The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Specifically how Barrie guided his young charge was shown when Michael had to write an essay at Eton on ‘What makes a Gentleman’. Having read it his tutor commented that ‘he seemed to me to show a kinship in spirit to his guardian’.

  ‘I believe’, Michael wrote,

  I am right in saying that John Ball made use of the following couplet in his discourses:

  ‘When Adam delved and Eve span,

  Who was then a gentleman?’

  Doubtless Ball used the word gentleman in the more degrading sense, denoting one of the upper classes – I think he was wrong. Adam was no gentleman, not because he was not Lord Adam, but because he gave away his wife in the matter of the apple … Laurence Oates, a very gallant gentleman, went out into the blizzard because he knew he could not live and wished to give his friends a better chance. He was a gentleman because when he knew he was being brave he did not say ‘I’m a hero and I’m going to die for you’, but merely remarked he was going out for a bit, and left the rest to their imagination.

  This was the heroic code of the day, Barrie’s morality to the letter. Oates met his death in Scott’s disastrous 1911 expedition to the Antarctic. He was both a hero and an Old Etonian. The connection between Barrie and Scott and Michael made him an especially relevant model for Michael’s education.

  Barrie told the story of Michael’s transition at Eton in a short story ‘Neil and Tintinnabulum’. The boy leaves his prep school, captain of the football team and a cricketing legend, and arrives at Eton where his fag-master is ‘a human reminder of the brevity of human greatness’. Equating the adjustment Michael must undertake to survive at Eton with the breaking in of a wild horse, Barrie leans over a bridge on the Eton campus, ‘enviously watching the gaiety of two attractive boys, now broken to the ways of the school’, wishing that Michael was one of them, ‘till I heard the language…’

  The image of breaking a wild horse suggests that the boy would have to lose his natural freedoms and the inner joy he discovered in the wild hills and lochs of highland Scotland and replace them with the dissatisfaction and perpetual agitation of being an Eton swell, a creature irrationally driven by self-esteem, even vanity, and as Rousseau put it, condemned ‘to the legally sanctioned servitude necessary to preserve his god, the Institution of Private Property’.

  We watch as, in Michael’s unhappiness, he turns to his guardian, and Barrie enjoys ‘being the one needed’, just as Meredith predicted. And we pity Michael as Barrie creeps around the playing fields of Eton, ‘so that he may at least see me nigh though we cannot touch’.

  But this isn’t the whole story, for Michael was a very bright boy. Macnaghten described him in a book he wrote about his fifty years at the school as the brightest boy he had ever taught. When Michael took the Eton scholarship he came fourth of all entrants, three places higher than Peter, and much was expected of him.

  According to Nico, Michael was the most ‘intellectual’ of all the brothers, but also the best all round at sport, though he added, ‘Heaven knows how different we all would have been if our parents had lived and the little wizard of Thrums had ganged awa’!’

  Through this period of despair Michael, on the threshold of puberty, turned to Barrie, and Barrie was a welcome influence at this point. But also Michael showed a natural directing force of his own – a force approaching spirituality – which proved itself capable of making the adjustment to the System, but on his own terms.

  Macnaghten’s outcome report reads as follows: ‘In 1914 Michael resolved to face every event with absolute self-possession, however much it cost him.’ At Christmas 1914, his Division Master wrote of him, ‘He may go very far if he finds an ideal … could be formidable in opposition with a will like adamant, but does not set himself in opposition.’

  As usual at public school, the sports field was deemed the most telling of character. ‘At any crisis he was glorious, self-controlled, and almost always controlling the result,’ wrote Macnaghten.

  In a Junior v. P. V. Broke’s he came in last with a bandaged hand, which he could only trust for a single stroke: we had lost on the first innings and needed four runs to win, with only five more balls to make them. He smothered the first two balls, chose the third and drove it hard and low through the hedge into the Datchet Road for six, splitting his hand again; but he had done what he had determined to do, and he alone showed no trace of emotion. Not without reason a good judge of character wrote six months later: ‘Very anxious not to give himself away or show any excitement about a game’.

  The deep cause ‘for this self-imposed law of self-restraint’, Macnaghten believed, was that ‘Michael judged it to be necessary for the training of his soul’.

  The key phrase in all this is that Michael ‘could be formidable in opposition with a will like adamant, but does not set himself in opposition’. He had come out of himself with an adamantine will – ‘adamant’, the legendary, impenetrable stone, unyielding, inflexible, unbreakable. But he was not employing it, as many did at Eton, to his own aggrandisement or to someone’s detriment. He was, as his contemporary Sebastian Earl put it, still ‘wholly un-Etonian’.

  His was the optimum combination of what he had been with what they wanted to make him. He may never extend Eton’s list of prime ministers, a spiritual appreciation of beauty sadly not being the sine qua non of political advantage, but there was a new edge to the ‘more than earthly aura’ that surrounded him: ‘Michael was a cat that walked alone,’ according to Clive Burt.

  Macnaghten wrote further of the boy that ‘his judgement is unerring … a boy of terrific power, though still “very anxious,” he was marked out as inevitably Captain of the House: “there are no limits,” said his predecessor, “to what he might do for good.”’

  One boy, a year older than Michael, took special notice. Roger Senhouse, a romantic creature, sensitive to beauty in nature and literature – Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats above all – was described by a boyfriend some years later as having ‘a melting smile and dark grey eyes’.45

  In his twenties Senhouse would become perhaps the very last recruit to the Bloomsbury set, and an editor and translator of exceptional quality. His skill in translation from the French was to be largely responsible for a revival of British interest in Andre Gide and Colette. In 1936 he would co-found the famous publishing house of Secker & Warburg and bring the Italian existentialist writer and sexual libertarian Alberto Moravia to the English-speaking world for the first time. He was also himself a poet, but like Michael wrote in secret, too modest to allow it to appear before the public gaze.

  Senhouse thought Michael a genius, but he was first bowled over by the eldest Davies boy, George. He’d caught sight of him standing naked in the shower opposite his room after an Old Etonian football match – ‘I shall never forget that Blake-like effulgence. I wanted to extend the Davies family in my mind and these early memories have held an important position in my life.’

  But then ‘the ineffable subliminity’ of Michael took over, he ‘who in a sense assumed a kind of father figure for me and in some strange way replaced that of your brother George’, he wrote in 1960 to Nico.

  I have never again since Michael’s death felt that those astonishing years have been equalled in intensity – the élan vitae in all its phases … I was then in touch with life forces that have since eluded me and this is not to be accounted for by the age of puberty and the threshold of life.

  Michael and Senhouse appeared inseparable and were fleetingly lovers, according to Bob Boothby. Although forbidden by English law there was nothing unusual in sex between boys at Eton. There was virtually no opportunity to have sex with girls. So unusual were heterosexual relations that one Harold Barker became famous around the school for indulging. Barker broke out of Eton one night, fell in love with a girl at a ball and gave her his School Shield, which you’d get if you won a cricket net. The girl told her father and Barker was expelled.

  Even Nico confessed to an affair with a boy at Eton. It
happened with Fitz-Wright, following the debacle of his attempt to be admitted to Pop. Indeed, it was Macnaghten’s habit to appraise new boys on their arrival of the likelihood of it happening – ‘that some boys kissed other boys etc’, as Nico, who refused to believe it when his housemaster came out with it, recorded.

  Senhouse wrote that one of his earliest recollections of his affair with Michael ‘was being helped down the stairs by the toe of [his brother Peter’s] boot and being called a dirty little boy … It is the sight of [Peter’s] gown descending that most often stays in my memory,’ he mused fifty years later.

  But, unlike Nico with Fitz-Wright, it was always more than sex between the two boys. Michael was ‘the one profound influence in my life’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I became so wrapped up in him that I faltered, soon I began to fail in concentration on my work.’ Macnaghten observed what was going on and told Barrie ‘how obsessed I was with him’. But it seems to have been taken as a force for good. His obsession led Senhouse to taking

  Extra Works [extra-mural studies] in Trials [internal exams] in a futile attempt to keep some sort of pace with Michael … Macnaghten was slightly jealous of our friendship, almost worshipping Michael himself & always encouraging me to prevail upon him when depressed ‘because I know how very close you are to him’.

  Michael, it seems, was flooring them all and it was now increasingly obvious – if not to his Division Master – that he already had an ideal: the aesthetic he’d brought with him, the ideal of beauty, something he had naturally from a child and reinforced in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland at the end of an eight-foot wand and a hooping, snaking yardage of fly fishing line – an ideal that could be applied everywhere and in everything, even at Eton.

  Not appreciating the potential of such an ideal in the big wide world, Barrie’s friend E. V. Lucas, while noting a growing ‘thoughtfulness for others’ in Michael, referred to him as ‘an elvish spectator rather than a participant’, something of an analyst of the pitiful world, not unlike Barrie.

  But no one spoke of him as cynical, as they did of his guardian; nor was he thought of as narcissistic, although Narcissus is one of the mythical figures often linked to a Peter Pan (and it is easy to see why).

  Certainly the boy yearned for love, but not at that time of himself – he yearned for a love for another that might consume him like his passion for lochs and mountains, a love that would speak to his soul and move it, a love that would eclipse the images of the dead – that old dead foe which disturbed him – a love that would make him feel blessed to be alive, and once found would seem always to have been within him. For, as Sylvia’s beloved son knew from his reading of the poets, such a love might set him free. As Meredith might have put it of the new Michael: ‘Beauty was his handmaid … and sweet Romance his bride.’

  It is perhaps no coincidence that Macnaghten took to encouraging his pupils to learn by heart Meredith’s twenty-verse poem ‘Love in the Valley’. If they succeeded, he let them off the ‘saying lesson’ for the rest of the term.

  Owing to Barrie’s commitments in London, the Scottish holiday in the summer of 1913 had been brief. He had rented his friend the spiritualist Marie Corelli’s home in Killiekrankie – a spacious stone house built in an ‘L’ high up above the famous Pass, a magnificent wooded gorge with the River Garry flowing through it.

  There were games of cricket in the garden (with many a ball disappearing into the gorge beneath), great fishing, and rousing stories of the first Jacobite Rising, a short-lived victory for the Jacobites on 27 July 1689, fought nearby.

  Then in January 1914 he took them, with Brown the butler, to Murren in Switzerland. Wrote Mackail:

  George twenty-and-a-half. Little Nicholas over ten. But Michael still and always the special companion, in Switzerland or anywhere else. Unspoilt by it – but a bunch of brothers can help here. Malleable, but already less malleable than you might suppose. Character here; so much that even Barrie couldn’t always bend it.

  Thence to Paris in April, which proved to be a last hurrah for George, Peter, and indeed for the Belle Époque itself, as, in the months following, the Balkan conflict led to the violence that erupted into the First World War.

  The boys went everywhere from their base at the fashionable Hotel Meurice in the Rue de Rivoli, and did everything: the Louvre; the Left Bank; the bookstalls by the Seine; the red-light district of rue Pasquier; a game of L’Attaque organised by Michael – a famous game of military tactics, strategic battle and manoeuvre; tea at Rumpelmayer’s, the chic place for Paris gourmets owned by a family of Austrian pastry-cooks and situated between the Tuileries and the Louvre; finishing at the Café de Paris, properly attired of course in tail coats and white ties.

  It was George’s first taste of Paris. He ‘took to all this like a duck to water’, wrote Peter, ‘and it was then that he and I first clearly saw what Jack had missed by being sent into the Navy instead of to Eton’.

  Then, at the end of July, Barrie booked Auch Lodge on the 30,000-acre Auch Estate in the Grampian Mountains, close to the Bridge of Orchy at the bottom of a glen that runs up from Tyndrum towards Rannoch Moor and Glencoe.

  The L-shaped stone house with six bedrooms, four bathrooms and annexe stands surrounded by trees beneath three 3,000-foot hills – Beinn Dorain, Beinn Chastiel (pronounced hastle) and Beinn Odhar, overlooking the confluence of the Allt Kinglass (a significant tributory of the Orchy) and Allt Coire Chailein rivers.

  Salmon and trout from the Orchy; trout from the Kinglass. As ever, Johnny Mackay was there to act as Michael’s ghillie and although he was supposed to be there for Nico too, the ten-year-old generally opted for something else to do, as Barrie wrote to Lord Lucas on 31 July:

  Nicholas is riding about on an absurdly fat pony which necessitates his legs being at right-angles to his body. The others are fishing. The waters are a-crawl with salmon, but they will look at nothing till the rain comes. The really big event is that Johnny Mackay (Michael’s ghillie) has a new set of artificial teeth. He wears them and joins in the talk with a simple dignity, not boastful, but aware that he is the owner of a good thing – rather like the lady who passes round her necklace.

  But the diplomatic manoeuvring between Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and Britain following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo at the end of June left everyone with a sense of foreboding, of unease of what was to come, and indeed of uncertainty as morning papers only occasionally arrived on the date of issue at Auch.

  Barrie wrote in his notebook: ‘The Last Cricket Match. One or two days before war declared – my anxiety and premonition – boys gaily playing cricket at Auch, seen from my window – I know they’re to suffer – I see them dropping out one by one, fewer and fewer.’

  Even on 4 August, the day Britain declared war on Germany, which Barrie noted was ‘vilely wet & windy’ in Auch, he was writing anxiously to Nan Herbert, ignorant of when war would come:

  We are so isolated from news here, that when I wrote last I was quite ignorant that Europe was in a blaze. We occasionally get the morning paper in the evening, and there may be big news today. I don’t see myself how we can keep out of it long in any case, and if so, probably the sooner the better. You will be terribly far from the centre if you go to Servia, and I should think you ought to wait, but you know best. It seems awful to be up here at such a time catching fish, or not catching them, for it has rained four days and nights and is still at it, and all the world is spate and bog.

  The news reached Auch the following day. Wrote Mackail: ‘We know now that it was the end of a world which can never return again.’

  Barrie, George and Peter left at once for London, both boys joining up with the Special Reserve at Sheerness, beside the mouth of the Medway in Kent. Jack of course was already in the navy, somewhere unknown. Michael, Nicholas and Nanny Hodgson alone remained at the Lodge, where at least the fishing was good.

  Towards the end of the month George and Peter ret
urned for a few days’ fishing until 9 September, when George wrote in his diary: ‘In the morning I threw a farewell Jock Scott, Blue Doctor, & Silver Doctor over the Orchy. Not a rise. The fish were very lively, evidently owing to the rain that came after lunch. Fini’

  45 Lytton Strachey.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1914–15: Loving, J. M. B.

  THE FIRST WORLD War marked a terrible frontier between innocence and adult worldliness. For Peter, first-hand experience of the horrors would consign blissful childhood visions to doubtful memory and shatter his nerves so that he would never truly recover.

  Damage went deep into the very culture of Britain. The war broke the continuity of life and of ancient custom. ‘Not all the good will in the world could construct the fabric of the old ways; in the years immediately after the war, they vanished like snows touched by the sun, like a dream “remembered on waking”,’ as the historian A. L. Rowse put it in his memoir, A Cornish Childhood.

  Poets, such as Edmund Blunden, would return from the horrors and explore country life again looking for confirmation of their early childhood experiences, which had formed them and seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Nothing would be quite the same again. The war drew a line between the Old World and the New.

  In January 1915, professional soldier Guy du Maurier, who had gone out to France to fight with 900 men and had only 200 left, wrote to his wife:

  The trenches are full of dead Frenchmen. When one is killed they let him lie in the squelching mud and water at the bottom; and when you try and drain or dig you unearth them in an advanced state of decomposition … There are many dead Highlanders just in front – killed in December I think – and they aren’t pleasant. One gets used to smells … Two hundred of my men went to hospital today – mostly frost-bitten feet; bad cases are called gangrene and very bad cases the toes drop off … When we’ve done our four days I’ll try and go over to see George who I think is only two miles off. I haven’t seen anyone I know lately. I fancy most of the Army I know are killed or wounded.