The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Like playing with a pretend friend, Joseph, who when you went for walks and people said, ‘What a beautiful view,’ preferred ‘the muddy lanes that go twisting in and out, and the little trees blown crooked in the wind, and water where it lies on top of a weir and curves over the edge, gently, gently, before it goes crashing down below’.

  Like writing plays for your brother and sisters to act out and poems to recite – ‘conscientious rather than inspired’ – always laughing and dancing, sometimes spontaneously for joy, and sometimes for the travelling harpist John Roberts, who, when he was through, turned his harp ‘a little towards the south-west, so that we heard a faint sighing in the strings as the breeze swept through them and passed on its way’.

  Among her many poems, Eiluned wrote ‘The Birthright’, which puts what she laid before Michael at Glan Hafren perfectly:

  We who were born

  In country places,

  Far from cities

  And shifting faces,

  We have a birthright

  No man can sell,

  And a secret joy

  No man can tell.

  For we are kindred

  To lordly things,

  The wild duck’s flight

  And the white owl’s wings;

  To pike and salmon,

  To bull and horse,

  The curlew’s cry

  And the smell of gorse.

  Pride of trees,

  Swiftness of streams,

  Magic of frost

  Have shaped our dreams:

  No baser vision

  Their spirit fills

  Who walk by right

  On the naked hills.

  Eiluned’s older sister Medina wrote modestly that the contact with JMB and the boys meant an enormous amount to them ‘in our quiet country life, broken only by boarding school. Of course to them, with their far wider circle, it meant much, much less.’

  This was not the case for either Michael or Nico.

  Nico was the life and soul of the games and wrote nostalgically to Eveline more than thirty years later, ‘Bless you for those many happy memories you were largely responsible for giving me…’

  When Michael first arrived at Glan Hafren he was fifteen. Had he found Eiluned as a younger child, they would have been dubbed the heavenly twins. Now that he could reflect on his early youth, he believed, as he had just written in the Eton Chronicle, that the only true pleasure is happiness coming unconsciously from within. He loved Eiluned’s still-unconscious empathy with all that was beautiful about Glan Hafren. Children were children for longer in remote rural parts and Eiluned had lost nothing of her innocent charm. Though she and Medina were in their young teens, their mother told Medina years later that ‘watching us on the lawn one day JMB had remarked, “It is so innocent, it almost hurts.”’

  Michael’s short piece in the Chronicle in February had been about ‘pleasure – voluptus’. He’d quoted Keats, from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in support of the idea that pleasure pursued for its own sake must always ‘leave a heart high, sorrowful and cloyed’, and cited Maurice Maeterlink’s 1908 play about the Blue Bird (the ancient mythical harbinger of happiness) in support of the idea that true happiness is unconscious, and can only be found at home.

  Now here was Eiluned at home, the epitome of all that he had written about happiness unconsciously pursued. When writing his ‘pleasure’ piece he’d had in mind the happiness he felt in the Scottish Highlands fly fishing. Now, at Glan Hafren, Michael had found a similar happiness, for the first time since his mother’s death, in female form.

  He was over the original pain of his mother’s death. ‘It is a common phrase, “to indulge in the luxury of tears”,’ the fifteen-year-old wrote, ‘but until that luxury has been indulged in, it is not possible to realise how expensive this form of pleasure may become.’

  He was done with crying, but not with love and wonder, and making the wild his home. He was reading Shelley and Keats, and Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’ –

  Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,

  Swift as the swallow along the river’s light

  Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,

  Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.

  Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,

  Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,

  She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,

  Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

  He would soon be giving a public recitation of William Johnson Corey’s ‘Amaturus’ at Eton –

  Somewhere beneath the sun,

  These quivering heart-strings prove it,

  Somewhere there must be one

  Made for this soul, to move it;

  Some one that hides her sweetness

  From neighbours whom she slights,

  Nor can attain completeness,

  Nor give her heart its rights;

  Some one whom I could court

  With no great change of manner,

  Still holding reason’s fort,

  Though waving fancy’s banner;

  A lady, not so queenly

  As to disdain my hand…

  Michael was yearning for love but the solitude of spirit that drove his soul to create its own world meant that he found it at least as difficult to be gay – the word widely used in those days for its original sense of carefree and merry – as any teenager who had no experience of girls.

  Typically, his letters made the switch from his earnest side by dropping into an Etonian vein, as this public-school-boyish letter to Eiluned on 17 January 1917, when both were sixteen, shows. But that he wrote such letters to a girl and was making what for him was an almighty effort to engage Eiluned, is itself a mark of his feelings, as he didn’t write them to anyone else. Naturally, he used his pet name for her.

  Dear Jane,

  I choose the prettiest in your bright constellation of names.

  I hear Levana has again taken you to its ample bosom but without the Editress, or rather the Ex; Ed; Lev. I don’t know if May will be there with you, but from my more world-wide experience, if she is, I think you will then look back with great regret to the days when you were the sole representative of Glenhafren and Levana. Have you stepped into your sister’s illustrious shoes on the Editorial staff? … Salute them all six (or is it we are seven?) from me, but two to Margo, the dear girl! Tell me not that Gertrude has left! If so – I must know at once where I may seek her. You can picture the scene thus: – as the last note died away, the audience burst into a storm of clapping, & Gertrude was preparing to take her encore, when there was a sudden commotion in the crowd – a tall commanding young man thrust passionately through, & bending, whispered into the girl’s shell-like ear ‘Come,’ he said simply & they rose together & went out … Wish me luck! Heaven help me if she hath been faithleth!

  Sir James, Davies minor, and yr humble servant have just returned from Brighton, with its poisonous people piers postcards picture palaces & penny in the slots. Have you been there? I trou not, else you would not be the pure & innocent maiden that you appear. We have luckily got a week more before Eton, in which I shall trot around London with a pail of red paint.

  I hope Monsieur & Madame, your parents, are in excellent health, not to forget M. Peter, Mdlle May, & Mdlle K. Medina, to whom I must write. Peter D is now at Sheerness, preparatory to France again, & Jack D in the North Sea. Nico D is entirely the ‘young Eton’ that you w’d expect. He grows in all directions. Believe me, madam, I am hoping this finds you as it leaves me.

  Yr obed serv

  Michael Ll. Davies

  P.S. Any message to Colonel David Davies if I meet him in the House?

  P.P.S. Offly jolly that in your paper about the Names on the Wall. What? I sh’d like to know that girl!

  P.P.P.S. If there’s any literature you want, Lindsay Gordon or anything, command me, I beg.

  P.P.P.P.S. Do
you want a Rolls Royce?

  In 1979, not long before Eiluned died, when the only surviving Barrie-boy, Nico, approached her directly and touched on the subject of Michael’s girlfriends, she moved the focus effortlessly but almost too swiftly onto Audrey Lucas – ‘Oh, of course Audrey Lucas was the one, wasn’t she? Is she alive?’

  Nico knew, as did everybody (including Eiluned), ‘that there wasn’t a whiff of an affair’ with Audrey, though she and Michael had been friends for many years.

  In one or two letters presently in the possession of Eiluned’s daughter, Katrina Burnett, there is a hint of Barrie trying to get Eiluned and Michael together more. ‘He was far too canny to push it,’ Katrina writes. But not so canny as to see how infuriating Michael must have found it when Barrie subsequently adopted Michael’s pet name for Eiluned in correspondence with her.

  Nico was of the opinion that if Michael hadn’t had an affair with Eiluned then he never had an affair with any girl in his life, and that this might be ‘a tinge of a clue’, as he put it, to Michael’s sexuality.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1916–17: Home Fires Burning

  MICHAEL’S FRIENDSHIP WITH Roger Senhouse, which had been intimate and remained close, and the new experience of friendship with Eiluned meant that this was an especially intense time for Michael. Macnaghten observed that ‘for the next year he was strangely difficult. He never means to be rude, but he is too clever not to see the weak points in his Tutor and others.’

  From 1916 until 1920, Michael saw Eiluned a great deal. At first Scotland diminished in importance because of the war, but also she and the rest of Glan Hafren contributed so much to his emotional and spiritual life. Although it would be the males in Michael’s life who would steer him, Eiluned made him happy in a way no female had since he was ten; quite possibly he enjoyed his greatest happiness with her, though not when they went swimming in the nearby River Severn. ‘My mother always said Michael was frightened of water and never enjoyed bathing in the Severn with the others,’ remembers Katrina Burnett today. In Welsh the River Severn is ‘Afon Hafren’ – Hafren being the name of a legendary British princess who was drowned here.

  Happiness spread through all the participants. Wrote Peter, Eiluned’s young brother:

  I shall never forget being there [at Barrie’s Adelphi Terrace apartment], seeing the wide view of five bridges over the river, the woven mesh matting and the great fireplace with school caps for Eton worn by the boys, pale blue for the first eleven at cricket, scarlet one for the Field (Eton football), all the boys were brilliant at games … I can remember a most memorable half term when Sir James entertained the whole family to a box at the Coliseum for a performance in aid of War Charities, of The Admirable Crichton with Ellen Terry in the lead role.

  Hugh Lewis brought his own special character to the friendship. Barrie wrote of him after his early death:

  He was one of the most lovable most honourable men I have encountered in my wanderings through the years; every one who met him whether intimately or casually must have been the better of it. He not only gave much happiness but received it. I think I can really call him about the happiest man I have ever known.

  Medina said that her ‘boyish’ father brought ‘all sorts of jokes and nonsense with the boys, which JMB with all his wit could never do’, but that was because she never knew the Barrie of the Kensington Garden days. That Barrie was a good deal less visible now.

  She recalled one incident which puts the fun the two families had together perfectly in focus. The Lewises had gone down to Eton with Barrie and Nico to watch Michael play cricket.

  Coming back, and walking up the Paddington exit, my mother and JMB were in front, his perpetual cough was worse than usual, and she was very concerned. We young ones were loitering behind at the end of a long hot day, and my father and Nico, one each side of the street, were making faces at each other like a couple of school boys. A taxi came along, JMB hailed it and got in, followed by Nico. My father, as a parting shot, made a ‘long nose’ at Nico, who responded by acting ‘the death of the Fat Boy’ over the back of the open taxi, JMB still coughing and ignorant of the antics going on beside him. ‘The Death of the Fat Boy’ was a wonderful invention of Nico’s, in which with puffed out cheeks and rolling, squinting eyes he gave a life-like representation of an apoplectic fit. The road was practically empty at the time, but I can still see the puzzled, disapproving expression of one lady passing by.

  Nico’s corpulence was a running joke and he never begrudged any of those who gathered around the Welsh Lewises a joke at his expense. There is a relic of the period, purportedly written by Michael, which shows just how far the joke was taken and the kind of innocent fun everyone at Glan Halfen enjoyed, adults and children together.

  Glan Hafren

  Newtown,

  Wales

  Mon, 18 April, 1920.

  SOCIETY for REDUCTION of NICO.

  REPORT for 1920–21.

  Jan 3. The Society met to discuss what policy it should adopt for this year, being unanimously agreed that the methods employed during the previous year achieved dangerously little.

  The Hon. Pres. (Miss May Lewis) in throwing the debate open to the House, expressed a hope that any if not all, of the distinguished visitors present would give the House their views on this tremendous subject.

  Mr Lewis (Dick) Davies at once sprang up.

  – He had been riding (he said) along the Dolfor road on Christmas eve with the debated subject, and had observed that the back of the subject’s mount had sagged in an alarming manner. Was this sort of thing going to –

  – One moment, Dick, said the president, rising from her seat with a swish, of frou-frou, – what the BLAZES d’you mean by not addressing the House in time-honoured fashion?

  The Hon. member sat down discomfited.

  The member fra’ Forfar took his pipe out o’his mouth. – Miss P, and G, (he said) The Insurance laddies has refused tae insure ma unco flat because of this wee nannie (laughter) Syne he waur tae gang bump, d’ye see…? (he waved his hand in an expressive manner) Thon’s al a’hae tae whustle.

  He curled his legs under him and sat.

  At this period there was a struggle in the back of the House, and simultaneously with the appearance of a smallish sandy-haired gentleman who spluttered something about being squashed, a lady with red-rhododendronian hair dragged him down, folded her arms, and exclaimed in the tongue of CYMRI:

  – Fwls, he is but a feeder – I have dandled him lightly [sic].

  (Instantaneous uproar, shouts of Oh No, Impossible, Withdraw. The reactionary female is ejected, also the sandy-haired lad, who has been discovered to be an emissary of the REDS.)

  When the tumult had subsided a stranger of very striking mien rose to his feet and delivered the following in a voice vibrating with emotion:

  – There are three reasons (he said) why this house MUST, I say, go through with its work. ONE, because now it is not possible [for] the subject and the billiard-table to be in the room together at the same time, TWO because he has to go up in the lift, which will carry 5 persons [only]. THREE because he has rolled on me twice. You will understand me if I say that I AM HIS BROTHER.

  The HOUSE rose to its feet & sang MEIN Fader its ash Appenzeller.

  After this there were a few hesitating speeches, among others from Mr Hugh Lewis, who mentioned a broken back-axle, and Mrs Hugh Lewis, who told of ominous cracks in her dining-room ceiling.

  The Hon. Pres, then rose and proposed: THAT WE DO FORBID NICO TO VISIT GLAN HALFREN BECAUSE HE HAS TOO MUCH THAT IS GOOD TO EAT THERE.

  Mrs Lewis opposed pro forma. Susie seconded. Carried.

  The House then adjourned.

  Present: The Hon. Pres., Mr & Mrs Lewis, Preece, Dick Davies, Kinsey, Sir Jazz Band Barrie, Susie, Emily, Ray Lankester, Fatty Arbuckle.

  There were guests of that house: Cargantus, Caruso, John Watts, the BIG FOUR, and the Neapolitan Giant.

  London was all this
time in the grip of war, with Zeppelin raids and food shortages. On 24 September 1916, Barrie wrote to Nico in his first term at Eton:

  We had zeppelin excitement last night as you will have heard, and two down is a good bag. When I was at the kitchen window the first one fell and so I missed it. I would have seen it if I had been at my corner window, which I had just left. I watched them shelling one, which looked to be just over the Cecil Hotel. I hope you have had a first good Sunday…

  As with the others, it was signed, ‘Loving, J. M. B.’

  There were also food shortages, and Glan Hafren stepped into the breach, Barrie writing to Eveline in May 1917:

  How truly splendid and magnanimous of you to send the potatoes. When they were revealed to my astonished eyes my hand (I am sure) went instinctively to my head to take off my hat. Brown looked as if he ought to be singing the national anthem. Cheers for Glan Hafren! How sorry we were to go.

  You will be interested to hear that Nico finished Ivanhoe several minutes before returning to school and came out head of his division in the exam. Michael is now captain of his house XI ‘with power to tan’. Nothing so triumphant to record about myself. My love to all and looking forward to seeing you before long in London.

  Glan Hafren was the opposite to war. Peter Davies wrote from the Front on 16 August 1916, that he’d received ‘a cake and some peppermints inside it’ from Eveline. Immediately his thoughts had turned to Glan Hafren, to bathing ‘in the cool stream of the Severn or the Pool’, and walking the slopes of Plynlimmon, a massif that dominates the countryside of northern Ceredigion, memories of a landscape beauty so at odds with the ghastly reality of the front line.