The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  We will see that this artistic, even spiritual, insensitivity is what ultimately lost him Michael. For while Michael, with a poet’s eye, came to discern a spiritual dimension in the Scottish landscape, Barrie remained stuck in his gloomy supernatural heritage and in the ‘Kailyard’, or Cabbage-patch, school of cosy sentimentality to which his novels about Thrums (his name for Kirriemuir), Auld Licht Idylls, A Window in Thrums and The Little Minister, adhere.

  Du Maurier would have scorned Barrie’s lack of Romantic vision and excluded him for it, if for no other reason. It was something he was good at when a face didn’t fit. And this was just the moment in Barrie’s career when he would have benefited from being in rather than out. It makes his pursuit of du Maurier’s daughter and her boys look rather strange, purposeful, anything but mere chance. In 1922, after it was all over, he admitted, as if it had been of critical significance to the direction his life took: ‘I think an individual may have done me harm by thinking too little of me.’

  Emma would have had no difficulty in recalling the period in the mid-to late 1890s when her husband would have met Barrie and when, much to her chagrin, du Maurier returned to a preoccupation with the occult and took a house in Bayswater, entertaining his friends and writing Peter Ibbetson, while still keeping the family home in Hampstead.

  All might well have been revealed in Emma’s very full correspondence with Sylvia in subsequent years after Barrie became a fixture in her life, for mother and daughter wrote to one another ‘almost daily’.36 But, again, the papers were destroyed, this correspondence was nowhere to be found among Barrie’s effects after he died, which included everything else that Sylvia left.

  The3rd of April 1909 found Barrie in Edinburgh receiving an honorary degree from his alma mater. All he could think of was Michael. ‘If Michael had met me in a wood,’ he wrote to Sylvia about his red and blue ceremonial gown, ‘he would have tried to net me as a Scarlet Emperor.’

  Barrie was dying to get together with Michael at Easter, eight days later, but Sylvia denied him. So, on the 11th, Barrie was spending Easter at Black Lake Cottage with Mason and other guests, including the actress Hilda Trevelyan (Wendy in Peter Pan), who was looking out of her bedroom window one morning when a vision appeared beneath the window of Barrie walking slowly down the garden in deep thought, apparently oblivious to the fact that Luath was following hard on his heels on two legs, his forepaws up on Barrie’s shoulders. Trevelyan shook her head in disbelief and the vision passed on.

  Probably Barrie had been composing his letter to Sylvia, written that day, in which he referred to a statue of Peter Pan modelled on Michael which he had commissioned from Sir George Frampton for display in due course in Kensington Gardens. He had given Frampton the photographs of Michael dressed in the Peter Pan costume that Barrie had given to the boy on his sixth birthday. ‘Frampton was very taken with Mick’s pictures,’ he wrote, ‘& I had to leave them with him. He prefers the Peter clothes to a nude child … I don’t feel gay, so no more at present, dear Jocelyn.’

  No doubt Sylvia was relieved that Michael would not be appearing in Kensington Gardens in the nude. But still, by June he had not seen him and was driven to write:

  Dearest Jocelyn,

  …How I wish I were going down to see Michael and Nicholas. All the donkey boys and the fishermen and sailors [in Ramsgate] see them but I don’t. I feel they are growing up without my looking on, when I grudge any blank day without them. I can’t picture a summer day that does not have Michael skipping on in front. That is summer to me. And all the five know me as nobody does. The bland indifference with which they accept my tantrums is the most engaging thing in the world to me. They are quite sure that despite appearances I am all right. To be able to help them and you, that is my dear ambition, to do the best I can always and always, and my greatest pride is that you let me do it. I wish I did it so much better … I am so sorry about those pains in your head.

  Your affectionate

  J. M. B.

  Clearly it is Michael that he is missing, but it is perfectly true that all of them, except Jack, did indeed love Uncle Jim with that natural, no-strings-love that children reserve for close family, Michael in particular. Barrie and Jack were poles apart, but as Jack’s wife, Geraldine Gibb, told Andrew Birkin later, ‘Michael and Barrie spent so much time together. They were there with each other. It was almost bound to happen.’

  Nor was the boys’ love at root self-seeking, as the loving and respectful letters of George and Peter from the Front in the First World War will show. Barrie was always a favourite with them for his own sake, and now that Arthur was dead he did in many ways already play the role of father in their lives.

  But that is where the problem lay for Sylvia. The relationship had started out almost as if he had been a second nanny, which is why Nanny Hodgson’s nose was originally put out of joint. Barrie admitted there were ‘many coldnesses and even bickerings between us … We were rivals.’ Sylvia, with three sons under five, had been only too happy to have him take them off her hands. Barrie enjoyed being dominated by her, as Peter pointed out, and she rose to his wit and sense of humour, and, yes, increasingly to the money. Barrie was a year-on-year earning millionaire. Peter Pan had taken over and they all now lived within the Peter Pan cult. At school, George, Peter and Michael were ragged about it, and Peter of course suffered more in this way than the others on account of his name, so that even as a sixty-year-old he was bitter about it. Again, like the children at Norland Place, people pointed at Sylvia as the friend of J. M. Barrie and mother of Peter Pan.

  Now, since Arthur’s death, the mènage à trois had become a mènage à deux, yet the dynamic between Sylvia and Barrie was nowhere near being a ‘partner’ relationship. When Arthur was dying he was her ‘fairy prince’ and immediately afterwards he was ‘the best friend in the whole world’ because the need was there. Sylvia had been closest to Barrie when the chips were down. The need was still there for his financial support and, yes, the boys would miss him, but by now it was clear to both parties that there would be no marriage between the mother of all mothers and the fairy prince.

  In July the second summer presentation of Peter Pan opened in Paris and somehow or other Barrie – there is no explanation of how he was conveyed – had managed to get Michael to join the party already there, which, besides Barrie, included Mary Ansell, Charles Frohman, Paulene Chase, who had replaced Dion Boucicault as Peter Pan in England, and Lord Esher’s younger daughter.

  There is a photograph of Michael driving a miniature electric hire car in Le Grand Trianons at Versailles, and there was some sort of row in which Frohman refused to participate in the fun at either of the Trianons and eventually insisted that ‘his man’ Herbert get the boy home to England.

  No good would come of this potentially explosive state of affairs. Nor did it. Sylvia was dying. First Arthur, then Sylvia, both in their early forties, leaving Barrie with the family he wanted above all else. You couldn’t write it. Except as a horror story. And that is what it was, a horror story. Which is why Michael was still having nightmares. No jarring or suspected criticism here.

  If, during 1909, in which she spent a great deal of time with her mother, Sylvia kept her distance from Barrie, she was helped in this by events. Barrie was drawn into the affair between his wife and Gilbert Cannan when Mary Ansell’s infidelity was officially made known to him by the gardener at Black Lake Cottage, a Mr Hunt. He had informed on Ansell in retaliation for her criticism of his gardening skills, we are to believe.

  Barrie’s lawyer, Sir George Lewis, advised him to avoid too much contact with Sylvia in case the prosecution implicated her in any way. The shame of divorce was one thing. To be named in a divorce could destroy your reputation.

  So that summer of 1909 Barrie went to Switzerland with Gilmour and Mason, while Sylvia had a holiday with the boys at Postbridge, a far more ancient hamlet than the road of Roman origin that strikes through it, situated in the centre of Dartmoor in Devon beside t
he East River Dart, forded by a medieval clapper bridge. Here in summer purple shadows leap the rivers and chase across the heathered hills, while in winter Conan Doyle’s hound of the Baskervilles can easily be imagined to break upon one out of a wall of fog.

  How much the boys must have missed Barrie to bring it alive for them. Instead, he was writing a letter from Mason’s London apartment in Stratton Street off Piccadilly, where he had taken refuge away from Leinster Corner, which ‘it is always so painful to me to go to now’.

  The letter, dated 12 August, is addressed to:

  Dear Jocelyn,

  I hope you are all settled down comfortably now, and that there is a bracing feeling in the air despite the heat. In this weather the boys need not expect to get as many trout as the waters will all be small and clear but after all the sun is better than trout and they will find lots of other things to do. I sent some gut, etc. and some fly hooks…

  Yours ever

  J. M. B.

  The reduction from his usual ‘Dearest Jocelyn’ to ‘Dear’ matches the unusually restrained feel of Barrie’s letter, possibly in reaction to the wide publicising of his impending divorce, which will have been anathema to him – as Peter notes, the letter was written a fortnight after the storm burst. And he signs himself with just the kind of neutrality Sir George would have advised, but it all makes a good fit too with the cooling of his relationship with Sylvia.

  There is a sad photograph of Sylvia fishing the river in full mourning dress, including hat and veil, but in fact she seldom ventured more than a few hundred yards from the house. It was all butterfly chasing, bug hunting and line-and-hook worm fishing for the boys. Jack followed Barrie’s advice and found something better to do. Going on fifteen, but more mature than his older, Etonian brother George, he found amusement with the daughter of a local farmer.

  A fortnight later Barrie confirmed that he was travelling to Zermatt at the end of August, where he would be staying with Gilmour and Mason at the Monte Rosa, a hotel frequented by the Alpine Club, including Edward Whymper who made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. They actually met the great man, which raised Barrie’s spirits and will have fascinated the boys when he wrote to them about it, but his own attempts at climbing met with abject failure. He resented the guide’s instructions and he soon called it a day, going walking instead with Gilmour while Mason climbed. At the end of September they moved on to Lausanne.

  By this time Michael had joined Peter at Wilkinson’s in Orme Square and suffered the indignity of having tea with Milky and his wife at home in their rural retreat, a cottage close to E. V. Lucas’s place – Kingson Manor House – in Sussex. Audrey described Milky as a most genial man, but when Peter and Michael happened to be staying and were invited with Audrey to tea ‘a marked change came over their demeanour. They were positively subdued and never, in spite of Mrs Wilkinson’s cakes, quite natural again until we were well out in the road with the front door shut behind us.’

  Entering Wilkinson’s had meant cutting off Michael’s long wavy tresses, the shearing seeming to add Samsonian proportion to the moment of childhood loss already associated with graduation to the school.

  But Michael would never lose the aura of mysterious innocence, open countenance and unconscious awareness that characterised his original state, even after Eton and the tragedies that were heaped upon of him – it was what Barrie loved about him and identified him as that innocent spark of Peter Pan, that betwixt-and-between boy, which Barrie had lost to shrewdness and canniness and old age. ‘He strikes me as more than old,’ said Cynthia Asquith who knew Barrie intimately, ‘in fact I doubt whether he ever was a boy.’

  Losing his locks meant nothing to Michael, but Barrie was distraught to have missed the moment of matriculation and wrote a piece fantasising that he had indeed been there.

  When he was nine I took him to his preparatory, he prancing in the glories of the unknown until the hour came for me to go, ‘the hour between the dog and the wolf,’ and then he was afraid. I said that in the holidays all would be just as it had been before, but the newly-wise one shook his head; and on my return home, when I wandered out unmanned to look at his tool-shed, I found these smashing words in his writing pinned to the door:

  THIS ESTABLISHMENT is NOW PRERMANENTLY [sic] CLOSED.

  I went white as I saw that [Michael] already understood life better than I did.37

  In fact, Barrie had not returned from Switzerland until the beginning of October, long after the winter term at Wilkinson’s had begun. The date of his return was determined rather by the divorce hearing on the 13th.

  Mary wrote to H. G. Wells that Barrie ‘came out badly in court. Three lies.’ First, that Mary had said the affair with Cannan was the only one she had had; it was not, nor had she said that it was. Second, that Black Lake Cottage was his property, when it had been Mary’s name on the lease, not his. Third, that he had lived happily with his wife.

  Mary retreated to Black Lake Cottage. Barrie stayed with Mason at No. 17 Stratton Street: ‘Walking up and down when his friend set off for the House [of Commons], and still walking up and down when he returns. The silences are as long and overpowering as ever. And Mason, though the burden grows no lighter, is endlessly patient.’38

  After six weeks of this, Lady Lewis found Barrie a flat at 3 Adelphi Terrace House in Robert Street just off the Strand, on a bend of the Thames affording a view of five bridges. Barrie slept there for the first time on 20 November: ‘I am in and it is all so comfortable and beautiful & all owing to you.’ Five months later, in better fettle, he wrote to Lady Lewis, describing the awesome feeling of looking out through the wide expanse of window across the Thames:

  I feel I am writing on board the good ship Adelphi, 1200 tons. The wind is blowing so hard. The skipper has lashed himself to the wheel. Down in the terrace a bicycle has just been blown across the street. Mr Shaw has just made a gallant attempt to reach the pillar box. His beard is well in front of him. I feel I ought to open my portal and fling him a life-buoy. See if he does not have a column about this in tomorrow’s Times.

  Some years later Barrie wrote to Thomas Hardy’s wife that Turner ‘when very young used to come to 8 Adelphi Terrace and paint panoramas of the river’.

  Everything then seemed more settled, until, after a visit to the Lucases in their new home near Lewes, in Sussex, Sylvia collapsed again.

  36 Nanny Hodgson’s testimony to Peter.

  37 J. M. Barrie, Neil and Tintinnabulum (1925).

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

  Chapter Seventeen

  1910: No Idle Steer

  IN HINDSIGHT, IT was then that the countdown began. Occasionally she might summon the energy to walk from the house to the green in Campden Square and watch Barrie play cricket with Michael and Nico, but generally Sylvia was in bed, and the doctors were becoming increasingly concerned, although in the absence of any record, diagnosis, treatment or post-mortem, thirty years later Peter was baffled about what exactly was wrong with her.

  ‘While, thanks to the letters I know all about father’s illness I am strangely ignorant about mother’s. Can you tell me where the disease attacked her?’

  Nanny replied only that it was too near the heart to operate, and when Peter pressed her further, she didn’t respond to the question.

  Christmas 1909 was a low-key affair. Barrie was now in attendance, as he had been for Arthur. No arguments now as to his presence. The need was there, as in this case, where Barrie was despatched to pick up Peter from Eton where he had just sat the scholarship examination and was about to join George there (thanks again to Barrie) whether or not he won an award:

  July 6, 1910

  Dear J,

  Would you do something for me. I want 11/2 doz. White collars (George wears the shape) for Peter & 2 doz. white ties (also like George), as they are best bought at Eton. The shop is called New & Lingwood. Ask for collars for tails & Peter will know what size & can try one on if wanted.
He must bring them home with him…

  Affec:

  S.

  Michael sat with his mother in her darkened room whenever he could. It was also he who sat on the end of her bath chair on a rare trip to Kensington Gardens, guiding it while a helper pushed it from behind. On a visit to see his sister, Gerald du Maurier entered her room to find Michael sitting at a small desk in the corner doing his homework, tears flowing down his cheeks. As with his father, he didn’t need to be told.

  But it wasn’t all tears. When Peter was informed that he had won a scholarship to Eton he was playing corridor cricket with his brothers. The joy this news gave Sylvia was very welcome, particularly as Peter’s academic success lit up a link to Arthur’s side of the family, for Arthur was still sorely missed.

  Sylvia had to be carried to bed now and was under 24-hour-a-day care by one Nurse Loosemore, who was suddenly faced with an extraordinary plan to deliver Sylvia to Ashdon Farm on Exmoor, on the borders of Somerset and North Devon.

  To say that the farm, which is still there today, is remote and isolated is understatement. It lies alone in the valley of the River Oare, close to where John Ridd emerged in R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, the novel that tells of the savage deeds of the Doone family who terrorised the country round about and escaped with their booty across the wild hills of Exmoor precisely where Sylvia now found herself.

  The area is indeed beautiful. Francis Kilvert writes in his Diaries of Lynton, a small town six or so miles distant as ‘one of the loveliest nooks in the Paradise of this world’. But the journey from London – almost five hours on the train followed by a dozen or so miles in a car across what was then a poor moorland road – would have been exhausting for Sylvia.