The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  ‘Do you remember a garden at Burpham,’ Barrie wrote to the grown-up boys more than twenty years later, ‘and the initiation there of No. 4 when he was six weeks old, and the three of you grudged letting him in so young?’

  Michael was in all right. He had never been out.

  20 Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. Barrie (1941).

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

  Chapter Nine

  1901–03: Unrest Within the Family

  PERHAPS IT WAS actually watching Sylvia mother her new baby that first made Michael Barrie’s favourite, or that she and Barrie secretly hoped that he would show signs of having inherited the du Maurier ‘spark’. Certainly, Barrie feted Sylvia as a mother. Enacting the transmutation of Sylvia into Grizel, as one of Barrie’s notebooks reveals, Sylvia was to him ‘a woman who will always look glorious as a mother … a woman to confide in (no sex, we feel it in man or woman). All secrets of womanhood you felt behind those calm eyes.’ One can imagine what this meant to a woman who bore five sons in ten years.

  Barrie’s reverence for the mother in Mrs Davies irritated Mary Ansell, who disliked children. In a letter to No. 3 son Peter, many years later, she blamed the absence of children in their own family on Barrie’s impotence, but we should also harken to Pamela Maude’s view of her and Mary’s confession that she didn’t like them.

  One is inclined to close both eyes and ears and seek sanctuary in the undeniable truth that Barrie was happiest when being a child in the company of other children. As Tommy in the novel, remembering that all children were birds once, he says as much to Grizel:

  ‘Any feathers left, do you think, Grizel?’ he asked jocularly and turned his shoulders to her for examination.

  ‘A great many, sir,’ she said, ‘and I am glad. I used to want to pull them all out, but now I like to know that they are still there, for it means that you remain among the facts not because you can’t fly but because you won’t.’

  ‘I still have my little fights with myself,’ he blurted out boyishly, though it was a thing he had never meant to tell her, and Grizel pressed his hand for telling her what she already knew so well.

  However, Barrie’s games produced their own pressures, which as yet went unnoticed by the boys, who were dancing to a different tune to the grown-ups, who themselves were divided as to where their position should be on the issue.

  Sylvia, who already shared the wild, free spirit of a boy, was all for the Black Lake experience, particularly as the first holiday followed hard on the birth of Michael and she needed all the rest she could get.

  But Arthur, the father, was not so sure. He looked forward to spending time with his boys when he wasn’t at work, and found it irksome that he almost always found them at play with ‘Uncle Jim’.

  Arthur began picking holes in Barrie’s plans, drawing attention to hidden dangers of boys playing with bows and arrows and so on. But how could he complain, so happy were they in Barrie’s company?

  Nevertheless, Barrie must have been aware of the tension his presence was creating.

  The following Easter, Arthur and Sylvia holidayed with the three eldest boys in the Isle of Wight, leaving Michael with a cold in the care of Nanny Hodgson at home. This was the first of many illnesses: health concerns for the boy perpetuated throughout his childhood. On a later occasion it would become so serious that TB was feared and Michael was transferred to Ramsgate for six months, to the seaside home of du Maurier’s widow, Emma, in East Kent.

  At the end of July 1901 the whole family made it down to Black Lake, this time staying at a farmhouse in Tilford for about six weeks. This was far closer than they’d been at Burpham and the boys were at Barrie’s cottage every day, the distance made easier by his purchase of a steam-car, until eventually a Lanchester, the first of its sort coming out that very year, and a new chauffeur called Frederick, took over.

  If Edwardian England was one long hot summer before the First World War engulfed it and almost destroyed a generation, 1901 was when it began, and was surely the most memorable part of it for the boy castaways of Black Lake Island. Happy and carefree they went naked most of the time ‘that strange and terrible summer’, as Barrie referred to it. He took scores of photographs and made an elaborate, illustrated book with extended captions and called it after them: The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island.

  Two copies only were hand-printed and bound, specifically for Michael’s benefit, so Barrie wrote in the preface – ‘If it teaches him by example lessons in fortitude and manly endurance we shall consider that we were not wrecked in vain.’

  One of the two was given to Arthur to read and he left it on a train. This was Arthur’s role, it sometimes seemed.

  The last piece of news that year was bad, the death of Porthos. He was replaced by a black and white Newfoundland, Luath, dull and apathetic of nature but no less a character. He began by catching hedgehogs in the garden of Black Lake and bringing them to the boys as if to announce he wanted to be part of the games. In time he became the model for Nana in the play of Peter Pan, crossing gender for the purpose.

  Barrie liked to point to a particular picture of Luath nannying the boys at Black Lake, a clear forecast of his role in the fictional Darling nursery, captioning it: ‘We trained the dog to watch over us while we slept.’ In it Luath is sleeping in a position that is a careful copy of his charges. ‘Indeed,’ wrote Barrie, ‘any trouble we had with him was because, once he knew he was in a story, he thought his safest course was to imitate you [the boys] in everything you did.’

  How anxious he was to show that he understood the game … He became so used to living in the world of Pretend that when we reached the hut of a morning he was often there waiting for us, looking, it is true, rather idiotic, but with a new bark he had invented which puzzled us until we decided that he was demanding the password. He was always willing to do any extra jobs, such as becoming the tiger in mask, and when after a fierce engagement you carried home that mask in triumph, he joined in the procession proudly and never let on that the trophy had ever been part of him.

  Long afterwards he saw the play from a box in the theatre, and as familiar scenes were unrolled before his eyes I have never seen a dog so bothered. At one matinee we even let him for a moment take the place of the actor who played Nana, and I don’t know that any members of the audience ever noticed the change, though he introduced some ‘business’ that was new to them but old to you and me. In after years when the actor who was Nana had to go to the wars he first taught his wife how to take his place as the dog till he came back, and I am glad that I see nothing funny in this; it seems to me to belong to the play. I offer this obtuseness on my part as my first proof that I am the author. .

  In London that same year the Barries moved closer to the Davieses, an address on Leinster Terrace at the corner of the Bayswater Road, situated on the north side of the Kensington Gardens and looking over the park.

  Leinster Corner, as the house became known, was a two-storey, semi-detached building with a small garden in front and a larger one behind, with formal pond and fountain and at the far end a building where Barrie would write Peter Pan.

  Mary Ansell saw their move and the death of Porthos as the beginning of the end: ‘Buried with Porthos,’ she wrote, ‘was the first seven years of my marriage.’ And Leinster Corner was walking distance to the Davieses, which made her husband’s ‘philanderings’ (her word) with the boys ever more easy. The Davieses had in fact also moved, but only across the street to No. 23 Kensington Park Gardens.

  Mary’s heart pained further when in November Barrie took Sylvia and Michael on holiday to Paris, leaving both her and Arthur at home. This was to be a trend into the future, and it devastated Arthur:

  2, Garden Court, Temple, E.C.

  Nov. 28, 1902

  Dearest Father

  I don’t know what your arrangements are for Christmas, nor if you are likely to have the vicarage very full. I should like to come, if possible
, bringing one boy or perhaps two. It is just possible that Sylvia may be induced to come too, but that is not likely…

  Sylvia is at present on a trip to Paris with her friends the Barries, by way of celebration of the huge success of Barrie’s new plays and new book. The party is completed by another novelist, Mason,22 and they seem to be living in great splendour and enjoying themselves very much. They left on Monday and return tomorrow [Saturday]. Barrie’s new book, The Little White Bird, is largely taken up with Kensington Gardens and our and similar children…

  My work is moderately prosperous but no more…

  Your affect. son,

  A. Ll. D.

  Arthur’s letter makes pathetic reading. His purpose in writing to his father had been to discuss Christmas, and clearly, by 1902, there was doubt that Sylvia and Arthur would be spending it together.

  Forty-four years later, Peter, compiling the family record, read the letter and wrote to Nanny Hodgson for her opinion, ‘Did JMB’s entry into the scheme of things occasionally cause ill-feeling or quarrelling between father and mother?’

  Nanny replied with devotion, diplomacy and a commendable lack of clarity: ‘What was of value to the One had little or no value to the Other. Your Father’s attitude at all times was as “one Gentleman (in the true sense) to Another.” Any difference of opinion was never “Public Property” – in the Home.’

  Would Barrie wake up and acknowledge that his dream was intruding on the reality of Arthur and Sylvia’s marriage and threatening it? Or was their marriage not the reality? No one was quite sure any more where the fantasy began and reality ended.

  Cousin Daphne wrote to Peter that Arthur could not have been hurt deeply by Barrie taking Sylvia off, that it was normal in those days for a married woman to enjoy the attentions of an admirer without the relationship becoming intimate.

  But how often was that extended to going on holiday together?

  It is a significant matter because, as it augured badly for the marriage, the tensions would have found their way in to the minds of the children, even if only subconsciously. A ‘state of tension’ was already being felt between Sylvia and her sister Trixy over Barrie’s interference in their lives, as a number of letters show.

  The feeling was that Barrie had insinuated his way into Sylvia’s affections against Arthur’s wishes and that she had encouraged him, and that Arthur had bottled up his feelings, perhaps to the detriment ultimately of his own health.

  But that is to ignore what was plainly also on the table, namely Sylvia’s wild, free personality, which she had never been one to hide and which Arthur knew about before they married, and indeed must have been part of what attracted him to her.

  Peter recognised this and commented that his mother’s ‘wit and individual attraction owed something to her heritage from Mary Anne Clarke, the memory of which survived’. Mary Anne Clarke was the boys’ ‘naughty great-great-grandmother’, later to be the subject of a novel by the boys’ cousin Daphne. She was the nineteenth-century kiss-and-tell mistress of the Duke of York, a flirt and a bitch of the first order, whose fortune she owed to her betrayal of the Duke.

  Another analysis came from Dolly:

  I suppose [Sylvia] liked the admiration of men – if that is considered a fault – but as she was free from any sort of jealousy – or desire to be the centre of things – which may be the characteristic of those who love men – they naturally felt her attraction very strongly … Her love of admiration was less than in most attractive women, I should say. She was full of fun & gaiety with men – but not the true flirt, as she was too light in hand & in her treatment of them – to induce a feeling that she really liked them.

  The boys were devoted to their mother and only her second son Jack saw the situation with Barrie in less than positive terms:

  I couldn’t at all agree that father did anything but most cordially dislike [Barrie]. I felt again & again that father’s remarks & letters simply blazoned the fact that he was doing all he could poor man to put up a smoke screen & leave Mother a little less sad…

  By 1903 George and Jack were attending Wilkinson’s. In March Sylvia became pregnant with her fifth son, Nicholas (known as Nico), who would be born on 24 November.

  Peter (six) and Michael (three) became main participants in the Kensington Garden games and Michael in particular began making up for lost time.

  ‘At three,’ Peter reminded Dolly years later, ‘Michael was one of the most lovable people in the world. And he was the world to Uncle Jim.’ As soon as he was able he was off with Barrie in the Gardens, picking up all the stories and mythical topography that was ingrained in the minds of the two eldest brothers.

  On 11 May, Barrie wrote to both Peter and Michael a thank-you letter after Sylvia had arranged for them to give him a birthday present:

  Leinster Corner, Lancaster Gate W.

  11 May, 1903

  Dear Petermikle,

  i thank u 2 very much 4 your birth day presents and i have putt your portraitgrafs on mi wall and yourselves in my hart and your honey lower down.

  i am

  your friend,

  J. M. Barrie

  Barrie was now pinning photographs of the boys on his wall at home and confessing his love for them. Then in August the whole family were down again to Tilford. ‘New and old stories for them. New and old games. Other visitors coming and going at the Cottage, expeditions in the Lanchester, or still sometimes on bicycles, to friends in the neighbourhood; and Barrie, whatever else he was doing, thinking more and more of the play,’ as Mackail wrote.

  One of the trips out in the car was to see Dolly, who had by this time herself married an Arthur, a diplomat and later Liberal and then Labour Member of Parliament, eventually to become a Labour Lord – 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, a beautiful twelfth-century Augustine Priory.

  It was to this thoroughly English home-county jewel, a distance of about ten miles, that Barrie brought Sylvia and Michael one afternoon in the summer of 1903. Dolly, now mother of two-year-old Elizabeth, known as ‘Girly’, was expecting them for tea. It was a sunny afternoon at the end of a week of incessant rain. The idyllic picture was captured in Dolly’s diary.

  Jim Barry [sic] with a child clinging to each hand at once went & sat in the dining room chimney corner & looked so characteristic & like one of his own books. Elizabeth petrified at all the company sat refusing to eat her tea. Sylvia beautiful & satisfying – loving the house & appealing to ‘Jimmy’ [Barrie] about it … It was very charming to see Girly give her hand to Jimmy & with Michael [who was three] on one side & her on the other they walked down the garden path into the field – his devotion & genius-like understanding of children is beautiful & touching beyond words – as he has none himself.

  Barrie with his faraway look and hand-held children: one can imagine nothing but beauty and goodness coming of it. But a darker side was also apparent. For Dolly reported that Sylvia had ‘a sort of morbidness about her’. She interpreted this as ‘a sort of premonition’.

  When she began to say something critical about Barrie in the presence of three-year-old Michael, ‘I remember [Sylvia] saying “Ssh” when I burst out with [it] … looking at Michael [in case he heard], and I felt quite ashamed.’ Dolly referred to this as Sylvia’s ‘apprehensive imagination’.

  Mackail wrote of Barrie at this time that his ‘gifts’ could be ‘turned on to hypnotise almost anyone’. It was Svengali and Trilby all over again.

  22 A. E. W. Mason, remembered best for his ‘heroic’ novel The Four Feathers, published that year, 1902. For a single term from 1906 Mason was also a Liberal Member of Parliament, and since they met in 1898 he had been an intimate of Barrie, indeed one of his closest circle.

  Chapter Ten

  1903–04: The Real Play

  BARRIE STARTED WRITING Peter Pan on 23 November 1903. Its original title, The Happy Boy, changed to Fairy, then Peter and Wendy, later still The Great White Father, and latterly, before settling as Peter Pan, it was Anon
– A Play. He claimed the first hand-scripted draft to have been mislaid, but in fact he had given it to Maude Adams, the first actress to play Peter in America. On page two he wrote a note vertically down the page from the top left-hand corner – ‘To Maude Adams this the M. S. of Peter Pan from his humble servant and affectionate friend J. M. Barrie.’ The manuscript, all handwritten and containing many second thoughts by Barrie, is now safely in the Library of Indiana University.

  From it we see that the original cast list comprised: Mrs Darling; Peter Pan; John Frederick Darling; Alexander Roger Darling; Tootles; Nibs; Slightly; Curly; First Twin; Second Twin; Captain Hook; Starkey; Mr Darling; Nannna; Tiger Lily; Tippy (the Last Fairy); Wendy Maria Elizabeth Darling; Pirates; Redskins; Beautiful Mothers etc; a crocodile; a lion; a jaguar; and a Bunch of Wolves.

  No Michael. His role was taken at this stage by ‘Alex’ or ‘Alexander’, possibly on account of the growing unease at home about Barrie’s increasingly close friendship with him. Barrie had never used the true names of any of the boys in a work before. However, that would be corrected on the cast list the following year, when Michael was very much in evidence.

  No Smee either, no Noodles, Mullins, Jukes, etc. Nanna was spelled with three ‘n’s (later two), and Tinkerbell went under the name of Tippy. That would change with Tink being ‘quite a common girl, you know. She is called Tinker Bell because she mends the fairy pots and kettles.’

  In Barrie’s hometown Kirriemuir in Scotland, these sort of good fairies were known as brownies, which during the day hid in out-of-the-way corners of the house, but at night would make themselves useful in some onerous or pressing housework.