Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  What did you do then?

  I left Gaskell at the weir and ran to Radley College boathouse for assistance. Some of the Radley students were bathing, but some of them came back with me and others brought a boat.

  How far is the boathouse from the pool?

  About a ten minutes’ run there and back. It would take about ten minutes to bring a boat up.

  When Beecham got back to the weir he pointed out the spot where he saw the men go down, and then returned to the mill to telephone information to the County Police. Gaskell gave corroborative evidence and, answering a juror, said it took less than a minute from the time he heard the shout to get the lifebelt. A juror asked whether the witness could say whether the men were clinging to each other as though one was trying to help the other?

  Their heads were close together.

  In other words, he couldn’t say that.

  You could not see anything else?

  They appeared as though they were just standing in the water with their heads above the surface.

  Said another juror:

  Was there anything to suggest that one was supporting the other?

  One might have been, but I could not say.

  Thomas Frederick Carter, of 34 Nelson Street, Oxford, employed by the Thames Conservancy, then said he was in the depot at Osney when, just before five o’clock, he received a call to go to Sandford Pool. The superintendent sent him to drag the pool for two undergraduates who had been reported drowned. With two other assistants, he continued dragging operations, but up to dark neither of the bodies had been recovered. At seven o’clock the next morning dragging was recommenced. One body was recovered shortly after two o’clock about thirty yards from the weir, in about twenty feet of water.

  As I was hauling the body up I noticed something drop off when within about 8 ft from the surface. At first I thought it was a limb of a tree, but have now come to the conclusion that it must have been one body dropping from the other.

  One body was taken to the hotel while they dragged for the other, which was recovered an hour later. Asked the Coroner –

  Where?

  At the same spot I found the first.

  Which body was first recovered?

  I do not know the gentleman’s name, but he would be about 6 ft 2 in.

  The Dean of Christ Church asked the witness –

  Are there any notices at Sandford drawing attention to the depth and extreme danger? –

  Yes, at both gates.

  So anyone going to bathe must have seen them?

  They should have seen them quite plainly.

  Asked a juror –

  Did you form the impression that the bodies were clasped?

  Yes, that was my impression.

  And you thought they became separated when you were drawing them up?

  Yes.

  Said the Dean of Christ Church –

  I suppose as you were pulling them up the weight suddenly became lighter?

  Yes.

  The Dean – as he gave the jury’s verdict – was overcome with emotion.

  On the evening of 19 May Jim was at home alone in the Adelphi, writing his daily letter to Michael, saying that he hoped he would be able to come down for the opening performance of his new play, Shall We Join the Ladies? which starred Gerald as Dolphin, a butler. At eleven o’clock, with the intention of posting the letter, he walked out of the flat and took the lift to the ground floor. As he opened the gate of the lift and moved into the hallway, he was approached by a stranger who raised his hat, said he was from a newspaper and asked if Sir James could oblige him with a few words on the incident. Jim asked what he was talking about. It was in this way that he learned of Michael’s drowning.

  He turned and went back into the lift. In a daze he telephoned Gerald and Peter first, and then his secretary Cynthia Asquith, who recalled that he spoke ‘in a voice she hardly recognised’.

  When Cynthia arrived at the flat Gerald and Peter were already there. They tried to persuade Jim to go to bed, but he would not. Eventually they left for their own beds, and when Cynthia arrived the following morning, Jim had still not slept. He had been pacing up and down the length of the study floor all night long.

  Nico was playing cricket at Eton while Michael drowned, and in the evening sang at a Musical Society concert. He was told of his brother’s death by his tutor after lights out, at around ten o’clock, but had gone to sleep not really believing it. The full import hit him when Peter arrived at his bedside the following morning and his housemaster Macnaghten,* made it worse by coming in, kneeling by his bed and holding both their hands.

  Peter then drove Nico to Slough for breakfast and on to Jim’s flat. Recalled Nico: ‘Uncle Jim’s immediate reaction on seeing me was “Oh – take him away!” Strangely I don’t remember feeling hurt at this.’

  Nico was given the responsibility of telling Nanny, who was working as a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital.

  He was excused from the funeral and went to stay at Cannon Hall with the du Mauriers. In the 1970s, in an interview with Andrew Birkin, he said:

  I’ve always had something of a hunch that Michael’s drowning was suicide – he was in a way the ‘type’ i.e. exceptionally clever, with varying moods.

  Drowning in a pool had resonances with the original myth, in which the boys were immersed: Peter Ibbetson’s suicide attempt, his ‘one fixed idea – that of self-destruction’ after the death of Mary, Duchess of Towers, when he filled his pockets with stones and made ready to throw himself into the mare d’Auteuil, but desisted when Mary’s ghost appeared to him. It was also an idea force-fed by Jim, as author, into Tommy’s weirdly predictive dream of ‘a very noble young man, his white dead face staring at the sky from the bottom of a deep pool’.†

  Equally, of course, drowning identified Michael with Peter Pan, who stayed on the magical island as the waters of the lagoon rose, knowing ‘that it will soon be submerged’, standing erect with a smile on his face and a drum beating in his breast, knowing that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

  The lagoon was a hypnotic focus for the boys; ‘to be a real boy’ was to pass over to the other side by drowning.

  There is a programmed inevitability about Michael’s death, and the programmer is Uncle Jim. The significance of it cannot have been lost on Daphne although she, the self-styled biographer of the du Mauriers, omitted ever to mention the great family tragedy of Michael’s death in any of her three biographies of the family.*

  The du Maurier secrecy about ‘matters au sérieux’, which had been Kicky’s and concerned the psychic arts, and was then given to Barrie’s invasion and destruction of the family, was compulsive. But, as ever, Daphne could not keep it out of her fiction.

  When she began to unravel the mystery of her life in the late 1950s in The Breaking Point, the collection that reveals how she and Peter ‘awakened’ to the predatory nature of Jim’s possession of the family, Michael’s death rose to the surface in ‘The Pool’, which makes devastating reading.

  Daphne takes a central image of Barrie’s, the lagoon in Peter Pan, an image of Neverland, where acceptance – the closing in of the waters – means another kind of seeing, another kind of hearing, and just as the lilies fold so does the soul submerge and new knowledge flow from ‘the secret world’. But then she shows it disintegrating before our eyes. For this story, like Michael’s suicide, is one of disillusionment. The pool becomes what it was in reality for Michael. As Daphne’s heroine, Deborah, sleepwalks into it, ‘the lilies held her. . . up to her armpits and her chin’, exactly as Michael and Rupert were held up in Sandford Pool, appearing as though they were standing in the water with their heads above the surface, before they gave themselves to death –

  The triumph was that she was not afraid, was filled with such wild acceptance... She ran into the pool. Her living feet felt the mud and the broken sticks and all the tangle of old weeds, and the water was up to her armpits and her chin. T
he lilies held her. The rain blinded her . . .

  ‘Take me too,’ cried the child. ‘Don’t leave me behind!’ In her heart was a savage disenchantment. They had broken their promise, they had left her in the world. The pool that claimed her now was not the pool of secrecy, but dank, dark, brackish water choked with scum.

  Daphne told her children that the story was written to mark Flavia’s loss of ‘boyishness’ when she reached puberty, and there are plenty of references to this in the text. The implication is that, now she is no longer a boy, Deborah will no longer be allowed through the gate and into her ‘secret world’ in the pool, her Neverland. Likewise, Michael, who has grown out of Jim, who has left the young man a deranged and damaged soul, ‘will not touch again Pan’s perfumed shore’.

  According to Peter, Uncle Jim bore Michael’s death ‘somehow, with wonderful composure, and physically at least with better success than could have been expected’. He wrote this to Dolly Ponsonby. Denis Mackail took a different view: ‘He never got over it. It altered and darkened everything for the rest of his life.’ Jim himself wrote in a letter to Dundas a year after the tragedy: What happened was in a way the end of me.’

  Peter was aware that it wasn’t long before Jim was making notes for a story based on the tragedy. To be entitled Water or The Silent Pool or The 19th, it told of a dream he had of Michael returning from the dead, the boy unaware that he had been drowned until ‘the fatal 19th’ approached again and he realised the inevitability of his death being repeated and walked with Uncle Jim, holding his hand, into Sandford Pool – ‘He said goodbye to me and went into it and sank just as before . . .’ Chillingly, Jim then added a note –

  Must be clear tht [sic] there is nothing suicidal about it.

  * A long-term friend of Barrie, one of the inner circle. According to R. G. G. Price’s A History of Punch, ‘his polished and gentlemanly essayist’s persona concealed a cynical clubman – very bitter about men and politics – [with] the finest pornographic library in London.’

  * Himself a suicide in later years.

  † The dream occurs in Tommy and Grizel. When Tommy awakes he finds that a boy really is drowning.

  * Daphne du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait (1934), The du Mauriers (1937), and Myself When Young (1977).

  PART VI

  1921–1989

  Uncle Jim and Daphne: the Rebecca inheritance

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rebecca, a demon boy

  The shock waves of Michael’s death eddied beyond his immediate family. There was genuine sadness within the Bloomsbury set. Lytton Strachey wrote to Ottoline Morrell, ‘I am sure if Michael had lived he would have been one of the most remarkable of his generation.’1 The effect on Roger Senhouse was devastating. D. H. Lawrence wrote –

  My dear Mary, we had your note after your second trip to England. No, I hadn’t heard of the boy’s drowning. What was he doing to get drowned? J. M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.2

  ‘Mary’ was Mary Cannan (née Ansell), Barrie’s ex-wife. She met Lawrence in 1914 when living with her new husband Gilbert Cannan in a cottage in Buckinghamshire a mile away from where Lawrence was living with Frieda Weekley. The two couples invited each other over to dinner, got to know one another, and in 1914 celebrated Christmas together. Lawrence described them in unusually flattering terms: ‘Gilbert and Mary Cannan are here. I rather love them. There is real Good – power for Good – in Gilbert.’ Lawrence also corresponded with Barrie directly during this period, though sadly their letters are lost. And they had a meeting in London in 1915, probably arranged by Mary.*

  As all this was going on Lawrence was writing Women in Love. A month before he wrote to Mary about Michael’s death, he had written to Cynthia Asquith, telling her that he had arranged for her to receive a copy of Women in Love, and adding in a postscript: ‘Tell J.M. [Barrie] what I think of him.’ It is fair to assume that what Lawrence thought of Barrie had been influenced by what Mary had told him. Mary refused to speak to any biographer, but she seems to have revealed much to Lawrence, including ideas which were incorporated into Women in Love.*

  The du Maurier family was, meanwhile, in uproar. There were rumours about Jim’s relationships with the boys. Gerald was struggling with a situation in which neither emotion nor reason could justify his head-in-the-sand collusion.

  There were discussions about what should go on Michael’s tombstone. Jim suggested including ‘adopted son of J. M. Barrie’. According to Nico, ‘Uncle Gerald flew into a rage and said no Barrie should be mentioned etc.’

  Tod, Daphne’s faithful governess, chose this moment to hand in her notice and take up a position with the children of Sultan Prince Abdul Madjid in Constantinople.

  But, in the end, the family closed ranks and, as usual in times of stress there was a fillip for Gerald: he was honoured with a knighthood. No one could quite work out why. Even Mo was baffled. But one didn’t have to look far for a sponsor.

  By now, Jim was very well connected within the Establishment. But, aware that ‘the greatest power is the one that is subtle and adjusts itself, he kept his head down. In the theatre he made a tactical withdrawal. Peter Pan continued each year and some revivals were staged, but there was no new play until almost the end of his life. However, in 1922, the year after Michael’s suicide, there were discussions about a film of Peter Pan. Jim met Charlie Chaplin, dined with him at the Garrick and invited him back to the Adelphi Terrace apartment.

  Chaplin, an observant and sassy young man of thirty-two, whose best films were yet to come, described Jim as ‘a small man, with a dark moustache and a deeply marked, sad face, with heavily shadowed eyes; but I detect lines of humour lurking around his mouth. Cynical? Not exactly . . .’

  He recognised that he was dealing with a clever operator and was immediately on the defensive:

  Barrie tells me that he is looking for someone to play Peter Pan and says he wants me to play it. He bowls me over completely. To think that I was avoiding and afraid to meet such a man! But I am afraid to discuss it with him seriously, am on my guard because he may decide that I know nothing about it and change his mind. Just imagine. Barrie has asked me to play Peter Pan! It is too big and grand to risk spoiling it by some chance witless observation, so I change the subject and let this opportunity pass. I have failed completely in my first skirmish with Barrie.

  Gerald appeared at Jim’s apartment after dinner. Around three in the morning he walked Chaplin back to his hotel and felt the need to mention ‘that Barrie is not himself since his nephew was drowned, that he has aged considerably’.3

  In the same year, in a small windswept town in the far north-east of Britain, Jim made a confession. In his 1922 speech to undergraduates of St Andrews University, who had elected him Rector, he acknowledged a ‘darker and more sinister’ side of himself; saying he had not always been master of it, he admitted it had pushed him in a direction that ‘every instinct of self-preservation told him was dangerous’.4

  This stirring of conscience would have been lost to the North Sea winds had it not been published as a book with the title, Courage. Perhaps it had taken courage, but not as much as it had taken Michael. Jim described his occupation as ‘playing hide and seek with angels’, and himself as of Lucifer’s descent:

  It is M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half... he is the fanciful half... he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him.

  He pleads for our sympathy, at once penitent and victim, a variation on the sentimental line he had taken so often in his work:

  I might have done things worth while if it had not been for M’Connachie, and my first piece of advice to you at any rate shall be sound: don’t copy me. Beware of M’Connachie. When I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I speak with his voice... You will all have your M’Con
nachies luring you off the high road. Unless you are constantly on the watch, you will find that he has slowly pushed you out of yourself and taken your place. He has rather done for me.

  M’Connachie gets the blame, just as Tommy and Peter Pan and all of Barrie’s personae were blamed, because, as Tommy himself once cried, with bitter conceit, ‘If they knew what I really am, how they would run from me.’

  In 1928, Jim completed the rehabilitation of his conscience by donating the copyright in Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital. He made the gift ‘for the very best reasons’, according to Nico, ‘but also for the not-quite-so-good reason that he hoped everyone would say what a splendid thing to have done’.

  Following the tragedy of 19 May 1921, Daphne wrote a story, calling it ‘The Seekers’ after Uncle Jim’s little gods, one of whom, being malicious, had done for Michael, ‘the lad that will never be old’.

  But in Michael’s poem about Eilean Shona seekers appear to have the power to make ‘all the beauty of the scene seem one’. Daphne’s story peters out before we meet her seekers, but what we have suggests that she identified more with Michael’s seekers than Uncle Jim’s malignant ones at this time.

  ‘The Seekers’ was her first serious piece of writing. It tells of a boy called Maurice, a thinly disguised Michael Davies. She wrote to Tod that it was about ‘a boy who is searching for happiness, at least not exactly happiness, but that something that is somewhere, you know. You feel it and you miss it and it beckons and you can’t reach it... I don’t think anyone can find it on this earth.’

  Uncle Jim is central to the plot and known as Tommy Strange, ‘the man with the pipe’,* who ‘never grew up properly. He was only a very cocky little boy... [who] loved people to like him... he almost strutted up the drive towards the house thinking desperately how to show off in some way... No-one could quite understand Tommy. I don’t think he did himself.’