Porthos was the child in their house, but he wasn’t the only one. It was, in the opinion of a few observers, all a bit ‘unnatural’. But it was perfectly natural for them.
A toyshop en route to the gardens was a regular stall. Porthos would come to a halt there and wave his tail, so that one or other of them would buy him a toy. He liked dolls mostly, not balls. It all began after Barrie bought himself a toy for his own amusement.
It represented a woman, a young mother, flinging her little son over her head with one hand and catching him in the other, and I was entertaining myself on the hearthrug with this pretty domestic scene when I heard an unwonted sound from Porthos, and looking up, I saw this noble and melancholic countenance on the broad grin. I shuddered and was putting the toy away at once, but he sternly struck down my arm with his, and signed that I was to continue. The unmanly chuckle always came, I found, when the poor lady dropped her babe, but the whole thing entranced him; he tried to keep his excitement down by taking huge draughts of water; he forgot all his niceties of conduct; he sat in holy rapture with the toy between his paws, took it to bed with him, ate it in the night, and searched for it so longingly next day that I had to go out and buy him the man with the scythe…
The dame in the temple of toys which we frequent thinks I want them for a little boy and calls him ‘the precious’ and ‘the lamb’, the while Porthos is standing gravely by my side. She is a motherly soul, but over-talkative.
‘And how is the dear lamb today?’ she begins, beaming.
‘Well, ma’am, well,’ I say, keeping tight grip on his collar.
‘This blighty weather is not affecting his darling appetite?’
‘No, ma’am, not at all.’ (She would be considerably surprised if informed that he dined today on a sheepshead, a loaf, and three cabbages, and is suspected of a leg of mutton.)
‘I hope he loves his toys.’
‘He carries them about with him everywhere, ma’am.’ (Has the one we bought yesterday with him now, though you might not think it to look at him.)
‘What do you say to a box of tools this time?’
‘I think not, ma’am.’
‘Is the deary fond of digging?’
‘Very partial to digging.’ (We shall find the leg of mutton some day.)
‘Then perhaps a weeny spade and pail?’
Once Porthos was let off his leash in the gardens, his master would play with him, and soon children would gather round to watch. The huge dog, up on his hind legs, was as tall as the little man in the bowler hat. Man and dog boxed, circled, and stopped to go off running, then walked on again to play hide-and-seek among the trees.
Pamela Maude, daughter of West End actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, who were starring at the time in Barrie’s hit play The Little Minister remembered: ‘Mr Barrie had a pale face and large eyes and shadows round them; he looked fragile. But he was strong when he wrestled with Porthos.’
But then all of a sudden he’d stop and become like ordinary people again and make jerky jokes or do tricks with match-boxes or talk about cricket. He tried to show Pamela’s sister Margery how to bowl and to bat, but she always refused to learn; she stood with a stubborn look on her face and her hands on her hips. ‘I am a girl,’ she said, ‘and girls don’t play crickets.’
Mr Barrie’s face showed he thought girls were stupid.
Pamela remembered that his wife Mary ‘was lovely’.
Her cheeks were the colour of a wild rose and we liked to stare at her. She wore pretty clothes that seemed different to those worn by other people, dresses in brown and green that some woodland fairy-lady could have worn. She made us think of the Flower Ladies in our books, which were illustrated by Walter Crane – she was ‘Queen Summer’. But we could not feel at ease with her. She did not talk to us and she never smiled when we were with her.
Mary, the daughter of a licensed victualler and a woman who kept a boarding house on the south coast, had given up a promising career in the theatre to become Barrie’s wife. She had even had her own company at one time. The sight of children about her husband soon began to arouse mixed feelings. ‘I am not quite happy with them,’ she wrote with honesty.
Something about them puts me off, their humanness to tell the truth. They are little people. I have never been really happy with people. Some constraint tightens me up when I am with them. They seem so inside themselves, so unwilling to reveal their real selves. I am always asking for something they won’t give me; I try to pierce into their reserves; sometimes I feel I am succeeding, but they close in again, and I am left outside.
Truth was that Mary far preferred dogs to children. ‘An animal is so helplessly itself … perhaps my love for the dogs, in the beginning, was a sort of mother-love…’
Few had much either good or bad to say about Mary Ansell. Dolly described her as ‘commonplace, 2nd rate & admirable’.
Besides having an interest in cricket and playing with toys, Barrie confessed to having taken a few simple lessons in conjuring in a dimly lit chamber beneath a shop from ‘a gifted young man with a long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a barber’s pole from my pocket, saying at the same time, “Come, come, sir, this will never do.”’
Whether because he knew too much, or because he wore a trick shirt, he was the most depressing person I ever encountered; he felt none of the artist’s joy, and it was sad to see one so well calculated to give pleasure to thousands not caring a dump about it.
The barber’s pole was successfully extracted from many a child’s mouth in the Kensington Gardens, even though the difficulty of disposing of it Barrie found considerable.
Then there was the magic egg-cup. ‘I usually carried it about with me, and with its connivance I did some astonishing things with pennies; but even the penny that costs sixpence is uncertain, and just when you are saying triumphantly that it will be found in the eggcup, it may clatter to the ground…’
The next moment he was pretending to hypnotise a child with his eyebrows. He had an unusual ability to elevate and lower his eyebrows separately, like two buckets in a well, while gazing into the face of a child intently with his large, morose, staring eyes, not unlike those of Porthos. It was a trick that almost never failed to give him a chance to check a screaming boy’s tears.
The boy would stop mid-scream and consider the unexpected movement without prejudice, his face remaining as it was, his mouth open to emit the frozen howl if the trick did not surpass expectation. The fair-minded boy was giving the odd little man a chance. It was all Barrie needed. Next minute he was telling him about fairies as though he knew all about them.
He had a favourite haunt called the Story Seat and told a new fairy tale there every afternoon for years. Asked when was the first fairy, he would say: ‘When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.’
Nannies would press their charges upon him, making no connection at all with the stories coming out of the Old Bailey about Oscar Wilde and his young friends.
Indeed, so innocently was he regarded that, in 1902, Lord Esher, Secretary to His Majesty’s Office of Works, who was responsible for the gardens and who for reasons perhaps best kept to himself took to calling Mr Barrie ‘the furry beast’, presented him with his own key so that he could go there whenever he liked, even unattended after lock-out time.
‘Lock-out time is fairy time in the gardens,’ Barrie would tell his young charges.
You can be looking at fairies during the day without knowing. I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks. They usually pretend to be flowers, because the court sits in the Fairies’ Basin, and the Fairy Basin, you remember, is all covered with ground-ivy (from which they make
their castor-oil), with flowers growing in it here and there. Most of them really are flowers, but some of them are fairies. You never can be sure of them, but a good plan is to walk by looking the other way, and then turn round sharply. Another good plan, which I sometimes follow, is to stare them down. After a long time they can’t help winking, and then you know for certain that they are fairies. There are also numbers of them along the Baby’s Walk (which as you know runs off the bottom of the Broad Walk towards the Serpentine Lake). There are so many flowers there, and all along the Baby’s Walk, that a flower is the thing least likely to attract attention. They dress exactly like flowers. The beginning of the tulip weeks is almost the best time to catch them.8
8 J. M. Barrie in The Little White Bird (1902).
Chapter Four
1897: Spellbound
IT WAS NOT until 1897 that the Llewelyn Davies family arrived at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of the gardens. After their wedding in 1892 and a honeymoon at Porthgwarra in deepest Cornwall, Sylvia and Arthur had set up home at 18 Craven Terrace in Paddington, close to where Arthur had been renting lodgings.
Craven Terrace was ‘a dear little house (or Sylvia made it so), a sort of maisonette’, as Dolly Parry described it. Sylvia had a flair for design and created soft furnishings for their home as well as lovely clothes for herself and her sons, often evolved from whatever lay to hand. ‘I remember Arthur telling me that Sylvia gave away his trousers for plants which a man brought round on a barrow,’ wrote Dolly years later. In fact, money had been so short at this time, so early in Arthur’s career, that Sylvia had been working for a well-known theatrical costumier, Ada Nettleship, who made clothes for the famous actress Ellen Terry (a great friend of du Maurier) in a dressmaking business set up by her father.
Then, in October 1896, du Maurier had died and the family benefited from legacies, mainly derived from the huge sales of du Maurier’s second novel, Trilby, which tells of the fate of a young, bohemian artist’s model in Paris when a man by the name of Svengali inveigles his way into her life and exercises his hypnotic power over her. With more than a touch of irony, the royalties from Trilby brought Sylvia and her sons within Barrie’s orbit for the first time.
The extra money also brought Nanny Hodgson on to the scene. At Craven Terrace, two children had been born to Sylvia in successive years – George on 20 July 1893, Jack on 11 September 1894. Her third son, Peter, was born on 25 February 1897, and as Sylvia now had three boys claiming her full-time attention, the decision was taken to employ a nanny.
Mary Hodgson (Dadge to her family) was the eighth of ten children born to Thomas, a stonemason, and his wife Mary, at Kirkby Lonsdale. Nanny was twenty-one going on twenty-two when she arrived. Inevitably, being so close to the Kensington Gardens, she joined the throng between two and four each afternoon, with George and Jack conspicuous in bright red tam-o’-shanters, blouses and breeches, made by Sylvia, and little Peter in his perambulator pushed by Nanny. It was only a matter of time before Barrie caught George’s eye.
He claimed first to have seen the four-year-old on the sward behind the Baby’s Walk. Originally George was, he said, ‘a missel thrush, attracted there that hot day by a hose that lay on the ground sending forth a gay trickle of water’. George was lying ‘on his back in the water, kicking up his legs’.9
The boy never tired of this story, and soon it was he who told it to Barrie rather than Barrie to him. All children were birds once apparently, and all children in this part of London were originally birds in Kensington Gardens:
Solomon Caw, the wise old crow on Bird Island in the Serpentine, was responsible for choosing a bird for each new mother and sending it to her. And the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people sometimes forget that they no longer have wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney.
Young George’s delight on a summer afternoon was to go with him to some spot in the gardens where the unfortunate mothers who have no children may be seen trying to catch one with small pieces of cake.
That the birds know what would happen if they were caught, and are even a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every student of them. Thus, if you leave your empty perambulator under the trees and watch from a distance, you will see the birds boarding it and hopping about from pillow to blanket in a twitter of excitement; they are trying to find out how babyhood would suit them.10
The saddest sight is the birds who never find a mother. He chose the original title of a book he published in 1902 called The Little White Bird, because ‘the little white birds are the birds that never find a mother’. Sad because Barrie never would have a child of his own flesh, though he had the fantasy of a boy called Timothy and wrote about him, wishing that he could have played just once in the Kensington Gardens, ‘and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper galleon on the Round Pond, [or] chase one hoop down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once…’
Barrie claimed that he had the fairy language from George after thinking back hard and pressing his hands to his temples.
‘“Fairy me tribber” is what you say to the fairies when you want them to give you a cup of tea,’ it emerged one day.
Barrie was pleased, but advised that ‘it is not so easy as it looks, for all the ‘r’s should be pronounced as ‘w’s.’
‘What would you say,’ George asked him, ‘if you wanted them to turn you into a hollyhock?’ He thought the ease with which they can turn you into things their most engaging quality. The answer is ‘Fairy me lukka’.
‘Fairy me bola’ means ‘Turn me back again’, and George’s discovery made Barrie uncomfortable, for he knew he had hitherto kept his distance from the fairies, mainly because of a feeling that their conversions are permanent.
Forsaking the realm of fairyland for a while, and indicating a change of subject by exposing his peculiarly large head to the elements, Barrie would gravely and reverently tell of some great explorer. Gallant tales of the search for the Northwest Passage, expeditions to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the exotic Orient and the dark continent of Africa provided a steady stream of adventure. On the little party a stillness would fall as all the time he spoke ‘as one fresh to the world before ever he had time to breathe upon the glass’, and they listened, spellbound.
George would trail around after him, Jack sometimes tagging along, while Peter was not out of his pram and was a long way from realising that ‘Mr Barrie’, as he later put it, ‘became a unique influence in the lives of all of us, one that was to affect our destinies in ways as yet unknown.’
Nanny, being Nanny, feared this from the start and became less and less keen the more the boys were ‘taken over by this strange little man’. Walks with the children became ‘less pleasurable’, she told her family in Kirkby Lonsdale and later came to look upon Barrie as an intrusion.
9 J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird (1902).
10 Ibid.
Chapter Five
1897: Barrie Comes Out
THE BARRIES MET Sylvia and Arthur at a high society dinner hosted by the leading London solicitor Sir George and Lady Lewis at their mansion at 88 Portland Place W1, on New Year’s Eve, 1897.
Before his death the previous October, du Maurier had been a regular guest of the Lewises since at least the 1860s; he was among their oldest friends. Sometimes hundreds would be invited to the Lewis parties, a mixture of peers of the realm and celebrities from the world of the arts. Occasionally there would be a much more select, high-profile evening, involving royalty. Party lists show, for example, that in March 1885 the Prince of Wales (Albert Edward, later Edward VII) was the principal guest, and du Maurier and his wife Emma attended with only a dozen or so others.
Barrie’s inclusion on party lists was singular and more recent – they show only one invitation earlier that same year (1897). At thirty-seven h
e was one of the most talked of figures in the literary world, with money pouring in from books and plays, in that very year to include a play based on his novel The Little Minister which it has been said earned him as much as £80,000, the equivalent of millions today. His invitation to the Lewises had seemed inevitable at some point.
But it was less inevitably to be accepted, for Barrie could be gauche in company. He and Mary by this time had begun to give little dinner-parties of their own at No. 133, so that their circle of friends was expanding all the time beyond the almost exclusively male band of friends that Barrie had enjoyed – mostly journalists and writers – up to the time he was married.
But even these little soirées could be difficult affairs, as very often Mrs Barrie was the only one who spoke.
Her husband’s prolonged silences were deafening. They defined him more completely than any feature other than his small stature, strong Scottish accent and persistent smoker’s cough. Said the writer Jerome K. Jerome:
Barrie could easily be the most silent man I have ever met. Sometimes he would sit through the whole of a dinner without ever speaking. Then, when all but the last one or two guests had gone – or even later – he would put his hands behind his back and, bummeling up and down the room, talk for maybe an hour straight on end. Once a beautiful but nervous young lady was handed over to his care. With the sole au gratin Barrie broke the silence:
‘Have you ever been to Egypt?’
The young lady was too startled to answer immediately. It was necessary for her to collect herself. While waiting for the entrée she turned to him.
The Real Peter Pan Page 3
