The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Now, noted Denis Mackail, Barrie had what he had wanted all along:

  Michael was ten last summer. Still looks like his mother, and hasn’t escaped her charm. An orphan at ten. Not wax for Barrie – not by any means – but you can steer or lead little boys of ten in a way that you can’t do afterwards. The spell is still irresistible when it chooses, and here is the boy – quick, sensitive, attractive, and gifted – who is to be everything else that the magician most admires. There is no cloud between them. From Barrie, as yet, Michael has no secrets. You can call him the favourite, if you like – indeed there are plenty of moments when it is impossible to call him anything else – but his brothers are the last to resent this. He and Barrie draw closer and closer, and perhaps it isn’t always Barrie who leads or steers. He has given his heart to Michael – or must one again say one of his hearts? – and has transferred an enormous part of his ambition. Is this dangerous? No answer. One mustn’t say so. It may be; but there can be nothing wrong with such kindness and such love.41

  39 Description of Henry James by his friend, the writer, Edmund Gosse.

  40 W. A. Darlington, J. M. Barrie (1938).

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

  Chapter Eighteen

  1910–11: Scourie: Learning to Fly

  MACKAIL WAS THERE; he knew them all; and although he was writing his biography guardedly (because that was the limitation of the arrangement he had with Barrie’s executor, Lady Cynthia Asquith) the tenor rings unusually clear as regards Michael, and clearest about Michael taking the lead. That was the ironic position Barrie liked to adopt with him and initially it increased Michael’s self-esteem considerably, as well indeed as giving Michael an influence on his work.

  For example, on Michael’s say-so the first notes appear in 1911 in Barrie’s notebook for a murder mystery, later to be called Shall We Join the Ladies? The scene is a (so far) week-long country house party – thirteen are present, twelve guests plus the host Sam Smith, a little old bachelor who sits there beaming on those present at dinner like an elderly cupid. So they think him, but they are to be undeceived, for each has been invited on account of their involvement with the host’s brother, who has been murdered.

  Barrie never finished the play, some say because he couldn’t work his complicated twists and turns into a solution, though it was rumoured that Sam Smith (basically Barrie himself) was the murderer, and Barrie was unsure whether the admission was an ironic step too far in a play that would be watched by thousands. As with Socrates, someone might reach for the hemlock. The first act was produced on its own in a wider programme in 1921, and was (as ever) a hit.

  There was the odd titled lady in the cast list and Lady Tree was among the top-line actresses who played them. Titled ladies were a Barrie speciality. It had not always been the case. Once, in the early 1890s, when things were a little rocky for him and Mary Ansell (Barrie had suffered three mental breakdowns during the period he was playing around with hypnotism and shadowing du Maurier), one of them offered them sanctuary in her home. ‘She flattered, she spoke honeyed words,’ according to Mackail, and Barrie got it into his head that she fancied him. He made love to her in the only way he knew – with laboured, sentimental verbal blandishments – and she had recoiled. It was not at all what she’d intended to encourage, and Barrie was left with egg on his face. A polite retreat was not going to be enough. He had to get out. Such humiliation the little man could barely countenance; he had caught sight of himself through her eyes and hadn’t liked what he saw, and was deeply scarred.

  The result was Lady Pippinworth in Tommy and Grizel and Lady Sybil Tenterden in the play What Every Woman Knows – self-seeking, bumptious parasites on society.

  But since he had become a success, titled ladies were more respectful to him, and when one in particular, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, asked him for ideas for a costume that would make her shine in a high society ball at the Albert Hall in aid of the National Theatre in 1911, he not only came up with some ideas, but engaged a designer to make it for her.

  Now, on 20 April of the same year, it was payback time. He wrote to ask her

  Whether you would in the goodness of your heart set some factor in Sutherland searching for a house for me up there for August and September. I bring four boys with me [Jack, of course, was unavailable]; what they yearn for is to be remote from Man and plenty of burn trout fishing, of which they never tire from the rising to the setting of the sun. The rate would not so much matter but there should be space for about ten of us including maids.

  The Duchess was a good person to advise on this. In 1872, when the government ordered only the second audit of land since the Domesday Book, the ten leading Dukes in the Kingdom owned over 100,000 acres each, while the Duke of Sutherland, whose money came largely from coal, had 1,350,000 acres. By 1911, some of it had passed into the hands of the Duke of Westminster, but not enough to bother five young boys.

  This holiday was meant to be special, the first in Scotland since Barrie had secured his own family. ‘I have in a sense a larger family than you now,’ he boasted to Charles Turley Smith, the writer of books about schoolboys and member of the Allahakbarries. ‘Five boys whose father died four years ago and now their mother last summer, and I look after them, and it is my main reason for going on. The Llewelyn Davies boys.’

  By July the holiday was fixed and on the 10th Barrie wrote to his friend again:

  We are going for seven weeks or so beginning of August to Scourie in the west of Sutherland. 630 miles rail, then a drive 44 miles. The nearest small town is farther than from here to Paris in time. Nothing to do but fish, which however is what they want. Now that Miss Corelli and Ranger Gull [science fiction writer under the pseudonym Guy Thorne] have appeared among you I shall expect to see an improvement in your style. You don’t say whether you are working much but I hope all is well with you, body and soul. I have nearly finished my P. Pan book. We might play draughts by correspondence so as not to get rusty at it…

  I have been teaching Michael to bicycle, running up and down the quieter thoroughfares of Campden Hill and feeling what it must be like at the end of a Marathon race. Have also taken him to a garden in St John’s Wood where an expert teaches him fly fishing on a lawn…

  Scourie is an unspoilt dream of a village on the far north-west coast of Scotland, a region of white sandy beaches, great boulder mountains, rushing rivers and literally hundreds of fishable lochs and lochans – formed, one cannot but think, from the myriad splashings of some giant who in myth leapt out of the sea at Laxford Bridge.

  There are more than 300 of them, including the famous fishing grounds of the Laxford, Lochs Stack and More, and the Lower Duart, noted for its migratory run of fish from the frozen Atlantic.

  You can’t get much further away from the world of telegrams and anger than this. Barrie wrote of it to Nurse Loosemore (surprising that he was still in touch with her so long after Sylvia’s demise):

  It is a remote place, nearly 50 miles from a railway, and when you want food you have to kill a sheep. It is very beautiful with sea & lochs, all as blue as the Mediterranean, and in the course of their wanderings the boys see eagles, otters, whales, seals, &c. The wanderings are all in search of fish, and it is a great place for fishing.

  The 630 miles by rail, which will still take you more than twenty hours from London today, brought Barrie and the boys to Lairg, the railhead for the north-west on a similar latitude to Ullapool. Here the early twentieth-century traveller would linger for an hour or two before being bundled into the mail bus, in Barrie’s time a horse-drawn waggon of some sort – not until the ’20s did it become a red motorised van – a long and rather uncomfortable ride many miles up the single track mountain road to Scourie.

  Once in the ultima Thule, one found the gable-stepped houses of the old village by means of a narrow country lane, which spilled out at its north end into the sheltered waters of the old harbour of Scourie, and the Duke of Sutherland’s
hotel and hunting lodge.

  The Lodge, where the boys stayed with Barrie, is tucked behind the harbour in its own landscaped gardens. For fifty-odd years before Barrie took it, it had been home to Evander Maciver, the Duke’s factor for the whole of Sutherland, unpopular to this day for his key role in the infamous Highland clearances, which robbed crofters of a living and led to misery in enforced exile abroad for untold numbers.

  The hunting lodge and Scourie Hotel, known in Michael’s day as the Stafford Arms, combined with a house known as Roseville to offer some sixty-three rooms. Scourie was not a stag-hunting centre. People came for the fishing, particularly for the fly-fishing – dry, wet, and dapping with a large fly mimicking the action of flying insects such as daddy long-legs or, if there’s a hatch in the area, mayflies.

  Every day, ghillies would gather outside the hotel to attract the custom of the guests in return for a few shillings. Ghillies knew, then as today, where the fish lie in any of the 300-odd local lochs, which are split into forty-six beats. These men – all self-employed local fishermen – will also tell you which fly to use, and the best of them offer a lot more besides.

  It is possible that Barrie found his ghillie on the way from Lairg, as the man’s brother was for some time the mail bus driver.

  Johnny Mackay turned out to be a lucky strike. He got to know all the boys and Barrie well, but hit it off especially with Michael, ending up his personal ghillie, firm friend and mentor, and reappearing later in his story.

  A few months before he died in 1977, Mackay recounted how Barrie, while fishing with the humbler worm, ‘looked so scruffy that when the Duchess of Westminster saw him she thought he was a poacher and ordered him off her land; and he was too shy to say who he was, so he went’.

  Barrie, no fly fisher himself, wrote that Mackay taught Michael ‘everything that is worth knowing’. Used to casting on a lawn in St John’s Wood in London, the boy soon found that it was a different matter on water.

  Mackay took him back to basics, explaining the stance that would best facilitate the smooth action required in a cast – now like a cricketer at the crease getting stance, grip and body action just right, now like an archer transferring the energy from bow to arrow, as his line snaked over his shoulder and he brought it up abruptly to fall at (hopefully) just the right spot. Michael, a good enough cricketer to make the first XI at Wilkinson’s, and with a wrist action soon to be celebrated in a natural aptitude for Eton Fives, picked up on it fast.

  Mackay’s niece, the sculptor Dorothy Dick, lives in Scourie today and remembers Johnny well:

  He was a good ghillie and a delightful person. As a child I loved his company. He would take me to nearby lochs, but I never really mastered the casting. He could cast the trout line and put it exactly where he wanted it.

  Mackay was a magician with his casts and Michael began to appreciate the sheer beauty of the shape of them – the wand, as the fly rod is often known, snaking back and forth, back and forth, until whoosh, the line glides in a straight line down upon the water like a wingless bird.

  For days Michael experimented with Johnny’s techniques, finding those that suited him best, and the ghillie began talking to him about what was involved besides the cast – like how to read the water, how to recognise the different parts of a loch or river and how to unravel its meaning in the same way a trout has to do in order to survive. He also taught him how to recognise where currents have formed, how to cast across currents of different speeds, how to control how the fly line is affected by them, and particularly how to ‘mend’ when the line gets caught up in them and begins to drag.

  MacKay distinguished between those of his clients who wanted to know how to cast and those who wanted to be taught how to fish, and once it was clear that Michael was of the latter sort, their conversation turned to flies. As Dorothy recalls, ‘Johnny tied his own flies in a shed beside the house. I loved going into that shed.’

  There was Claret Grouse and Teal & Yellow, but the fly I remember best was a Jungle Cock. It was beautiful. The feathers looked almost as if they were burnished. They must have come from a tropical bird, I guess: yellow, black and grey … He took one feather at a time and delicately put the thread around to tie it on the hook, so that it looked like the wings of an insect that the fish would like. And then the body of the fly would be silver, like tinsel.

  But besides being good at finding the best place to catch a fish he was very popular because he was good at telling stories. Of course people were in those days. There was no other entertainment up here. Johnny was probably very good with Michael. He was very good with me.

  A year had passed since Sylvia had died. In all that time Michael, described by Barrie at this age as ‘the mysterious boy of the so open countenance … with the carelessness of genius’, had found no activity that took his mind off his mother’s death, until now. Within a few days of Mackay starting with Michael and Nico, Barrie was taking Nico out on his own to fish. Michael was no longer available.

  On 18 August, Barrie wrote to Lady Lewis: ‘The fishing is extraordinary good, and Michael does fare better than almost any of the bags we see recorded in the papers…’

  Fifteen days earlier, on 3 August, Michael had caught his first sea trout – 2½ pounds. He had waded downstream in the Laxford and cast to the tail of a pool. The fish had taken. He had given the line a short sharp pull backward and up to set the hook, and all his equipment had come alive, throbbing, surging with life. The fish had jumped out of the water and Michael had lowered his rod, giving it slack and then reeling it in, keeping the pressure on, waiting for the fish to tire. It was a battle he had no desire to win and yet knew he could not duck out now.

  Afterwards Johnny told him he was a real fisherman now. But, for the first time that day, Michael felt alone. That night he took the sea-trout to bed with him, placing it on a chair by his side. Next day Barrie sent it to England to have it stuffed. But it arrived on a Bank Holiday. The shop was closed and it was taken to the gardener’s cottage of one of the firm. The gardener’s wife thought it was a gift from some anonymous friend and ate it. Barrie didn’t dare tell Michael until he got his first salmon.

  Scourie was a most memorable holiday, one of the best, for it started Michael, this young city boy of eleven years of age, on a relationship with nature and replaced something that had been missing since his mother had gone.

  When he arrived home in Kensington, he was full of Scourie, but momentum was gathering beneath the wheels of discontent from various relatives, particularly Margaret Llewelyn Davies, as Dolly Ponsonby’s diary record for the very day that Michael’s sea-trout had arrived in England attests:

  Monday Aug 7th, Bank Holiday [1911] M[argaret] & I talked all morning of Sylvia & Arthur’s boys – & Jimmy Barrie. M is very desperate at moments about them & I too have felt the pity of their easy luxurious lives. In fact it has been on my tongue to say to J. M. B. does he want George to be a fashionable gentleman? Of course in principle he doesn’t. In principle he is all for the ragged raggamuffins & says he wants the boys to be for them too. But in his desire to make up to the boys for all they have lost, he gives them every material pleasure. Nothing is denied them in the way of amusement, clothes, toys, etc. It is very, very disheartening, & when one thinks of Arthur their father – almost unbearable … J. M. B. takes the boys to very grand restaurants in their best evening clothes & they go on to stalls or box at the theatre. They buy socks costing 12/6 a pair & Michael, aged 11, is given very expensive lessons in fly fishing.

  Michael, however, was enjoying life more than he had for a very long time and beginning to fit in more at school, as Barrie recorded in a piece about him, as usual selecting, rejecting and inventing what material he needed to make the story more completely reflect his feelings for the boy. ‘Here is interesting autobiographical matter,’ Barrie wrote.

  I culled [it] years later from the fly-leaf of his Caesar: ‘Aetas 12, height 4 ft. 11, biceps 8 1/4, kicks the beam at 6-2.’ The referen
ce is to a great occasion when Michael stripped at his preparatory (clandestinely) for a Belt with the word ‘Bruiser’ on it. I am reluctant to boast about him (this is untrue), yet must mention that he won the belt, with which (such are the ups and downs of life) he was that same evening gently belted by his preceptor.

  It is but fair to [Michael] to add that he cut a glittering figure in those circles: captain of the footer, and twenty-six against Juddy’s. ‘And even then,’ his telegram to me said, ‘I was only bowled off my pads.’

  A rural cricket match in buttercup time with boys at play, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead, for ever passing along our country lanes on their eternal journey, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.

  Let Michael’s twenty-six against Juddy’s, the first and perhaps the only time he is to meet the stars on equal terms, be our last sight of him as a child. He is walking back, bat in hand, to the pavilion, an old railway carriage. An unearthly glory has swept over the cricket ground. He tries to look unaware of it; you know the expression and the bursting heart. Our smiling Englishman who cannot open the gate waits to make sure that this boy raises his cap in the one right way (without quite touching it, you remember), and then rejoins his comrades. Michael gathers up the glory and tacks it over his bed. ‘The End,’ as he used to say in his letters. I never know him quite so well again. He seems henceforth to be running to me on a road that is moving still more rapidly in the opposite direction.