From Barrie, as yet, Michael has no secrets. You can call him the favourite, if you like – indeed there are plenty of moments when it is impossible to call him anything else – but his brothers are the last to resent this. He and Barrie draw closer and closer, and perhaps it isn’t always Barrie who leads or steers. He has given his heart to Michael... and has transferred an enormous part of his ambition. Is it dangerous? No answer. One mustn’t say so . . .

  We don’t know how Mackail got this passage past Cynthia Asquith’s censoring pencil, but we do know that Geraldine Gibb, soon to become the wife of Michael’s brother Jack, thought the relationship between Michael and Uncle Jim ‘unhealthy. Everybody else did too... It was very bad for Michael to be so much the centre of Barrie’s world.’1

  Michael had attracted Uncle Jim from the start. The fourth of the brothers, born in 1900, he was a year old during the first holiday at Black Lake, where ‘he was merely an honorary member of the band, waving his foot to you for luck when you set off with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him’. But later, it was he who first saw Tinkerbell. ‘It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves No. 4 saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink.’2

  In The Little White Bird, Michael’s foot makes as significant an appearance as Trilby’s in the du Maurier novel. The Captain (Jim) mocks Nanny Irene (Nanny Hodgson) for keeping the child away from him, and an arrangement is made for him to see the child alone. Nanny begs to be allowed to stay, but the boy’s mother has already acquiesced and Nanny is dismissed. As she takes a tearful farewell, she says to her charge: ‘And if he takes off your socks, my pretty, may he be blasted for evermore.’

  The taking off of a baby’s sock, the ultimate transgression, gives the Captain something to aim for, and Jim, as omnipotent author, dares us to see it as a metaphor for abuse.

  The innocence in the boy’s eyes shames the Captain into seeing himself as he really is. ‘In them I saw my true self. They opened for me that peddler’s pack of which I have made so much ado, and I found that it was weighted less with pretty little sad love-tokens than with ignoble thoughts and deeds and an unguided life.’ The peddler, the trickster of tradition, is the sidekick of the Devil, which is why he must ever move on. The Captain looks dejectedly at the boy, ‘because I feared he would not have me in his service’.

  But then the child smiles, and is at once a lost boy. ‘I felt myself a fine fellow... never before had I come into such close contact with a child; the most I had ever done was, when they were held up to me, to shut my eyes and kiss a vacuum... and yet we managed it between us quite easily. His body instinctively assumed a certain position as I touched him, which compelled my arms to fall into place, and the thing was done... I discovered that he wanted me to take off his sock!’

  The first boy actually to be born into Jim’s Peter-Pan boy cult, Michael never found it easy. In 1912, when he was 12, Daphne recalled overhearing a conversation between Nanny Hodgson and her own nanny: ‘“Michael has bad nightmares. He dreams of ghosts coming through the window.” At night I would stare at the window and understand.’ But Michael’s nightmares were severe:

  There was a horror looking for him in his childhood. Waking dreams we called them, and they lured him out of bed in the night. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking, and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it, probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up. I have known the small white figure defend the stair-head thus for an hour, blazing rather than afraid, concentrated on some dreadful matter in which, tragically, none could aid him. I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me, for I had been advised, warned, that I must not wake him abruptly. Gradually I soothed him back to bed, and though my presence there in the morning told him, in the light language we then adopted, that he had been ‘at it again’ he could remember nothing of who the enemy was. It had something to do with the number 7 . . .3

  The following year Michael was sent to Eton as a boarder. Jim wrote to Turley Smith and thanked him ‘for the affection that made you know how sad I would be about Michael gone to school. He is very lonely there at present, and I am foolishly taken up about it. It rather broke me up seeing him crying and trying to whistle at the same time.’4

  Michael disliked Eton from the start, and Jim found the separation so difficult he took to creeping around the playing fields of the school, a ghostly presence through the mist, ‘so that he may at least see me nigh though we cannot touch’.

  George, meanwhile, who had joined the Army on the eve of the Great War was still very much in the frame. In September 1914, Jim was in New York with Gilmour and Mason when he received news of George’s summons to Sheerness in Kent for training. Staying mostly ‘in hiding’ to avoid being chased by reporters, Barrie wrote marvelling at the American cult of celebrity, but was obviously enjoying life – ‘Last night I had a Gin Whizz with a Long Tom in it. I slept well. Mason had two and slept better.’ Shortly afterwards, Peter joined George at Sheerness, where both young men awaited orders from the Front.

  Now that Michael was away for extended periods at school – Nico was never a favoured one – Jim began to take a serious interest in his godson Peter Scott, who was three when Jim wrote him this letter:

  My dear Peter,

  Hallo I am so glad too get your ripping letter it is a lovly let ter the reaso

  N I have not wrote [strike through] writ [strike] rot before is because I have been in Switserla

  Nd with Ni

  Kolas and Mi

  Kal and them

  Uther boys . . .

  It is time u sawed Pete

  R Pan I am

  Too ring youre

  Mother up

  About it tomo

  Rrow. He is br
/>
  Ave he can fly

  I am

  Yure lovin

  G

  Godfather

  Ure fotogrfs is grand they is on my

  Bookshelf

  Peter Scott made frequent visits to Adelphi House over the following years, and his mother Kathleen was happy to leave him alone with Jim. Peter remembered ‘long silences’.

  Soon Jim began actively negotiating with Kathleen to become the boy’s guardian in the event of her death. ‘No one could love Peter more than I do,’ he wrote to her. Kathleen resisted being cast as ‘another Sylvia’ and called on the support of Lord Knutsford. Soon all three were writing letters, Knutsford asking the most pertinent question – ‘What sort of life do you want for Peter and could Sir J B or my family the better give this?’

  Kathleen eventually had the guts to turn down Barrie’s offer. But the seriousness of his intent, or more likely the willingness of one of Barrie’s many friends in Fleet Street to participate in his dark sense of humour, was revealed in a note she received at this time:

  The News Editor of the ‘Daily Chronicle’ presents his compliments to Lady Scott and would be obliged if she would confirm or deny a report which has been forwarded to the News Editor this afternoon that she was married to Sir J. M. Barrie six weeks ago . . .

  At Christmas 1914, just as George was arriving at the front line in France and his brother, the other Peter, was poised to join him, Peter Scott was Uncle Jim’s guest in a box at a performance of Peter Pan, where he enjoyed himself tearing up the programme and throwing the pieces on people’s heads.

  Between 1915 and his death the following year, George’s letters to Uncle Jim show the ghastly realities of trench warfare on the Somme – liquid mud up to the knees, the stench of rotting corpses beneath the feet, and the agony of frozen and frostbitten extremities – but Jim’s remarkable talent for ‘finding a way’ served to lighten the young man’s spirits. ‘Boxes and boxes’ of goods from Fortnum & Mason, dispatched on Jim’s orders, somehow found their way through.

  In March 1915 the 9th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Division, prepared for an attack ‘with the object of straightening out the line’ at Saint-Eloi. George told a comrade that he had a premonition he would be killed. He was sitting on a bank along with the rest of his Company being addressed by his Colonel when he was shot through the head. He died almost immediately.

  That same night, Nico and Nanny were awakened by a loud knocking on the door of 23 Campden Hill Square. (Michael was away at Eton.) The knocking was Uncle Jim. Nico sat up in bed listening as a ‘Banshee wail’ filled the house. Jim mounted the stairs, came into his room, and sat on his bed in silence.

  George had been the leader, and in the wider family the sadness was augmented by the death in battle that same year of Sylvia’s brother, Guy du Maurier. Naturally the boys were deeply affected by the losses but for Michael there was the additional dimension that George’s death increased the intensity of Uncle Jim’s attentions. Explained Nico years later –

  George being dead – we all knew Michael was The One. If George hadn’t been killed, who knows? Probably Michael would always have been Number One.5

  For Michael, now 15, life with Uncle Jim became a game of chess, ‘the game of trying to know each other without asking questions’. Jim’s moves took the boy from dependence on him to a position of domination over him. Just as Sylvia had initially relied on Jim as ‘a kind of extra nurse, extremely useful fairy-godmother, or sometimes even errand-boy’, and Jim had used this platform of dependence to dominate her from within, with his alchemic text rituals, now he created a similar sort of relationship with Michael:

  When Uncle Jim was strongly attracted by people, he wanted at once to own them and to be dominated by them whichever their sex. There’s no denying that he did increasingly ‘own’ Sylvia and her boys. Later, I think, he achieved something of the same peculiar equilibrium with George, and much more with Michael.6

  Since the death of Sylvia, Jim had enjoyed being ‘the one needed’ in his relationship with Michael. And now he puffed up Michael’s self-esteem by involving him closely in his work.

  No. 4 jumps from being astride my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to becoming, while still a schoolboy, the sternest of my literary critics. Anything he shook his head over I abandoned, and conceivably the world has thus been deprived of a masterpiece . . . Sometimes, however, No. 4 liked my efforts, and I walked in the azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus* to me with the comment ‘Not so bad.’7

  Macnaghten, his tutor at Eton, said that Michael was the brightest boy he had ever taught, even that he was a poet of genius. It is true that Michael became editor of the Eton College Chronicle and wrote many a leader article, also that his friend Roger Senhouse thought him a genius and tried unsuccessfully ‘to keep some sort of pace with Michael’. Michael was certainly out on his own in one sense, a loner, ‘very reserved – not a seeker after popularity’, as another friend, Clive Burt, put it. But no evidence of genius comes down to us – some passable journalism and two poems, fairly average for a boy of 20, a bit pretentious.

  George had won the Essay Prize at Eton, Peter was the scholar, yet always it is Michael, Uncle Jim’s protégé, who is the genius. Perhaps Macnaghten, who was keenly aware of Michael’s sensitivity to the tragedy of his parents’ death, talked his talents up. This may not ultimately have been to the boy’s advantage, any more than Jim using him as an editorial adviser. Encouraging Michael to exercise control over his work meant that the boy became immersed in Jim’s ideas, which shaped the relationship between them beneath the surface, allowing Jim to get ‘inside’ him just as he had done with Sylvia.

  Besides the annual production of Peter Pan, with its developing ideas about the supernatural and death, three plays in particular set the tone of the relationship. The first, Barrie’s play of 1917, Dear Brutus, takes up Henry James’s idea, aired in ‘The Middle Years’, of a second chance. It dramatises what happens when a group of characters, all of whom yearn for a second chance in life, enter an enchanted wood on Midsummer Eve, and one by one go back in time to reshape their lives. Characters pass from one world into a parallel reality, in this case not the world of the dead, but a dream world. As in all three plays the main relationship is that of a father and his child.

  The second, A Well-Remembered Voice (1918), was inspired by George’s death. A group of people gather for a séance for a young victim of the Great War, but when the young man crosses over from the spirit world, it is only to his father that he appears. The returning soldier is recognisably George, his voice ‘as boyish as ever’. The father to whom he returns is recognisably Jim. They meet in Jim’s study at Adelphi Terrace and talk eerily about the battlefield, and the lightest of veils that separates the living from the dead. As in Peter Pan, we are led to appreciate ‘what a little thing’ death is.

  The third play that shaped the Michael years, Mary Rose (1920), is also about the supernatural and the morbid. It tells of a mother who disappears on a magical Hebridean island and returns to her son as a ghost. Again there is a crossing over between life and death, and with special significance this time, because it is an idea that had its origin in Jim’s belief, first expressed in The Little White Bird, that the only ghosts are ‘dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare’, the implication being that no other inducement is great enough to bring back the departed.

  Supernatural currents, born out of George du Maurier’s work, drove Jim’s work and made a little god of Michael, celebrating his aura, the ‘Blake like effulgence’ that Roger Senhouse noticed also about George.

  But there was also a morbid streak about Jim’s captivation of Michael, both in the plays, which he discussed with Michael, and in the way he dealt with Sylvia’s death. We know that after Sylvia died Barrie made a point of writing a letter to her on each anniversary of her death, bringing her up to date with the progress of the boys.

  Nanny became increasingly
concerned, and when Nico went as a boarder to Eton in 1916 she offered her resignation. Jim saw immediately that that would not do. In spite of her disapproval of him, Nanny Hodgson had been a silent witness, hidebound by her loyalties. Jim needed her discretion, rooted in her continuing loyalty to Sylvia and Arthur, which a new nanny would not have. Jim did all in his power to persuade her to stay. Reluctantly, she agreed.

  He then set about securing a position that was not beholden to this woman, who had been a thorn in his side for as long as he had known her. He moved from his flat on the third floor of Adelphi Terrace House (fifth if you looked at it from the Embankment side) to a larger studio apartment on the top floor of the same building. No expense was spared in its redesign by Edwin Lutyens. A large study room ran the length of it to huge casement windows looking out over the Thames, making it even more like the Captain’s bridge than the flat below. The walls were mahogany panelled. Large brown wooden book-shelves were installed. The overall impression was one of brownness. Immediately to the right on entry was a large inglenook fireplace, into which Jim, at just over five feet, could wander without bending, and tuck himself away on a hard settle to read in the light of a log fire. The floor of the room was covered with matting, and later by rugs chosen by Michael. In one corner stood a polished iron stove, where Jim brewed tea when his manservant, Thurston, was not in attendance.

  ‘Somehow the apartment seems just like him,’ wrote a visitor.* Dark, bookish, imposing, hard, it would not be out of place in the opening scene of Faust as the ‘high-vaulted, narrow Gothic chamber’ where we first see the scholar sitting restless at his desk.