The Highlands are very lonely this year. Almost every able bodied man seems to have gone, and we are alone in a big hotel. I was loath to come but it seemed best for M. and N. I am wondering whether Bron has gone yet. Give him my love, and do let me hear from you and how things are going at Wrest. I wish I could be walking up the steps at this moment and seeing you come down the stairs in your nurse’s garments. This is a big job you have taken on and trying to keep at it so long, but at any rate there is no doubt that it was worth doing…
Barrie also wrote to Elizabeth Lucas at the Chateau in Marne along the same lines – how all the Highlands were ‘denuded of their young men [and] there are scarcely any tourists’ and that he ‘had to knit my teeth to come away at all’, adding ‘Michael would like me to take him to the chateau but I suppose better not … Now I’m off to read War and Peace.’
Towards the end of August the party struck out 100 miles south to Kimelford, a village beyond Oban and opposite Mull, in the area of Gleann Mor (Glenmore), close to another archipelago of islands and sea lochs.
Where the dam is today ran the famous Pass of Melfort, a mountain trail cut into the rock along which an open coach drawn by five horses would transport some twenty or more passengers from M’Gregor’s offices near the Station Hotel at Oban, southwards to Glenmore.
The journey to the Cuilfel Hotel in Kimelford – the seventeenth-century drover’s inn which was the Barrie party’s destination – was reckoned in those days to be fifteen miles from Oban but took two hours to reach. So narrow was the pass and high the walls and deeply laid the adjacent rushing river that it is not at all clear from surviving photographs how any vehicle coming in the opposite direction could do anything but turn back.
The Cuilfel offered deep-sea fishing off the coast as well as sea-fishing in the tidal Loch Melfort, and fresh water fishing up in the hills above the village, where a multitude of lochs were stocked by the Cuilfel with the much-prized Loch Leven and Fontinalle, or Great American Brook Trout.
John McFadyan was the keeper of the inn. Tennis and hot and cold baths were supplied ‘and all conveniences connected with hotels’, which may seem a little vague. Normally, local ghillies were supplied to take people across the road from the inn and up into the hills for the day, but once again Barrie appears to have been happy enough to take on that role.
On a warm, windy day in summer the hills above the Cuilfel are a heady potion of clover, ling, alpine meadow flowers, white and purple thistles, bog-loving bulrushes and grasses, the odd crimson foxglove, underscored by the pungent nutty scent of bracken – warm, wet; the scent of fertility. It is a gem of a place, sheep grazing on the sides of gentle, round-topped hills, with serene freshwater lochs, like Lapis Lazuli dropped in their midst. You never know when you will find another such jewel over the rise.
Perhaps the pastoral beauty reminded Barrie of a visit he’d made with Peter on short leave in June to Montgomeryshire in rural Wales, for it was now that Michael began pestering him to take him to meet a family which had for some time been referred to as the ‘Welsh Lewises’, so to distinguish them from the solicitor Lewises of Portland Place.
On 1 September, he wrote from the Cuilfel to Eveline, the mother of the Lewis household at Glan Hafren, the large, detached, listed property at Penstrowed, just outside Newtown, where the family lived:
Dear Mrs Lewis,
I wish there were a few more like you, but it is perhaps better that you should remain unique … It has been rather grim in Scotland this year. The Highlands in many glens are as bare of population owing to the war as if this were the month before Creation. I have just Michael and Nicholas with me and they feel it too, but they climb about, fishing mostly, and if you were to search the bogs you would find me in one of them loaded with waterproofs and ginger beer … I wish we could hurl ourselves straight upon Glan Hafren, but we shall be here till the 8th and that only gives us an exact week before Michael returns to school, and we need that time in London. It shows how much we must have talked of you that he (the dark and dour and impenetrable) has announced to me that he wants to go to see you. I was never so staggered.
He was ‘never so staggered’ because as Medina, one of the daughters of the Welsh Lewises later wrote, ‘Up to then, Michael’s one idea of a holiday seems to have been fishing in Scotland.’ A date was fixed for Barrie, Michael and Nico to visit Glan Hafren the following Easter.
The Welsh Lewises were very Welsh and very Lewis, so that, for example, Eveline’s husband, Hugh Lewis (1860–1921) was the son of Lewis Lewis (the younger) and grandson of Lewis Lewis (the elder), who took over a tannery in Newtown, which became the family business.
Hugh had studied at Cambridge University before returning to help run the tannery, and married Eveline Griffiths, Headmistress of Newtown County Intermediate School for Girls, where Hugh was Chairman of the Governors.
Hugh and Eveline had three daughters and two sons, one of whom, Hugh Griffith Lewis Lewis, died just before his eleventh birthday. In descending order, the other children were: Katherine Medina (Medina), Janet Ellen (known as Eiluned, which became her pen name), Eveline Mary (May), and Hugh Peter Meredith (Peter).
Hugh and Eveline played a large part in the life of Montgomeryshire, now a part of Powys. He was High Sheriff in 1902–03, Chairman of the County Council from 1910 to 1918. Both were JPs and Eveline was a County Councillor. Both were very involved in the Montgomeryshire Liberal Party.
They came into Barrie’s circle after Hugh became embroiled in a tussle as Chairman of the Education Committee, which had disowned responsibility for the management of the elementary schools of the county. In the course of the disagreement, George Meredith wrote in Hugh’s support, they became friends, after a difficult moment when Meredith appeared to think that they had abused his friendship (he was not an easy man), and eventually Meredith accepted Hugh and Eveline’s invitation to become godfather to their youngest child, Peter.
Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote a book about George Meredith, was deeply envious of the intimacy they enjoyed with his subject, writing to Mrs Lewis:
It must have been a wonderful experience to hear G. M. talk. For 18 months I literally lived with him in my thoughts, until I almost felt that I had known him. And the more I studied him & his works the more I admired his character. I suppose he had rather a sharp tongue; but his actions seemed to show how generous and immensely courageous he was. Anyhow, you will find it all in my book!
Very likely it was Meredith who gave Peter a copy of his friend Barrie’s book, The Little White Bird. He may not have read it because Peter was the one who, on Meredith’s advice, was not to be burdened with the toil of learning to read until he turned seven. If so, Eveline read it to him and Peter liked it so much he made a drawing, which Eveline sent to Barrie towards the end of 1912 with only ‘Glan Hafren’ for a return address, not wanting to seem like an autograph hunter.
Wrote Peter later, ‘As a small boy I drew a picture which I called “The Long Walk taking the Broad Walk for an outing (in a pram)”. Eveline was amused and decided she would send it anonymously to Barrie. Somehow he managed to trace the sender and correspondence followed.’
Something about the letter persuaded Barrie to respond, which he did with a copy of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Correspondence with Mrs Lewis led to Barrie taking Peter Davies to visit the family in September 1914, when Peter was on short leave from Sheerness and after Michael had returned to Eton.
The two eldest girls, Medina and Eiluned, were also away at boarding school in Wimbledon at the time, but Barrie and Peter met Hugh and Eveline and the other two children, May and Peter, and thoroughly enjoyed the warm Welsh family atmosphere, likening it to the idyllic rural life of Dr Primrose, his wife Deborah and their six children in Goldsmith’s minor classic, The Vicar of Wakefield.
Meredith had died in 1909, so he couldn’t have had a hand in progressing the relationship between the two families, although it is of course possible that he had earlier confid
ed in Barrie that he was Peter Lewis’s godfather. But there was a clear rationale for the meeting to happen on another level.
Wrote Medina: ‘I think that these holiday visits, which meant such an enormous amount to us, were also welcome to the boys, for as Eiluned has said they provided a background of family life, complete with sisters of their own age, which the boys had not known before…’
What’s more, Wales was the Llewelyn Davies’s native land. Barrie was in a very real sense bringing them home – home into a world that hadn’t changed in centuries and was not noticeably changed by the advent of war.
Unlike in other parts of the country, life at Glan Hafren continued more or less unimpaired.
Our coachman and gardeners were old, so not called up, and there were no munition works at hand to absorb our few maids. We had kept our horses and carriages, and were still able to get about, while so many other households – with only cars – were immobile. We did not farm but kept cows, chickens and pigs for our own use, so food was never short.
All this combined with the clear benefit of a traditional family environment, which Barrie will have sensed Michael would enjoy, that led him to take the step (most unusual for him) of pursuing contact with the Lewises.
It should also be said that Eveline shared Barrie’s interest in the paranormal, which was then being re-examined in the new terminology of modern psychology.
There are letters from Eveline to, among others, the philosopher H. H. Price, Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford, and to Whateley Carrington, who was a parapsychologist with a particular interest in telepathy.
According to the family, Eveline herself was telepathic. Her letter discussed ideas put forward by Maurice Maeterlink in The Unknown Guest (1914). Carrington was riveted by her theory that linked ‘the telepathic, etc, phenomena with the concept of Deity, via what I should call the Common Subconscious or Mind or Spirit of Man’, as he wrote.
He corresponded with the Society for Psychical Research on her behalf: ‘She adopts the hypothesis of what we should now call a Common Subconscious … of virtually unlimited knowledge and powers, with which the individual “finite” mind may somehow or other “make contact”.’
Her idea seems to have been that the ‘Common Subconscious’ (what Eveline actually referred to as the ‘Infinite Unconscious’) can be a means of communication beyond the space-time continuum – in telepathy (in the present with another living person), in séance (with the past), in precognition with the future.
Dealing with phantasms and the like, Mrs Lewis writes: ‘We may take as an example of the point of contact some such simple idea as the perception of a room or place in which the individual is at the time. Immediately the contact is made his idea of the room becomes enlarged by some addition from the Infinite Consciousness. This addition may be borrowed from the past or the future … Thus the individual may become suddenly conscious of some scene formerly enacted in that spot, or he may have a prophetic vision of events that are to come.’
How this connects with the concept of deity is that we live a kind of epiphytic existence on the Infinite Unconscious, which is more or less a projection of what people understand by the Deity. The psychiatrist Carl Jung later came up with a not dissimilar idea when ‘translating’ the work of German theologian Meister Eckhart into modern psychoanalytical terms.
There is no evidence that Eveline had read du Maurier, but the latter’s notion of a ‘sixth sense’, which survives after death, with its infinite knowledge and powers, is accommodated within her ideas, and Peter Ibbetson and Mimsey Seraskier’s plumbing of the mysteries of the Infinite Unconscious in their communication with past, present and future, which is at one point joyously telepathic, is precisely Eveline’s preoccupation.
So, Eveline understood the du Maurier family myth, which was one very good reason why their meeting was such a success.
It wasn’t long before the members of the Lewis family absent from their first meeting in 1915 were invited to Adelphi Terrace. On 20 June, Peter Davies wrote to Peter Lewis a playful letter after their visit, which also contained the information that ‘your mother and father and two sisters are coming to tea this afternoon’, Medina and Eiluned on leave from their Wimbledon boarding school.
So, Barrie had met the entire Lewis family by Easter 1916 when Michael and Nico were introduced to them for the first time. Yet, according to Medina, it had been obvious that Barrie was anxious that the holiday might yet be a failure. Probably he was worried about how Michael would react, for in company that bored him he could be as moody as Barrie himself.
He needn’t have worried. All the children got on brilliantly. ‘Glan Hafren had never seen such days,’ wrote Peter Lewis.
As well as riding and occasional fishing, there were competitions in croquet and tennis (carefully drawn so that if possible each one of the Lewises would win in turn). There were also fancy dress teas. I can remember [my father] Hugh dressed in a genuine Chinese costume and Sir James appearing in a dressing gown and large cosy from the spare room with Dwr Poeth (warm water) embroidered in silk. Sir James became devoted to Eveline until he died.
Michael and Nico were at Glan Hafren again in September, without Barrie this time, and Michael wrote thanking Eveline on the 17th, as soon as they were home.
Dear Mrs Lewis,
We reached Paddington in safety, & y’day evening Sir Jas went off to Wrest [Nan Herbert’s hospital]. He is returning today. Thank you so much for the lovely time you gave us – I feel I ought to write to every one of you, but will you thank everyone for me. Nico is going to make an attempt to write.
… I am sending Medina a little letter for the Levanian [the magazine of Levana School, Wimbledon]. I hope she accepts it, as it is not so very often that I get my little things accepted. It’ll probably be the old old story. ‘Dear Sir, I fear the Levanian has no great use for yr style of work, spicy and vivacious tho’ it be. Yrs very sincerely, K Medina Lewis, Editor Levanian.’
Please give my love to Mr Lewis and Medina, and Jane, and May, and Peter, and Sir John, and Peregrine,
Yrs Michael Llewelyn Davies
Michael got on with everyone, but especially Eiluned, whom he now addressed in his letters as Jane rather than Janet or any one of the variety of nicknames (besides Eiluned), from which he could have chosen – Luned, Bittie or Bits among them. She had been christened Janet Ellen but didn’t like either, and Michael wanted his own name for her. She was just five months younger than he.
In the 1970s, in response to a question about whether Michael ever had a girlfriend, Nico recommended Andrew Birkin, who was researching his film J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys to get in touch with Eiluned: ‘I’ve no idea whether she and Michael even held hands, but she might well have a clue as to his feelings towards girls.’
Eiluned was the one who perceived the true spirit of Glan Hafren and in her thirties captured it in a bestselling novel, Dew on the Grass (1934), still in print today. She was a poet as well as a novelist, and a journalist who rose to become assistant editor of the Sunday Times.
Dew on the Grass is the story of a rural childhood based on her own at Glan Hafren. It is an evocation of a lost world – not only of childhood, but of a whole way of living in rural Wales as she was growing up, when the year revolved around the seasons, the village, the church and the festivals. It was, as A. E. Housman put it in A Shropshire Lad, a ‘land of lost content’, a land in which time stood still, life was one endless summer day and Eiluned was borne along by its very current.
There is little of Housman’s melancholia here, only Eiluned’s strikingly clear, joyous remembrance of what it was like to be Lucy, an imaginative little girl of nine years of age growing up in rural Montgomeryshire in the first decade of the twentieth century: a wholly natural, idyllic environment of which she and her three siblings – Delia (eleven), Maurice (six) and Miriam (three) – were intensely aware, but never consciously so.
For Lucy there was ‘real’ and ‘prete
nd’ and the latter ‘was often the most important of the two’.
Like when she drew imaginary pictures on the ceiling with one finger – pictures of knights on horseback, and ladies with flying hair, running, running as fast as they could through haunted woods … ‘They said that she looked like a half-wit, lying in bed, waggling her finger at the ceiling; but the moment they were out of the room she began again…’
Like playing games of hide and seek with her sisters and friends from the village in the endless garden and outbuildings – hiding in the coach-house terrified that ‘a groping hand might suddenly touch you, dreading the flight and pursuit: feet running behind, drawing nearer every minute…’ Knowing that it was ‘something infinitely disastrous that would catch you in the end’, but then becoming so lost in thought in the dark that time did stand still, and when they found her it was by the light of lanterns and the game was long over and the visiting children had gone home.
Like knotting a skipping rope around your waist so that it resembled a cartridge belt, drawing the elastic of your hat on to your chin, and choosing a pea-stick to become Hawk-Eye, Leather Jacket and La Longue Carabine in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which in those days of great adventure (before television) all children were reading, even girls.
The Real Peter Pan Page 21
