The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Whatever did happen, not even Sylvia could entice Michael into the sea now, and as Nanny didn’t swim, Barrie arranged for the housekeeper of Black Lake Cottage, one Mabel Llewelyn, to come down for three weeks to teach him, but it did no good.

  In fact, Michael would never be able to swim more than twenty yards in spite of developing into perhaps the most sporty of all the boys and making great efforts to overcome his fear. His brothers, on the other hand, were all fine swimmers.

  Barrie never holidayed by choice at the seaside, which he regarded as a dull experience – all you can do is ‘wander along the weary beach, fling pebbles at the sea and wonder how long it will be until dinner time’. So, towards the end of their stay he repaired to Scotland and invited the family to take another holiday as his guests at Fortingall, just a few miles west of Strathtay.

  Arthur wrote to Margaret on 6 September:

  We are just at the end of our stay here, having failed to get an extra week for which we asked. We have succumbed to an invitation to go to Scotland with Jimmy for the close of the holidays.

  First the scheme was to take George and Jack only, then we were unwilling to abandon Peter, and lastly Michael has, inevitably, been included. Nicholas [at three] so far remains out of the cast. We are to stay at a small village called Fortingal, in Glen Lyon, Two and a half miles from Loch Tay among high mountains … and surrounded by burns in which the boys will fish. They are all prodigiously excited at the prospect … The holiday [at Rustington] has altogether been entirely successful.

  Arthur barely disguised his true feelings. He had ‘succumbed’ to the invitation, and the inevitability of Michael being in the party seems laced with not a little cynicism. It would of course have been unthinkable for Barrie to invite the family anywhere without Michael. Nevertheless, Arthur committed to going with all but Nico in attendance.

  ‘Dear Jimmy,’ he wrote after it was all over,

  You have done wonderful things for us since the beginning of June – most, of course, during June and also in the last week – but at Rustington also you made all the difference to the success and pleasantness of the holiday.

  We all hope to see you soon and often,

  Yours,

  A. Ll. D.

  25 Daphne du Maurier, The du Mauriers (1937). Daphne, another of Barrie’s prodigies at this time, picked up on his preoccupation with the passage ‘between two worlds’ as surely as Michael would.

  26 J. M. Barrie, Neil and Tintinnabulum (1925), largely based on his relationship with Michael.

  27 Letter to Andrew Birkin.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1906: Barrie’s Scotland

  BARRIE’S SCOTTISH HERITAGE ran deep. He was an Ogilvy by virtue of his mother, Margaret, who was the dominant force in the family, but modestly born. The Ogilvies are one of the most distinguished families in Scotland. Oglilvy lands are in Angus, a county in eastern Scotland located between the mighty Grampians to the north and the city of Dundee on the Tay estuary to the south. Running through its high central plain in the lea of this mighty mountain range is the South Esk River, which channels many a Grampian torrent into the sea at Montrose to the east. ‘Ogilvy’ (in Gaelic, ‘Ocel-fa’) actually means high plain, so clan identity is hewn out of the very landscape over which it held sway for many years, on and off, since Pictish times (as early as 100 BC) into which Barrie was born.

  In the first century AD the Ogilvy line supplied one of the earliest recorded Mormaers (regional leaders in medieval Scotland), by name ‘Dubacan of Angus’. A descendant of his, one Gilchrist, became the first Earl of Angus in about 1115 AD, the highest position in the nobility after the feudal system was adopted under King David, and of course hereditary.

  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Ogilvies also became hereditary sheriffs in the county. In the 1430s Sir Patrick Ogilvy commanded the Scottish forces fighting with Joan of Arc against the English. In 1425 Sir Walter Ogilvy was appointed Lord High Treasurer of Scotland under James I. In 1430, he was an ambassador to England, and four years later attended Princess Margaret on her marriage to the Dauphin, heir of the throne of France. From Sir Walter’s son, Sir John Ogilvy, descend the Ogilvies of Airlie – in 1459 Sir John received a charter to Airlie Castle, four miles to the south-east of Kirriemuir. In 1473 the family also acquired Cortachy Castle, four miles to the north of Kirriemuir. And so on, the line continuing and still based at Cortachy to the present day.

  So, students of Barrie used to thinking of him as a poor weaver’s son from Kirriemuir, which is a burgh in Angus, should also remember that he had Ogilvy blood in him, and the clan was all around him. Membership offered certain advantages. With the coming of power looms to the weaving industry in Kirriemuir, Barrie’s father David had left to become an accounts clerk in nearby Forfar, but returned home when Messrs Ogilvy opened a big factory on the banks of the little Gairie, where David was instantly in line for the better position of principal clerk.

  Ogilvy exploits also formed a significant part of Jamie Barrie’s early cultural education. Kirriemuir lies on the west side of the high plain that gave the clan their name, then Forfar and finally Brechin on the east side. Along the way lies a miscellany of little villages, such as Careston, Fern, Glenquiech, Memus, Shielhill, Inverquharity and Glamis, all heavy with stories, legends and folklore – stories which seem to define the landscape more perfectly than any map and in their telling project the spirit of the local people and the magical world they took for granted.

  Nico wrote of how the boys would listen ‘with bated breath while he told us magic stories’, not only as they walked through Kensington Gardens but now in Scotland – ‘through Dhivach [above Loch Ness, which they would visit in 1907 for the first time] or through the Trossachs’.

  Next to telling stories was his love of walking and fishing. In his schooldays Barrie was so famed for walking his native landscape that his maths master formulated a special problem for his class: ‘If two boys walk from Dumfries to Carlisle, a distance of thirty-three miles, in eight-and-a-half hours, how long would one boy take to cover the same distance walking at the same pace?’ Barrie would say, in gloomily self-deprecating fashion, how this ‘floored one youth repeatedly – and he may be at it still’.

  Meanwhile his appetite for fishing was first filed in his notebook when he was sixteen. It includes his ‘Fishing and Walking Statistics’ for the holidays of that year and the next. He lists ‘Distance Gone Over’, ‘Catch’, ‘Name of the Stream’, ‘Name of Companions’ – most often only one, James Robb, who would become an ironmonger and remain a friend for ever. The tallies are often amazing and the recording pernickety, for example: ‘Fished 12 times. Caught average of 2 doz & 6 in all 30 doz. Walked 18 times. Average of 13 11/18 in all 245 miles. J. M. Barrie [signature]. holidays. 1876.’ Again: ‘Fished six times. Caught average of 2 doz & 6 in all 15 doz. Walked in 1 six times average of 13 5/6 in all 83 miles. J. M. Barrie [sig.]. holidays. 1877.’

  From the moment Arthur Davies fell terminally ill with cancer of the jaw, Barrie’s Scotland became the big new influence on the lives of the boys, and particularly, eventually, on Michael’s life, for Barrie would soon be bringing him to Scotland annually, often for two or more months at a time. The mountains and lochs would open to Michael more readily than to any of the boys. Here he would find his own ‘island’, and in spiritual and aesthetic terms climb to the top of a mountain that Barrie would never reach.

  The Highlands had become the holiday choice of the rich English, and some great Scottish estates were now opening their doors, rivers and wildlife habitats to them. The popularity of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the English artist J. M. W. Turner’s Romantic vision of the magnificence of nature and the violence of the elements, Edmund Burke’s philosophical appreciation of the concept of the Sublime and the poetic interpretation of elemental forces in nature by such as Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth prepared the way. But it was royalty’s adoption of Balmoral Castle (Queen Victoria first leasing
it in 1842 and Prince Albert buying it for his wife as a Highland residence in 1852), that led to sporting lodges, ghillies’ bothies, housing for stalkers and other attendants, as the gentry made the summer school holidays and parliamentary recess a time to come to Scotland, fish the rivers, rent a boat.

  Barrie’s choice of Fortingall for the Davieses’ first foray was far from arbitrary. The place still abounds today in stories close to his heart.

  About fifty miles west of Kirriemuir, the village lies in Glen Lyon, the long, narrow, winding glen in Highland Perthshire through which the River Lyon flows west to east, through a narrow pass where the mountains rise straight up from its banks, into the Tay.

  At Fortingall the glen widens into level fields and the village occupies a quite beautiful location that has been occupied since time immemorial. Its church, dedicated to Coeddi, Bishop of Iona, was founded circa 700 AD, while recent archaeological investigations suggest that this was one of the earliest monasteries in Britain. Iona was the fount of Christianity in Scotland. Fortingall was in there at the very advent of it in Britain.

  But this is only the surface picture. Finely carved cross-slabs put the site at the very changeover from pagan times, and there is much evidence that takes us back further into history.

  At the head of Glenlyon stands a tiny pagan shrine called Tigh-nam-bodach, which means ‘the old woman’s glen’. The old woman refers to the witch, or goddess source of all rivers. Her ‘family’ are said to live within the shrine in winter but outside in summer. These are in fact water-worn stones, many of which have been purloined to stand sentry on the gateposts of local houses to ward off evil spirits. ‘Lyon’, you will soon discover over a drink at the local pub, is the Gaelic word for ‘grinder’, which refers to the action of the river on these stones, which are said to be moulded by the river witch into their unusual shapes. Between two of them is said to run the most prominent ley-line28 through the glen.

  Pulling us further back in time are three groups of three standing stones between 6,000 and 3,000 years old. They can be seen in a field to the east of the village, and to the south of them lies Duneaves.

  ‘Duneaves’ derives from the Gaelic ‘Tigh Neimhidh’, meaning ‘House of the Nemed’ (‘House of the Spirits’, a pagan meeting-place). But this pagan meeting place must have been special, because it lies in the shadow of Schiehallion, Gaelic for Sìdh Chailleann, which translates as ‘Fairy Hill of the Caledonians’.

  Schiehallion, the bold, brooding mountain that rises high above Fortingall to the north (and more immediately behind the grim castle of the Stewarts of Garth), was indeed the epicentre of the sacred in the Scottish Highlands, and is still regarded as such today.

  All this rather strange history is brought together into a living whole today by a 5,000-year-old yew tree, quite possibly the oldest living thing on earth, which sits in its own place beside the church. Today’s New Age pagan people have decorated it with coloured strings carrying a small white skeleton, wool from sheep or goat and other animal parts.

  It is clear from all that one discovers of Fortingall that from the beginning the lairds of Glenlyon’s knowledge of the magic arts and apparent ability to ‘summon spirits from the vasty deep’29 characterised the culture here right into the nineteenth century and continues to do so today. One is not surprised to hear that the creator of Harry Potter chose it as her habitat. J. K. Rowling has the Killiechassie estate just eight miles away.

  Heroic medieval and later stories of clan conflict also abound, signalled by place names such as MacGregor’s Leap. In 1565, high up on the road which leads west and northwards out of the village, following the line of the Lyon which cascades forcefully down a series of falls and dark, tranquil pools here, Gregor MacGregor of Glenstrae, local MacGregor chieftain but also foster son and son-in-law of one of the early Campbell chiefs of Glenlyon, leapt to safety across the roaring torrent to evade those Campbells who would take him for avenging the murder of two of his clan.

  Turner painted the Leap. The Laird of Glenlyon whom Barrie knew – Sir Donald Currie (1825–1909), a shipping magnate from Greenock who became MP for Perthshire and in 1885 purchased the Glenlyon Estate, including the village of Fortingall – had a large collection of Turners.

  When the Davies family arrived in September 1906 they stayed not at the Fortingall hotel, an eye-catching building which, along with most of the village was redesigned in 1891 by Arts & Crafts architect James MacLaren, but in the Laird’s own Glenlyon House on the western fringe of the village. Glenlyon House is reputed to have been the home of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, infamous for his part in the massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe.

  All of this must have been an exciting prospect for the boys, particularly as the whole supernatural culture was a rather different one to the delicate, joyous, pretty little fairies of middle-class Edwardian England, and it was Barrie’s birthright.

  In Scotland, dour gloom regularly attends its supernatural beliefs and legends, even if all summer long the young folk were having fun up in the sheilings. The national psyche of Scotland has a sense of its own fate or doom, a sense of the cruelty of the mystery of life and death and of the darkness that enshrouds the whole. A gloom so tangible that even ‘to praise a babe upon the nurse’s arm was to incur suspicion of wishing to bring down ill upon its head’, wrote Sir George Douglas in 1901.

  Kirriemuir and neighbouring Forfar became famous for the practice of witchcraft. Many of the older buildings have a ‘witches stane’ built in to ward off evil. This is a hard grey stone set into the local red sandstone, which the buildings were built from.

  In Scotland in the 1660s, some 300 women were executed as witches. Names such as Isobel Shyrie, Jane Howatt, Helen Guthrie, Janet Galloway and Elspet Alexander, the last two of which participated in the Kirriemuir coven, are still known in the area today.

  Helen was strangled by the executioner on 14 November 1662, and her body incinerated in a barrel of tar. This was the usual method of execution for a witch, although tar was not the only means used to burn the body.

  The Auld Licht, a fiercely puritanical Protestant sect and ‘the keenest heresy hunters’ in the Presbyterian Church, which Barrie wrote about in the three novels that first made him famous,30 was the organisation behind the trials and executions of hundreds of witches in Scotland, having laboured strenuously to stir the civil authorities to inflict the death penalty.

  We read of Barrie’s maternal grandfather, ‘a stoop’ of the Auld Licht, going to the local kirk with

  his mouth very firm now as if there were a case of discipline to face, but on his way home he is bowed with pity. Perhaps his little daughter who saw him so stern an hour ago does not understand why he wrestles so long in prayer tonight, or why when he rises from his knees he presses her to him with unwonted tenderness.

  In fact, the Auld Licht did nothing to stamp out superstition, it simply drove it underground. Even Church ministers preached against them, while watching their backs the whole time.

  The effect exercised upon popular superstition by the ruling passion of Calvinistic religion is one of the most striking features of Scottish folklore. Pamphlets and articles written by ministers show their acceptance of the idea of fairies and the phenomenon of second sight, and there are cases in which ministers join with parishioners to recover women who have been spirited away.31

  Barrie’s mother may have been born a member of the Auld Licht, but she had left it of her own volition long before her son Jamie was born. He grew up saturated with the supernatural superstitions of previous generations. In his time there were still people interested in the way witches exercised their domination over the minds of those they would control. Only the methods were changing – from casting a spell to playing mind games; from sticking pins in a tiny human effigy to pegging a fictional character on a person and rewriting their destiny in a story.

  The effect was the same. It was all about creating ‘a secret sympathy’ with a life and then dominating and
manipulating it. In his novel Tommy and Grizel Barrie explained how it was done: to rewrite Grizel’s destiny was to explore the possibility that the fictional effigy he was creating of her might intrude on the reality, ‘as a wheel may revolve for a moment after the spring breaks’. What was being undertaken was the same today as yesterday, only now it was being described in psychological rather than supernatural terms. Barrie lived right on the cusp of the two interpretations.

  Barrie himself used the language of spiritualism in analysis of the ‘unruly sinister’ side of himself which he admitted lay beyond the more witty, whimsical exterior:

  Did I never tell you of my little gods? I so often emerged triumphant from my troubles, and so undeservedly, that I thought I was especially looked after by certain tricky spirits in return for the entertainment I gave them. My little gods I called them, and we had quite a bowing acquaintance. But you see, at the critical moment they flew away laughing.

  This is identical to the spiritualists’ belief that people are inhabited by immortal spirits, which may be beneficent or malevolent. In Barrie’s novel Tommy and Grizel, his little gods are bad devils that enjoy the cruel games he plays with Grizel’s heart, and when he is about to offer poor Grizel marriage, ‘Tommy heard the voices of his little gods screaming to him to draw back.’

  In 1898, Barrie’s interest in spiritualism had brought him to Strathtay with his wife and close friend Arthur Conan Doyle, a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) since 1893. Their purpose was to look into the haunting of Ballechin House, which had made the pages of The Times in August 1896 and led to a decision by the SPR to begin a long-term investigation, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

  Barrie’s interest also led to a friendship with the writer Marie Corelli, who had a house not far from Strathtay, at Killiekrankie. Corelli was a highly successful occult novelist and Queen Victoria’s favourite author. Barrie would stay at her house with Michael in the summer of 1913.