The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  G. Oh oh oh!

  J. If Michael says that, Uncle Jim will fix it up. If on the other hand Michael says ‘Delay for three years,’ it will be fixed that way.

  G. Oh, if he should say that!

  J. He won’t.

  G. How can you be sure?

  J. I should kick him.

  Transferring to Loch Katrine, the boys had two weeks’ fishing and on 17 August, Barrie wrote to Nan Herbert:

  I don’t know if you were ever here. It is pre-eminently the spot where you are supposed to stand on a rock and recite Sir Walter Scott from the guidebook. A very wet rock too at present. May is the best month for fishing if you come in August, and August is the best month if you come in May. You can, however, fall in all the year round.

  Thereafter, Barrie, Michael and Nico transferred to a shooting lodge near Fort Augustus in Inverness-shire, lent to them by Lord and Lady Astor. And a week later, having picked up a new croquet set on the way, they wound up at Edgerston, a 3,700-acre estate six miles south of Jedburgh, a charming, historic border town.

  Edgerston House was originally built in the seventeenth century, with two Regency wings added to the older part of the house a century later. Today fully restored to its original splendour, with formal gardens, burn, natural pool, acres of woodland climbing the surrounding rounded hills, and a library of Walter Scott first editions, it is easy to see why Barrie warmed to the place immediately.

  The Rutherford history of Edgerston brought Walter Scott into the picture – Scott’s mother, Anne, was a Rutherford, hence the first editions. The story goes that as a young girl she became very ill and was declared dead by her father who was a doctor in Edinburgh. She was buried and, that night, grave robbers dug her up to get the jewellery that she was wearing. It was a custom in those days to bury one’s jewellery with the person. When they couldn’t get her ring off, they started to cut her finger off and she arose and screamed. Persons living nearby heard it and came to her rescue.

  Barrie arrived at Edgerston as the guest of Frederick S. Oliver and his wife, who had bought the estate from William Edward Oliver-Rutherford (1863–1931) in 1915. Frederick Oliver was an outspoken British political writer and businessman. Though this was Barrie’s first visit, he had stayed before at the Olivers’ house in Berkshire, but it was clear that Frederick Oliver had already found his way into the spirit of the place to an almost magical degree.

  Later Barrie wrote to Mrs Oliver:

  I wish I was still among your rounded hills. You have a prospect as fair I think as any in Scotland, and though you all love it, it means most to Fred. One day as I watched him from a window stalking in the garden with the round hills for company I made a discovery about him that I have probably been on the verge of discovering for years and then missing – that he is really a figure in some unwritten tale by Walter Scott. The scene of it is certainly Edgerston and the whole thing would begin to move if something very small could happen, such as the opening of a gate down by the burn. I could go on in this way for a long time, and for the moment at any rate it is my chief memory of that happy visit. I seem to know a little more of Scotland than I ever knew before … I felt very much at home at Edgerston. I give you many thanks for that. You were the chief conspirator.

  This was pure Barrie sorcery, but he warmed also to the nearby market town of Jedburgh, where he found history everywhere he looked, his imagination turning with delight to the Young Pretender, who stayed in Castlegate in the town in 1745, also to Robert Burns, who lodged in Canongate in 1787, and to Mary Queen of Scots, who stayed in Queen Street in 1566 at what is still known as the Queen’s House, and was visited by her lover, David Rizzio, in nearby Hermitage Castle.

  The town is redolent of the history of conflict between Scotland and England, and Barrie liked to think of Edgerston as the last house in his native land. So attached did he become to it that he was still coming in 1932 to celebrate the centenary of Sir Walter Scott’s death.

  For Michael there was fishing in the burn and the Tweed, but Barrie was in fantasy mood with them. On 30 August 1917, he wrote to Turley Smith:

  I am up here with Michael and Nico – the last house next to the English border. Three German escaped prisoners are lurking about and Nico is looking forward to being compelled to exchange clothes with them some day when they catch him fishing. He is then to Sherlock them.

  My love to you.

  Jedburgh conferred the Freedom of the town on Barrie, and he became so embedded in the culture of the place that he was asked to present the prizes at the estate school. As a result we have a little snapshot of him from a schoolgirl who won a prize that day.

  Elizabeth Dodd, who lived on an isolated farmstead three miles away and walked to school and back each day, remembered Barrie as ‘a very odd little man in crumpled clothes and with a faraway look in his eyes. I would sooner have met Mr Anon whose works I knew better. The nearest theatre was over fifty miles away, so what chance had I of seeing Peter Pan.’

  Dodd grew up to be a famous, bestselling author and broadcaster and was honoured with the MBE – her pen name, Lavinia Derwent. She said she would have been bursting with pride if only her prize was being awarded for something to do with brains. ‘The truth was, it was for the best-dyed egg.’ Worse, Jessie had made it, she hadn’t done it herself at all, as she wrote in A Breath of Border Air.

  I stood trembling in front of the famous man, hanging my head in shame and wondering how I would confess my sins. Sir James was very complimentary. He had never seen such a beautiful egg. If only hens could lay them like that every day … What a clever little girl I was, and what pleasure he had in presenting me with the first prize which I richly deserved.

  Every word he said cut me to the quick and made my sins seem more scarlet. More so when I saw the prize. It was a book of bible stories with a picture of the Good Samaritan on the cover. I clutched it under my arm and was sure that I would be struck dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  1918: The Real Peter Pan

  PERHAPS SENSING THAT Gerrie was an ally, which indeed she turned out to be, when Michael returned home he reached out to her in a letter, showing her the kind of life he led with Barrie, telling her that he was taking him and Nico to four theatres before their return to school:

  A musical thing called ‘Chap’ being the only one as yet – but we are going to a play called ‘Trelawney of the Wells’ tomorrow and my Uncle Gerald’s play – ‘A Pair of Spectacles’ [by Sydney Grundy] on Saturday. So we shall soon be painting London red in earnest.

  We go in daily fear of air-raids just now – at least we are supposed to. I believe the thing to do is to lie between two mattresses on the ground floor out of range of glass – with a Book of Common Prayer in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other – in case of interment while alive! I think of going to the Red Lion myself. Don’t you think it w’d look well on the placards.

  ANOTHER BLOW FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

  A young Etonian has just entered the Red Lion in Notting Hill Gate where he was a regular visitor when a bomb entered through the ceiling striking the unfortunate young debaucher on the right hand, as he was raising a glass to his lips, caused immediate death by laryngal congestion.

  The Pink ’un w’d put me down as ‘Died as he lived.’

  Nico returns to Eton on the 19th and I on the 21st – and hope you’ll pay us a visit on our Lordly Stairway.

  I hope you’re tying Jack down with the dear old blue ribbon.

  Don’t bother to answer.

  If the last line sounded abrupt, perhaps Michael hoped that Gerrie would be in touch but was afraid to burden her with his case, not surprising as Barrie’s involvement with Michael now was increasingly and depressingly marked with a preoccupation with death.

  On 20 February 1918, Barrie wrote a letter from Adelphi Terrace to Elizabeth Lucas:

  I emerge out of my big chimney to write to you. I was sitting there with a Charlotte Bronte in my hands (when I read her I think m
ostly of Emily) and there was a gale on the roof; it is probably not windy at all down below but with the slightest provocation the chimneys overhead in their whirring cowls go as devilish as the witches in Macbeth, whom they also rather resemble in appearance. I hope, however, it is a sufficiently dirty night as the sailors say to keep the air-raiders at bay…

  I had an odd thought today about the war that might come to something, but it seems to call for a poet. That in the dead quietness that comes after the carnage, the one thing those lying on the ground must be wondering is whether they are alive or dead. Out there the veil that separates the survivors and the killed must be getting very thin, and those on the one side of it very much jumbled up with those on the other. One can see them asking each other which side of the veil they are on, not afraid that they may be dead so much as curious. And then the veil thickening a little, and the two lots going their different ways. You could even see some going with the wrong lot, a dead man with a living, a living man with a dead. Perhaps it is of this stuff that ghosts are made. These be rather headachy thoughts. I expect the lot on the other side of the veil have as many Germans as British, and that they all went off together quite unconscious that they had ever been enemies. To avenge the fallen! That is the stupidest cry of the war. What must the fallen think of us if they hear it. Audrey would be amused with the subject Michael had to write a poem about in the Eton Chronicle – not had to but greedily pounced on it…

  This may have been written some time after Barrie’s dream. Indeed, he may not have had the dream at all. For the play he had been working on in his mind for some time (A Well-Remembered Voice) was based, of course, on George, and he will have been concerned that people might find that insensitive, so he was testing it on Elizabeth.

  He may already have tested it on Michael, as he did all his works in progress. If so we, don’t have Michael’s opinion of it. Nevertheless, significantly, Michael chose this moment to make a speech at Eton, which suggests that his mind was far from ruminating with Barrie on ‘the mighty dead’.

  The subject was Frederic W. H. Myers’s essay on the novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802–85), who was the literary force behind the Romantic movement in France. Myers was a poet and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. He was sufficiently to the fore in the thinking of the times to be said to have influenced the philosopher William James and the psychiatrist Carl Jung.

  Hugo’s spiritual views changed radically over the course of his life. In his youth he was a Christian, then he became a Spiritualist, believing, as Barrie said he did, in the existence of immortal spirits with beneficent or maleficent influences on the physical world, and participating in séances conducted by the French author, Madame Delphine de Girardin.

  Eventually spiritualism was discarded and he developed an acute appreciation of Nature, which led him to an acceptance of a spiritual dimension not dissimilar to Michael’s. A reviewer in the Eton Chronicle praised Michael’s speech not simply as well researched, but recognising it as a personal credo: ‘He spoke clearly and with an understanding quite unusual.’

  The holiday at Edgerston in the summer of 1917 had been a return to the Scotland that had reformed Michael after his mother’s death. But that wasn’t all that the Highlands had meant to him at that stressful time. It offered him relaxation and release certainly, but not merely escapism in the manner of Barrie’s ‘lost boy’, who runs farther and farther into the wood, singing joyfully to himself and hoping that no adult will turn up and compel him to face life’s harsh realities.

  Since Scourie and Amhuinnsuidhe Michael had come to understand that the source of his new-found calm was both within and around him in the highland landscape, and that the degree of peace it afforded him was in direct proportion to that more mysterious awareness.

  Michael had spoken well of Victor Hugo because his transition had been similar to his – both away from Barrie’s morbid spiritualist preoccupation with the dead and towards the apprehension of a spiritual dimension within and around him in the natural world.

  The hours Michael spent fly-fishing – still and poised to perform some deft movement – induced in him a sort of mystical transcendence. He was a bright boy, but intellectual capacity had nothing to do with it. The natural environment, the stillness and peace, the requirement to listen, to concentrate, to attend rather than to think, brought him to it. What died to the process were words from Barrie, images of islands and pools, thoughts of any kind, petty concerns, ambitions and self-consciousness – all instruments and material effects of the external world.

  After a century or more of analytical introversion, it is not easy for us to appreciate that the spiritual effect of purposeful activity in a landscape of great sublimity has the potential to be more productive than psychology.

  The joy of liberation from the tawdry and the trivial and the sense of unity with all Nature may indeed be as blissful as du Maurier described in Peter Ibbetson. It is the same for Michael as for Peter Ibbetson – the discovery of the real Peter Pan within, an inner sense not directed like our eyes or ears towards the external world. With it, one can see the most heavenly music and hear the sun shining on earth. With it, blindness made no difference to Homer and Milton, nor deafness to Beethoven.

  To cousin Daphne it was ‘an other-world intimacy’, which as we grow up becomes ‘etiolated by disuse’. For she too associated it with the real Peter Pan, calling it ‘the secret of the elixir of youth’.49

  The question remained as to whether Michael could carry this inspirational quality into the hurly burly of life. If the real Peter Pan did remain in the ground of his being, it would be the making of him and those around him.

  Meanwhile it would have to withstand being beaten down by more and more of Barrie’s morbidity, as the plot of his play, A Well-Remembered Voice, unfurled:

  A group of people are gathered for a séance for a young male victim of the First War, including the boy’s mother and sometime sweetheart, Laura (in real life, Josephine Mitchell-Innes).

  The boy’s father, Mr Don, is sitting ‘in the inglenook’, paying no attention to the party round the table. So famous was Barrie’s seat in the inglenook, the massive fireplace of the main room of the Adelphi Terrace flat, that he was painted in it by Sir John Lavery. We are to see Mr Don as Barrie.

  The séance yields one phrase only from the other side, ‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, which later turns out to be the password that facilitates the son’s passage over from ‘the other side’.

  Eventually father and mother are left alone, and their attention is riven by their son’s fishing rods against the wall. The mother says. ‘[The rods] are sacred things to me.’

  At last, the father is left alone. ‘He stands fingering the fishing-rods tenderly, then wanders back into the inglenook. Through the greyness we see him very well in the glow of the fire. He sits on the settle [in the inglenook] and tries to read his paper. He is a pitiful lonely man.’

  Dick, the son, appears. A well-remembered voice says, ‘Father.’ Mr Don looks into the greyness and sees his son.

  It is a touching reunion. Dick has no taste for sentiment. The disadvantage of the hereafter is that there are no risks to run, and Dick will admit that his gaiety is part put on to help his father, which was so George. His voice is ‘as boyish as ever’, but ‘there is a new note in it … Dick may not have grown much wiser, but whatever he does know now he seems to know for certain.’

  They are in the inglenook together now and the boy ‘catches his father by the shoulders’, the very behaviour that he would remember of Michael so vividly after his death. They discuss their times fishing together. Dick confesses that he put a stone in the mouth of his prize catch to make it a seven-pounder. They laugh. Then they speak eerily of the battlefield, the lightest of veils that separates the living from the dead, and of ‘what a little thing’ death is.

  We are with the living wounded and the dead, feeling the quietness of death, the concatenation of the two w
orlds, and the passing over. ‘When I came to,’ says Dick, ‘the veil was so thin that I couldn’t see it at all; and my first thought was, Which side of it have I come out on?’

  It is touching, but irredeemably sad. We may feel sympathy, but the words are those of ‘an inspired and desperate alchemist hoping to still these obstinate questionings by forcing some lone ghost to render up the tale of what we are’.50

  A Well-Remembered Voice characterises the context in which Barrie’s relationship with Michael moved to its tragic conclusion. Barrie couldn’t help himself. As early as July 1909, he had written to Q, ‘I fancy I try to create an artificial world to myself because the one I really inhabit, and the only one I could do any good in, becomes too sombre. How doggedly my pen searches for gaiety.’

  He even invented an alter ego that he called ‘M’Connachie’, blaming him for his sombre shivery side.

  M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are compliment and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family solicitor, standing firm on my hearthrug among the harsh realities of the office furniture; while he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him.

  So he claimed, a medical condition meant that he had lost the battle to stand firm on his hearthrug and now preoccupied himself wholeheartedly with death. It was the theme not only of A Well-Remembered Voice, first produced at Wyndham’s theatre on 28 June 1918, but also of Barrie’s long awaited realisation of the Amhuinnsuidh play, Mary Rose, adjudged by W. A. Darlington the last of his great successes in the theatre. It appeared at the Haymarket on 22 April 1920, just one year before Michael himself died.