The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  One can see him serene, astride a Scotch cliff, singing to the sun the farewell thanks of a boy … If there is any of you here so rare that the seekers have taken an ill-will to him, as to the boy who wrote those lines, I ask you to be careful.

  In the second poem the process of rejection has begun.

  ‘Island of Sleep’

  Island of sleep where wreathéd Time delays,

  Haven of things remote, indulgent, free,

  Thou whose enriching mists in autumn days

  Veiled the intruder on thy secrecy;

  He there beheld bright flowers in a dream

  Join with tall trees to cheat the Cyprian,

  And heard in murmurs of a woodland stream

  Arcadian incantations of resurgent Pan;

  Yet will not touch again thy perfumed shore

  And mount the coloured slopes beneath the trees

  Or there release his senses ever more

  To tread the foot-prints of old deities,

  So thou do not send echoes to remind

  Of those sweet pipes, and charm him from his kind.

  He is telling us of the opportunity that so remote and time-lost a place as Shona affords the poet to hear ‘in murmurs of a woodland stream Arcadian incantations of resurgent Pan’. The word ‘incantations’ is fairly illegible in the handwritten original and has been variously guessed at, but the rest is clear.

  Michael is reminding us that Barrie chose to name Peter Pan after the goat-foot god of Greek myth, who ran with Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, on the mountains of Arcadia. We are back on the dark side. ‘Yet [Pan] will not touch again thy perfumed shore … to tread the foot-prints of old deities, So thou do not send echoes to remind of those sweet pipes, and charm him from his kind.’

  I have already mentioned his cousin Daphne’s poem ‘Another World’, where the ‘loathly keepers of the netherland’ have ‘cloven feet’ and there is a ‘horn that echoes from the further hill, Discordant, shrill’. Michael is commanding that it has to end. He is saying goodbye to Barrie’s boy-cult.

  It was far from certain that Barrie was going to let him have his way.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  1920–21: Barrie Gets His Way

  ON 9 SEPTEMBER, while still in Scotland, Michael wrote to his tutor, Robert Dundas, presumably in case it hadn’t filtered through to him, that he had given notice to the University:

  Dear Mr Dundas.

  Your emotions will not, I know, be violently stirred, when I say I am not going up to Oxford again; surprise, pity, or wrath, can scarcely have survived the thrashing of last term.

  I feel very much the young fool; but wish to be obstinate into the bargain, even if the first step I take for myself be into the deepest of deep ditches; it will at least be an experiment; and I am a little strengthened by Stevenson’s Apology for my kind.

  I shall always be sorry for not having taken Greats for Mods; and shall look out for the O’s on judgement day.

  Yours sincerely

  Michael Ll. Davies

  I do incidentally hope to quit education for some trade, so as to give Mr Stevenson’s immorality some sort of standing.61

  The comment at the end is probably facetious. We must surely believe that Michael was still (in his mind) bound for the Sorbonne to study art.

  At any rate no good honest work found him, and suddenly he did change his mind, writing to Dundas from rooms in the heart of old Oxford across the road from Christ Church at No. 84 St Aldates, a building full of character on the corner of Pembroke Street.

  84 St Aldates.

  Friday.

  Dear Dundas (according to suggestion not since withdrawn) I’m sorry to be a bother; but should I possibly be allowed to creep into the House again in October, into some obscure corner? Of course it is unprecedented. I am not in the least deserving; but reasons faintly sincere, these: if I stay in lodgings I should like to go with someone else after 2 terms of my own company; it would be rather foolish to go with natural non-Greats friends, and Marjoriebanks and I are not, in confidence, very good cohabitants. I know I could work if it were permitted. Now is the time arrangements are made, and the element of doubt which you must have about the use of me at Greats makes such rather more difficult. I’m sorry if this is at once trivial and impossible.

  I dislike always bringing up the whole question of my existence before you.

  Would you come to lunch here on, say, Friday, if I ask Charlie B-H? This is not a persuasive, nor a lenient, measure.

  Yours,

  Michael Davies

  Edward Marjoribanks was an Old Etonian friend of Michael, later to become a Conservative politician. A telegram followed the letter some days later:

  R H Dundas, Senior Common Room Christ Church Oxford

  Have become moral and ask leave to return to work but is this possible as have opened no book this vacation. Query Collections and Verdict. Meanwhile starting to read.

  By then Michael’s address was Barrie’s apartment off the Strand. These erratic missives will have done little to give Dundas confidence, but he was allowed to return to Oxford. A relation of his, Andrew Sellon, with an interest in the family tree, described Dundas as ‘a somewhat notorious Fellow, I believe he had the same rooms that Lewis Carroll once had’. Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, became a lecturer in Mathematics there in 1855, publishing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.

  It seems that Elizabeth Lucas had taken Michael aside and persuaded him at least to finish his degree before going to Paris. On 19 December, Barrie wrote to her:

  It was nice of you to have that talk with Michael and I have no doubt that for the time at least it had a steadying effect. All sorts of things do set him ‘furiously to think’ and they seem to burn out like a piece of paper. He is at present I think really working well at Oxford and has at any rate spasms of happiness out of it, but one never knows of the morrow. I think few have suffered from the loss of a mother as he has done.

  Elizabeth Lucas was a warm friend to Michael, relieving him of the necessity of spending Christmas 1920 with Barrie by taking him to Paris.

  Macnagthen wrote of this difficult period being turned around after he was allowed to return to Oxford: ‘Henceforward there was no wavering; he worked loyally and found increasing satisfaction in his work; he was at Eton for a day at the end of March (1921), full of quiet happiness.’

  Barrie said much the same of Michael, writing to Elizabeth,

  He is working hard and really enjoying his life at Oxford for the present at least. He has the oddest way of alternating between extraordinary reserve and surprising intimacy. No medium. In his room at Oxford lately he suddenly unburdened himself marvellously. One has to wait for those times, but they are worth while when they come.

  The description is not a happy one on the face of it, suggestive of stress at the very least.

  Returning to Oxford had meant of course that his relationship with Rupert would continue as before. No doubt the business with Dundas about Michael’s lodgings in college was connected to his being closer to Rupert, as the gates of Christ Church closed at night.

  On 13 February, Rupert wrote to his mother of new rooms in college. ‘My rooms are much better than they were: but as yet there are no pictures! … you must give advice on the question. Blue furniture and curtains and a red carpet are the dominant colours.’

  The week before, he had written to his mother that ‘the Norway project is rather vague still, I’m sorry to say. Michael may not be able to go, in which case it will have to be given up.’

  Whatever the Norway project was, it was evidently planned for the Easter holidays – Easter Day fell on 27 March – when Barrie had already planned to take Michael and Nico elsewhere. Reading between the lines, this looks like a further opportunity for disagreement between Barrie and Michael. In the event, Rupert and Michael spent Easter in Corfe Castle in Dorset, staying at a little inn by the sea. Barrie joined them for a few days at the end of it.

  The
next we hear is that Michael travelled to Oxford from London on 9 May, Barrie’s sixty-first birthday. Nico to Eton, too, which suggests that Michael had been down for Nico’s half term. Then, on 17 May, Barrie writes to Michael: ‘The Mill House sounds like a good place, and you had lovely weather for it.’ We know no more than this, but it seems likely that Michael and Rupert have again been away together.

  Two days later, Thursday 19 May, was a warm summer’s day in Oxford, a day in Eights Week, the main University rowing event, a big festive occasion which takes place over four days.

  Edward Marjoribanks saw Rupert that morning and Michael around midday. Michael said he was going to swim in Sandford pool that afternoon, and would not be able to watch the Eights. Buxton had not mentioned he was going out. The two young men left the city together shortly after two o’clock.

  There was nothing unusual or foolhardy about swimming in Sandford Pool. Arthur Bryant, a friend and contemporary of Rupert at both Harrow and Oxford, wrote that the couple had been to Sandford together to swim several times before. While on the following day Thomas Ripon said, ‘There are bathers there almost every day in the summer, and I believe that Rupert was a good swimmer.’

  The couple walked there through Christ Church Meadow, a spacious and beautiful pasture belonging to the college and a popular place for walking and picnicking during the day, when its wrought iron gates are open to all.

  Moving southwards through the meadow, which is bounded on its west side by the Thames and on the east by the Cherwell, the couple approached the place where cattle graze and the two rivers converge. Here, on an island, the many college boathouses will have been busy, as this upstream stretch of the river is where the Eights Week rowing events occur.

  The path, altogether the most lovely river walk in Oxford, leads past eights and fours and sculls, past river boats and flocks of grazing geese, and continues on its way south under a road bridge and a railway bridge, over Hinksey Stream by means of a footbridge and a further bridge over the weir stream, where a narrow path leaves the main one for Sandford lasher.

  Here the river thunders through the weir into a large still pool, perhaps 100 metres across, by means of a series of sluice gates between concrete piers, which support a railed pathway, which Rupert and Michael took across the river to the west bank on the other side.

  It led them past a nineteenth-century obelisk, which in their day would have carried the names of only three Christ Church students who died here – Richard Phillimore and William Gaisford who drowned in 1843, and George Dasent in 1872.

  For, ‘the pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in’, as du Maurier’s great friend Jerome K. Jerome had written in Three Men in a Boat (1889).

  Today, owing to these deaths and people’s interest in an additional and more recent two, the railed pathway is barred and the single lifebelt by the obelisk is unobtainable. But it is still possible to find a way onto the side of the lasher where Rupert and Michael went that day by walking past Sandford Lock and through a field leading to the west bank.

  It is an idyllic spot, the pools, high and low, separated by the weir, are quite beautiful and tranquil in summer. Hither the boys came, ‘either wildly gay or very serious’ (as Barrie wrote to Rupert’s mother afterwards), gazing over their gloomy grave, sensing the gentle motion of the leaves on the trees, the grass springing under their feet and the soft thunder of the lasher in the distance.

  Later it was reported that one of the men swam over to the weir and sat on it basking in the sun. It would have been the poor swimmer Michael left alone on the bank, gazing at the pool where two universes met.

  Did he turn to Shelley, dreaming that he could somehow lose himself in the otherworld of the pool, wet and remote – ‘What am I that I should linger here? – Vision and Love – Sleep and death Shall not divide us long’? Or, as he watched the muscular Rupert drop his clothes beside him and swim strongly out towards the weir, did Michael not know that death was on him?

  When on the threshold of the green recess

  The wanderer’s footsteps fell, he knew that death

  Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,

  Did he resign his high and holy soul

  To images of the majestic past,

  That paused within his passive being now,

  Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe

  Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place

  His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk

  Of the old pine; upon an ivied stone

  Reclined his languid head; his limbs did rest,

  Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink

  Of that obscurest chasm;– and thus he lay,

  Surrendering to their final impulses

  The hovering powers of life. Hope and Despair,

  The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

  Marred his repose; the influxes of sense

  And his own being, unalloyed by pain,

  Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed

  The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

  At peace, and faintly smiling…62

  61 The comment about taking up a trade refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1877), which Stevenson said was written with himself in mind. Only a year later he was able to write to his mother: ‘It was well I wrote my “Idlers” when I did; for I am now the busiest gent in Christendom.’

  62 From Shelley’s poem, which foretold his own drowning, ‘Alastor’.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  1921: Disposal

  THERE WERE TWO eye-witnesses to the drowning, Charles Henry Beecham, engineer’s assistant at the nearby Sandford Paper Mills and his assistant Matthew Gaskell, both of whom testified that the pool was ‘as still as a mill-pond’.

  They gave their evidence on Saturday 21 May to a Coroner’s Inquest, which was conducted by F. E. Marshall, described as ‘one of the University’s coroners’, at the Settling Room, Gloucester Green, in the city.

  Beecham said that when he went up to the weir with Gaskell to regulate the water which fed the paper mill, he was standing on the Oxford side [the east side].

  Marshall: Did you hear a shout?

  Beecham: Yes, I heard a shout. I looked in the direction and saw two men bathing in the pool in difficulties.

  Marshall: Did they appear to be struggling – or what were they doing?

  Beecham: I only just saw their heads above water.

  Marshall: What did you do?

  Beecham: I immediately ran across the bridge to get the lifebelt, and Gaskell followed. Gaskell held the line while I threw the belt, but the men had already disappeared.

  Marshall: What did you do then?

  Beecham: I left Gaskell at the weir and ran to Radley College boathouse for assistance. Some of the Radley students were bathing, but some of them came back with me and others brought a boat.

  Marshall: How far is the boathouse from the pool?

  Beecham: It would take about ten minutes to bring a boat from there to the pool. I ran to the weir but saw no sign of the deceased.

  Marshall: Then what did you do?

  Beecham: I pointed out to one of the Radley students where the men went down. We returned to the mill about a quarter of an hour afterwards. The accident had already been reported to the police in Oxford by telephone. I can swim very little. The pool I believe at the spot is between twenty and thirty feet deep. There are at present no weeds likely to cause danger and the water is unusually low at this time of year, and is still. I should say there is no backwash.

  Marshall: Was there any sign of either of the men clinging to the other?

  Beecham: I could not see that.

  Gaskell was then called and corroborated the evidence of Beecham. Asked if he would like to add anything, he said: ‘I think not.’

  Answering a question from the Dean of Christ Church, the Very Reverend Dr H. J. Wright, he said that it h
ad taken less than a minute from the time he heard the shout to get the lifebelt. Gaskell was then asked whether he could say whether the men were clinging to each other as though one was trying to help the other.

  Gaskell: Their heads were close together.

  Juror: You could not see anything else?

  Gaskell: They appeared as though they were just standing in the water with their heads above the surface.

  Another juror: Was there anything to suggest that one was supporting the other?

  Gaskell: I could not say. It was a very quick affair.

  Thomas Frederick Carter, of 34 Nelson Street, Oxford, employed by the Thames Conservancy, then said he was in the depot at Osney, when, just before five o’clock, he received a call to go to Sandford Pool. The superintendent sent him to commence dragging in the pool for two undergraduates who had been reported drowned. When he got to the pool, dragging operations were commenced. With two other assistants, operations were continued, and up to dark neither of the bodies had been recovered. At seven o’clock the next morning dragging was recommenced. One body was recovered shortly after two o’clock about thirty yards from the weir, in about twenty feet of water.

  Carter: As I was hauling the body up I noticed something drop off when within about 8 ft. from the surface. At first I thought it was a limb of a tree, but have now come to the conclusion that it must have been one body dropping from the other.

  One body was taken to the hotel while they dragged for the other, which was recovered an hour later.

  Marshall: Where?

  Carter: At the same spot I found the first.

  Marshall: Which body was first recovered?