The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  This is Barrie bathing in the love he feels for the boy, positioning him for a glorious future from the spring of 1913, when he was due to shine at Eton. But still he manages to slip in that bit about ‘the unseen dead, for ever passing along our country lanes on their eternal journey’. And with good reason. He had not given up on the idea for a play drawing on the legend of Kilmeny. Despite the fact that he clearly had misgivings – in March 1911 he’d written to Quiller-Couch that ‘No one should come back, however much he was loved’ – with the death of Sylvia, the legend had taken on tangible realism. For hadn’t he written in The Little White Bird, ‘There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back’ than dead young mothers returning as ghosts to see how their children fare?

  They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers are in the grip, and whisper, ‘How is it with you, my child?’ but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little vests he has. They love to do these things. What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses…

  Now he had a situation with the orphaned Michael which, if handled carefully might draw back the veil on ‘the ranks of the unseen dead’, if not literally at least metaphorically. Central to the project was the boy’s relationship with his dead mother, which Barrie had already decided to keep alive by writing her a letter every year, ‘telling her how things now were with her children’, though according to Andrew Birkin he later destroyed these letters.

  Sylvia’s warning not to press Michael sounds somewhere off stage – ‘He is at present not very strong but very keen and intelligent: great care must be taken not to overwork him. Mary [Hodgson] understands & of course JMB knows and will be careful & watch.’

  But, like it or not, Barrie’s affair with Michael was the driver and Barrie was ever-driven by the need to write from life, even if he was also aware of the need to proceed softly. For being in loco parentis he had every opportunity now to witness Michael in the grip of nightmare as it occurred:

  I have known the small white figure defend the stair-head thus for an hour, blazing rather than afraid, concentrated on some dreadful matter in which, tragically, none could aid him. I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me, for I had been advised, warned, that I must not wake him abruptly. Gradually I soothed him back to bed, and though my presence there in the morning told him, in the light language we then adopted, that he had been ‘at it again’ he could remember nothing of who the nameless enemy was. Once I slipped from the room, thinking it best that he should wake to normal surroundings, but that was a mistake. He was violently agitated by my absence. In some vague way he seemed on the stairs to have known that I was with him and to have got comfort from it; he said he had gone back to bed only because he knew I should be there when he woke up. I found that he liked, ‘after he had been an ass’, to wake up seeing me ‘sitting there doing something frightfully ordinary, like reading the newspaper,’ and you may be sure that thereafter that was what I was doing.42

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

  Chapter Nineteen

  1912: The Outer Hebrides: Catching Mary Rose

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER a boyhood friend of Barrie’s from Kirriemuir, Peter Lindsay, put him on to Amhuinnsuidhe (pronounced ‘aven-suey’), a castellated mansion situated on North Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

  North Harris could just as well be taken for South Lewis, as the isles of Lewis (north) and Harris (south) are geologically one. But the natural boundary line between them – the narrow slip of land at Tarbert – is not the one chosen by their people. So that, while Amhuinnsuidhe has a Harris address, it actually lies within the Lewis land mass.

  There are various routes to this remote location, including a two-and-a-quarter-hour ferry ride into the Atlantic, west from mainland Ullapool to Stornoway on Lewis’s north-east coast, which takes some beating on a sunny day with dolphins playing all around, but in high winds can be dramatic, even treacherous. Alternatively, one can cross further south and take in Skye en route to Tarbert.

  In Barrie’s day supplies for the fishing and shooting seasons would be brought to the castle in May on the Dunara Castle, the boat coming up almost to the castle door. And guests would be ferried to and from Tarbert on two launches, called Rover and Mabel.

  It was while on their way to Tarbert in 1912 that Barrie revealed to Nanny, Michael and Nico – George and Peter were to follow after school camp; Jack as usual was ruled out – just what it meant to travel with a man with one foot in a magic wood.

  ‘My grandest triumph is that long after No. 4 [Michael] had ceased to believe [in fairies], I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes,’ wrote Barrie.

  We were on our way in a boat to fish the Outer Hebrides (where we caught Mary Rose), and though it was a journey of days he wore his fishing basket on his back all the time, so as to be able to begin at once. His one pain was the absence of Johnny Mackay, for Johnny was the loved ghillie of the previous summer … but could not be with us this time as he would have had to cross and re-cross Scotland to reach us.

  As the boat drew near the Kyle of Lochalsh pier [off the south-east of Skye] I told Nos. 4 and 5 it was such a famous wishing pier that they had now but to wish and they should have. No. 5 believed at once and expressed a wish to meet himself (I afterwards found him on the pier searching faces confidently), but No. 4 thought it more of my untimely nonsense and doggedly declined to humour me.

  ‘Whom do you want to see most, No. 4?’

  ‘Of course I would like most to see Johnny Mackay.’

  ‘Well, then, wish for him.’

  ‘Oh, rot.’

  ‘It can’t do any harm to wish.’

  Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes No. 4 was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny.

  ‘Amhuinsuidhe’ is the Gaelic for ‘sitting by the river’ and indeed one of the salmon and sea trout systems careers across the rocks to the sea right beside the castle. In the vicinity are ten distinct fresh-water loch and river systems, all in remote and beautiful surroundings, variously accessible by vehicle or on foot.

  Charles Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, built the castle in 1867, but when he went bankrupt the estate was taken over by his bankers, headed by Sir Edward Scott. Barrie first rented it from Sir Edward’s son, Sir Samuel Scott, from July to September 1912. ‘This place is very remote,’ he wrote to the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell – ‘nothing alive but salmon, deer, and whales.’

  Wild country, certainly – the birds are especially impressive – huge, white-tailed eagles with eight-foot wing spans, the largest in Britain. But there was also a place to play cricket and a tennis court, which today completely surprises one in the midst of wilderness some miles before you come upon the castle.

  In Sir Edward’s day, non-paying guests were invited for the hunting and fishing and attended by a staff of forty. But it seems that Barrie took the place over in its entirety, drafting in his own staff – Nanny and the below stairs staff, Minnie, Lilian and Bessie from 23 Campden Hill Square, and Harry Brown, his manservant/butler from Adelphi Terrace.

  Nurse Loosemore, who nursed Sylvia but had had no duties in the household since her death, was also invited and stayed ‘for an indefinite period’, as Nanny o
bserved. Writing to her sister, Nancy, on 1 September, Nanny said:

  The weather has been very good for Scotland, & the fishing splendid. They (the boys) generally go on ponies & are getting quite expert at riding. Jack is not with us – his holidays do not come convenient. J. M. B. is well, & much better than I have seen him for some years.

  Among Barrie’s friends to be invited to join the party were: Turley Smith; the E. V. Lucases with daughter Audrey (who stayed for a month); Mason (who stayed for ten days) and Anthony Hope, the celebrated author of The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) who had known Sylvia since before she was married; and Hope’s wife and daughter, Betty; plus Betty’s governess (they stayed for well over a month).

  Wrote Nanny: ‘We have had (to use slang) the pick of the literary genius’s [sic] of England, but alas – either my liver is out of order, or my ideals too high, for at close quarters they are but mortal – & very ordinary at that.’

  Auberon Herbert, 9th Baron Lucas, also put in an appearance with his sister, Nan. ‘Bron’ Lucas was shortly to become President of the Board of Agriculture in the Asquith government, and was an athlete in spite of a wooden substitute for a leg lost as Times correspondent in the Boer War.

  Typically, Nico, who at eight had two prominent front teeth and a lively, arrogant charm that made him a popular boy at Wilkinson’s and somehow excused his impossibly forthright approach and insensitive manner towards adults, had straight away gone up to Lucas and asked him whether he could see his artificial leg. Lucas had taken Nico up to his room immediately, removed his leg and shown it to him.

  Betty Hope provided a great deal of the gossip among the boys and seems to have had little time left to study with her governess. According to Nico, she was bedded by No. 1 son George (nineteen) – ‘Yes indeed! I’m sure she also took Jack (eighteen) to bed with her, though not at Amhuinnsuidhe as he wasn’t there.’

  Having just finished his last term at Eton and preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps to Cambridge, George had arrived at Amhuinnsuidhe pumped up after a sensational performance at the annual Eton–Harrow cricket match at Lords. He had scored the second highest among Eton’s batsmen, bowled out the leading Harrow batsman, and made a spectacular catch at full stretch.

  From Betty he found adulation fit for his heroics. Peter (fifteen) described her as ‘an attractive femme du monde – very easy on the eye, and American’, but doubted loyally ‘whether [she] ever had a more attractive adolescent to play around with’ than George.

  So interested was Peter about what was going on between the young couple, particularly in the ancient fishing-huts by the side of these remote romantic lochs, that George had to take him aside and teach him some tact, ‘i.e. the necessity of making myself scarce’, as Peter put it. Henceforth, Peter ‘envied from afar’.

  The fishing here was the best to be had anywhere, and Michael (twelve), advised and counselled by Johnny Mackay, was once again exclusively in his element.

  The Amhuinnsuidhe experience is of real, uncreated, natural beauty, and of course the fly fisherman enjoys this as a participant. Sitting in a boat on a loch with the mist closing in around him, it becomes a gateway to his Neverland.

  Amhuinnsuidhe isn’t of course alone in this. The fly fisher’s ‘other’ world breaks in upon him just as well in the South of England, soothed by the lush water meadows and slow reedy streams of deepest Berkshire when the mayflies are dancing. It has something to do with the peacefulness and curiosity of the occupation, in which he is at once relaxed, detached and enlivened with high levels of attention and observation.

  Every sight and sound from the hills, the water and the air in the long periods of solitude which Michael spent in these sublime surroundings sent impulses to his heart, acting upon him inwardly, delivering a sense of the fullness of life and also a humility and surprise understanding that there was something other than himself out there – something unseen within the beauty, which at any moment he might encounter.

  In Scourie, in the wilds of Sutherland, Michael realised instinctively that the world of the fly fisherman was one that he definitely wanted to cross over into again. As soon as he was on the water with Johnny, he slipped right back into the spirit of it.

  In the isolated beauty of the hills and lochs around the castle he no longer felt lonely or lost, or abandoned by his mother, but found in his solitary occupation what the Romantic poets he was already reading referred to as an immanence within Nature’s structure – immutable, everlasting, free of decay.

  He was no longer looking at the landscape, but was living it, a shift of consciousness into the hills themselves. He and the landscape were one; part of the one consciousness.

  Who he was and where he was going no longer mattered, not even how successful he was going to be that day at fishing. Here, in the silence and stillness of the moment, time disappeared, the world of eternity came near, and what mattered was simply being.

  This is what Peter meant when he said of Michael that he had ‘the true stuff of the poet in him from birth’, because even as a child his appreciation of beauty and enchantment was his first and principal quality. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before he awakened and found a use for the sixth sense which requires no eyes or ears, and which survives into a world beyond space and time so familiar to the du Maurier line. For that is how Mary Seraskier describes living in the afterlife when she dies and returns to visit Peter Ibbetson as he is about to drown himself in the Mare d’Auteil.

  It must have been easy to believe that this ‘sense’ was a quality built up over generations – genetically, hormonally – George du Maurier’s ‘little spark’, Daphne’s ‘faculty amongst the myriad threads of our inheritance’. D. H. Lawrence recognised it as a more widespread phenomenon – intuitive, instinctual faculties too often dulled by our obsession with ego – and called it ‘knowledge in the blood’.

  What is certain is that when Michael was orphaned and flung upon the special beauty of the Highlands in the care of Johnny Mackay, wild Nature grew uniquely dear to this reserved but impressionable city boy.

  A special sense did prevail, a natural appreciation of the spirit of place led to a sense of a supra-natural spirit within. And now, while George and Betty cavorted, Peter made himself scarce and envied the lovers from afar, and Nico played the clown with Lord Lucas’s artificial leg, Michael fished and developed a poetic eye for the stories that appertained to the hills and lochs around them.

  With Johnny he explored many of the lochs in the vicinity of the castle, from the adjacent sea run of Castle River, Douglas Pool and Ladies Loch to the remote Brunaval, a walk of six challenging miles even after any recognised track disappears.

  But his focus was Voshimid, one of the most productive salmon and sea trout lochs in Europe, located at the end of the Meavaig track, which takes off to the east a few miles south of the castle on the road between Amhuinnsuidhe and Tarbert.

  Nanny wrote to her sister of Michael’s success here:

  I trust you received the salmon & served it up with mayonnaise sauce. It was one of Michael’s catches … Minnie also sent fish to her home, also Lilian, also Bessie, also Mr Brown (J. M. B.’s butler), also Michael’s ghillie – the man who accompanies him in his travels & whom I implore not to bring him back in pieces.

  Shrouded in mist after a day of torrential rain, the track to Voshimid is hard going and very wet. The storm-laden river alongside can carry a man to his death faster than he might canter on horseback. After a good half-hour walking against the weather, the small, so-called ‘Weedy Loch’ emerges through the pall, and then Voshimid herself. The 200-year-old fishing huts where George and his girlfriend romanced are there still, as is the islet in the south-west corner, where, with Michael’s help, ‘we caught Mary Rose’, as Barrie put it.

  Was it a case of beauty boiling over and the spirit of Michael’s beloved mother pouring through the mist towards him – of love bidding the son ‘to find the maid wherever she be hidden,’43 as the poet wrote
?

  However it happened, here Michael ‘caught’ the Ghost Mother, the first hint of which was noted back in 1894, and who now picked up a more modern echo in the tragic passing of his mother, Sylvia, to become the basis of Barrie’s play, Mary Rose.

  A young married couple, Mary Rose and Simon, go on vacation to the Outer Hebrides, leaving their little son, Harry, behind with a nurse. They visit a small island, which has a bad name among the locals. People, including a young boy, have gone missing there. No one can hear the call of the island except for those for whom it is meant, but once it is heard it cannot be ignored. Mary Rose, who like Michael (and Kilmeny), has an elusiveness of which she is unaware, hears the call and disappears.

  We learn that this is a repeat disappearance, the first occasion being in the same place when Mary Rose was Michael’s age, on a fishing trip with her father. Twenty days later she returned, unaware that she had been away, and her family never discussed the episode with her.

  Now, after her second disappearance, twenty-five years pass before she returns, again unaware that she has been away. She looks for her son, but cannot find him. As a lad Harry ran away to sea. She dies, but her ghost continues to haunt the house, still seeking her son. Three years on, Harry returns and confronts his mother’s ghost…

  On ‘several occasions’ at Amhuinnsiuidhe, according to Nico, when Michael disappeared off on his own, Barrie ran after him manically calling his name. ‘We’d hear this haunting, banshee wail, “Mi-i-ichael-l-l!”’ he wrote. ‘It was an extraordinary sound as it echoed through the hills. And of course Michael was always perfectly all right, and wondered what all the fuss was about.’44

  Nico, at age eight, was unaware of what was really going on. Heb knew nothing of Kilmeny, the girl of poetic nature, the lover of solitude who wanders off alone at twilight and disappears into the wild among the hills, her friends looking in vain for her, their cries echoing around the glen.