J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  (cont'd)

  (Have you read the grand new serial?

  The best place to begin is the middle.

  Synopsis of preceding chapters – Sherlock and What Ho go down to Eton.

  Principal characters –

  Sherlock, aged 91.

  What Ho, aged 5.

  Davies Bros, and other kids.)

  ‘Have you a plan?’ I enquired anxiously.

  ‘Have I a plan!’ he repeated with a lick of disdain. In short, he had no plan. The Eton Case baffled him.

  Sherlock H was baffled!

  But not for long.

  ‘Our first step, What Ho,’ he said, … ‘is to get you entered for a pupil at My Tutor's house.’

  ‘Me!’ I astounded.

  ‘There will be no difficulty,’ he clapped, ‘your intelligence is of such a juvenile character that you will easily be mistaken for a scug.’

  He was right. He was always right. …

  ‘Next,’ Sherlock fluttered, ‘you must be made fag to Davies major.’

  ‘I can't,’ I said, ‘Bowman is his fag.’

  ‘You must get rid of Bowman,’ he annunciated. …

  At that moment the unsuspecting Bowman passed, chewing a banana mess, which ran down his person.

  Sherlock lifted him like a puppy by the collar & dropped him over the bridge into the river.

  ‘Your way is now clear,’ he said, wiping his hands. …

  Loving

  J.M.B.

  With Michael and Nico both at Eton, Barrie spent most of his time at Adelphi Terrace, developing his Dream notes into a one-act play entitled ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraik’.* Mr Lapraik is two men: the young man he used to be, and the worldly success he has now become (just as Neil and Tintinnabulum represent two sides of Michael's character). The young Mr Lapraik returns, ghost-like, to inform the now ageing Mrs Lapraik that he is her husband. She asks who is the older Mr Lapraik – the man she believes to be her husband:

  LAPRAIK. He is what I have grown into, my dear. I am what he used to be. … Look at me, Nora, what do you see?

  MRS LAPRAIK. I see the man who married me so many years ago. My lover! A boy he seems to me now. You are somehow that boy come back. …

  LAPRAIK. I am that boy come back to look for his fine ideas and conduct and aspirations of twenty-five years ago – to see what the man I became has made of them.

  Michael with his house cricket cup

  Lapraik then tells his wife how he had lain asleep, to be awakened by ‘something bending over me, pushing me stealthily. … I knew that the degenerate thing I had become was trying to push me out of this shell that is called me, and to take my place’ [Barrie's italics].

  Work on ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraik’ alternated with the continuing saga of Sherlock H., What Ho, and Michael and Nico's twin-bedded room at Eton:

  16 Nov 1916.

  The Room with 2 Beds

  (cont'd)

  Chap 10 – Fags & the Fag System.

  I was a fag!

  I was Major Davies's fag!

  In passing I ought to mention that quite a number of boys have this melting title. … The honour is naturally much coveted, and it amused me to notice that the small brother of Davies always referred to him proudly as ‘my Major’. …

  I find it will be impossible to convey any adequate account of the strange happenings at Eton … without first saying a few words about Fags and the Fag system. …

  The origin of the word Fag is interesting: Anglo-Saxon F, Sanscrit A, Rumanian G. To be fagged = To be tired out – ‘that tired feeling which comes if you don't use our lotion.’

  One of the oldest traditions of Eton is that no senior … must let himself get tired or, in the vox populum, fagged. He therefore hires a scug (Anglo-Saxon , meaning a cheese-paring, or, more accurately, an infinitesimal piece of the rind) to get tired for him. … The senior lies in bed reading O. Henry while his fag does all the tiring things for him, such as attending chapel. …

  Endless tales have been written of the bullying of fags. At Eton the ‘bully’ is an institution, [and] it is his duty to kick the little ones. This makes them hardy. …

  (To be cont'd)

  J.M.B.

  Nico, aged twelve, responded to Barrie's serial with a saga of his own that moved at a decidedly faster pace:

  ‘The Room’ etc.

  My dear Uncle Jim, 17th November 1916.

  The Dynamite King

  CHAPTER II

  The Deadman's Rock

  ‘Let us dine out to-night Smith’ I cried.

  ‘No’ he rapped ‘I want to stay here in order to tug the lobe of my left ear.’

  ‘Shall I leave you?’ I queried.

  ‘No, something may happen.’…

  Suddenly to my horror I saw a ghost come up from the sea! Ah! How I struggled to get loose. Then the ghost advanced and touched me. I shivered! Then, to my relief & astonishment it said ‘Rise up Petrie’

  I knew the voice so well.

  IT WAS NAYLAND SMITH.

  ‘My Aunt Sempronia's whiskers!’ he said, you're as white as—Good Lord! That creature's moving, he said, pointing to the dead man. It was alive!

  IT WAS THE DYNAMITE KING = FU-MANCHU!

  Order your next week's copy!

  Much love,

  Nicholas

  Llewelyn

  Davies.

  Barrie and Hugh Macnaghten at Eton

  Michael wrote to Mary Hodgson on December 10th: ‘My tutor [Hugh Macnaghten] told me he wished I was like Nico; he says he's the heart & soul of the house, so you can see Nico's firmly settled in that quarter. The point is that he's far far heartier than I ever was or shall be.’

  There was little to brighten Barrie's world during the term-time, apart from his weekly instalments of ‘The Dynamite King’ and his letters from Michael. The last months of 1916 were particularly savage: Lord Lucas shot down over German lines and killed; both his nephews killed; ‘Wrest in Beds’ burnt down; and the hospital at Bettancourt closed as Elizabeth Lucas was too exhausted and ill to continue its organization.

  At nineteen Peter Davies had become eligible for the trenches, but scarcely had he arrived on the Western Front than he found himself in the thick of the bloodiest conflict of the war: the Battle of the Somme. After two months he was invalided home, suffering from eczema and shell-shock, from which he recovered by the following Easter; the mental wounds, however, left their scars for life. Of the four surviving brothers, Peter's desolation at the death of George had been the greatest; Barrie had written to Charles Turley Smith, ‘I feel painfully for Peter between whom and George there was a devotion not perhaps very common among brothers.’ With George dead, his parents dead, and no real communication with Barrie, Peter had lived for two years in a void, now filled with little but the memory of mud, and bodies, and bits of bodies. In later life he took meticulous care to suppress all evidence of his own past: his Morgue consists almost entirely of letters relating to his ancestors, his parents, his brothers, Barrie – everyone but himself. Since he also published Denis Mackail's official biography, he was able to censor his role to a minimum. One letter that survived this suppression was written by Crompton's wife, Moya, at the time of Crompton's death in December 1935:

  Peter in 1917. He wrote to Barrie frequently, his letters spanning his initial enthusiasm to the full horror of the trenches: ‘Not long ago I can remember rather looking forward to taking part in a fight. My curiosity has been satisfied, and I shall never have any such desire again. Honestly, Uncle Jim, I can't write about it – I don't believe anyone could, and I'm not particularly anxious that anyone should. There isn't a single attractive feature from beginning to end. Modern artillery fire is damnable beyond all powers of description …’ Peter's letters have now been transcribed, and can be found at www.jmbarrie.co.uk

  ‘Crompton mentioned your name, Peter, in his second or third last letter to me. … He said you were always a very special person to him, that he felt a loving intim
acy with you beyond what he felt for almost anyone else, and I remember him telling me in the early years of our marriage more than once “Peter is the One”. You were certainly his favourite of the five sons of your beautiful mother, of whom he never spoke without a break in his voice.’

  An Etonian letter from Nico to Eiluned Lewis

  Davies major and minor returned to London for the Christmas holidays, spending much of their time in the Adelphi flat as Peter was being nursed by Mary Hodgson at Campden Hill Square. Barrie wrote to Mrs Thomas Hardy on December 29th: ‘I have my boys home now for the holidays … and the flat is for the nonce a noisy spot. Just listen for a moment and you will hear another plate go smash.’ While Nico pursued his hectic social life of Christmas parties, Michael gratified Barrie by reading the various manuscripts awaiting his inspection. It was Barrie's proudest boast that Michael, while still a school-boy, had jumped ‘from being astride my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to [becoming] … the sternest of my literary critics. Anything he shook his head over I abandoned. There was for instance that little tragedy Mr Lapraik, which I liked until I foolishly told Michael its subject, when he frowned and said he had better have a look at it. He read it, and then, patting me on the back, as only he and George could touch me, said, “You know you can't do this sort of thing.” End of Mr Lapraik.’8

  Michael wrote to Eiluned Lewis at Glan Hafren on January 15th:

  MONDAY

  the ? January

  in the year 1917 of grace.

  Dear Jane,

  I choose the prettiest in your bright constellation of names; … Sir James, Davies minor, & yr humble servant have just returned from Brighton, with its poisonous people piers post-cards picture-palaces & penny in the slots. Have you ever been there? I trow not, else you would not be the purre & innocent maiden that you appearrr. … Peter D. is now at Sheerness, preparatory to France again, & Jack D. in the North Sea. Nico D. is entirely the young Etonian that you w'd expect. He grows in all directions. Believe me, madam, I am, hoping this finds you as it leaves me etc –

  Yr obdt servt

  Michael Ll. Davies

  At the end of the month, Michael and Nico returned to ‘the Room with 2 Beds’ and Barrie to the loneliness of his Adelphi flat. Having abandoned ‘Mr Lapraik’, he started work on a new one-act play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals: ‘Three nice old ladies and a criminal, who is even nicer, are discussing the war over a cup of tea.’ The criminal is the Old Lady of the title; her medals are the regular letters she receives from her son, fighting for King and Country; her crime is that she has no son: the envelopes, ‘all addressed in pencil … with the proud words “Opened by Censor” on them' – cantain blank pieces of paper.

  Gary Cooper in the 1930 film version of The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, re-titled Medals, in which Cooper plays the Old Lady's ‘son’, loosely based on George. Barrie lived to see fourteen screen adaptations of his works, including Cecil B. De Mille's 1919 epic, Male and Female

  Early in 1917, Barrie learned that all was not well between Mary and Gilbert Cannan, whom she had married in 1910. There were rumours that Cannan had seduced Mary's maid and made her pregnant, though Mary herself was still childless; now, it seemed, he had taken up with another woman, leaving his wife in reduced circumstances. Kathleen Scott, who had retained her friendship with the Cannans, told Barrie that Gilbert was losing his reason and had already been admitted to several mental homes for short durations. Barrie never liked to discuss his own broken marriage; he knew where the fault lay, and if ever a word was raised against Mary, he would contradict it with a flat statement: ‘She was perfection.’9 Nor did he blame Cannan. ‘I always held that he had many fine qualities,’ he wrote to Kathleen, ‘and I hope they will yet bring him to port.’10 Mary's pride did not allow her to approach her former husband for money: instead, Barrie wrote to her on March 5th:

  My dear Mary,

  It would be silly of us not to meet, and indeed I wanted to go to you all day yesterday. I thought perhaps you would rather come here, and of course which ever you prefer is what I prefer, but that is your only option as I mean to see you whether the idea scares you or not. Painful in a way the first time but surely it need not be so afterwards. How about coming here on Wednesday to lunch at 1.30? If you are feeling well enough I wish you were doing war work. There must be posts you are so particularly fitted for. We could have some talk about that. All personal troubles outside the war seem so small nowadays. But just one thing I should like to say, because no one can know it so well as I, that never in this world could a young literary man have started with better chances than Mr Cannan when he had you at the helm.

  Yours affectionately,

  J.M.B.

  (Gloria Swanson), thinly based on The Admirable Crichton

  Prompted by a suggestion from A. E. W. Mason, Barrie had exhumed his notes on The Second Chance (see page 150) and was turning them into a full-length play under the title Dear Brutus. The idea sprang from Old Solomon Caw's warning to Peter Pan in The Little White Bird: ‘In this world there are no second chances.’ Evidently Mary Cannan thought otherwise, for, according to Elizabeth Lucas, she took Barrie's offer of help to mean a second chance of marriage. But Barrie stood by the moral of his play: that people who are given a second chance invariably make the same mistakes again. He offered to pay her an annual allowance, and to see her once a year, but further than that he would not go.

  Meanwhile Jack Davies was pursuing his first chance of marital bliss. His ship was based in the Firth of Forth, and while on shore-leave in Edinburgh he had met and fallen a victim to an ‘extraordinarily pretty’ nineteen-year-old daughter of a Scots banker, Miss Geraldine Gibb. Without consulting Barrie, Jack proposed to her, and Geraldine – or Gerrie, as she was known – accepted. Jack wrote to her from H.M.S. Octavia on March 25th:

  Jack in 1917

  ‘I can honestly hardly believe my stupendous luck. Fancy being engaged to you! … I cannot see the point in being engaged for years & years can you? It seems such unutterable waste of very good time. Perhaps (your word is law) you think otherwise, in which case yours so very humbly has only to be told. But, bien aimée, & these loathsome details have to be faced, my Guardian has to be talked to gently on the everlasting question of dibs. Lord but it's unseemly to mix up filthy lucre in a question of any sort, but it has to be done, doesn't it, & knowing the dear little man as well as I do this sort of question has somewhat naturally never cropped up before & I'm hanged if I know what he'll say. He's infernally wealthy himself but knows me – or rather knew me before I met you – & so knows my wonderful incapacity for keeping money. Still, I shall see him this next visit to town & as I know so well he's one of God's own, I have the highest hopes. … We've a house in London that no one lives in now as we're all away. It's quite small but my mother did it all & it's most wonderful inside. … I wonder, will it be OURS one day? As a sailor one has such a mighty small use for a house in London – still, it's for one of the family Davies, so why not us? … The family will fight for you if I know anything of them. My particular pal is Nicholas – the youngest, whose smile you liked [on the photograph] in my cabin. He's a bird & will ask to take you straight to his heart. George, John,* Peter, Michael & Nicholas – we're all saints! Poor old George was killed in France. He was a wonderful person. That really was a case of “they whom the Gods love die young.” Peter is one of God's own. Michael is at present rather trying, but he'll get over it.

  Just 16 & full of Eton you know, but withal a good fellow. And Nico. He'll never be trying. … Mother you really would have adored. Everyone did. Father died when I was 12 & Mother never really got over it. They were wonderful people, I suppose really rather too perfect to go on. But I should so have loved to go to Mother & say, “Here's a daughter for you at last.” She always longed for a daughter but never had one. She was so lovely herself that it seems a great pity she hadn't a daughter like her. There are so very few people I can ever talk to about this sort of
thing that I know you'll forgive me. … Are you happy to know that someday you'll be Mrs John Llewelyn Davies herself? To me it's so wonderful I'm beaten all of a heap!’

  Geraldine Gibb

  Jack went to London at the beginning of April to put his case to Barrie. He wrote to Gerrie on April 4th:

  ‘I haven't seen the little Baronet yet, but am lunching with him today. … My pay's about £230 & I also have about £180 & with your £100 that's £510. Wonderful mathematician. Now if I can only persuade Guardy to add £200 – which is such an utter flea-bite to him – I really don't see why the deed shouldn't be done. But I have a grizly feeling he'll be “un peu difficile” to put it mildly. He's the dearest fellow in the world, but he knows me!’

  Jack wrote again the following day:

  Michael's only surviving Eton letter to Barrie. He rarely signed his letters with anything less formal than ‘Yours’, even to Mary Hodgson

  ‘You'll have to take a big pull on yourself to bear this news bravely. I spoke to my Guardian about you & he says that to gain his consent & help we are to wait a year. It's a grizly thought I know, but when you think what his help means to us, I think we can do it, don't you? … Cause if we go against him & get married he'll never help us. I know him well enough to be sure of that. … One thing, if by any chance I got shifted from [Edinburgh] … I think the little Baronet could probably get me shifted back again all right. He has untold influence if only he'd use it & not have some silly idea about seeing if separation would make any difference to us. Of course it does make a filthy difference, but not in the way he means! … Damn all hard-headed & so-called level headed Guardians. No, I don't mean that because he's been so almighty good to us. I'm an ungrateful beast, but it's so infernally hard to wait. … Michael and Nico are having tea in here now, & pulling my leg hard about you. One has just said, “Don't put crosses at the end, it isn't done.” He got a matchbox in the chest!’