The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Peter (nineteen) was fighting in the Battle of the Somme when he wrote this. Between 1 July and 18 November 1916 more than one million men would be wounded or killed.

  A month earlier, at his first sight of ‘the Line’, he had been awed by the apocalyptic beauty of star-shells bursting above him in the air, casting an extraordinary light all around. But within a few days of continuous rain and cold, despite being in the middle of summer, he had his first night in the trenches in ‘a foot and a half of mud and water, with no shelter to speak of’. At no point were the trenches deeper than six feet, so Peter had to walk with a stoop, aware that one false move would provide a target for a sniper like the one that shot his brother. As a signalman the shelling was especially ominous, for while you crouched down in your trench like the rest of the men, listening to the shells whispering overhead and waiting to be hit, you also knew that after it was over you would have to mend the communication lines, which meant prowling around No Man’s Land on your stomach at night even ‘to within about 50 yards’ of the German line, mending the wires. The Line was now ‘the most desolate, ravaged place imaginable … damnable beyond all powers of description’.

  On 25 July he wrote that a certain Captain Wilson of Edwardes Square, close to Campden Hill, had joined the battalion. Peter had discovered that Wilson was a scholar at Winchester, and both turned their classical education to advantage, forging a special bond of homespun intimacy by ‘quoting the ancients’ to the ‘amazement of our comrades’.

  Two days later he wrote excitedly about Michael making ‘Sixpenny’, the under-sixteen cricket team at Eton, and captaining the winning junior cricket team. On 30 August a strong breeze across the battleground reminded him of Voshimid at Amhuinnsuidhe – a breeze ‘such as delights the heart of him who lures salmon from the loch’.

  Michael received Peter’s letters knowing that it would be his turn in 1918. Each successive year of war since 1914 brought rumour of its ending and then certainty that it would continue into the next. Everyone was scared of dying. Everyone wondered when it would end. Physically, Michael would cope, but emotionally? War was the desecration of his ideal, which was neither the heroic idea of Barrie’s Castaway games, nor the Victorian values that had led to this war.

  On 21 August, Peter wrote to say that Wilson had been mortally wounded. He had come upon him shortly after he was hit and recognised at once ‘that horrible colour of dirty chalk…’

  Then, three weeks later, he wrote to say that he was lying ‘between clean sheets, after a long hot bath, in a hospital at Etaples’. He’d been invalided out with impetigo, which covered him in a rash, the result of the filth and the mental and physical strain. Once home he was admitted to Wandsworth military hospital, thin and haunted, his nerves shot.

  But, by 14 July 1917, he was passed fit to go back again and by 12 December he felt ‘called upon to write in a “pacifist” strain…’ Drawing support from his Aunt Margaret’s views, ‘firmly convinced of the hopeless and grotesque folly of the war’, he wrote that his ‘dislike of it all is infinitely greater than it was before, and I often feel as though I should wake up a raving lunatic at the end’.

  As for Jack, no one ever seemed to know where he was, only that he was still serving in the Royal Navy on a destroyer, with yet another gold band on his arm.

  In January 1917, shortly after writing to Eiluned about his visit to Brighton, Michael went down with chicken pox and for some unaccountable reason suddenly began to draw like his grandfather du Maurier.

  People were already expecting Michael to do great things. ‘[He] was going to be something pretty remarkable sooner or later,’ wrote Mackail. ‘There was never a moment’s doubt about that.’ Naturally, a tutor in art was found to bring the new talent along.

  And still – getting on for seventeen now – he was the closest companion [to Barrie] of all. No secrets. No shadows. Character and cleverness, fully authenticated by his housemaster as well. Yet always one dread. What if the war weren’t over in time, and Michael’s turn must come too? An icy terror that gripped at the heart, and then must be hidden; for if this had to be, there must be no weakness at which even Michael could guess.

  Michael’s record in the spring half of 1917 included a poem in the Eton Chronicle and first prize for throwing the cricket ball in the sports. It was in this year too that Barrie gave him a copy of a play he’d written and asked his opinion of it.

  Barrie had worked his way into the boy, given him his own ambition, and now loved to be dominated by him. He liked to say that even as a schoolboy, Michael was ‘the sternest of my literary critics’. And this was perfectly true.

  Wrote Barrie: ‘Anything Michael shook his head over I abandoned, and conceivably the world has thus been deprived of a masterpiece … Sometimes, however, No. 4 liked my efforts, and I walked in the azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus to me with the comment “Not so bad.”’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  1917–18: Michael Turns Away

  DEAR BRUTUS OPENED at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End on 17 October 1917. It ran for 365 performances, almost to the end of the war. Five years later, it ran again at the same theatre for 258 performances.

  Its theme was one that Barrie had already raised in The Little White Bird and was ubiquitous in his notebook thereafter. The context in the 1902 novel is Peter Pan being locked out of his mother’s love, calling,

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ but she heard him not; in vain he beat his little limbs against the iron bars … What a glorious boy he had meant to be to her! Ah Peter! We who have made the great mistake, how differently we would all act at the second chance. Solomon was right – there is no second chance, not for most of us. When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.

  His mother has been crying, ‘and he knew what was the great thing she cried for, and that a hug from her splendid Peter would quickly make her to smile. Oh! He felt sure of it…’ But the ‘great thing she cried for’ was ‘the great mistake’, which Peter had made and we are never told about, so big a mistake that a hug is not going to be enough.

  What locked Barrie out of his mother’s love, as he describes in his biography of her, is the death at thirteen of her favourite son David in a skating accident, after another boy bumped into him and he fell and hit his head on the ice. Her exclusion of David’s six-year-old brother Jamie was catastrophic, it probably crippled him emotionally for life. It is possible that little Jamie Barrie was involved in his brother’s accident, which is why his mother was so hard on him – ‘Ah, Peter! we who have made the great mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance.’ But, whatever is the truth, it is enough to know that while we all believe there are no second chances in this world, no way back from our great regrets, Barrie thought that he had found a way by opting for a life of fantasy and illusion, and that is the burden of Dear Brutus.

  Dear Brutus dramatises what happens when a cast of characters, all of whom long for a second chance in life, enter an enchanted wood on Midsummer Eve and go back in time to re-shape their lives. Barrie’s technical mastery is superb – how he convinces the audience that there can be such a thing as a magic wood into which we, the audience, might find our way. As is the stagecraft, in convincing us that the wood has crept right up to the house in the eerie moonlight and is suddenly visible through the windows of the drawing room – all this is pure genius and completely convinced audiences in 1917.

  It is the plot, however, that is so troubling, now that we know so much more about Barrie than the 1917 audience did. One character, Will Dearth (played by Sylvia’s brother, Gerald) finds himself in the magic wood with a fantasy daughter (clearly based on Gerald’s favourite daughter Daphne du Maurier). The scene imitates and embellishes Gerald’s special love for Daphne with titillating, even erotic and incestuous undertones, all delivered so smoothly in Barrie’s trademark style that it is easy to allow it as simply the whimsy we expect from him (indeed the play is actually bil
led as a comedy).

  But it isn’t quite like that. Will Dearth possesses his daughter utterly. Absent is any notion of the disinterested love a father usually feels for his daughter. In particular the girl’s approaching independence of her father is anathema to him, and appears to him to cheat him of what is, by rights, his.

  The best time in a father’s life is the year before his daughter ‘puts her hair up’, when a girl turns eighteen. The girl counters that there is one time better, ‘The year she does put up her hair.’ She then puts her hair up and asks him, ‘What do you think? Will I do?’ Dearth’s eyes fall on ‘the young woman that is to be’, with ‘the change in his voice falling clammy on her’, as Barrie’s stage direction reads.

  Smitten, Dearth speaks ‘with an odd tremor’ in his voice, and his daughter manhandles him, ‘bumping into him and round him and over him’, saying he will be sick of her with her hair up before he has done with her. Then she teases and tantalises him with the thought of one day being in love with a boy.

  Their dialogue has a quasi-erotic ring. Daddy is controlling; he has taught her all she knows, like a master teaches his dog how to catch a biscuit in its mouth. He even takes credit for her beauty: ‘I wore out the point of my little finger over that dimple.’ Daphne’s dimple on her chin was a feature as a child. His rights over his daughter are repressive. There is nothing about the girl that Daddy does not regard as his, and he holds ultimate power over her.

  Afterwards, as the child recedes from his imagination, he, despite all that she does to dissuade him, leaves her in the wood on her own, and she cries: ‘Daddy, come back; I don’t want to be a might-have-been.’

  With her dismissal as a might-have-been, the playwright gives the girl no more reality than the fading colours on the artist’s easel, because of course she is just a figment of Dearth’s imagination, alive only in the magic wood.

  The effect on ten-year-old Daphne du Maurier, who was no stranger to her father’s first nights, was devastating. She fled from the theatre in floods of tears because she recognised herself and her relationship with Gerald immediately.

  Years later, John Gielgud revived the play and admitted,

  I kept remembering how marvellous [Gerald] du Maurier had been as the painter Dearth. I could not touch him in the part. – …when he came on in the last Act, his face when they told him that the child was only a dream was so extraordinary I remember thinking what a pity it was that he never played in Chekov or Ibsen.

  Again, as Noël Coward put it, in Dear Brutus, ‘Gerald tore your heart out.’

  Perhaps no playwright other than Barrie could have had Gerald play it as he did. Gerald was already having a relationship with his favourite daughter very like the one between Will Dearth and his dream-child daughter. As Daphne admitted, she became engaged in ‘a sort of incest’ with her father, her feelings ‘tragic’ because they never would be fulfilled. It was as if Gerald had brought Dearth home into their relationship. There was even an estrangement between Daphne and her mother (as was also predicated in the play).

  Dear Brutus and all that followed gave Daphne what she called a ‘Daddy complex’, which muddled her sexuality, and in time developed into a serious inner conflict which infected her work and finally brought her to breakdown.

  In the play the theme is put to positive use – after Dearth’s experience in the magic wood he and his wife Alice emerge as the two characters in the play capable of learning from their adventures, and as the critic W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘There is a hint that they will come together, and that the dream-daughter will no longer be a might-have-been.’

  But in reality the intensity of the relationships between Gerald and Daphne and of course in parallel between Barrie and Michael was less easy to square. Where did it leave the dream-child who was being used and might be disposed of at will? There was this pornographic notion of disposability, which disturbed Daphne so deeply at ten years of age that she ran from her seat in tears, and showed that Barrie simply didn’t understand what parental love is.

  As Nico, who’d always been immune to resurgent Pan, saw it, Barrie had been ‘in love with’ George originally and was now in love with Michael, ‘as he was in love with my mother [Sylvia]’, while Barrie’s feelings for Nico himself, Peter and Jack ‘came nearer to normal deep affection’.

  The difficulty of Barrie’s love for Michael, loaded as it was with his own needs, was already causing some concern, both from Nanny Hodgson and, in the autumn of 1916, from Jack’s fiancée, Geraldine ‘Gerrie’ Gibb, who provided a new, sensitive and objective view of the relationship.

  Nico was right. Barrie was in love with Michael in the only way he could be. When Michael was younger that probably meant he had to suppress feelings towards him of a sort which, in 1917, he couldn’t help but expose in the whimsically erotic parent–child relationship of Dear Brutus.

  To Andrew Birkin, Gerrie described Barrie’s love for Michael as

  very intense … I think it was bad for Michael to be so much the centre of Barrie’s world. And Barrie made demands on him, writing to him every day and all this kind of thing … You must let your children go free. But Barrie certainly clung to Michael.

  But to be fair, Barrie did give the boys real affection, which was clearly reciprocated – George and Peter’s letters from the front exemplify this. And there was another amazing dimension to his love for them. Barrie paid for, educated and entertained Michael and his brothers like no other could have done.

  Nevertheless, Barrie was becoming aware that Michael was ‘building seven walls around him’. In ‘Tintinnabulum’ he described him as receding ‘farther from my ken down the road which hurries him from me … he no longer needs me as [he] did, and he will go on needing me less… On the last night of the holidays he was specially gruff, but he slipped beneath my door a paper containing the words “I hereby solemnly promise never to give you cause for moral anxiety.”’

  Senhouse, still the closest of Michael’s friends, will have been of particular concern to Barrie and was possibly the reason Michael put that paper under Barrie’s door. Senhouse described how, on a weekend spent at Barrie’s London flat in 1918, Barrie had not addressed one word to him from first to last. But he was the same with other of Michael’s friends. It was the behaviour of a man who wanted Michael to himself.

  Barrie decided to reignite the spirit of his relationship with Michael with a holiday in Scotland, not visited since 1915. He, Michael and Nico went first to Edinburgh, where they were due to meet Jack and his fiancée Gerrie. All five met on a platform at Edinburgh station and then went off for dinner, an event Barrie later wrote up as a spoof in a letter to Lady Juliet Duff, the humour harbouring truths about each character just below the surface, and Barrie pretending that the whole thing went off at the Trossachs Hotel in Loch Katrine, where in fact they gravitated to later on.

  As he wrote it to Lady Juliet on 14 August:

  We were all outwardly calm, but internally white to the gills; Nicholas kept wetting his lips, Michael was a granite column, inscrutable, terrible; I kept bursting into inane laughter, and changing my waistcoats. So the time of waiting passed, the sun sank in the west and the stars came out with less assurance than usual. What is that? It is the rumble of wheels. Nico slips his hand into mine. I notice that it is damp. Michael’s pose becomes more Napoleonic, but he is breathing hard. The chaise comes into view. I have a happy thought. They are probably more nervous than we are…

  M. What do you think?

  N. I like her awfully.

  M. Don’t be an ass. You don’t know her at all yet. What do you think, Uncle Jim?

  J. (with a great sigh of relief). The first impression is very favourable.

  N. Rather! What is favourable exactly?

  M. Do shut up, Nico.

  J. I should call her tall, dark and pretty.

  M. (who knows more about it). She is pretty. The question is, is she very pretty?

  N. I think—

  M. It
doesn’t matter what you think.

  J. I should say she is very pretty.

  M. She is. It’s not a common type of prettiness.

  N. No, it isn’t. What is type exactly?

  J. She’s elusive, that’s what she is.

  M. (guardedly). It may be that.

  N. Yes, it’s that. What is elusive?

  In the meantime another conversation is going on in another part of the edifice, which is probably to this effect.

  Jack. Buck up, Gerrie, that’s the worst over.

  Gerrie. Oh dear, I was so nervous and they were all so calm.

  J. It was a biggish ordeal to you, but of course it was nothing to them. Besides, they are three to two.

  G. How do you think I did, Jack?

  J. Splendidly. I never admired you so much.

  G. I took to Nicholas at once. I feel I can get round him.

  J. Rather. What about Michael?

  G. He alarms me. Did anybody ever get round Michael?

  J. I can’t say I ever did. After all the third chappie is the important one.

  G. (gasping). I know. Oh, Jack!

  J. Yes, he’s a bit like that. His heart’s all right.

  G. Is it? His face is so expressionless.

  J. It’s an uncomfortable face of course.

  G. He never smiled once.

  J. I bet you he thought he was smiling all the time. That’s the way he smiles.

  G. Good gracious!

  J. He’s really rather soft. We can all twist him round our fingers.

  G. (looking at her fingers). I wonder.

  J. You see he is essentially a man’s man. He doesn’t know what to say to women. They don’t interest him. I think he’s a woman-hater.

  G. Don’t!

  J. What are you to wear for dinner?

  G. Does it matter? He won’t notice.

  J. No, but Michael will. He takes Michael’s opinion on everything. All depends on Michael. If Michael says ‘Let them marry next week—’