The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  the same year. At some point in the spring of 1920 Michael and Rupert, described as 6 ft 2 in. tall, athletic and ‘of gigantic physical strength’,58 met. Before the beginning of Trinity term, they took themselves off for a reading holiday in preparation for their exams. On 4 April, Buxton wrote to his mother:

  I had a most successful time in Surrey with Michael Davis [sic]. I am sorry to say that I did not get through a great deal of work as the county was so lovely, and there was such a lot to do. Our last few days were the best – actually the last two. We took an expedition walking from the neighbourhood of Chichester to Beachy Head, the whole length of the South Downs … We did thirty-five miles a day, I have never known such a walk for views – south bound over the hills to the sea and naturally over the whole expanse of Sussex and Surrey on a narrow grassy plain with steep sides covered with primroses, violets, cowslips and anemones. A most inspiring place to walk and I can well understand the enthusiasm of Belloc and Kipling for the ‘Great hills of the South County’ and the patriotism that they breed.

  Then, the following month – tragic news. Oxford undergraduate Alastair Grahame, the only child of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, committed suicide by lying across the railway line that runs down the east side of Port Meadow, an ancient grazing ground between the Thames (known as the Isis in Oxford) and the railway, to the north-west of the city.

  There was already a literary association with the river here. In 1862 a lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up it with three young girls — Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell.

  Alastair Grahame’s story is a wretched one. He, like Michael, had been born in 1900 and attended Eton before Christ Church, though this had not been his first public school.

  The Wind in the Willows (1908) had not been made from the spark his father had got from Alastair in quite the same way as Peter Pan had been inspired by the Davies boys, but Grahame had given his son to believe that the character of Toad was based upon him. Like Peter Pan, it became a children’s classic (both in book form and as a play written by A. A. Milne) at a time when the cult of the child was identified with all that was glorious about Edwardian England.

  The attention it brought Alastair was especially unwanted, partly because he was born blind in one eye and with a squint in the other. To compensate, but in the process adding to his discomfort, his parents were determined to show that he was genius material. They exaggerated his gifts and pushed him hard in ways that didn’t suit him, so that he developed a frustrated, angry temperament when he didn’t measure up.

  So unruly did Alastair become that when as a child he walked in Kensington Gardens – at the same time as Michael and Nico played there – complaints were received about his slapping and kicking other children. Only his father’s bedtime stories about Mole, Ratty and Toad could calm him.

  Antipathetic, squinting, half-blind and easy meat for bullies, he lasted at his first public school, Rugby, one term only. When Eton took him he had an emotional breakdown and in 1916 left. Afterwards, somehow, he was found a place at Oxford, where he was still referred to as Toad: ‘Of course I was not surprised at the news,’ wrote a friend after Alastair passed Mods, ‘for we were both determined that nothing else should happen, were it only for the Toad’s sake.’59

  Whereupon he had lain down on the tracks and a train had run over him.

  The coroner’s report stated that Alastair had lain down on the tracks and waited for the train; it had not knocked him down. But they recorded a verdict of accidental death anyway. Student suicide was not something any college wanted to acknowledge, and in those days, the establishment got what it wanted.

  His death will have touched Michael more than some; because Alastair’s close friend and confidant leading up to his suicide had been Rupert.

  The man with the film star looks – Rupert did seriously consider becoming a film actor – had befriended the temperamental, seriously reserved, physically damaged boy. They were not mere acquaintances. Rupert had taken him on, taken him home to Woodredon, let him play the organ at Warlies (which Alastair greatly enjoyed). Then, one month after Rupert and Michael returned from their working holiday in Dorset, Alastair had committed suicide.

  Bob Boothby told Michael that he had made a mistake about Rupert Buxton and thought he should ditch him. He said he recognised a ‘dark force’ in Rupert, and in an interview with Andrew Birkin sixty years later referred to him as saturnine, gloomy, sinister and very possessive. But, even in the light of Alastair’s death, many assumed that Boothby was just jealous.

  57 Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1964).

  58 Nicholas McAulay.

  59 Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland (1995).

  Chapter Thirty

  1920: Michael Breaks Out

  THE FIRST SUGGESTION of an unbalanced state of mind was evident very publicly on 4 December 1918, in Rupert’s last year at Harrow, when he found his way into the pages of The Times in a most mysterious set of circumstances. A letter, unsigned and unstamped, had apparently been left for him at his house at the school. It read, ‘You will be well advised to walk up Peterborough Hill alone at 10 minutes past 7 on Sunday night. Your help is needed.’

  Peterborough Hill lay only a few yards from Rupert’s house at the school. He sent a note to his housemaster, Archer Vassall, enclosing the letter and informing him that he was keeping the appointment. He had then mysteriously disappeared. Vassall and another master had watched the road for some time, but nothing was seen of the boy. The police were called in after he failed to appear on the last train from London.

  The following day, a Monday, another letter, in the same hand as the first, was, according to The Times, received at Rupert’s home, ‘stating that he was safe, but that his brains were needed. The letter concluded – “Ill if he refuses, well if he agrees.”’

  The next anyone heard was apparently from Buxton himself. A telegram from Newcastle, signed ‘Rupert’ was received by his school and by his father stating that he would shortly be returning to London.

  Extraordinary, one might think, that a national newspaper would be interested in carrying such a story. Being The Times, one might be tempted to conclude that Rupert’s aristocratic and public school background was the reason for the interest of a newspaper which then appealed to the upper classes. But in fact The Times report followed an article the previous day (3 December) in the Daily Mail, which made the point that Rupert’s disappearance was ‘engaging the attention of New Scotland Yard officials and the police throughout the county’. The article also made some interesting points about the letter and about Rupert that The Times omitted.

  In the Mail, the Headmaster admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the letter. Only a few of Rupert’s friends had seen it: ‘[Rupert] showed the letter to one or two other boys who … advised him not to take any notice of it.’ So, Rupert had taken the letter with him and it was never produced for Scotland Yard to investigate who might have sent it.

  On 9 January 1919, a second, shorter article appeared in The Times newspaper, following a statement about his earlier disappearance made by Buxton’s father, who had eventually found Rupert at King’s Cross Station ‘in a fainting condition’. According to The Times, Rupert ‘had, in the doctor’s opinion, been suffering from overstrain resulting in some measure from preparing for a scholarship examination at Oxford … He is already much better and it is confidently expected that a short period of rest will completely restore his health.’

  In a case, without any solution or explanation in the offing, the Mail saw fit to mention a childhood accident that might explain it. Rupert ‘was seriously injured cycling near Walton Abbey in August 1912, the shaft of a dogcart with which he collided penetrating his forehead…’

  Buxton did not return to Harrow after the episode. ‘Since then he has been having a “rest” with his elder brother,’ wrote his housemaster to t
he Provost, the senior academic administrator at his Cambridge college. ‘He is quite recovered and there is no reason to anticipate a recurrence. The episode above appeared to have been entirely a medical question and does not in any way reflect on his character.’

  The headmaster’s letter to the Provost admitted that the episode was ‘still unexplained … I think myself that there was something histrionic and self-conscious about that strange episode at the end – but he was overwrought at the time, and not his normal self.’

  The provost then wrote to Charles W. Cassington at Harrow, presumably a master, but one who unfortunately had only just returned to the school and wrote back that ‘I am afraid I can’t tell you much,’ except that ‘all his story about the escapade was an illusion with no truth in it … His family are rather cranks, as you know…’

  This rather unkind, blanket dismissal of the Buxtons was probably levelled at their religious convictions. The family was not simply religious, they were evangelical. Rupert’s grandfather built St Thomas’s Church, at Upshire, close to the family’s two homes, as the focal point of their evangelical mission – prayer meetings, bible society, Band of Hope, etc – and he himself appointed a chaplain to run it.

  ‘The keystone of Victor Buxton’s life,’ read Sir Victor’s obituary in the Essex County Chronicle, ‘was his entire dependence on God. He believed firmly and joyfully in the personal guidance of Christ.’

  Rupert’s mother Anne was the daughter of the Rector of Feltwell, near Thetford in Norfolk. Catherine Marsh, the evangelical writer and propagator of the Gospel among working people, was a close family friend. One of Rupert’s early poems was entitled ‘In Memoriam Catherine Marsh’.

  Between 1915 and 1919, the family, like many others during the war, suffered a number of bereavements and it was in the context of death that Rupert’s beliefs found form, just as it had been for Barrie.

  In 1915, Rupert’s grandfather Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton died and the following year his brother Jocelyn was wounded during the Battle of the Somme and went missing, strangely, only after he’d been rescued and delivered to the front-line hospital service station.

  Rupert was just sixteen when he wrote:

  My own darling Mother. This must be a very trying time for you and darling Father. You have always been so gentle and comforting to us all in our troubles; I wish I could return that sympathy.

  I was sitting out in the garden when your letters came: all the wonderful peace of God’s love was on the flowers. Do you know, I always like to think that He loves the flowers just as much as us – in fact we are all His garden flowers! Well, He seemed to whisper down through the evening scents of roses and carnations, that He would take care of our precious flower Jocelyn … Just as, when we pick a rose it soon fades; so when the life is picked from one of His Roses, it droops and dies – to revive in the great cool calm depths of Heaven’s garden. And the wonderful flower is revived by His gentle hands, and, the Night of Rest freshens its beauty for Tomorrow’s Life.

  I am glad you like the ‘Dewdrop’, though there is no depth to it: it was only a pretty sketch. Yes, I wrote a poem last night which I think is my best. But I will not send it to you as it is one that ought to be said – at least I think so; because it is the most serious I have written.

  … May God’s great gentle eyes look down and watch over our darling Jocelyn, as they watch over us; and may he give us all his Calm, and perhaps a little of His Wisdom for the trying days that are coming…

  (Later)

  My precious Mother,

  I had not posted my Sunday letter to you when I got yours. My own dearest Mother, I know how awful it is to find another hope shattered: but, surely there is absolutely no reason to give up hoping as strongly as we did before.

  Look at these statements:

  From Captain Grey: ‘Several men state that he [Jocelyn] was wounded in the shoulder, and that they saw Pte Ryecroft bring him into our trench’.

  From a man in his section; ‘This is to certify that I saw the above person (Rycroft) bringing in 2nd Lieut Buxton from the front of our barbed wire into the trench… (Pte. Gordon)’

  Capt. Grey again: ‘Several of his section informed me that he was brought into our trench from “No man’s land” by his servant who was also wounded.’

  Lieut. Norris: ‘There is every reason to believe he was brought in safely as I was given to understand by one of our chaplains who knew him well, that he saw him arrive at the first dressing station…’

  I do wish we were at home now, so as to be able to help somehow, but God will take care of him wherever he is, and if He has taken him, it is for his good…’

  Later in July, Rupert learned of his grandmother Lady Victoria Buxton’s death. On 27 July, he wrote that he was sorry to hear about ‘darling Granny … but don’t you think she would be better out of this emptiness of life, to go and join Grandfather Beyond. Perhaps this will be so.’

  In November Rupert’s brother Clarence was decorated with the Military Cross (for bravery) at Buckingham Palace. On 29 January 1917, Rupert wrote to his mother:

  It is great news that I hear from your last two letters. How splendid that we shall all be together again – and how happy our dear Jocelyn [presumed dead] will be when he sees us all in church and sitting down to Sunday lunch; for he will be there too, and the circle will join hands with Heaven and those who will never die.

  What a splendid fact it is – the Communion of Saints – the Communion of Souls. The continued taking part in all one’s doings: the sharing of one’s hopes, and the sharing of our disappointments. How glorious it is to think of him looking down to earth and joining in our prayers – which to us his soul ‘beacons from the abode where the eternal are’.

  This last is a quote from Shelley’s ‘Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats’, in which the poet exhorts us not to mourn Keats, who is ‘made one with Nature’, where ‘envy and calumny and hate and pain’ cannot reach him. He is not dead; it is the living who are dead. His being has been withdrawn into the one Spirit, which is beauty.

  Rupert echoed these ideas in a Sonnet, which begins:

  Eternity! Man clutches at an hour,

  Feverish, to fill a quest of emptiness,

  While in him all thine ages, limitless

  Stretch through death’s sunset in a mist of power.

  Why, in the tide-washed pool of mortal time

  Stays he to bathe, while God’s infinity

  Lies all around him, and earth’s vanity…

  Death, for Rupert, was the gateway to heaven, much to be desired: ‘…beyond Death’s surf-washed crest Lies the blue ocean of a dreamless Rest!’

  On 22 August, he wrote to his brother Clarence about their friends killed in the war: ‘I think they are with us – actually taking part in our thoughts, moulding them, inspiring them, guiding them with the great love which they have found in Heaven.’

  In a 24-stanza narrative poem, ‘The Pilgrimage of Thala’, Rupert told of a boy making his way gloriously into the presence of God by drowning:

  XIX

  …he must either die upon the rock

  Or dive into this iridescent lake,

  And drown himself beneath its flowing rills.

  He chose the latter course, and throwing off

  His flask of wine and precious hunting knife,

  (He knew not why), he plunged into the pool

  To drown himself at once, and yet for aye.

  XX

  But look what wondrous thing has come to pass!

  Instead of suffocating beneath the wave,

  He glided thro’ the [slumbering] rills of green,

  Down thro’ the water, further, till he thought

  He must be dashed against the bottom rocks.

  But no! Thro’ lovely flowers of blue and green

  He glided, sinking more – and sinking yet!

  Oblivion came, and after that he slept:

  Yet onward thro’ the limpid green he sank –


  And died – yet lived in spirit one more day

  Till two great scenes could shew him all this life,

  And what it comes to in the sight of God.

  Buxton found the image so deeply affecting that he illustrated these stanzas with a photograph of a real pool cut from a magazine.

  It was but a short step from believing wholeheartedly in the glory beyond oblivion to welcoming it with open arms. By 30 September 1917, he was of the opinion that ‘it was a terrible existence we are in’.

  From the Monitors Room, Harrow he wrote to his mother:

  We have had very good views of the raids from here. Last night was a wondrous scene. There was a big silver moon and the sky was of that strange pale gold colour which seems to remind me of the Past. Great banks of saffron rested on the horizon.

  And there, amongst all this beauty; the scintillating, sinister beauty of soaring star-shells and crackling shrapnel; the blue green flashes of guns on the ground, and the darting, dashing lights of our air squadrons.

  It is a terrible existence we are in, Mother.

  There is something so dreamlike about it, so like a nightmare from which we will awaken. But no, not now.

  One staggers under the accumulated weight of sorrow which afflicts this sad sweet earth of ours.

  Then, in May 1919, his father, who couldn’t drive, bought a car and tried it out on the Warlies estate with one of his employees, who couldn’t drive either. Somehow, Sir Victor fell out of the car onto the road and was run over by it. So serious were his injuries that he had to have a leg amputated. Gangrene set in and he died.

  The family was then crippled by a tax bill and were forced to sell Warlies to Dr Barnardo’s.