The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  On the way down from London in the train, realising that they hadn’t much hope of winning, Barrie asked his friend the explorer Joseph Thomson what the African for ‘Heaven help us’ was. The answer came, ‘Allahakbar’, so the club became the Allahakbars and later the Allahakbarries.

  Against Shere they were all out for eleven runs, but the Allahakbarries became a famous institution, with village and country house fixtures and an annual game first with the famous artistic community in the beautiful village of Broadway in Worcestershire, and then from 1900 in the large flat garden at Black Lake Cottage.

  A match would be followed by all the games Barrie could imagine including golf-croquet, and cricket with the men playing left-handed to the ladies. ‘The new variant [of golf] that some inspired character had recently given to the world,’ wrote Mackail, ‘had instantly become a mania [for Barrie] only second to cricket, and he must have played it thousands of times during the next thirty-odd years.’

  No one ever had such an eye, or no one at any rate combined it with such astonishing luck … In tactics he was incomparable. The game never had a greater or more devoted exponent.

  As the game then had no governing body or association, Barrie made up his own rules: one was that nobody, male or female, must ever swing the mallet between their own feet. Others, perhaps, were less surprising, but whatever they were, you must always accept what you were told. There was no appeal, and it was quite useless to say that you had played differently elsewhere.

  [The impresario] Charles Frohman, for whom even this amount of exercise was against all precedent, would find himself playing golf-croquet at Black Lake. And because it was Barrie who made him do it, he was fascinated. Insisted on installing hoops, pegs, and all the rest of it at the retreat which he shared with another manager, Charles Dillingham, outside New York. Amazement of all onlookers, and, alas, disillusionment for C F. Even with other English playwrights it just wasn’t the same game. It wasn’t funny, or exciting, and there was no magic. Barrie, he discovered again, had got to be there for that.

  By the time it was all over Barrie’s friends wouldn’t believe how they had been so led into the childish follies in which they became involved.

  In 1905, when Sylvia and Michael came down to Black Lake Cottage, Michael was recruited as the team’s mascot and photographed on the lawn being presented with the match ball by E. V. Lucas, there with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Audrey,23 Michael looking ‘like he could be either a girl or a boy with his long hair and loose-fitting smock: an ideal Peter Pan’, according to Kevin Telfer.24

  But far and away the more significant event occurred after the Allahakbarries dispersed, and Barrie and Michael discovered that death by drowning in the mermaid’s pool could be an awfully big adventure.

  23 E. V. Lucas was a prolific and well-known writer with reputedly the largest collection of pornography in England. Audrey, just two years older than Michael, would remain a friend of his for life.

  24 Kevin Telfer, Peter Pan’s First XI (2010).

  Chapter Twelve

  1905–07: Death Takes a Hand

  FROM THIS MOMENT the definition of ‘boy’ changed: ‘To be a real boy’ was to pass over to the other side. It was a turning point. Henceforth, Peter Pan had one foot in the afterlife, a Neverland altogether more profound than Barrie had given the play’s original audiences to imagine. The inspiration for it brought Peter’s story to its third arena. After Kensington Gardens in London and the Black Lake in Surrey came the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

  In the same year as Michael played Peter on the point of drowning in the mermaid’s lagoon, 1905, Barrie wrote in his notebook: ‘Hogg’s Queen’s Wake – a sort of Rip van Winkle.’ Hogg is James Hogg, the Scots shepherd, born in Ettrick in 1770, who imbibed the great oral tradition of the supernatural at his mother’s knee and was at his poetic best writing poems of the vernacular patterned on the old minstrelsy, such as ‘The Witch of Fife’.

  As a young man with an ink-horn slung around his neck, Hogg had wandered the hills of Scotland’s Arcadia, teaching himself to write and discovering a genius for poems that gave the whole world of Fairyland and floating thought, witchcraft and necromancy, a permanent substantial form.

  Being spirited away to ‘the other world’ is the main force of Hogg’s poem ‘Queen’s Wake’, which Barrie had noted as the basis of a play. Embedded in it is the poem or ballad of Kilmeny.

  Hogg is said to have fallen asleep one day out on the hills and dreamed the dream of Kilmeny, about a girl of poetic nature, a lover of solitude, who, wandering alone at twilight, is spirited away into the ‘land of thought’ and disappears into the wild among the hills. Her friends look for her, their cries echoing around the glen. Their search is in vain, but long years later she returns to find a place in the land of living, and can remember nothing of where she has been:

  For Kilmeny had been she knew not where,

  And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.

  Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,

  Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew;

  But it seemed as the harp of the sky had rung,

  And the airs of heaven played round her tongue,

  When she spake of the lovely forms she had seen,

  And a land where sin had never been,—

  A land of love, and a land of light,

  Withouten sun or moon or night;

  Where the river swa’d a living stream,

  And the light a pure celestial beam:

  The land of vision it would seem,

  A still, an everlasting dream.

  Kilmeny, now too good and pure for this world, must inevitably return to ‘that silent shadow-world that marches a hand’s breadth from our own’.25

  Hogg carried Kilmeny’s image in his mind’s eye until the day he died. And the legend became a touchstone for Barrie. He alluded to it in various books, and often, as we shall see, in his relationship with Michael, and in the play Mary Rose, which many see as Barrie’s best and which is still produced today, more faithfully than any production to be seen of Peter Pan.

  There are countless instances of men as well as women vanishing in the hill country of Scotland and then returning when all hope of their being seen again has disappeared. They haven’t aged and they remember nothing. The fairies have taken them and then, perhaps having tired of them, returned them with all memory of the episode wiped from their minds, to the spot where they first disappeared.

  As early as 1902 in The Little White Bird Barrie had rehearsed the possibility of dead young mothers returning as ghosts to see how their children fare. ‘There is no other inducement great enough’, he wrote, ‘to bring the departed back.’

  By April 1906, Barrie was writing to his close friend, the author and academic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known as ‘Q’: ‘I do strongly believe in the return from the dead as a strong dramatic motive.’

  In January 1906, he invited Sylvia and Michael to Paris again, but Sylvia declined, saying Michael was ill. Illness had also apparently prevented the boy from attending the first of the annual revivals of Peter Pan.

  By now it was obvious to everyone that Barrie and Michael had a special relationship. No. 5 son Nico would say that Barrie was in love with him, ‘as he was in love with my mother’.

  Barrie was a self-made man of forty-six, a big name as an author and playwright. In 1906 alone he made £44,000, the equivalent of £3.5 million today (the Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Treasury, was paid one-tenth of that). He wrote about his fabulous wealth in a play, The Accursed Thing (1907), but, however accursed, it played a significant part in his main business, his relationship with Michael, which needed Sylvia’s compliance.

  He was, wrote Mackail,

  a man of power, a man who had got what he wanted – or at any rate what he had set out to get – a man whose gifts could be turned on to hypnotise almost anyone, who had gone his own way as an author and yet brought the world to his
feet. A man who had left Scotland with twelve pounds in his purse, and was now so rich that only Gilmour, as a matter of fact, had the faintest idea what his fortune was worth.

  Michael’s illness was not going to stand in the way of his seeing him when he wanted to. Barrie commanded Frohman, now one of the most, if not the most, powerful impresario on Broadway and in London’s West End, to transport Peter Pan to Michael’s bedside in Berkhamsted. ‘Frohman waved his own wand, had dresses and properties packed up, and sent some of the company down to Egerton House to act scenes from the play in Michael’s nursery,’ wrote Mackail, noting also that no one else on the planet could have got Frohman to do such a thing.

  Barrie wrote of the event,

  We took the play to his nursery, far away in the country, an array of vehicles almost as glorious as a travelling circus; the leading parts were played by the youngest children in the London company, and No. 4, aged five, looked on solemnly at the performance from his bed and never smiled once.

  In May, Barrie repeated his invitation for Sylvia and Michael to accompany him to Paris. And she accepted.

  The whole magical, emotional, ridiculous charabanc was careering out of control, perhaps looking unconsciously for an escape route from major upset.

  Arthur provided one. Later the same month he noticed a slight swelling on the side of his face. He had taken himself to the dentist, and the dentist had made him an appointment with ‘an expert in cheek and jaw’.

  Then another Arthur had shot himself. Barrie’s agent, Arthur Addison Bright, had been caught diverting money from his clients’ accounts into his. In Barrie’s case, it amounted to £16,000. He hadn’t even noticed the shortfall and argued for clemency.

  This, besides causing great dismay for everyone concerned, meant that Sylvia and Michael would not now be accompanying Barrie to Paris. It was just as well. On 2 June, Arthur wrote to his sister, Margaret:

  Dearest Margaret,

  I am sorry to say I have bad news. The swelling in my face turns out on investigation not to be an abscess, as was hoped, but a growth. It is of a very serious kind, called sarcoma, and requires an operation…

  Your affect. brother,

  A. Ll. D.

  The operation involved the removal of Arthur’s upper jaw and the roof of his mouth. Barrie dropped everything and put himself at Sylvia and Arthur’s disposal, standing sentinel over Arthur in his decline, playing, as Peter put it, ‘the leading part in the grand manner’. While Arthur scribbled notes of what he was thinking about – his sons, ‘S’s blue dress’, Porthgwarra (where he and Sylvia honeymooned in 1892’, etc. – Barrie made notes for a prospective work: ‘The 1,000 Nightingales: A hero who is dying. “Poor devil, he’ll be dead in six months.”’

  Barrie saw to it that he had the best possible treatment, and in October wrote to Dolly a little tersely after she expressed concern about Arthur’s treatment:

  Oct 10, 1906

  Dear Mrs Ponsonby,

  Dr Rendel and the local doctor are attending Arthur mainly to do certain necessary things that any medical man can do. They have not and never have had in any way this case in their charge, that is [surgeon] Mr Roughton’s, from whom they have their instructions. He is in touch with Sir Frederick Treves [also a surgeon … who said] that everything that could be done for a human being was being done.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. M. Barrie

  Dolly might have been reassured to know that Treves was the surgeon who treated Joseph Merrick, the man known as the Elephant Man who had such severe facial and other deformities that he was exhibited in a penny gaff shop on the Whitechapel Road in London’s East End, where Treves met him.

  Thank goodness for Nanny, who was keeping everything on an even keel at home. While Sylvia was at Arthur’s bedside at the nursing home at 12 Beaumont Street (next to where the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers is today), Michael’s sixth birthday was approaching:

  For June 16th

  My Michael’s birthday

  I am coming to see you and I will bring my present to you my dear darling. I want to tell you about Father, who is so brave & you will be so proud that you are his little boy.

  I don’t like being away from you on your dear birthday but I shall see you in a few hours. Oh my little Michael won’t it be nice when we are all together again. Father does so want to be back with his sons. He is sleeping now, & I am being very still & writing this letter by his bed.

  Mr Barrie is our fairy prince, much the best fairy prince that was ever born because he is real.

  Loving Mother

  Barrie had been buying the boys presents to keep them happy. Sylvia, aware now that she really couldn’t do without Barrie, felt the need to draw a clear line between reality and fantasy for Michael. But the difference between Michael and the other boys was that they knew the Neverland was make-believe, while to Michael make-believe and true were the same.

  On the same day Arthur wrote his birthday letter to Michael:

  My very dear birthday boy Michael,

  How I wish I could see you with my own eyes on your birthday, when you are really 6 years old. But I can only wish you many happy returns by a letter, and send you my dear love, and a pencil as a little birthday present for you … Perhaps when I am well enough to come back you will take me to see some cricket matches. I am going to have quite a long holiday, and shall be able you take you to school every morning…

  Now goodbye my dearest 6 year-old boy, and I hope you will have a very very very jolly birthday.

  From your affectionate Father

  Barrie ensured that he would. He ordered William Nicholson, the designer responsible for the costumes in Peter Pan to run up a Pan costume for Michael and get it down to Egerton House. As any six-year-old would have been, Michael was knocked out by the gift and wasn’t out of it for days.

  Eleven days later, Arthur announced he was coming home.

  My dear Michael,

  Here is my last letter of all before coming home to Berkhamsted and my boys. We are coming all the way in Mr Barrie’s motor car, if it is fine, and we shall arrive in good time for tea. I want very much to see your motor car and Peter’s stone roach [fishing gear], as well as Nico’s musical wheel-barrow. And I wonder whether there will be any good songs to be heard which I have never heard before. If there are it will be altogether a fine homecoming for Mother and me. After tea tomorrow you will take me carefully for a walk all round the garden, and show me all the flowers which have come up since we went away?

  I wonder whether I shall be able to read to you when we have come back. You know that I cannot speak very plainly just now but if you can understand what I say well enough, I shall have plenty of time to go on reading Biblia to you right on to the end. Or perhaps you will now be able to read aloud to me as well as sing songs to me.

  Goodbye now, my dear boy. My love to all my boys, not forgetting dear Nicko.

  From your affectionate Father

  Arthur had an artificial jaw fitted and was wearing a black eye patch, and it is unlikely that reading Biblia in his distorted voice to Michael (presumably some sort of bible study) will have been anything other than disturbing.

  The reactions of the boys go unrecorded, other than Peter’s, who referred to the artificial jaw as ‘the most dreadful element in the whole sad story … a nightmare … it so soon became impossible to wear’.

  In August, Barrie accompanied the family to Rustington. Arthur, Sylvia and ‘Jimmy’, as Arthur began to refer to him, made ‘as odd a variation of the mènage à trois as ever there was’, as Peter had to admit.

  Granny Emma du Maurier had called the family together and rented Cudlow House, a large detached dwelling with plenty of privacy, occupied by Sir Hubert Parry before his family had moved to Knightscroft House on the opposite side of Sea Road.

  In Arthur’s words, the boys played ‘endless cricket and lawn tennis in the garden’, Sylvia and Barrie too, though his underhand serve, while reputedly treacherous,
demanded little of most opponents. And it was on this holiday that Barrie took the now famous photographs of Michael in costume as Peter Pan. In time they would be used as a reference for the sculptor commissioned to create the statue of Pan still to be seen in Kensington Gardens today.

  It was on this holiday, too, following the one-to-one sessions between Barrie and Michael at the Black Lake, that it first became clear that Michael had developed an unnatural terror of water. Nightmares had also ensued. His sleep was full not so much of dreams as of ‘strange scenes of inexplicable reminiscence, all vague and incoherent, but which had something to do with the number seven’.26

  Barrie’s method of captivating a child was to tell him a story in which both he and the child figured, consuming the child’s interest with a narrative often full of menace, and the session at the mermaid’s lagoon would have been no exception. We may legitimately wonder whether Michael was indeed placed on a rock in the Black Lake, probably naked as the boys often were there, with the waters apparently rising around him, in order to plumb the situation for Michael’s imaginative response. There is a photograph of Barrie and Michael in the Peter Pan costume, with Barrie playing Hook wrestling menacingly with Michael’s Peter Pan, a situation that Nico – while looking at the photograph – much later described as ‘very typical [of their interaction] and unusual’.27