J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  ‘I had made up my mind that when the time came to describe Grizel's mere outward appearance I should refuse her that word beautiful because of her tilted nose. … Her eyes at least were beautiful, they were unusually far apart, and let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth. And she had an adorable mouth … the essence of all that was characteristic and delicious about her seemed to have run to her mouth, so that to kiss Grizel on her crooked smile would have been to kiss the whole of her at once. … There were times when she looked like a boy. Her almost gallant bearing, the poise of her head, her noble frankness, they all had something in them of a princely boy who had never known fear.’

  After an initial resentment towards Sylvia, Mary tried to win her friendship. Nor was she wholly unsuccessful. Sylvia could afford to be generous, and besides, the two women shared an interest in clothes and interior decoration. But Mary's character was altogether too pathetically flamboyant for Sylvia's taste: she would offer introductions to her famous husband (without her famous husband's permission), and talk loudly about his wealth (which displeased him even more); she would order writing-paper with her initials monogrammed thereon, and was in the habit of being singularly rude to shopkeepers and servants. Her frustration had turned her into a snob. ‘I loathe snobbishness so much that I hate to write of it,’2 commented Barrie to Quiller-Couch, though he himself was to have the accusation levelled against him in due course.

  The Balloon Woman, a familiar sight outside the gates of Kensington Gardens. From Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) illustrated by Arthur Rackham

  What Mary needed was some surrogate activity to which she could devote her energies. The Barries had never intended to live in London all the year round, and Mary therefore decided to look for a country house: a secluded retreat for her husband and herself, miles from the city—and the Davies family. Barrie made no objections; the search kept her occupied, and allowed him to get on with his own life.

  George and Jack had now started day-school at Norland Place in Holland Park Road. Arthur would accompany them in the mornings on his way to the Temple, leaving Mary Hodgson to pick them up after lunch. Some days Barrie would meet them on their way home from school and take them off to Kensington Gardens. Although Sylvia had given her blessing to the affair, Mary Hodgson did not greatly approve of his intrusion. She was the boys' nurse, not Mr Barrie; how could she be expected to retain her authority over the boys when he so obviously gloried in their waywardness. Barrie was well aware of her hostility—indeed he exulted in it. He and George were companions, but Mary was a grown-up, an outsider. Naturally when George and Jack misbehaved, Barrie turned a blind eye; to have taken Mary's side would have been tantamount to a betrayal. Mary Hodgson's reactions to The Little White Bird are unrecorded, but she can have had little difficulty in recognizing the identity of David's nurse, Irene:

  ‘I was now seeing David once at least every week, his mother, who remained culpably obtuse to my sinister design, having instructed Irene that I was to be allowed to share him with her, and we had become close friends, though the little nurse was ever a threatening shadow in the background. Irene, in short, did not improve with acquaintance. I found her to be high and mighty, chiefly, I think, because she now wore a nurse's cap with streamers, of which the little creature was ludicrously proud. She assumed the airs of an official person, and always talked as if generations of babies had passed through her hands. She was also extremely jealous, and had a way of signifying disapproval of my methods that led to many coldnesses and even bickerings between us, which I now see to have been undignified. I brought the following accusations against her:-

  ‘That she prated too much about right and wrong.

  ‘That she was a martinet. …

  ‘On the other hand, she accused me of spoiling him. …

  ‘That I am not sufficiently severe with him, leaving the chiding of him for offences against myself to her in the hope that he will love her less and me more thereby. …

  ‘Of not thinking of his future.

  ‘Of never asking him where he expected to go if he did such things.

  ‘Of telling him tales that had no moral application. …

  ‘Of fibbing and corrupting youthful minds.’

  Mary Hodgson

  One of the ‘tales that had no moral application’ concerned George's baby brother Peter. According to Barrie, all children were birds once, and ‘the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because [children] sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney’. Peter, however, was still able to fly because his mother had forgotten to weigh him at birth. He therefore escaped through the unbarred window and flew back to Kensington Gardens:

  ‘If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape, but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half way up the chimney. …

  ‘Children in the bird stage are difficult to catch. David knows that many people have none, and his delight on a summer afternoon is to go with me to some spot in the Gardens where these unfortunates may be seen trying to catch one with small pieces of cake.’

  Peter Pan as a baby (Rackham)

  As the saga developed, an inherent defect in the story became evident. If Peter could fly, how was it that he remained singularly immobile in his perambulator? In order to solve the dilemma, a second Peter began to emerge, who soon became as real as his earthbound namesake. This second Peter was called Peter Pan, named after the Greek god who symbolized nature, paganism, and the amoral world. Whether this was a deliberate joke to provoke Mary Hodgson's preference for stories with a ‘moral application’, or merely an allusion to Peter's gay and heartless character, or a multitude of other possibilities, is open to speculation. Cecco Hewlett sometimes accompanied them in the Gardens, and his father, Maurice Hewlett, had just published a play entitled Pan and the Young Shepherd, which opened with the line, ‘Boy, boy, wilt thou be a boy for ever?’ This may have been a pure coincidence, but Barrie almost certainly knew of its existence, as he and Hewlett were close friends. Whatever the origins, Peter Pan soon became the topic of endless discussion between Barrie and George, recorded by Barrie in The Little White Bird:

  The frontispiece to The Little White Bird. ‘C. Hewlett's Tree’ at top left is where Cecco lost a penny, went back to look for it after Lock-out Time and found threepence. ‘Where Peter Pan landed’ is now the site of the Peter Pan statue. ‘The shade of Pilkington’ celebrates Mr Wilkinson, headmaster of Wilkinson's private school in Orme Square, and precursor of Captain Hook

  ‘I ought to mention here that the following is our way with a story: First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of [his], recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking hard.’

  Having escaped from the nursery, Peter Pan, still believing himself to be a bird, returns to the island in the Serpentine from where he originated, presenting himself before the birds' potentate, Old Solomon Caw, for reinstatement. But Old Solomon points out the regrettable fact that Peter is no longer a bird but a human baby:

  ‘“I suppose,” said Pe
ter huskily, “I suppose I can still fly?”…

  ‘“Poor little half-and-half!” said Solomon, “you will never be able to fly again, not even on windy days. You must live here on the island always.”

  ‘“And never even go to the Kensington Gardens?” Peter asked tragically.

  ‘“How could you get across?” said Solomon. He promised very kindly, however, to teach Peter as many of the bird ways as could be learned by one of such an awkward shape.

  ‘“Then I shan't be exactly a human?” Peter asked.

  ‘“No.”

  ‘“Nor exactly a bird?”

  ‘“No.”

  ‘“What shall I be?”

  ‘“You will be a Betwixt-and-Between,” Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out.’

  Peter Pan puts his case to Old Solomon Caw (Rackham)

  Thus Peter Pan becomes an outlaw, living on the island in the Serpentine. Sometimes he rows across to Kensington Gardens in a bird's nest to watch real boys at play, or to join in adventures with the fairies after Lock-out Time. It is the fairies who teach him to fly without wings, and now and again he flies home to watch his mother weeping for her lost child, and is moved by her tears; but always the freedom of the Gardens calls him back. However, eventually he resolves to return home ‘for ever and always’, despite the fairies' pleas to stay:

  Peter Pan rowing across the Serpentine (Rackham)

  ‘He went in a hurry in the end, because he had dreamt that his mother was crying, and he knew what was the great thing she cried for, and that a hug from her splendid Peter would quickly make her to smile. Oh! he felt sure of it, and so he flew straight to the window, which was always to be open for him.

  ‘But the window was closed, and there were iron bars on it, and peering inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm round another little boy.

  ‘Peter called, “Mother! mother!” but she heard him not; in vain he beat his little limbs against the iron bars. He had to fly back, sobbing, to the Gardens, and he never saw his [mother] again. What a glorious boy he had meant to be to her! Ah, Peter! we who have made the great mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance. But Solomon was right—there is no second chance, not for most of us. When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.’

  While the oral story of Peter Pan continued to evolve at a leisurely pace, Barrie utilized the bones of the idea in his revisions of Tommy and Grizel. In the following scene, Tommy Sandys is about to send his new manuscript to his publishers. He shows it to his wife, Grizel—who in this instance reflects Mary Barrie rather than Sylvia:

  ‘She kissed the manuscript. “Wish it luck,” he had begged of her; “you were always so fond of babies, and this is my baby.” So Grizel kissed Tommy's baby, and then she turned away her face. … If he had not told her about his book it was because she did not and never could understand what compels a man to write one book, instead of another. “I had no say in the matter; the thing demanded of me that I should do it and I had to do it. Some must write from their own experience, they can make nothing of anything else; … I don't attempt to explain how I write, I hate to discuss it; all I know is that those who know how it should be done can never do it. … You have taken everything else, Grizel, surely you might leave me my books. … I must write. It is the only thing I can do. … Writing is the joy of my life… [and yet] if I could make a living at anything else I would give up writing altogether.”…

  Bedford's illustration of Peter Pan running through the woods of the Never Land

  ‘“It was not that I did not love your books,” she said, “but that I loved you more, and I thought they did you harm.”…

  ‘The new book, of course, was “The Wandering Child.” I wonder whether any of you read it now. Your fathers and mothers thought a great deal of that slim volume, but it would make little stir in an age in which all the authors are trying who can say Damn loudest. It is but a reverie about a little boy who was lost. His parents find him in a wood singing joyfully to himself because he thinks he can now be a boy for ever; and he fears that if they catch him they will compel him to grow into a man, so he runs farther from them into the wood and is running still, singing to himself because he is always to be a boy. That is really all, but T. Sandys knew how to tell it. The moment he conceived the idea … he knew that it was the idea for him. He forgot at once that he did not really care for children. He said reverently to himself, “I can pull it off,” and, as was always the way with him, the better he pulled it off the more he seemed to love them.

  ‘“It is myself who is writing at last, Grizel,” he said as he read it to her.

  ‘She thought (and you can guess whether she was right) that it was the book he loved rather than the child. She thought (and you can guess again) that in a subtle way this book was his autobiography.’ On April 26th, 1899, Barrie strangled Tommy to death on an iron spike and wrote ‘The End’ across the 464th page of manuscript. It had been almost ten years since he had started making his first notes, and three years since the publication of its forerunner, Sentimental Tommy. The reading public had eagerly awaited its sequel, but they found Tommy and Grizel altogether too morbid and bitter, and despite a few enthusiastic notices the book had a poor reception. Barrie's account of The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up had been a comparative failure.

  * * *

  In August 1899, the Davieses went down to Rustington for their annual holiday. Arthur's work at the Temple allowed him little time to see his sons, and he looked forward to spending the summer weeks alone with his family. There were no Parrys as neighbours this year, Dolly having married Arthur Ponsonby, a British attaché at Copenhagen, in 1898. However, there was no shortage of company; after a brief holiday in Germany, the Barries decided that they too would take the sea air throughout August, renting a house less than half a mile from the Davieses' mill cottage. George and Jack were delighted: it meant that they could spend whole days with Mr Barrie, not just the odd afternoon snatched now and then after school. The Peter Pan stories continued to develop; so too did an endless variety of games: Scottish games learnt by Barrie as a child—spyo, smuggle bools, kick-bonnety, peeries; games of his own invention, such as egg-cap and capey-dykey; and of course cricket, played between wickets improvised wherever he happened to be: trees in the park, chairs on the lawn, sand castles on the beach. Barrie had a natural flair for virtually any game that required a keen eye, whether it was billiards, croquet, or clock-golf, and his enthusiasm was soon shared by the boys.

  George (JMB)

  And Arthur played the perfect gentleman, remaining quietly in the background. In 1948, Peter Llewelyn Davies wrote to Mary Hodgson: ‘It is clear enough that father didn't like him, at any rate in the early stages. Did J.M.B.'s entry into the scheme of things occasionally cause ill-feeling or quarrellings between mother and father?’ Mary Hodgson replied, ‘What was of value to the One had little or no value to the Other. Your father's attitude at all times was as “One Gentleman (in the true sense) to Another”. Any difference of opinion was never made “Public Property” in the house. … The Barries were overwhelming (and found your mother's help, grace & beauty a great asset in meeting the right people, etc.)—aided by Mrs du Maurier—always ambitious for her favourite daughter. … The du Mauriers in a way stood in awe of your Father. There were times when he defied the lot—& stood alone—and his Wife stood by Him!’ Despite the unspoken resentments, the holiday drifted along in a more or less care-free fashion. Sylvia wrote to Dolly at the British Legation in Copenhagen on August 8th:

  Sylvia and Peter on the beach at Rustington in 1899 (JMB)

  Darling Dolly,

  Your dear letters were a great joy, please write many more of them & sometimes in the midst of Kings & Queens, think a little of the poor barrister's wife at Sea Mill with all the winds of heaven blowing her about & a great many noisy but beloved sons jumping on her. …

  Your friend
George hurt his poor little finger badly yesterday—he got it pinched in a deck chair so hard that his little nail was wrenched off—He was very brave, but it was dreadful & I ached for him. I will send you a photograph of him quite soon—they are so good I think, but I haven't ordered any yet. …

  Now dear Dolly I haven't any news—you know better than I how charming this little place is & how windy it is & how Sylvia goes in and out of the Mill cottage & looks after the 3 little boys with red caps, but when all is said & done Rustington can never be the same without you. …

  I am,

  your loving Sylvia

  In sending this letter to Peter Davies in 1946, Dolly Ponsonby wrote:

  ‘It conveys her so completely—at least to me. It recalls so visibly the Mill House, the sea, the wind and the little boys in red tarn o'shanters. You were too young to remember it. It is too subtle to be conveyed in writing. But the calm and beauty of her, and her delicious whimsical sense of humour, sewing perhaps in a tiny cottage sitting-room with those rampageous boys tumbling about her—I shall never forget it.’

  Jack, Sylvia and Peter on Rustington beach (JMB)

  On November 25th, 1899, Sylvia celebrated her thirty-third birthday. Barrie gave her an amethyst necklace, set in gold, and inscribed with her middle name, ‘To Jocelyn’. As she was normally known as Sylvia, Barrie adopted ‘Jocelyn’ as his own private pet-name for her. The necklace was accompanied by a card:

  To a Crooked Lady on her 33rd Birthday.

  At thirty-three she's twice as sweet

  As sweetest seventeen could be,

  At sixty-six I'm sure she'll beat