Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  At Christ Church Michael was considered ‘very reserved’, artistically gifted, impressionable. Robert Boothby described him as ‘very sensitive and emotional, but he concealed both to a large extent’. Lucas noted his alienation from the world, calling him ‘an elvish spectator’, something of an analyst of the pitiful world like Barrie, and yet no one spoke of Michael as cynical. On the contrary, Nico remarked on his genuine consideration for others. It seems that, unlike Uncle Jim, Michael was capable of disinterested love and compassion.

  Among the few close friends he made was Rupert Buxton, who did not come up until the following year. Rupert Buxton was the youngest son of Sir Thomas Fowell Victor Buxton, the 4th Baronet Buxton, who had died in 1919. In April 1920 Rupert Buxton wrote to his mother that he and Michael had had a working holiday in Surrey, though precious little work had been done. On the last two days they had walked from Chichester to Beachy Head along the South Downs, managing thirty-five miles a day.

  I have never known such a walk for views – southward over the hills to the sea and northward over the whole expanse of Sussex & Surrey on a narrow grassy plain with steep sides covered with primroses, violets, cowslips & wood anemones. A most inspiring place to walk on. I can well understand the enthusiasm of Belloc & Kipling for the ‘great hills of the south country’ and the patriotism that they breed.

  Buxton had been head boy at Harrow. But on 4 December 1918, he had found his way into the pages of The Times in a most mysterious set of circumstances. A letter, unsigned and unstamped, had been left for him at his house at Harrow. It read:

  You will be well advised to walk up Peterborough-hill alone at 10 minutes past 7 on Sunday night. Your help is needed.

  Peterborough-hill lay only a few yards from Buxton’s house. He sent a note to his housemaster, Archer Vassall, enclosing the letter and informing him that he was keeping the appointment. He had then disappeared. Vassall and another master had watched the road for some time, but nothing was seen of the boy. The police were called in after he failed to appear on the last train from London.

  The following day, a Monday, another letter, in the same hand as the first, was, according to The Times, received at Buxton’s home, ‘stating that he was safe, but that his brains were needed. The letter concluded – “Ill if he refuses, well if he agrees.”’

  The next anyone heard was from Buxton himself. A telegram from Newcastle, signed ‘Rupert’, was received by his school and by his father stating that he would shortly be returning to London.

  On 9 January 1919, a second, shorter article appeared in the same newspaper, following a statement about his earlier disappearance made by Buxton’s father to the effect that ‘his son had, in the doctor’s opinion, been suffering from overstrain resulting in some measure from preparing for a scholarship examination at Oxford... He is already much better and it is confidently expected that a short period of rest will completely restore his health.’ There then followed a quote from the headmaster, the Reverend Lionel Ford, about the qualities Buxton had exercised as head boy at Harrow, in particular his ‘high-mindedness, loyalty, tact, and consideration for others’.

  This was no idle puff. Buxton was an unusual and enlightened boy, and, like Michael, a poet. As head boy, he never beat other boys: this was unheard of in any English public school at the time. He also had a social conscience and even as a schoolboy faced up to the inequalities and prejudices of the world, going out of his way to make friends with ‘strange out-of-the-way people such as pavement artists and street hawkers’, as one Harrovian put it, and going into London for days at a time on philanthropic quests, one of which may have been connected to his mysterious disappearance in December 1918. He was sensitive to anything or anyone at all artificial, and was a lover of nature. All of this he combined with an outsize ego. Buxton was quite a handful even at 18, and some of his qualities were clearly shared by Michael.

  It was Boothby who said of Michael that ‘he had a profound effect on virtually everyone who came into contact with him’, and a colleague at Harrow said of Buxton, ‘Humble people always thought him a kind of saint as soon as they looked at him.’

  However, according to Boothby, ‘Buxton was dark, gloomy, saturnine, with an almost suicidal streak in him. I remember Michael asked me, “Why don’t you like my being friends with Rupert Buxton?” And I said “The answer to that is – I have a feeling of doom about him.”’

  Boothby’s insight into Buxton would be entirely consistent with the character of one so young and inexperienced emotionally taking on the sins of the world. Boothby made it clear that it was never a homosexual relationship between Rupert and Michael, and he would have known. But there is no shadow of a doubt that they became close, and I wonder whether it was Michael’s gloom that was fed to Rupert. What Boothby is telling us is that something was going on and that it was melancholy and abnormal. Boothby also had an insight into Jim and Michael:

  It was an unhealthy relationship. I don’t mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection... I thought there was something twisted about [Jim],

  Boothby had often visited Michael at Barrie’s Adelphi Terrace flat, and on one occasion recoiled from the scene as if it were the lair of the Devil:

  There was a morbid atmosphere about it. I remember going there one day and it almost overwhelmed me, and I was glad to get away. We were going back to Oxford in Michael’s car, and I said, ‘It’s a relief to get away from that flat,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is.’

  One is aware above all of the unnatural nature of Jim’s relationship with Michael, and that Jim was obsessed with death.

  Around this time Roger Senhouse introduced Michael to friends of his in the Bloomsbury Group. Here there was similar concern. He never seemed to relax at parties at Garsington Manor, and Dora Carrington wrote to Lytton Strachey of Michael’s moodiness –

  Perhaps that is just the gloom of finding Barrie one’s keeper for life.

  Rupert Buxton decided to sort the situation out. He invited Barrie to dinner, alone, just the two of them. That must have taken some guts, and was characteristic of the young man. There is a rather sickening letter from Jim to Buxton’s mother: ‘Rupert treated me quite differently from any other of my various boys’ friends. They were always polite and edged away from me, as of a different generation, but he took for granted that Michael’s friend should be mine also... I daresay the two of them chuckled over it [the dinner], for they could both be very gay. They were either wildly gay or very serious as they walked together to Sandford [where they drowned].’

  If Buxton had planned a sociable evening, wouldn’t Michael have been included? More likely Buxton invited Barrie to dinner alone because he wanted to say things to him that would have upset Michael. Michael was drawing away from Jim, but Jim was hanging on. Buxton wanted Michael to get away. There the critical tensions lay. But Jim was in control. As with Sylvia, as with George, he threatened to be Michael’s keeper for life.

  In August 1920 Barrie took a house on Eilean Shona, a small island off the coast of Argyll. Michael arrived with Nico and some friends, among them Senhouse, but notably not Buxton.

  The process of rejection had begun. Rejection of Barrie always went hand in hand with danger. Barrie wrote of Michael, in ‘Neil and Tintinnabulum’, that he had begun receding ‘farther from my ken down the road which hurries him from me... he no longer needs me as he did, and he will go on needing me less’. Of the boys and young men on Eilean Shona, he wrote to Cynthia Asquith, who was by now his secretary:

  We are a very Etonian household and there is endless shop talked, during which I am expected to be merely a ladler out of food. If I speak to one he shudders politely then edges away.

  In 1975 this was reprinted in an article by Alison Lurie,1 which infuriated Nico, for Lurie went on to say that the boys, ‘one by one, as they grew older, began to find his [Barrie’s] games and jokes embarrassing, and to resent his presence in the househol
d – an embarrassment and resentment complicated by the knowledge that this odd little man who looked like an aged child was paying the tradesmen’s bills and their fees at Eton and Oxford’.

  Of course, Barrie’s hold over the boys was more than his generosity with expenses. His morbid streak, and its roots in a neurosis and death fixation, was being fed to Michael as if through an umbilical cord. And it was true. Michael was trying to get away, and Barrie knew he was: ‘The new life is building seven walls around him. Are such of his moves in the game as I can follow merely an expert’s kindness to an indifferent player?’2

  Michael wrote two poems on Eilean Shona. One, ‘The Island of Sleep’, tells of the opportunity so remote and time-lost a place afforded to hear ‘in murmurs of a woodland stream Arcadian incantations of resurgent Pan’. The word ‘incantations’ is nearly illegible, but the rest of it is clear. Pan, the Greek god, ran with Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, on the mountains of Arcadia. ‘Yet will not touch again thy perfumed shore... to tread the footprints of old deities, So thou do not send echoes to remind of those sweet pipes, and charm him from his kind.’

  Michael is saying goodbye to the Barrie boy-cult. And he pictures it as linked to some sort of ancient religion – ‘foot-prints of old deities’, pagan deities, a Satanic reference. Islands and Satanic references run through the writings of both Jim and Kicky.

  The other poem is the more literary of the two –

  Throned on a cliff serene Man saw the sun

  hold a red torch above the farthest seas,

  and the fierce island pinnacles put on

  in his defence their sombre panoplies;

  Foremost the white mists eddied, trailed and spun

  like seekers, emulous to clasp his knees,

  till all the beauty of the scene seemed one,

  led by the secret whispers of the breeze.

  The sun’s torch suddenly flashed upon his face

  and died; and he sat content in subject night

  and dreamed of an old dead foe that had sought and found him;

  a beast stirred boldly in his resting place;

  And the cold came; Man rose to his master-height,

  shivered, and turned away; but the mists were round him.

  Nico recalled Michael showing him this poem, just after he’d written it, ‘and my saying words to the effect that I liked it but I hadn’t a clue what it was all about! Which I remember rather disappointed him as he thought it was “so simple”. I’ve never tried to think who was his “old dead foe”, just taken it to be imaginary.’3

  The old dead foe – I am led to believe – is ‘the same nameless enemy’, a Mephistophelean spirit, that pursued Michael in his nightmares as a boy. The ‘seekers’ are what in Tommy and Grizel Barrie himself calls ‘little gods’, but in truth they are devils because they enjoy the cruel games he plays with Grizel’s heart, and when Tommy is about to offer poor Grizel marriage, ‘He heard the voices of his little gods screaming to him to draw back.’

  Did I never tell you of my little gods? I so often emerged triumphant from my troubles, and so undeservedly, that I thought I was especially looked after by certain tricky spirits in return for the entertainment I gave them. My little gods I called them, and we had quite a bowing acquaintance. But you see, at the critical moment they flew away laughing.

  Tommy’s little gods, the dissolute trickster people of his imagination, do not always help him; they make him as ‘miserable as the damned’ when he does the right thing by Grizel, which suggests that he is less in control than he seems.

  Voices in the head are an occupational hazard of one who lives with multiple personalities and cannot distinguish what is real from what is unreal.

  Barrie was convinced that he was attended by a malignant devil, as in 1922 he explained to an audience of uncomprehending students at St Andrews University. He read them Michael’s poem, but without naming Michael:

  Spirits must sometimes walk St Andrews. I do not mean the ghosts of queens or prelates, but one that keeps step, as soft as snow, with some poor student. He sometimes catches sight of it. That is why his fellows can never quite touch him, their best beloved; he half knows something of which they know nothing – the secret that is hidden in the face of the Mona Lisa. As I see him, life is so beautiful to him that its proportions are monstrous. Perhaps his childhood may have been overful of gladness; they don’t like that. If the seekers were kind he is the one for whom the flags of his college would fly one day. But the seeker I am thinking of is unfriendly, and so our student is ‘the lad that will never be old’. He often gaily forgets, and thinks he has slain his foe by daring him, like him who, dreading water, was always the first to leap into it. One can see him serene, astride a Scotch cliff, singing to the sun the farewell thanks of a boy... If there is any of you here so rare that the seekers have taken an ill-will to him, as to the boy who wrote those lines, I ask you to be careful.

  This was the nightmare world – the Satanic dark side of J. M. Barrie – from which Michael was endeavouring to escape when he walked with Rupert Buxton to Sandford that day in April 1921.

  A push-and-pull series of escape attempts led up to it. On 9 September 1920, Michael wrote to Robert Dundas, Tutor and Senior Censor of Christ Church:

  Your emotions will not, I know, be violently stirred, when I say I am not going up to Oxford again... I feel very much the young fool; but wish to be obstinate into the bargain, even if the first step I take for myself be into the deepest of deep ditches... I do incidentally intend to quit education for some trade.

  Six days later he wrote again to Dundas, asking whether after all he could return to Oxford: ‘I dislike always bringing up the whole question of my existence before you. Would you come to lunch here, say, Friday?’ Then: ‘I’m sorry to be a bother; but should I possibly be allowed to creep into the House again in October, into some obscure corner?’

  On 28 September he sent a telegram to Dundas –

  Have become moral and ask leave to return to work but is this possible as have opened no book this vacation. Query collections await verdict meanwhile starting to read.

  In the Easter 1921 vac he went with Rupert Buxton on a reading trip to Corfe Castle in Dorset, staying at a little inn by the sea. Jim appeared and left with Michael for London.

  Thursday, 19 May was a warm summer’s day during Eights Week. Edward Marjoribanks, a fellow undergraduate of Christ Church, saw Buxton and Michael around noon. Michael said he was going to have a swim in Sandford Pool in the afternoon, and would not be able to watch the Eights. Buxton did not say anything. The two young men left the city shortly after two o’clock.

  The pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in.

  So wrote Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat in 1889. Other fatalities have been recorded there. On one occasion a Christ Church student was drowned while attempting to ‘shoot the lashers’ (the weir) in a boat. John Beckly, a son of the lock keeper, was drowned while taking fish from a trap ‘on the big lasher’.

  Sandford Pool, an idyllic spot a few miles south from Oxford on the way to Radley, lies on a stretch of water which is these days out of bounds to the inquisitive tourist, but can be reached by walking across the fields. Entry upon the weir or lasher that separates two pools is prevented by high fencing, but the pools, high and low, are open enough, and quite beautiful and tranquil in spring and summer.

  The view of the jury at the Coroner’s Inquest was that Michael was accidentally drowned while bathing, and that Rupert lost his life trying to rescue him.

  However, the jury did not visit the site, and the Dean of Christ Church was not only called to serve on the jury, but was appointed foreman of it. This is not just bad form, it is irregular, because a verdict of accidental death rather than one of suicide was clearly in the interest of the College.

  Additionally, the state of mind of the two dead boys was never a matter of analysis at the inquest. Yet the potenti
al for suicide is high in two young men as idealistic, mentally rigorous, poetically romantic and as doom-laden as Rupert and Michael.

  The verdict states that one boy was trying to rescue the other, which suggests that the one needing to be rescued was in difficulties, which implies accidental death. But, as Peter wrote to Dolly on 1 June 1921: ‘As a matter of fact, though the coroner chose to express a definite opinion, there was not the slightest evidence as to which of them was trying to help the other.’ No evidence was given at the inquest of any rescue attempt. An eyewitness told of hearing one shout, which could as easily have been a shout of triumph as of panic. What the witnesses actually saw was two men holding each other, not struggling, quite still in the water, before they disappeared.

  Much was made of Michael’s ineptitude as a swimmer. But Marjoribanks gave evidence that while ‘Mr Davies could not swim very well... It was his pride, however, to swim about twenty yards.’ And again, as Peter Davies, a sensible man who visited the site, as I did, wrote to Dolly: ‘The place is too calm, and the distance from bank to bank too small, for the question of swimming capacity to enter into it at all.’

  The two eyewitnesses, Charles Henry Beecham, engineer’s assistant at the Sandford Paper Mills, and his assistant Matthew Gaskell, testified that the pool was ‘as still as a mill-pond’.

  Beecham said that when he went up to the weir with Gaskell to regulate the water for the mill, he was standing on the Oxford side of the weir when he heard a shout. He looked and saw two men as it were standing together in the pool, their heads above water. Assuming that the shout had been for assistance –

  I immediately ran across the bridge to get the lifebelt, and Gaskell followed. Gaskell held the line while I threw the belt, but the men had already disappeared.