The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Where did the idea come from? Nurse Loosemore couldn’t believe that Barrie and Dr Rendel, the doctor who had supervised the last days of Arthur, had agreed to such a crazy idea. Barrie had booked the farm for the whole summer.

  Having delivered Sylvia and Nurse Loosemore to the farm he then left, returning for the odd weekend until the boys’ school holidays began. When the main force arrived, Nurse Loosemore warned Nanny Hodgson to make herself and the boys scarce ‘as anything might happen’!

  It wasn’t long before Emma du Maurier herself appeared, to find out what was going on. Barrie took Peter in a car to pick her up at Minehead station and after delivering her to her daughter beat a hasty retreat to Brendon, a hamlet a few miles away, where he took rooms. Emma was appalled to find Sylvia weakening rapidly.

  A local doctor had been called, who asked fruitless questions and knew nothing of the history of the patient or her condition. Emma immediately insisted that Dr Rendell be telegraphed to send a replacement.

  On 1 August Emma wrote to Sylvia’s younger sister May, ‘It is terrible to think of Sylvia so far from doctors … It is a nice house but hill all round, even from the lawn to the garden is quite a hill. This ought never to have been taken.’

  While writing the letter a Dr Spicer arrived from London, the Rendell recommendation, his advent serving only to convince Sylvia that she must be very ill indeed. No one, not even the doctors, seemed to know what was wrong with her.

  A month earlier, on 2 July, Emma had written to May implying that one of the doctors consulted had denied that Sylvia was as seriously ill as she had been said to be by the others, including Rendel. As late as that, there was no sense that Sylvia was suffering from a fatal disease.

  Now, Emma was troubled, very troubled indeed. If it had been known by Barrie and/or Rendell that she had a terminal disease, would they have brought her to so isolated a spot? Yet that was what was done, and four weeks later she was dead.

  The boys meanwhile were off almost every day walking with Barrie, watching buzzards circling high above the valley of the Lynn, eating huge teas of Devonshire cream and jam at Lynton, or fishing the Doone valley and bringing their catch back to Sylvia at tea time; then to her delight playing in the garden within sight of her room. She found she wanted to watch them rather than interact with them now. Nico’s clowning around was simply too much for her in her little room.

  Arthur’s brother Crompton also booked rooms in Brendon for a few days and took them climbing to the top of Dunkery Beacon, the highest point of Exmoor. The only other visitor was Maude Adams, the actress who played Peter Pan in America. She was invited by Barrie to meet Sylvia and the boys. Sylvia was barely able to raise a smile.

  Shortly afterwards came the day, 26 August, on the morning of which she died. She called for a hand mirror and gave orders that her boys should no longer be brought in to see her. Dr Rendel, Barrie, Nurse Loosemore and Emma du Maurier were the only ones present at the end.

  Barrie then told the children, one by one. He related later that Michael (ten), had broken into a rage and stamped his foot in fury, a credible response – the unfairness of losing the person he loved more than any other, the unfairness of it being so soon after the death of his father. Anger, too. All a common enough response from a child of his age to the loss of both parents.

  Sylvia dying turned this already introspective child further inside himself, but not depressively. He was fast developing a way of dealing with life. The story of Michael’s life reads like a series of tests, which ultimately developed within himself an adamantine grasp of who he was and how much of himself he was prepared to share with the world.

  Michael’s increasing retreat from the world that caused him so much distress was enhancing the aura of detachment which had set him apart from the start, and would impress many and make genius expected of him by some who described him as ‘gifted’ long before ever he produced anything of note. Barrie encouraged this by electing to discuss his own ideas with Michael (the only person with whom he did this), seeking his approval even and discarding anything he didn’t like.

  It was in this way that Barrie gave his heart to Michael, proud when he took the lead, happy when he could describe Michael as ‘the dark and dour and impenetrable’, which he often did, almost as if he liked to think he had met his match.

  On the Saturday, the morning after Sylvia died, George (seventeen) walked in an atmosphere of gloom with Peter to the nearest village Post Office carrying a sheaf of telegrams for despatch to members of the family and close friends. Then George observed to his younger brother that after all things were considered, they had managed that morning to get up, wash, get dressed and have breakfast in spite of the great tragedy that had befallen them. It was not the end of the world. All four of George’s brothers looked to him as leader and Peter took his point, though years later he was

  a little surprised, and rather disgusted too, to find, on the evidence of old letters and the memories they recall, how little I can have felt at the time, thanks to dwelling in the selfish and separate world of childhood. The delayed effect those events had on me is another matter.

  Jack’s feelings were not to be influenced by George, however much all the boys looked up to the eldest as leader. Barrie had told Jack that Sylvia agreed on her deathbed to marry him: ‘I was taken into a room where [Barrie] was alone and he told me, which angered me even then, that Mother had promised to marry him and wore his ring. Even then I thought if it was true it must be because she knew she was dying.’ To Jack, the thought of Barrie marrying his mother ‘was intolerable, even monstrous’, wrote Peter, who doubted that Sylvia had ever agreed to it.

  The question now was what should happen to the boys, and Emma didn’t know what to think. ‘At a quarter to two [Nurse Loosemore] called me,’ she wrote to May, her youngest daughter, of Sylvia’s death,

  And the doctor was holding dear Sylvia’s hands and asked me to fan her, but I didn’t know the end was so near. She was breathing with great difficulty and I couldn’t bear to look at her, then they called in Mr Barrie and I saw what it was and it was all over in about a quarter of an hour. It was her breathing that was exhausted, not heart failure…

  Henry James, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, burying his brother William, who had died there on the same day, wrote at once to Emma on hearing of Sylvia’s death from a neighbour of his in England.

  Henry had known the family intimately since the early 1880s, when Sylvia was fifteen, so fiery and uncontrollable that she was nicknamed ‘the blizzard’. Sylvia had insisted Henry join in the family fun and games. No one had ever invited this ‘benign, indulgent but grave’ man, ‘not often unbending beyond a genial chuckle’39 to do such a thing before. With the du Mauriers he had come alive. ‘My dear dear Mrs du Maurier,’ he wrote on 11 September.

  It moves me to the deepest pity and sympathy that you should have had helplessly to watch the dreadful process of her going, and to see that beautiful, that exquisite light mercilessly quenched. What you have had to go through in it all, dear Mrs du Maurier, and what you all, and what her young children, have, affects me more than I can say. She leaves us with an image of extraordinary loveliness, nobleness and charm – ever unforgettable and touching. What a tragedy all this latter history of hers! …

  Please believe, dearest Mrs du Maurier, in all the old-time intimacy of your faithfullest Henry James.

  He had hit the mark, for Emma had been completely felled by the experience of watching her daughter die. At the back of her mind she knew that she, as head of the family, had to make a decision about the boys, but she couldn’t even decide for sure that she would be going to the funeral. Two days later, she wrote to May:

  The arrangements are that we all go up tomorrow (all but Michael & Nicholas) by the one o’clock train reaching London 5.40 … I shall sleep at Campden Hill Square … The funeral is on Tuesday at twelve. I think I shall go … I can’t quite make up my mind about anything. Your loving Mother.

 
In the event, Jack, George and Peter travelled with Barrie in a van, along with Sylvia’s coffin, and at every stop along the way Barrie stood sentry outside it. Jack was glad when the funeral at Hampstead Parish Church was over. From there he went to stay with Sylvia’s elder brother, Guy, a career soldier, at Longmoor Military Camp in Hampshire, before returning to naval college in Dartmouth, where he found a letter from Michael, the only one to think to write.

  Meanwhile Michael and Nico had been invited to stay at the rectory at Oare, where R. D. Blackmore’s grandfather had been rector and Lorna Doone had actually been written. They moved there with Nanny Hodgson after everyone left the farm to go to the funeral.

  It was to the rectory that Crompton arrived on 1 September, with Barrie, George and Peter. He wrote that day to Emma:

  We arrived all well and found Michael & Nicholas with Mary [Hodgson] established here. They have been fishing & the time seems passing happily for them. I have written to Hugh Macnaghten [George’s housemaster] and Mr Wilkinson [Michael’s headmaster] – Michael has written to Jack & we all send you our dear love.

  Crompton Llewelyn Davies.

  On Wednesday morning, the day after the funeral, Barrie had taken George and Peter to Little’s, a shop in the Haymarket off Piccadilly in London, and bought eight-foot fly-rods, and fine casts and flies. This was a considerable step up for any fisherman. There would be no more catching trout with worm hooks. Real fishermen use flies.

  The boys were ecstatic. ‘We were selfish little creatures,’ admitted Nico in hindsight, like Peter, a bit embarrassed that they had accepted the transition to orphan so readily.

  Fly-fishing henceforth became the focus of every holiday and a significant part of Michael’s life, an activity that made a good fit with his nature, giving him more opportunities to withdraw into another world, a beautiful world, a world of silence and solitude in which he could still his feeling of loss.

  The man who owned all the fishing in the area was one Nicholas Snowe, and Nicholas Davies (six) was persuaded by Michael to ‘intercede with him for fishing facilities on the grounds that they were of the same name – successfully too’, Barrie reported. ‘Michael was ten then and I remember we had a grand scheme of reaching Dulverton and fishing some water there.’ The Rivers Exe, Haddeo and Barle coalesce near Dulverton and it remains one of the great areas for salmon and trout fishing today.

  As their holiday drew to a close Lady Lewis offered Barrie and the boys refuge at the Lewis’s palatial abode in Portland Place, but Barrie declared that home was still 23 Campden Hill Square, where they were reunited with Nanny, who now took the role of mother. ‘She was the person in our lives,’ said Nico later. ‘She was the mother.’

  But she wasn’t to be the only mother, for increasingly Barrie took on that role, which made for continuing unrest with Nanny. The critic Desmond McCarthy, who knew Barrie, made an astute definition of him as ‘part mother, part hero-worshipping maiden, part grandfather, and part pixie with no man in him at all’, each facet of the description – Barrie’s maternal love for the boys, his need to be dominated by Michael at least, his assumption of the mantle of grandfather du Maurier, and the fantasy games of his pixie-self – follow from it.

  However, except for staff, No. 23 was now an all-male dominion and the atmosphere seems to have been like that of a public school common room: periods of study alternating with raucous game playing, including cricket in the corridor, but with a certain control exercised by George, the eldest, the leader – a form of society George knew well and which was good practice for Peter, who would be joining him at Eton in the new term.

  As a Scot with a tendency to a very British sort of snobbery – ever at its worst when adopted by an outsider – Barrie was exultant at the very notion of the English public school, Eton in particular: ‘I am like a dog looking up to its owner, wondering what that noble face means,’ he once wrote of the public schoolboy, actually lifting a wonder-love line from du Maurier’s Trilby, though no one would notice the deep-set irony in so much of what he said and wrote. He would soon have four such noble faces, which could own him, but for the time being two, Michael and Nico, were not at boarding school and would return to the house each afternoon from Wilkinson’s and Norland Place respectively.

  A new notebook, dated 22 October 1910, registers Barrie’s address for the first time as 23 Campden Hill Square. Mackail writes that Campden Hill Square was ‘his home far more than the flat, at present’. And Nico: ‘As often as not he was there.’

  Thus, casually and with minimum fuss, did he get what he wanted. It was not what Sylvia had wanted or what she had specified in a handwritten document headed ‘Sylvia’s Will’. But immediately after the funeral Barrie had button-holed the du Mauriers and staked his claim. Emma hadn’t been happy, but what alternative could she propose? Nobody in the family could cater for the material needs of five boys as well as he, four of whom would go through Eton and university. And clearly the boys wanted him.

  What Sylvia wrote that she wanted was that Nanny Hodgson and her sister Jenny would together look after the boys, with Emma, Barrie and her elder brother Guy as trustees and guardians, and with backup from May du Maurier and Margaret Llewelyn Davies. But Sylvia’s will didn’t come to light for three months after her death.

  The odd thing was that when it did, Barrie sent a hand-written copy of it to Emma, altering ‘Jenny’ to ‘Jimmy’, the name by which he was often known, giving the false impression that Sylvia had wanted Nanny Hodgson and Barrie to be hands-on in charge of the boys.

  Much has been written about why Barrie did what he did. The die-hards say he must have mistaken the word. This is unlikely because ‘Jenny’ is so clearly written and Barrie was a stickler for accuracy and precision. The more sceptical argue that he was ever the twister and since the boys were not adopted in law, he needed to show the family that he was abiding by Sylvia’s wishes, hence the deliberate fabrication.

  No one was chasing him however and it is doubtful that the law would have been impressed by Sylvia’s makeshift will, as it gave custody to parties who had not been consulted and who were not prepared to take on the responsibility. Also, ‘possession is nine points of the law’ particularly to a Scot (it was originally a Scottish expression) and in those days a fifty-year-old bachelor millionaire was seen as more of a scoop than a threat to five orphan boys, whatever might go on behind closed doors.

  Barrie didn’t need to alter the document. He already had what he wanted. The die-hards call on this in support of their case – it would have been pointless to falsify the will: what had Barrie to gain?

  But there was a point, a motive which would not normally be considered in such a case, the motive Barrie had for almost everything he did, namely to manipulate and write from life so to make his fictional creation lively and life-like. Falsifying the will was an opportunity to study the family’s response, and if it was a worthwhile one, to use it in his work.

  Since he modelled Grizel on Sylvia twelve years earlier, her family had been Barrie’s paint box. He owed the boys more than anyone in this regard.

  The play of Peter is streaky with you … I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame … Any one of you five brothers has a better claim to the authorship than most, and I would not fight you for it, but you should have launched your case long ago in the days when you most admired me, which were in the first year of the play, owing to a rumour reaching you that my spoils were one-and-sixpence a night … You watched for my next play with peeled eyes, not for entertainment but lest it contained some chance witticism of yours that could be challenged as collaboration; indeed I believe there still exists a legal document, full of the Aforesaid and Henceforward to be called Part-Author, in which for some such snatching I was tied down to pay No. 2 one halfpenny daily throughout the run of the piece.

  This is perfectly true, Barrie drew up an Agreement dated 6 December 1903 with Jack on accoun
t of something he said that appeared in his play Little Mary. That Jack originally insisted on it, that he tied Barrie down to it, is wonderfully in the nature of their precarious relationship.

  Barrie’s life every single day was a mystery in the making and he wrote about himself as often as he wrote about the people in his web. He was quite ruthless in turning his life to advantage in his work, and crucially, while he ‘took an impish delight in decorating or even fantasticating his own portrait, he never falsified it’, as the critic W. A. Darlington was the first to point out.40 That was his genius: constantly he challenges us to decide whether it is irony or plain truth that he is delivering. Even as he says goodbye to Arthur and Sylvia, and the faint possibility that he might have had something to do with their deaths passes over our minds, he is writing of their alter egos, Mr and Mrs Darling in the novel Peter & Wendy (1911): ‘There never was a simpler, happier family until the coming of Peter Pan,’ and giving Peter the heartless line, ‘I forget people after I kill them.’

  Hugh Walpole, who knew Barrie when he was an aspiring journalist, before he was writing books, had no hesitation in concluding that it was the plain truth Barrie was delivering: ‘Barrie tricked nine-tenths of us, and knew well that he was tricking us. He was his own murderer, murdered and detective in his own mystery story.’

  In 1911, life with the Darlings was moving on and the focus was no longer on Sylvia but on Michael alone. The first stage of his scheme – ‘to burrow under [Sylvia’s] influence with the boy, expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine’ – had been ‘relentlessly pursued’ and successfully achieved, as Barrie predicted it would be in The Little White Bird. Sylvia had throughout been ‘culpably obtuse to my sinister design, having instructed Nanny – ever a threatening shadow in the background – that I was to be allowed to share him with her’.