The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  1901–03: Island Games

  ONE MONTH AFTER Michael was born, George Llewelyn Davies turned seven, and one afternoon in Kensington Gardens his friend, Oliver Bailey, a year or so older and about to graduate to a preparatory school known as Wilkinson’s, told him that when you went to Wilkinson’s you didn’t talk about fairies any longer.

  Named after its headmaster, Herbert ‘Milky’ Wilkinson, and located at Nos. 10 and 11 Orme Square, this was an independent day school for boys with a fine academic reputation. All the Davies boys would eventually attend it. Pupils – Peter and Michael included – regularly won scholarships to leading public schools. From a very early age the boys could remember watching them walking in a crocodile through Kensington Gardens.

  As soon as he heard what Oliver had been saying, Barrie knew what was coming. ‘On attaining the age of eight, or thereabout,’ he wrote, ‘children fly away from the Gardens, and never come back. When next you meet them they are ladies and gentlemen holding up their umbrellas to hail a hansom.’

  The problem was, he scribbled to himself, ‘children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, but every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead’.

  He realised he had to act, and once again drew upon Peter Ibbetson’s example, graduating from fairies to boys’ adventure.

  I reconsidered my weapons, and I fought Oliver and beat him. With wrecked islands I turned him. I began in the most unpretentious way by telling them a story which might last an hour, and favoured by many an unexpected wind it lasted eighteen months.

  It started as the wreck of the simple Swiss family [Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Weiss]. But soon a glorious inspiration of the night turned it into the wreck of George and Oliver Bailey.

  At first it was what they were to do when they were wrecked, but imperceptibly it became what they had done. I spent much of my time staring reflectively at the titles of the boys’ stories in the booksellers’ windows [and] found the titles even more helpful than the stories. We wrecked everybody of note, including all Homer’s characters and the hero of Paradise Lost. But we suffered them not to land. We stripped them of what we wanted, and left them to wander the high seas naked of adventure. And all this was merely the beginning.

  Before long I had been cast upon the island. It was not my own proposal … They found me among the breakers with a large dog, which had kept me afloat throughout that terrible night. I was the sole survivor of the ill-fated Anna Pink. So exhausted was I that they had to carry me to their hut, and great was my gratitude when on opening my eyes I found myself in that romantic edifice instead of in Davy Jones’s locker. As we walked in the Gardens I told them of the hut they had built; and they were inflated but not surprised. On the other hand they looked for surprise from me.

  ‘Did we tell you about the eggs we found in the sand?’ asked Oliver, reverting to deeds of theirs of which I had previously told them.

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Who found them?’ demanded George, not as one who needed information, but after the manner of a schoolmaster…

  ‘They were found,’ I said, ‘by George, the younger of the two youths.’

  ‘Who stabbed the wild pig?’ asked the older of the two youths.

  ‘Oliver Bailey,’ I replied.

  ‘Was it Oliver,’ asked George sharply, ‘that found the cocoa-nut tree first?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I answered, ‘it was first observed by George, who immediately climbed it, remarking, “This is certainly the cocos nucifera, for, see, dear Oliver, the slender columns supporting the crown of leaves, which fall with a grace that no art can imitate.”’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ remarked George with a wave of his hand.

  ‘I said things like that too,’ Oliver insisted.

  ‘No, you didn’t then,’ said George.

  ‘Yes, I did so.’

  ‘No, you didn’t so.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Well, then, let’s hear one you said.’

  Oliver looked appealingly at me. ‘The following,’ I announced, ‘is one that Oliver said: “Truly, dear comrade, though the perils of these happenings are great, and our privations calculated to break the stoutest heart, yet to be rewarded by such fair sights I would endure still greater trials, and still rejoice even as the bird on yonder bough.”’

  ‘That’s one I said!’ crowed Oliver.

  ‘I shot the bird,’ said George instantly.

  ‘What bird?’

  ‘The yonder bird.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Did I not shoot the bird?’

  ‘It was George who shot the bird,’ I said, ‘but it was Oliver who saw by its multi-coloured plumage that it was one of the Psittacidae, an excellent substitute for partridge.’

  ‘You didn’t see that,’ said Oliver, rather swollen.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I saw that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You shut up.’

  ‘George shot it,’ I summed up, ‘and Oliver knew its name, but I ate it. Do you remember how hungry I was?’

  ‘Rather!’ said George.

  ‘I cooked it,’ said Oliver.

  ‘It was served up on toast,’ I reminded them.

  ‘I toasted it,’ said George.

  ‘Toast from the bread-fruit tree,’ I said, ‘which (as you both remarked simultaneously) bears two and sometimes three crops in a year, and also affords a serviceable gum for the pitching of canoes.’

  ‘I pitched mine best,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I pitched mine farthest,’ said George.

  ‘And when I had finished my repast,’ said I, ‘you amazed me by handing me a cigar from the tobacco-plant.’

  ‘I handed it,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I snicked off the end,’ said George.

  ‘And then,’ said I, ‘you gave me a light.’

  ‘Which of us?’ they cried together.

  ‘Both of you,’ I said. ‘Never shall I forget my amazement when I saw you get that light by striking two stones together.’

  At this they waggled their heads. ‘You couldn’t have done it!’ said George.

  ‘No, George,’ I admitted, ‘I can’t do it, but of course I know that all wrecked boys do it quite easily. Show me how you did it.’

  But after consulting apart they agreed not to show me. I was not shown everything.

  George was now firmly convinced that he had once been wrecked on an island, while Oliver passed his days in dubiety. They used to argue it out together, and among their friends. As I unfolded the story Oliver listened with an open knife in his hand, and George, who was not allowed to have a knife, wore a pirate-string round his waist.

  Mary Hodgson, as usual, objected to the open knife and Barrie was all for defying her, but George convinced him to let her in and ‘she proved a great success and recognised the Yucca filamentosa by its long narrow leaves the very day she joined us. Thereafter we had no more scoffing from Nanny Hodgson, who listened to the story as hotly as anybody.’

  The Swiss Family Robinson had been one of the earliest books Barrie read as a child, but intuitively he knew that his island challenges with the boys would not be so easily solved as theirs were. So he turned to his real favourite, The Coral Island, which tells of three ship’s boys – Ralph, Jack and Peterkin – wrecked on a South Sea coral island. They build their own house, make fires, gather fruits, build boats to explore neighbouring islands, and settle down to an idyllic life, until the war canoes arrive full of cannibals…

  R. M. Ballantyne’s spell never left him from when he was a child, and now in the very year of Michael’s birth he encouraged his wife to buy Black Lake Cottage, a rural retreat a couple of miles south of Farnham on the Tilford Road in Surrey. It was here that he found the ideal base from which to indulge his island and wrecking fantasies with Sylvia’s boys.

  First he journ
eyed with them to the Reform Club in London, surely the oddest place to learn to make a fire as Jack made it in Coral Island. Their teacher was a learned American by name of Seton-Thompson:

  It is a few years ago and I am in a solemn London Club, there to meet a learned American who had vowed that he would show me how to make a fire. We adjourned to the library (where we knew we were not likely to be disturbed) and there from concealed places about his person, he produced Jack’s implements, a rough bow and a rougher arrow, pointed at both ends. Then he ordered a pat of butter (the waiter must be wondering still), and, like Jack, he twisted the arrow around the string of the bow and began to saw, placing the end of the arrow against his chest, which was protected from its point by a chip of wood; the other point he placed against a bit of tinder. Jack had no butter, but we had no bit of tinder. The result, however, was the same. In half a minute, my friend had made a fire, at which we lit our cigars and smoked to the memory of Ballantyne and The Coral Island.

  Then it was down to Black Lake Cottage, where Peter Pan made the transition from Kensington Gardens, and Michael’s formal initiation took place just six weeks into his young life.

  In those days the salmon-coloured trains of the South-Western Railway took one peacefully down from Waterloo to alight at Farnham. Then you cycled or drove for two miles down the Tilford Road behind a horse…

  until presently, to the right of the dusty, yellow road, there was a sudden clearing in the trees. Here, in still unspoilt Surrey and the very depths, as it seemed, of the country, the little two-storey cottage stood. On three sides the dark woods came right up to the edge of the garden, and as you climbed the rising ground at the back there were glimpses and then a wide prospect through the tall, straight trunks of acres of tree-tops laid out below. No other house, in those days, was within sight or sound. And though under grey skies there was something a little forbidding about the way that Black Lake Cottage was shut in, the summer poured plenty of sunlight through its windows and over the long, level lawn.20

  Denis Mackail’s description, written in 1940, catches the atmosphere well. Today there may be more houses, but they are not intrusive. The ‘cottage’ is now considerably more than a cottage, there is even a new house built behind it, within the old grounds, which once included ‘four acres of garden with carefully planned zig-zagging paths [which] led to secret bowers, rockeries, a Japanese garden and a pond with lizards and goldfish. There was a little tea-house lit on summer nights by Chinese lanterns,’21 and still plenty of room for a cricket pitch and a place to play golf croquet.

  The Tilford Road follows the line of one of those ancient sunken lanes for which rural Britain was once famous, and still the house is almost hidden from view by trees. On the north side, a broad-leaved haven where once Sylvia’s boys let rip with their bows and arrows, is even open to the public, though it can surely only be locals who know. Across the road lies the massive, scented, impossibly tall perpendicular forestation of pine surrounding the Black Lake itself, soon to become a South Seas lagoon.

  It is to the letter Peter Ibbetson’s secluded pocket of dreams, cutoff from the wide world on three sides by trees, as described by du Maurier:

  An Eden where one might gather and eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways of life without losing one’s innocence; a forest that had remade for itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled everything together.

  With George and Oliver challenging his belief in fairies, Barrie feared ‘I was losing my grip.’ But here at Black Lake he restored it by recreating Peter’s childhood paradise, even using the same mystical terminology as du Maurier – ‘the Tree of Knowledge’:

  One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the Tree of Knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the wood, as the unthinking may at a cross-road take a familiar path that no longer leads to home; or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you still belonged: soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for it vanishes if one needs to look for it.

  A time came when I saw that No. 1 [George], the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided the lingering faith of No. 2 [Jack]; when even No. 3 [Peter] questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better [Michael and Nico, the latter born in 1903], but their day was dawning.

  The Black Lake experience was an extraordinary fillip to the whole fantastic Neverland adventure, just as the Mare d’Auteil had clung to the young du Maurier’s mind in the Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps it was so effective because Barrie was returning the boys to the du Maurier collective unconscious as expressed in the family myth.

  For that is what Peter Ibbetson became for the family, a kind of source-myth, and not limited to the blissful experience of the lost joy of childhood. In the novel it emerges that Mary, Duchess of Towers, is Mimsey Seraskier, the little girl who was besotted with Peter in their childhood – she is ‘the one survivor of that sweet time’. They fall in love. She shows him how they can dream true together, Mary’s ‘warm life-current mixing’ with his, a telepathic union offering rapture unadulterated by the physical world. Peter is overwhelmed with the joy they experience together: ‘Was there ever … ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I feel now?’

  Du Maurier, it seemed to readers at the time, had found a way into a timeless ‘other world’ just out of reach, tinkering with the idea that our terrestrial, mundane life is a mere front for true mystical being. He was a Romantic through and through and had an exquisite, spiritual sense of beauty. And now he had found a way to induce in himself a state that could replicate ‘such as moves in sweet melodies, such as entrances in Chopin’s Ètudes, and in Schubert’s Romances’.

  When John Masefield wrote that du Maurier’s ‘effect upon that generation was profound – I can think of no book which so startled and delighted the questing mind’, he gave Peter Ibbetson’s public reception its proper context. In the milieu of the family, du Maurier had an even stronger influence. ‘He affected us all greatly,’ admitted Daphne, who owed her success to it from the moment in Alexandria when she dreamt she went to Manderley again and ‘was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers…’ (Rebecca, 1938)

  Although the first notes for the play of Peter Pan did not appear in Barrie’s notebook until the spring of 1903, the adventures that informed so much of the action unfolded here at the Black Lake: ‘I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan,’ Barrie confessed to the boys years later.

  You had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib. That is what must have happened, but I cannot remember doing it … The play of Peter is streaky with you still … A score of Acts had to be left out, and you were in them all.

  Out of Black Lake, characters and episodes fell onto the page. When Peter Pan, Wendy, John and Michael arrive in the Neverland ‘the chief forces of the island’, which emerged from the games, are introduced. ‘[They] were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins.

  ‘The lost boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I’m captain,’ says Peter.

  The central conflict in the play between Captain Hook (initially called Captain Swarthy in the games) and Peter Pan – ‘Most of all I want their captain, Peter Pan. ‘Twas he cut off my arm.’ – was also formed here. Barrie took the role of Captain Swarthy and Porthos pl
ayed the pirate’s dog (or a tiger in a papier-mâché mask).

  Hook – a ‘dark and sinister’ man – is deemed ‘by those in the know’, as Barrie also confessed, ‘to be autobiographical’. He is his doppelgänger, a strange mix of menace and ‘a touch of the feminine’, he admitted, adding with disarming wit: ‘it sometimes gave him intuitions’.

  ‘No. 4 [Michael] rested so much at this period that he was merely an honorary member of the band,’ wrote Barrie to the boys, ‘waving his foot to you for luck when you set off with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him; and one may rummage in vain for any trace of No. 5.’

  Nico, still three years away from being born, would miss out on Black Lake altogether and his character would be utterly different to those of the others. He was never to penetrate the Neverland on this side of the curtain.

  But Barrie lost no time in involving Michael wherever and whenever he could. In the area of the Black Lake that Barrie dubbed ‘the haunted groves of Waverley’ (with reference to the nearby ruins of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey), Michael became the agent for the reintroduction of certain fairy tale elements into the proceedings. Here, in the midst of the most adventurous of games, ‘we cassocked our first fairies (all little friends of St Benedict) in white violets’.

  Long before Michael could even walk he was credited with discovering Tinkerbell: ‘It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail was like by twilight,’ recalled Barrie.

  As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves he saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. It must not be thought, however, that there were any other sentimental passages between No. 4 and Tink; indeed, as he got to know her better he suspected her of frequenting the hut to see what we had been having for supper, and to partake of the same, and he pursued her with malignancy.

  On that first Black Lake holiday in the summer of 1900, the boys stayed with their parents a dozen or so miles hence in the village of Burpham, and it was here that Michael’s formal initiation into the Pan cult took place.