The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, wild country, nothing but salmon, deer, whales and white-tailed eagles. Michael was no longer looking at the landscape, he was living it.

  In Loch Voshimid, Michael ‘caught’ the Ghost Mother who became the basis of Barrie’s play Mary Rose – about a mother who returns from the dead to visit her son.

  August 1914, on the eve of war: Barrie wearing his favourite fishing hat at Auch Lodge, Bridge of Orchy.

  The Orchy, brimming with salmon and trout as it sweeps through the glen to Loch Awe.

  Tomdoun, where Barrie and Michael stayed in 1915 and 1918. On a summer’s evening there can be few more beautiful views from any hotel in the Highlands.

  Eiluned Lewis, whose sense of the spirit of Glan Hafren moved Michael. Nico felt that if Michael didn’t have an affair with her it was ‘a tinge of a clue’ to his brother’s sexuality.

  Michael’s intimate friendship with Roger Senhouse and new friendship with Eiluned made this a ‘strangely difficult’ time.

  Michael in ‘Pop’, aged seventeen, at Eton. Meanwhile, at home with Barrie, he had become ‘the sternest of my literary critics’.

  Michael in a boat at Edgerston with fellow Oxford student Robert Boothby (standing), who described him as ‘introverted, moody … a very desirable undergraduate’.

  Barrie in the inglenook of his Adelphi Terrace flat, where Boothby described the scene as ‘morbid’.

  Michael at Garsington Manor with (left) Dora Carrington and Julian Morrell. Lytton Strachey wrote of Michael: ‘He would have been one of the remarkable people of his generation.’

  Kenneth Grahame’s son, Alastair, who was close to Rupert Buxton before Michael met him. He committed suicide by lying across the railway line in Oxford.

  Michael’s close friend with the film star looks, Rupert Buxton – the boy with whom he drowned in Sandford Pool.

  Eilean Shona: ‘Superb as is the scene from the door,’ wrote Barrie, ‘Michael, who has already been to the top of things, says it’s nought to what is revealed there.’

  Barrie (standing), Michael, and Roger Senhouse (right) at Shona. At first, Barrie’s desperate attempts to bring Michael back on side looked doomed to fail.

  The view west from Shona across the Western Isles. Here Michael wrote his last two poems.

  Michael in a boat off Shona, preparing to break free from Barrie. It was a struggle he would not win.

  Sandford Pool, Oxford: ‘The pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in.’ – Jerome K. Jerome.

  Barrie after learning of Michael’s death. Rupert and Michael ‘were either wildly gay or very serious as they walked together to Sandford’, he wrote.

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  The Robson Press (an imprint of Biteback Publishing)

  Westminster Tower

  3 Albert Embankment

  London SE1 7SP

  Copyright © Piers Dudgeon 2015

  Piers Dudgeon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  ISBN 978-1-84954-925-7

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Set in Goudy Oldstyle