J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  Numerous guests came to stay at Amhuinnsuidh throughout August and September: A. E. W. Mason, Anthony Hope (Hawkins), his American wife and their children; E. V. Lucas, his wife Elizabeth and their daughter Audrey; and another Lucas, though no relation – Lord Lucas, better known as Bron Herbert, who had lost his leg in the Boer War. ‘Before Lord Lucas reached Amhuinnsuidh,’ recalled Nico, ‘everyone said, “Nico's bound to ask him about his wooden leg,” and I was most strictly told not even to be aware of it. We all gathered to meet him outside the castle when he arrived, and my very first words were “Can I see your wooden leg?” To which he immediately said “Yes. Where's my bedroom? Come upstairs and I'll take it off and show you—” And up we went and he did.’

  Amhuinnsuidh Castle in the Outer Hebrides, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean

  Peter wrote in his Morgue:

  ‘George (aged 19) was much intrigued by Betty Hawkins, and I think this was his first … experience of the delights of a flirtation with an attractive femme du monde. I also doubt whether Betty Hawkins ever had a more attractive adolescent to play around with. They enjoyed themselves quite a lot, sheltering from the eternal rain in the fishing-huts by the side of those lonely romantic lochs. She was very easy on the eye, and American, which perhaps accounts for the circumstance, rare enough in those far off days, that occasional nips of whisky fed the flames of dalliance. On these occasions George forcibly taught me the elements of tact, i.e. the necessity of making myself scarce, and I envied from afar, being just at the stage when poor J.M.B. had had to give me, by the banks of the burn, a small talking to for indulging at Eton in what my tutor euphemistically termed water-closet talk. He very nearly penetrated my juvenile defences by telling me it had always been his view that a man without some element of coarseness in his nature was not a whole man, which must have disconcerted me, coming from him. But I don't think he knew what was afoot between George and Betty: not that it amounted to anything.’

  If Barrie did suspect Betty's ‘little tendresse’ for George, then he doubtless looked upon it as Anthony Hope's just desert for having made his celebrated cri de cœur at the first night of Peter Pan, ‘Oh, for an hour of Herod!’

  Mary Hodgson gave a characteristically prosaic account of the Scottish holiday in a letter to her sister Nancy:

  Michael in Wilkinson's uniform

  Amhuinnsuidh Castle

  1st September 1912.

  My dear Nancy,

  I trust you received the salmon & served it up with mayonnaise sauce. It was one of Michael's catches. … Minnie* also sent fish to her home, also Lilian* also Bessie* also Mr Brown (J.M.B.'s butler), also Michael's ghillie – the man who accompanies him in his travels & whom I implore not to bring him back in pieces. … E. V. Lucas & his family have departed after a month's stay. A. E. W. Mason also, after 10 days. Anthony Hope Hawkins, wife, son & daughter & governess have been here five weeks & are still hanging on. Nurse Loosemore, who nursed Mrs Arthur, is also here for an indefinite period. … We have had (to use slang) the pick of the literary genius's of England, but alas – either my liver is out of order, or my ideals too high, for at close quarters they are but mortal – & very ordinary at that.

  The weather has been very good for Scotland, & the fishing splendid. They (the boys) generally go on ponies & are getting quite expert at riding. Jack is not with us – his holidays do not come convenient. J.M.B. is well, & much better than I have seen him for some years. Did you realise how well George played at Lord's Cricket Ground? You would have thought someone had given Nico sixpence that day, his spirits were so high. … The school is 2 miles away. The mistress has a strap – Nicholas has seen it. We leave here about the 17th, if all goes well. Then Peter goes to Eton alone, & George to Cambridge. Michael is now top of his school, & Nico is top but one of his class. I trust mother is keeping well, my love to you all,

  Dadge.*

  On Barrie's return to Adelphi Terrace, he found, among the pile of mail awaiting him, a letter from an anonymous woman enclosing a drawing of Peter Pan by her four-year-old son, Peter, which he had made after listening to The Little White Bird. Numerous people sent such letters, usually as bait for an autograph, but this letter was unsigned. The boy had written his name, Peter Lewis, at the foot of the drawing, and with the aid of the postmark, Barrie tracked him down to Glan Hafren in Wales. He sent him a copy of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with an accompanying letter:

  22 September '12.

  My dear Peter,

  Your mother rote me a letter but she did not tell me her name (which makes me like her better …), but she sent me some fine pictyours pikturs (dash it all) u drew about P. Pan, and they are just like the picters P.P. would draw himself. … Peter's mother thinks Mr. Barrie has a lot of people admiring him, but oh, Peter's mother, u are mistaken and he is a lonely dreary person and is very pleased to hear that some one thinks him nicer than he is …

  Your friend,

  J. M. Barrie

  The correspondence might have ended here, had it not turned out that Peter Lewis's godfather was one of Barrie's own literary heroes, George Meredith. This was their only connection with the literary world, but Barrie liked the sound of their Welsh home and family life: Peter had three sisters, contemporaries of Michael and Nico, and he saw that a friendship with the Lewises might provide the boys with friends of their own age in the land of their Llewelyn ancestors.

  In February, 1913, the news reached England that Captain Scott and his fellow explorers had perished in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman’, wrote Scott in his Message to the Public, found in his tent. ‘These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.’ The news of Scott's heroism did indeed stir the hearts of Englishmen, but not their pockets, and the Mansion House Fund set up for the benefit of ‘those who are dependent on us’ met with a poor response. Barrie set pen to paper and wrote a letter which appeared in The Times of February 19th, 1913, under the heading MR. J. M. BARRIE'S APPEAL:

  ‘Mr. J. M. Barrie, who is the godfather of the late Captain Scott's son Peter, has addressed the following letter to the Press:–

  The Athenæum, S.W., Feb. 18.

  Sir, – As a friend of Captain Scott, may I say what is in the minds of many others, that despite the fine help of the Press, things are not going too well with the various schemes started to do honour to the men who have done so much honour to us. Almost every Briton alive has been prouder these last days because a message from a tent has shown him how the breed lives on; but it seems almost time to remind him of that more practical Englishman who said of a friend in need, “I am sorry for him £5; how much are you sorry?” Of every 100 who are proud of those men in the tent some 99 have not yet said how proud they are.’

  Other newspapers published his appeal, and the public responded by swelling the Mansion House Fund to almost twice its original target. At the beginning of April, Kathleen Scott sent Barrie a letter addressed to him from her husband, written while he lay dying in his tent:

  Part of Scott's last letter to Barrie

  My dear Barrie

  We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot – Hoping this letter may be found & sent to you I write a word of farewell – It hurt me grievously when you partially withdrew your friendship or seemed so to do – I want to tell you that I never gave you cause – If you thought or heard ill of me it was unjust – Calumny is ever to the fore. My attitude towards you and everyone connected with you was always one of respect and admiration – Under these circumstances I want you to think well of me and my end and more practically I want you to help my widow and my boy your godson – We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit fighting it out to the end. It will be known that we have accomplished our object in reac
hing the Pole and that we have done everything possible even to sacrificing ourselves in order to save sick companions. I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future and that the country ought to help those who are left behind to mourn us – I leave my poor girl and your godson. … Do what you can to get their claims recognised.

  Goodbye. I am not at all afraid of the end but sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had planned for the future on our long marches – I may not have proved a great explorer, but we have done the greatest march ever made and come very near to great success. Goodbye my dear friend.

  Yours ever,

  R. Scott

  We are in a desperate state feet frozen &c, no fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and the cheery conversation as to what we will do when we get to Hut Point.

  Later. – We are very near the end but have not and will not lose our good cheer – we have four days of storm in our tent and now have no food or fuel – We did intend to finish ourselves when things proved like this but we have decided to die naturally in the track.

  As a dying man my dear friend be good to my wife & child – Give the boy a chance in life if the State won't do it – He ought to have good stuff in him – and give my memory back the friendship which you inspired. I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me – for you had much to give and I nothing.

  Everything about Scott appealed to Barrie, and nothing more so than the manner of his death. For years he carried Scott's letter around in his pocket, producing it at every opportunity, but never allowing the more personal references to be published. In the end he came to regard the explorer as another variation on the Peter Pan theme. ‘When I think of Scott,’ he later told an audience, ‘I remember the strange Alpine story of the youth who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that the body would again appear at a certain date and place many years afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier to see if the prediction would be fulfilled; all old men now; and the body reappeared as young as on the day he left them. So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities, always young.’7

  Peter Scott with his mother

  It was ironic that Scott's request to Barrie to help his widow and son should have arrived on the eve of Michael's adolescence and departure to Eton. Barrie wrote to Kathleen Scott on April 11th, 1913: ‘I have been hoping all this time that there was some such letter for me from your husband, and the joy with which I receive it is far greater than the pain. I am very proud of the wishes expressed in it. … I know a hundred things he would like me to do for Peter, and I want out of love for his father to do them all. And I want to be such a friend to you as he wished. I should have wanted to be that had there been no such letter, and now I feel I have a right to ask you to give me the chance.’ Kathleen, however, was not to be pressurized into any hasty decisions; she did not wish to become another Sylvia, with Barrie acting as a guardian to her boy, and although she skilfully retained his friendship and help, she never allowed him to take over the reins of her life.

  Michael in 1913

  At the end of April, Michael began his first half at Hugh Macnaghten's House. Unlike George, who had adapted to Eton within the first few days, Michael was utterly miserable, crying himself to sleep every night and refusing to make friends. Barrie wrote to George, who was up at Cambridge: ‘Michael is so far very lonely and unhappy at Eton, and I am depressed thereby’, and to Charles Turley Smith: ‘Many thanks for the bluebells and a squeeze of the hand … 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.’ The cause of Michael's unhappiness was homesickness. He missed Mary Hodgson; he missed Uncle Jim; most of all, he missed his mother. For three years, Barrie had tried to take her place; hardly a day had gone by when he had not walked him home from school, played billiards or cricket with him, or helped him through his nightmares, ‘sitting there doing something frightfully ordinary, like reading the newspaper’.8 But now that Michael was alone, with no Barrie to fill his mind with other thoughts, he began to pine for ‘the touch of vanished hands’. He had, in Peter's words, ‘the true stuff of the poet in him from birth’, and his extreme sensibility only added to the awareness of his loss. He fought hard to disguise his emotions, hiding behind a shield of reserve, or trying to mask his depressions with a dry, laconic sense of humour that owed much to his guardian. Barrie wrote later, ‘I think few have suffered from the loss of a mother as he has done.’9 In an effort to ease Michael's loneliness, he offered to write to him every day, instead of once a week as he had done to George. Michael responded by writing back to him, every single day. By the time he came to leave Eton, there were over 2,000 letters between them. These letters survived until 1952, when Peter, overcome with depression himself, decided to burn them. ‘They were too much,’10 he told Mary Hodgson. Doubtless he felt that they might be misinterpreted in a Freudian age prone to dissection and analysis. Something of Barrie's relationship with Michael may be glimpsed in the wandering pages of Neil and Tintinnabulum. In a chapter entitled ‘The First Half’, Barrie wrote:

  ‘The scene is changed. Stilled is the crow of Neil, for he is now but one of the lowliest at a great public school, where he reverberates but little. The scug Neil fearfully running errands for his fag-master is another melancholy reminder of the brevity of human greatness. Lately a Colossus [at his prep-school], he was now infinitely less than nothing. What shook him was not the bump as he fell, but the general indifference to his having fallen. He lay there like a bird in the grass winded by a blunt-headed arrow, and was cold to his own touch. … In that dreadful month or more I am dug up by his needs and come again into prominence, gloating because he calls for me, sometimes unable to do more than stand afar off on the playing field, so that he may at least see me nigh though we cannot touch. The thrill of being the one needed, which I had never thought to know again. I have leant over a bridge, and enviously watching the gaiety of two attractive boys, now broken to the ways of school, have wished he was one of them, till I hear their language and wondered whether this was part of the necessary cost.’

  In another chapter, Barrie recalled one of Michael's nightmares at Eton:

  ‘On this occasion his dame [matron] had remained with him all night, as he had been slightly unwell, and she was amused, but nothing more, to see him, without observing her, rise and search the room in a fury of words for something that was not there. The only word she caught was “seven”. He asked her not to tell me of this incident, as he knew it would trouble me. I was told, and, indeed, almost expected the news, for I had sprung out of bed that night thinking I heard [him] once again defending the stair. By the time I reached [him] it had ceased to worry him. “But when I woke I missed the newspaper,” he said with his adorable smile, and again putting … his hand deliciously on my shoulder (that kindest gesture of man to man). … How I wished the newspaper could have been there. There are times when a boy can be as lonely as God.’

  The last of the Allahakbarrie teams, matched against E. V. Lucas's team at Downe House in July 1913. Back row, l to r: George, Thomas Gilmour, Will Meredith, George Meredith Jnr, Denis Mackail, Harry Graham, Dr Goffe. Centre: A. A. Milne, Maurice Hewlett, Barrie, George Morrow, E. V. Lucas, Walter Frith. Front row: Percy Lucas, Audrey Lucas, T. Wrigley, Charles Tennyson, Willie Winter

  Nico was now the only boy left as a permanent resident at Campden Hill Square. On the night of June 13th, Barrie told him to look in the papers the next morning for surprising news. Nico was up betimes, and by the time Barrie came down to breakfast, had searched the cricket pages from end to end, but could find nothing of interest. What he had failed
to notice was that his guardian's name was among the new baronets in the Birthday Honours List. He was no longer Mr Barrie, but Sir James Barrie, Bart. – ‘TO HAVE and TO HOLD the said name dignity state degree style and title of Baronet aforesaid on to him … and the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten.’ Barrie had rejected a simple knighthood in 1909, but was unable to resist a baronetcy – an hereditary title that none of the Five could inherit. The boys greeted the news with a mixture of pride and derision – both of which delighted Sir James enormously. Michael and Nico started calling him Sir Jazz Band Barrie, or simply Sir Jazz, but soon drifted back to plain Uncle Jim. Jack, however, picked up on ‘the Bart’ and ‘the little Baronet’, depending on his mood, though he too, somewhat reluctantly, resorted to Uncle Jim as an alternative to Sir James.

  As well as writing to Michael every day, Barrie continued to keep in frequent contact with George at Cambridge, putting him in touch with young actresses who might amuse him – ‘if you have the pluck to approach’ – taking a keen interest in his work – ‘There was an essay prize your father got at Trinity that I am keen you should go in for’ – or encouraging his efforts in the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club – ‘I'm avid to know how you felt as well as how others thought you felt at the first A.D.C. – “Stage” fright!’ He wrote to him for his twentieth birthday on July 19th, 1913:

  George in the Cambridge A.D.C.

  My dear George,

  Only the other day – and now you have come to twenty years. When I saw you first, I said you were a gorgeous boy, and long afterwards I discovered that your mother thought I had been singularly happy in my choice of adjectives. 20 years with nothing very heinous on your soul I think, and many hopeful traits. May all turn out as your father and mother would have wished. It rests mainly with you, but I like to try to help. …