The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  With the Black Lake a mermaids’ lagoon and the surrounding fir trees a tropical forest, together Uncle Jim and the boy began telling a story. This was his way, always had been since he was a child, when one of his friends would tell half of a story he had read, and someone else had to work out the end.

  ‘First I tell it to him,’ said Barrie, ‘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. A story had to be told together.’

  It is intriguing to read the story of what became the new Act III of Peter Pan and wonder who contributed which parts. Peter and Wendy are marooned on a rock in the mermaid’s lagoon and must surely drown. We may see Michael’s contributions among the prettier parts, including Wendy’s rescue by means of a kite, which he had made only a few days before. Barrie, on the other hand, was always the provocateur in the games with the boys, responsible for the story’s more menacing aspects, and plainly there is his trademark, mock-heroic whimsy here too.

  As for the very last line of the story about death being an adventure, which in an extraordinary way predicts Michael’s own last act on this earth fifteen years later, it is anybody’s guess who put the idea in Peter’s mind. It had been tossed to and fro since its first utterance. While walking one day in Kensington Gardens one of Michael’s brothers had pointed to two headstones with ‘W St M’ and ‘13a PP 1841’ inscribed on them – they can still be seen on the west side of the Broad Walk in the Gardens today. Uncle Jim said they were gravestones for two children (Walter Stephen Matthews and Phoebe Phelps) who had fallen out of their prams and died. Peter Pan had his work cut out burying dead children, apparently, after 6 p.m. lockout in the Gardens, and would dance on their graves, playing on his pipes to make them laugh as they began their journey in the afterlife.6

  Barrie had a fascination with the afterlife, and where better to explore it than in the company of the beautiful mermaids of the Black Lake lagoon in such an innocent spirit of adventure as this?

  It is the end of a long playful day on the mermaids’ lagoon. The sun’s rays have persuaded him to give them another five minutes, for one more race over the waters before he gathers them up and lets in the moon. There are many mermaids here … and one might attempt to count the tails did they not flash and disappear so quickly. At times a lovely girl leaps in the air seeking to get rid of her excess of scales, which fall in a silver shower as she shakes them off. From the coral grottoes beneath the lagoon, where are the mermaids’ bed-chambers, comes fitful music. One of the most bewitching of these blue-eyed creatures is lying lazily on Marooners’ Rock…

  Here the mermaids love to bask, combing out their hair in a lazy way. Peter often chats with them and sits on their tails when they get cheeky. He has already given Wendy one of their combs. The most haunting time at which to see them is at the turn of the moon, when they utter strange wailing cries; but the lagoon is dangerous for mortals then.

  ‘Mermaids are such cruel creatures, Wendy, that they try to pull boys and girls like you into the water and drown them.’

  Wendy is uneasy as she surveys the rock, which is the only one in the lagoon and no larger than a table. Since she last looked around a threatening change has come over the scene. The sun has gone, but the moon has not come. What has come is a cold shiver across the waters which has sent all the wiser mermaids to their coral recesses. They know that evil is creeping over the lagoon.

  Peter of course is the first to scent it … The pirates are coming. (This is the moment for Hook and Peter.)

  HOOK ‘Pan! Into the water, Smee. Starkey, mind the boat. Take him dead or alive!’

  The fight is short and sharp … Hook’s iron claw makes a circle of black water round him from which opponents flee like fishes. There is only one prepared to enter that dreadful circle. His name is Pan. Strangely, it is not in the water that they meet. Hook has risen to the rock to breathe, and at the same moment Peter scales it on the opposite side. The rock is now wet and as slippery as a ball, and they have to crawl rather than climb. Suddenly they are face to face. Peter gnashes his pretty teeth with joy, and is gathering himself for the spring when he sees he is higher up the rock than his foe. Courteously he waits; Hook sees his intention, and taking advantage of it claws twice. Peter is untouched, but unfairness is what he never can get used to, and in his bewilderment he rolls off the rock. The crocodile, whose tick has been drowned in the strife, rears its jaws, and Hook, who has almost stepped into them, is pursued by it to land. All is quiet on the lagoon now, not a sound save little waves nibbling at the rock, which is smaller than when we last looked at it. Two boys appear with the dinghy, and the others despite their wounds climb into it. They send the cry ‘Peter – Wendy’.

  When their voices die away there comes cold silence over the lagoon, and then a feeble cry.

  ‘Help, help!’

  Two small figures are beating against the rock; the girl has fainted and lies on the boy’s arm. With a last effort Peter pulls her up the rock and then lies down beside her. Even as he also faints he sees that the water is rising. He knows that they will soon be drowned, but he can do no more.

  As they lay side by side a mermaid who had dared to come back in the stillness stretches up her arms and begins slowly pulling Wendy into the water to drown her. Peter, feeling her slip from him, wakes with a start, and is just in time to draw her back.

  Wendy rouses herself and looks around her. ‘Peter! Where are we, Peter?

  ‘We are on the rock, Wendy, but it is growing smaller. Soon the water will be over it. Listen!’ They can hear the wash of the relentless little waves.

  ‘I can’t help you, Wendy. Hook wounded me. I can neither fly nor swim.’

  ‘Do you mean we shall both be drowned?’

  ‘Look how the water is rising.’

  They put their hands over their eyes to shut out the sight. They think they will soon be no more. As they sit there something brushes against Peter as light as a kiss, and stays there, as if saying timidly, ‘Can I be of any use?’ It is the tail of a kite, which Michael had made some days before. It had torn itself out of his hand and floated away.

  ‘Michael’s kite,’ Peter says without interest, but next moment he has seized the tail, and is pulling the kite toward him.

  ‘It lifted Michael off the ground,’ he cries. ‘Why should it not carry you?’

  ‘Both of us!’

  ‘It can’t lift two; Michael and Curly tried.’

  Wendy knows that if it can lift her it can also lift Peter too, for she has the secret from the boys – Peter is no weight at all. But it is a deadly secret…

  ‘Let us draw lots,’ Wendy says bravely.

  ‘And you a lady; never.’

  Already he had tied the tail round her. She clings to him; she refuses to go without him; but with a ‘Good-bye, Wendy,’ he pushes her from the rock; and in a few minutes she is borne out of sight.

  Peter is alone on the lagoon, but with something much more exciting in mind than flying to safety on a kite string.

  The waters are lapping over the rock now, and Peter is aware that it will soon be submerged. Pale rays of light mingle with the moving clouds, and from the coral grottoes is to be heard a sound, at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the Neverland, the mermaids calling to the moon to rise.

  Peter is afraid at last, and a tremor runs through him, like a shudder passing over the lagoon; but on the lagoon one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and he feels just the one.

  Next moment, with the lagoon suffused with moonlight and that smile on his face and a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last, Peter stands erect on the rock again and calls:

  ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

  2 Barrie in Tommy and Grizel (1900).

  3 Peter Llewelyn Davies in the unpublished family history, which became known as The Morgu
e.

  4 The Seekers by Daphne du Maurier, unfinished and unpublished, was written in 1921 after Michael’s death.

  5 Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1993).

  6 The official line is that the stones indicate the old boundary line for the parish of Westminster

  St Mary’s and the parish of Paddington.

  Chapter Two

  1860–1900: A Rich Harvest of Possibility

  MICHAEL , THE FOURTH of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was born on 16 June 1900, at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of what were once the private gardens of Kensington Palace.

  Sylvia was a du Maurier, the third of five children born to Emma and George du Maurier. Her father had risen from a penurious and rootless childhood to become a famous cartoonist, notably for the society pages of Punch magazine, and the author of three bestselling novels: Peter Ibbetson (1891), Trilby (1894) and The Martian (1896).

  Before he had found fame on Punch, he had trained as an artist in Paris, smoked opium, exercised his beautiful tenor voice and engaged in séances and experiments in hypnotism. Arriving in London in 1860, he shared an apartment with James McNeill Whistler, mixed with Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Rossetti, Millais and Edward Burne-Jones and became something of a touchstone in London’s literary and artistic community, with Henry James his closest friend.

  Sylvia was her father’s favourite child. Brought up in an enlightened, bohemian atmosphere at New Grove House on the edge of sprawling Hampstead Heath, high above the city, she was ‘a graceful beauty, her charm enhanced by the endearing crookedness of her mouth and a tip-tilted nose’, according to the biographer Diana Farr.7

  Her skin was white, her shoulders wide and splendid; her hair very dark, a fine frame for that pale face which in repose had a noble almost Grecian quality. But perhaps her most remarkable feature was her eyes, set wide apart with a serenity which attracted the young, the shy and the hesitant.

  Sylvia’s unusual beauty, charm and grace, matched by a mocking wit and sense of fun, were already welcomed in London society when, at twenty-three, she first met Arthur, her future husband. They were the perfect foil to Arthur’s dark good looks and more serious demeanour: ‘We used to think he was a young warrior in an Italian picture,’ the composer Sir Hubert Parry, a family friend, once said of him.

  Three years older than Sylvia and a rising barrister, Arthur was the second of seven children of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies and his wife, Mary. The family home was miles to the north in Kirkby Lonsdale, a village between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.

  The Llewelyn Davieses were Christian, highbrow, but politically progressive. Arthur’s father had been President of the Cambridge Union and more recently Chaplain to Queen Victoria. Ottoline Morrell, one of the original Bloomsbury set, wrote of him:

  He had been a friend of F. D. Maurice and Robert Browning and even Thomas Carlyle. He was a shy, sensitive reserved man, and had rather a stiff, dry, unsympathetic manner, but after a time I had broken the ice. I found this old man, sitting in his little study, a great solace and very interesting…

  Besides the intellectual prowess and unsympathetic manner, the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies was an original member of the famous Alpine Club, and was the first to climb the highest peak within the Swiss frontier (the Dom, 14,911 feet). He was also a supporter of women’s rights and workers’ rights, a champion of trade unionism and had nerve enough to lambast imperialism from the pulpit while the Queen herself was in the congregation – the reason he found himself living hundreds of miles to the north in 1889 as Rector of Kirkby Lonsdale.

  Dolly Parry, one of Sir Hubert’s daughters, wrote of the appointment:

  It was regarded as a sort of banishment. He was a Broad Churchman, and on a very high moral and intellectual plane. Mr Gladstone [who was on his fourth stint as Prime Minister] was criticised for this appointment. I heard so much of it from my father and mother, though only thirteen – that I had my own reasons for disliking Mr Gladstone in my youth. He didn’t approve of Mr Llewelyn Davies and he cut down trees.

  For his part, John Llewelyn Davies was never in the least bitter and grew to love Kirkby and his walks over the Fells, where he turned the vicarage into a hive of reformatory endeavour.

  Dolly’s close association with the family had begun with her mother’s great liking and admiration for Arthur’s sister, Margaret, who was General Secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild from 1889 to 1922. The intellectual and social achievements of the Llewelyn Davieses knew no bounds. Arthur’s Aunt Emily founded Girton College, Cambridge, and his own list of accomplishments, before being called to the Bar, included Junior and Senior Scholarships at Marlborough School (a major English public school), Minor and Foundation Trinity Scholarships at Cambridge University, where he took a First Class Degree in the Classical Tripos and won the Lebas Essay Prize in 1884, the First Whewell International Law Scholarship in 1887 Law, and the Inner Temple Pupil Scholarship in Common Law in 1889.

  His brothers Crompton and Theodore had both been Apostles at Cambridge – members of a secret society to which only select undergraduates were elected and which would shortly include the philosopher G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica), the poet Rupert Brooke, and many members of the Bloomsbury set, such as John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his brother James.

  Crompton’s story is an especially adventurous one. He became a successful lawyer, friend of Lloyd George and supporter of Sinn Féin and married Moya O’Connor, an attractive, dynamic woman who smuggled guns during the War of Independence and was reputed to have been one of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins’ many lovers. Crompton actually helped Collins draft the Free State constitution and knew him well. After he was ambushed and shot through the head in August 1922, Crompton was appointed Arbitrator and Inspector General in Land Matters for the Free State.

  Arthur and Sylvia were a handsome couple with diverse and attractive strains in their character and background, which seemed to predict a lasting, dovetail attraction between them, rather than any serious kind of conflict, and a rich harvest of possibility for the generations to follow.

  Fate, in the shape of Mr Barrie, was to determine otherwise.

  7 Diana Farr, Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy (1978).

  Chapter Three

  1895: A Key to Kensington Gardens

  MOST AFTERNOONS FROM his house at 133 Gloucester Road, James Matthew Barrie, a boyish figure with a round, full, sensitive-looking head and a faraway look in his eyes, would make his way by means of Palace Gate on the south side of the Kensington Gardens on to the Broad Walk, dressed in overcoat and scarf to protect his chest. His constant pipe-smoking had produced a ticklish cough, which friends associated with him as surely as his thick, high-pitched Scottish accent.

  At this stage a bowler hat and a stick completed the ensemble, creating an image strangely like that of Charlie Chaplin, the south London export to Hollywood whom Barrie would later entertain at home and invite to play Peter Pan on film (which, alas, never happened). Like Barrie, Chaplin was short, although at five feet five he had one and a half inches on the little writer.

  In those days, the Kensington Gardens were wild, the paths rougher than they are today; and it was quieter: no bandstand even played. It was ‘a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees’, as one regular user described it, and although in the distance one could just hear the rumble of horse-drawn vehicles along the Bayswater Road, on the northern border, it was a peaceful, rural retreat, remote from metropolitan London, which swept past it. There were even sheep grazing there.

  Entering the gardens from the south with his pretty young actress wife, Mary Ansell, and huge St Bernard dog, Barrie came at once upon the main north–south axis of the gardens. The Broad Walk was nanny-central between two and four in the afternoon, when Kensington Gardens was commandeered by a number of young, middle-and upper-class children, many of the latter gathering in the more selec
t area at the top of the Walk, called The Figs.

  All perambulators seemed Gardens-bound then, although there were fewer people than you would see there today, and at first the Barries would walk in some solitude with their gigantic companion and, as they liked to do, play hide-and-seek and countless other games for a St Bernard’s delight.

  Porthos, for that was his name – vast, gentle and apparently melancholy, but not really – was more or less the child that they never had.

  After their marriage in 1894, which followed three nervous breakdowns and an emergency dash by Mary Ansell to Barrie’s bedside in the family home at Kirriemuir, ostensibly for a last goodbye, Barrie made a lightning recovery and a marriage ceremony was undertaken at the house (as was allowed under Scottish law). Afterwards, a much-recovered Mr Barrie and his new wife had honeymooned in Switzerland and bought the St Bernard there, and their London house the following year.

  The Barries’ home at No. 133 was a well-appointed, three-storey town house, the first outward sign of his success since buying a one-way ticket to London almost ten years earlier, clutching an article for the St James’s Gazette entitled ‘The Rooks begin to Build’.

  When he and Mary first lived there they wouldn’t see many people in the evenings, so the games with Porthos would continue, running breakneck races up and down the stairs, or playing ‘finding his favourite author’. Or Porthos might do the tricks his master had taught him, like drinking milk out of a tumbler, or shaking hands, or removing a glove from a pocket and bringing it back to him. And Mary would come alive and dance for Porthos, who would watch her every movement with solemn, worshipping eyes.