The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  George’s letters to Barrie, two miles up the Line from Guy, show less of the ghastly realities of trench warfare in a brave and touching attempt not to worry his guardian. On 27 January he wrote to Barrie to reassure him that

  There’s nothing for you to be anxious about. Of course, there’s always the chance of stopping an unaimed bullet, but you can see it’s a very small one. And I am far too timorous a man (I am a man now, I think) to run any more risk than I must.

  George’s first calamity was to be wounded in the leg two weeks later, but he made no mention of it to Barrie.

  On 3 March, Michael, who was laid up in bed at Eton ‘with a belly-ache’ wrote a nine-page letter to his eldest brother, telling him in minute detail what was going on at home, having been on leave from school the previous weekend. Barrie had been rehearsing plays with a bad cold and took Michael and Nico to some sort of musical evening at the Coliseum in London, typical of the sort of undemanding fare he selected for the boys’ attention, with, as ever, no expense spared.

  We had the Royal Box, which I had not been in before. There was a man attired so as to represent Nero (the Roman card) with huge legs and arms attached, and Nico has been copying him ever since … Also there was a very good singer, Jack Norworth [a famous American singer songwriter and vaudeville performer]. He sings ‘Sister Susie’s saving shirts for soldiers’, and also a new song which begins ‘Mother’s making mittens for the Navy, Bertha’s bathing baby Belgian refugees’. He is in Uncle Jim’s new burlesque. On Saturday Peter had large dinner at the Savoy with old Etonians, i.e. Pemberton & co. On Monday besides going to Uncle Jim’s rehearsals we (Sir J and I) lunched at the Automobile Club with Lieut Gen Sir David Henderson, the head of the flying corps, and his wife. He was very nice. I had no idea he was so important until Nico told me that crossed swords and a star means Lieutenant General. The Automobile Club is an enormous place. I went and saw the baths and gymnasia (I feel that Aunt Margo would approve of ‘gymnasia’). The evening passed in the usual way:

  Tea: then wait, wait, wait, wait, with futile attempts to play Rat-tat etc: books for Mary to pack: taxi comes early: wait: bag in taxi: hurried farewells, and station: crowds of boys: greetings which freeze on sight of Sir James: shouts of Good Lord here’s Davies! on finding a carriage: walk up to tutor’s on arriving, to feel you haven’t been to leave at all, except for the atmosphere of purses replenished and change suits: supper & prayers after which tutor comes in & asks all about George & Peter & leave in general, while doing his best to obliterate the foot of the bed. Then lights suddenly go out at ten when a new book by Wells [H G] or Bierce [Ambrose] becomes very interesting. Wake in the morning to the refrain of ‘Nearly a quarter to seven, Mr Davies. Are you awake, sir?’ To which the only possible reply is a grunt. A superhuman effort drags you to the shower-bath etc.

  Yesterday I managed to aid my partner in vanquishing the first-round opponents in school-fives and as the second round people have scratched we are in the Final which is not bad. I am in the Final of Junior Fives too. As for house-fives (school) I forget if I told you this, but as Cheney & Neville stayed out O’Peake and myself had to represent the first pair as well as the second. Playing for the first pair v. Brintons IV (first courts Tuesday) we won. For the 2nd pair v. R. S. de Hs II (2nd courts ditto) we lost. It was a very strenuous day. I hope to win my tutor’s junior house fives as I have not a bad partner and as good as anybody else’s. I think I would have won last year’s, only I got mumps in the final. Tom and Jack Bevan were down yesterday. I believe Tom was a pal of yours. I had a letter from Jack this morning in which he says he has done over 3,000 miles in the last twelve days which seems rather a lot. There is only a month till the end of the half [term] now, which seems an awful little when you say four weeks or four x seven days.

  The other day, I among others was made a temporary platoon commander in G Coy [Company], & I was even more astounded than anyone else at my voice. It is awful in G Coy now because Chaffey, of all people, has been taking us lately. ‘Sap it up, you chaps!’ ‘Dash it all you boys!’ “Pon my word, you know, you are a bad Disgusting little bounder!’ And the Adjutant McNeil is not much better. You should hear the songs they sing about him, such as ‘What she we do with the acting Adjer’ etc etc –

  My dame has just come in and at my suggestion asks me to give you her best regards & as he is very interested to hear about you. Coupled with this is the touching information to go up to the night [meeting] only when I feel inclined thereto! And no lunch.

  Again enters Mrs d’a with castor oil in Brandy, which now reposes in my belly. She has gone for a punch. The doctor (Ansler) used to live near grandfather du Maurier in Hampstead – enter my dame with Punch – and was interested in my pictures, besides pummelling my bolster and laughing at the fact that I had crumpets and fried eggs for tea yesterday.

  My source of information is now beginning to dry up and I feel that you will have to be satisfied with nine pages or thereabouts. I think it is about time you got leave home. It seems ages since you were home. You will be an awful dog when you get back, and must certainly come down to play against the school, and in your uniform. You could play in pop shorts & khaki stockings. I cudgel my brain, but I can find nothing more to say. So I fear I must finish. ‘J’ai fini!’ Now for a letter to Jack, and then the night only.

  Michael

  George will have loved to hear from his younger brother about home and Eton, where he’d been both successful and happy. ‘J’ai fini!’ was the phrase the boys used as very small children to let Nanny know they had finished on the potty.

  On 11 March, Barrie had to inform George of the death in action of Guy du Maurier, and in his own strange way wrote of his deep concern for him:

  Of course I don’t need this to bring home to me the danger you are always in more or less, but I do seem to be sadder today than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. For four years I have been waiting for you to become 21 & a little more, so that we could get closer and closer to each other, without any words needed. I don’t have any little iota of desire for you to get military glory. I do not care a farthing for anything of the kind, but I have one passionate desire that we may all be together again once at least. You would not mean a featherweight more to me tho’ you come back a General. I just want yourself. There may be some moments when a knowledge of all you are to me will make you a little more careful, and so I can’t help going on saying these things.

  It was terrible that man being killed next to you, but don’t be afraid to tell me such things. You see it at night I fear with painful vividness. I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now. Loving,

  J. M. B.

  If this was the tenor of his letters to George, we can begin to see why Peter destroyed the 2,000 he wrote to Michael because they were ‘too much’.

  In the same month the Ninth Infantry Brigade, Third Division, to which George belonged, prepared for an attack at St Eloi (today known as St-Elooi), south of Ypres in Flanders. Having just received Barrie’s letter about the death of Guy, George was sitting on a bank along with the rest of his Company, being addressed by his Colonel before the attack, when he was shot through the head and died almost immediately.

  That same night, Nico and Nanny were awakened by a loud knocking on the door of 23 Campden Hill Square. (Michael was away at Eton.) The knocking was Barrie. Nico sat up in bed listening as a ‘banshee wailing’ filled the house. He then heard Barrie mount the stairs and come into his room. He then sat on Nico’s bed in silence.

  He sent a telegram to Peter at Sheerness to come at once. Peter recorded that the effect on Barrie of the death of George, whom ‘he had loved with such a deep, strange, complicated, increasing love’, was ‘dire’. Among George’s effects was a copy of The Little White Bird, which he had taken with him to war, and a letter to Barrie written only
hours before he was shot, exhorting him once again to ‘Keep your heart up, Uncle Jim … carry on with your job of keeping up your courage. I will write every time I come out of action.’

  With George’s death Barrie lost any idea of war being heroic. No longer was he with Wendy in Peter Pan, when Hook brings her to see the lost boys walk the plank and she awes the pirates by saying: ‘We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen.’

  It fell to Barrie to write to Josephine Mitchell-Innes, Norma’s sister. George and Jack had met them at a dance in Cheyne Walk thrown by Sylvia’s sister, May, some three years earlier. George had stayed at the family’s homes in Scotland and Hertfordshire. He and Josephine had become close.

  Barrie wrote:

  My dear Josephine I send you on those other letters in a box. It was very nice seeing you, and still nicer liking you as much as I wanted to do. But I was not afraid. I knew there was one matter on which George could make no mistake. I hope we shall always be friends, though it has begun in a way so much more sad than it was planned.

  Yours affectionately,

  J. M. Barrie

  The Mitchell-Innes connection is interesting historically for Norma’s insight into George’s opinion of Barrie. She commented that while many people found Barrie ‘rather shivery’, George ‘was deeply fond of him, and understood him so well – saw through him a little, I think’.46

  The same might have been said of Peter, Michael and Nico, whose friends likewise found him a bit weird. Michael’s friend Sebastian Earl recorded:47 ‘I was terrified [of Barrie] … He never said a word, just sat like a tombstone.’ While Nico’s school friend, Cecil Day Lewis, to become Poet Laureate in 1968, wrote of a similar experience:

  On one occasion [Nico] took me back to his guardian’s house in Campden Hill Square, and introduced me to him. I remember a large dark room and a small dark man sitting in it: he was not smoking a pipe, nor did he receive us little boys with any perceptible enthusiasm – indeed I don’t think he uttered a single word – which was a bit out of character on his part, since the small dark man, Nico’s guardian, was the author of Peter Pan. After this negative encounter, we went up to an attic and fired with an air-gun at pedestrians in the Square.48

  It was not at all out of character. He had the same effect on many outside the Peter Pan inner sanctum, particularly now that he had the boys to himself, which was ultimately the most important thing to him and nullified the need ever to look over his shoulder again at anybody or anything, other than time. For time would eventually take them away from him and this war had dealt him the first irreversible, heartfelt blow.

  There was genuine affection from three of the four boys who remained, who had learned to live with Uncle Jim’s strangeness, respecting his space and giving any put-downs (which never applied when Michael was near) ample opportunity to disperse, not because, or solely because, he was their meal ticket, but no doubt too because, like George, they thought they saw through him a bit.

  The war did undoubtedly bring them closer. 1914 was the first year in which Barrie signed himself off in letters to the boys with the word ‘Loving’ instead of ‘Your affectionate’. Peter was the first to adopt the same sign-off when he replied from the Front.

  For it was Peter’s turn now to feel his guardian cared. On 7 August he wrote to Barrie from Sheerness that he was ‘simply burning to go [to war]’, although in the same letter that it was ‘just the time of year when I begin to feel the desire for Scotland in my veins, and I wish I was with you’.

  46 Interview with Andrew Birkin, 1978.

  47 Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979).

  48 C. Day Lewis, The Buried Day (1960).

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1915: The Blue Bird of Happiness

  IN 1915, IT was the Tomdoun in Glen Garry. Barrie, Michael and Nico, the sole travellers that year, set off on the Scots Express from King’s Cross at 7.20 p.m., taking a sleeping berth to Spean Bridge, just short of Fort William, where they picked up the West Highland Railway going north through unforgettable scenery to Invergarry. Thence, they drove the single-track road ten miles west along the north side of Loch Garry, probably in a vehicle belonging to Peter Grant, the landlord of the remote Tomdoun, whose family built the hotel in 1893 and had it right into the 1960s.

  The hotel is situated beside the single-track road on the side of a hill, its verandah overlooking a paddock and wide section of the Garry waters. In 1746 the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart crossed the river by means of a ford, which disappeared when the river was dynamited into a deeper channel. On a summer’s evening there can be few more beautiful views from any hotel in the Highlands.

  Scattered homesteads, a Kirk (still there) and a turning once led along the main road from the south to Kintail and onward for the Skye and Hebrides ferries, the Kyle of Lochalsh, the Sound of Sleat and the Sandaig archipelago, location of one of Scotland’s greatest literary love affairs, between Gavin Maxwell, an otter named Mij and the great Romantic poet Kathleen Raine.

  It is stunning country and has always been one of those secret havens for fly fishers and naturalists, the deer browsing in the sands on the banks of the Loyne and the golden eagle flying from its eyries in the Quoich Forest. It also had something of a reputation as a resort for partially dispossessed boys of Empire to be hardy and learn to fish, boys deposited in English boarding schools by parents abroad in the Foreign Office or in the armed forces.

  The fly fisher Geoffrey Braithwaite, whose Fine Feathers and Fish remains a collector’s classic and who was a regular at the Tomdoun in the first decade of the twentieth century, knew everybody in the Glen and recalled the simple fare at the hotel at the time Barrie and the boys were there:

  Mutton broth, trout and then mutton, which one could seldom masticate with any ease. So far as bath was concerned, and you were fortunate enough to get there first, you might manage to find a trickle of tepid water and God help those who followed. The bedrooms were always spotlessly clean but had the oldest iron bedsteads and the mattresses so hard that only through real tiredness after a hard day’s fishing that sleep came one’s way.

  The hotel wasn’t open all year round, only for the fishing season and the stag hunting. It was, in fact, as local inhabitant Ken Brown records,

  both a family home and provided accommodation for the staff that worked on the farm the Grants owned. It also housed the telegraph office. There were four or five ‘suites’ to let, guests had a bedroom and adjoining sitting room and shared a bathroom/WC. Meals were provided, either in the private rooms or in the dining room. You took what was offered. There was no bar, but drinks could be taken in the drawing room.

  It became a Mecca for real fly fishermen. You could get finer accommodation in nearby Glenquoich Lodge, with ‘Bear’ Ellice as host, partying with the great and the good of society. You could rent the more modest Kinlochquoich Lodge. But at the Tomdoun you were part of a legend.

  Salmon fishing was the draw in those days before the dams went up, and once again Michael was in his element, fishing the Horseshoe, the pool on the stretch of river in front of the hotel, as well as Kingie Pool and the Tailings, which could be leased for a weeks at a time.

  The hotel was manned by a team of expert ghillies, whose names recalled many of the Scottish clans: Hector MacDonald, Willie Ross, John and Neil Stewart, Ronald Gillies and Ian MacLennan were the regular ones, although when Barrie, Michael and Nico stayed there in 1915, every one of them was off doing something for the war effort, and their duties fell to Barrie who followed his charges with their coats and ginger beer.

  As a branch line from Spean Bridge station offered service north up the Great Glen to Fort Augustus, terminating at a pier on Loch Ness, the trip also supplied an opportunity to revisit Dhivach Lodge and reminisce about the last proper holiday with Sylvia after Arthur died, still only eight years ago.

  On 15 August, Nico (now almost twelve) wrote to Nanny Hodgson, telling her of the nostalgic expedition:
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  We saw the fall in the burn and the place where Uncle Jim and George and Jack played cricket … In the arbour we found the initials of all our names still there … Was the flicker-show any good? Did you like Charlie Chaplin? I had a long letter from Jack. He went ashore on Gallipoli with a letter to the French Headquarters … I miss you here very much. I have caught five trout here and Michael 15. But then Michael –!!

  Well love from

  NICHOLAS LLEWELYN DAVIES

  Tomdoun was clearly a hit, as Barrie returned with the boys in 1918. But Peter and Jack and the threat of war were never far from their minds. Deeply affected by a sense of doom for a whole generation of boys and concerned to do something, Barrie had financed a hospital at Bron Herbert’s Bedfordshire house, Wrest Park, for casualties of the war. He had also given E. V. Lucas’s wife, Elizabeth, £2,000 to set up a refuge and temporary hospital for women and children variously stricken and orphaned by the war in a large chateau at Bettancourt, in north-eastern France.

  Now, from Tomdoun, he wrote to Bron’s sister, Nan, of a recce he had personally undertaken on French soil:

  I went to see that little hospital I told you of. It is in a desolate chateau consisting largely of underground passages where French officers wander and is on the Marne. The guns are to be heard in the distance all day, and I was usually wakened in the morning by aeroplanes. In the stillness they fill the world with sound. The patients are children and women, either extremely wounded or destitute and ill. One little boy had his leg blown off by a shell at Rheims, and so on. The villages in that part are in a dreadful condition, some of them have about one house standing in fifty. They were destroyed by the Germans in their rush for Paris. There are thousands of Germans buried thereabout, and a grim notice has been issued on the Marne ordering all people to chain up their dogs at night. The dogs have taken to wandering and digging. The Germans stayed in the chateau but didn’t damage it.