The Real Peter Pan (15 page)

As their holiday drew to a close Lady Lewis offered Barrie and the
boys refuge at the Lewis’s palatial abode in Portland Place, but Barrie declared that home was still 23 Campden Hill Square, where they were reunited with Nanny, who now took the role of mother. ‘
She
was the person in our lives,’ said Nico later. ‘She was the mother.’

But she wasn’t to be the only mother, for increasingly Barrie took on that role, which made for continuing unrest with Nanny. The critic Desmond McCarthy, who knew Barrie, made an astute definition of him as ‘part mother, part hero-worshipping maiden, part grandfather, and part pixie with no man in him at all’, each facet of the description – Barrie’s maternal love for the boys, his need to be dominated by Michael at least, his assumption of the mantle of grandfather du Maurier, and the fantasy games of his pixie-self – follow from it.

However, except for staff, No. 23 was now an all-male dominion and the atmosphere seems to have been like that of a public school common room: periods of study alternating with raucous game playing, including cricket in the corridor, but with a certain control exercised by George, the eldest, the leader – a form of society George knew well and which was good practice for Peter, who would be joining him at Eton in the new term.

As a Scot with a tendency to a very British sort of snobbery – ever at its worst when adopted by an outsider – Barrie was exultant at the very notion of the English public school, Eton in particular: ‘I am like a dog looking up to its owner, wondering what that noble face means,’ he once wrote of the public schoolboy, actually lifting a wonder-love line from du Maurier’s
Trilby
, though no one would notice the deep-set irony in so much of what he said and wrote. He would soon have four such noble faces, which could own him, but for the time being two, Michael and Nico, were not at boarding school and would return to the house each afternoon from Wilkinson’s and Norland Place respectively.

A new notebook, dated 22 October 1910, registers Barrie’s address for the first time as 23 Campden Hill Square. Mackail writes that Campden Hill Square was ‘his home far more than the flat, at present’. And Nico: ‘As often as not he was there.’

Thus, casually and with minimum fuss, did he get what he wanted. It was not what Sylvia had wanted or what she had specified in a handwritten document headed ‘Sylvia’s Will’. But immediately after the funeral Barrie had button-holed the du Mauriers and staked his claim. Emma hadn’t been happy, but what alternative could she propose? Nobody in the family could cater for the material needs of five boys as well as he, four of whom would go through Eton and university. And clearly the boys wanted him.

What Sylvia wrote that she wanted was that Nanny Hodgson and her sister Jenny would together look after the boys, with Emma, Barrie and her elder brother Guy as trustees and guardians, and with backup from May du Maurier and Margaret Llewelyn Davies. But Sylvia’s will didn’t come to light for three months after her death.

The odd thing was that when it did, Barrie sent a hand-written copy of it to Emma, altering ‘Jenny’ to ‘Jimmy’, the name by which he was often known, giving the false impression that Sylvia had wanted Nanny Hodgson and Barrie to be hands-on in charge of the boys.

Much has been written about why Barrie did what he did. The die-hards say he must have mistaken the word. This is unlikely because ‘Jenny’ is so clearly written and Barrie was a stickler for accuracy and precision. The more sceptical argue that he was ever the twister and since the boys were not adopted in law, he needed to show the family that he was abiding by Sylvia’s wishes, hence the deliberate fabrication.

No one was chasing him however and it is doubtful that the law would have been impressed by Sylvia’s makeshift will, as it
gave custody to parties who had not been consulted and who were not prepared to take on the responsibility. Also, ‘possession is nine points of the law’ particularly to a Scot (it was originally a Scottish expression) and in those days a fifty-year-old bachelor millionaire was seen as more of a scoop than a threat to five orphan boys, whatever might go on behind closed doors.

Barrie didn’t need to alter the document. He already had what he wanted. The die-hards call on this in support of their case – it would have been pointless to falsify the will: what had Barrie to gain?

But there
was
a point, a motive which would not normally be considered in such a case, the motive Barrie had for almost everything he did, namely to manipulate and write from life so to make his fictional creation lively and life-like. Falsifying the will was an opportunity to study the family’s response, and if it was a worthwhile one, to use it in his work.

Since he modelled Grizel on Sylvia twelve years earlier, her family had been Barrie’s paint box. He owed the boys more than anyone in this regard.

This is perfectly true, Barrie drew up an Agreement dated 6 December 1903 with Jack on account of something he said that appeared in his play
Little Mary
. That Jack originally insisted on it, that he tied Barrie down to it, is wonderfully in the nature of their precarious relationship.

Barrie’s life every single day was a mystery in the making and he wrote about himself as often as he wrote about the people in his web. He was quite ruthless in turning his life to advantage in his work, and crucially, while he ‘took an impish delight in decorating or even fantasticating his own portrait,
he never falsified it
’, as the critic W. A. Darlington was the first to point out.
40
That was his genius: constantly he challenges us to decide whether it is irony or plain truth that he is delivering. Even as he says goodbye to Arthur and Sylvia, and the faint possibility that he might have had something to do with their deaths passes over our minds, he is writing of their alter egos, Mr and Mrs Darling in the novel
Peter & Wendy
(1911): ‘There never was a simpler, happier family until the coming of Peter Pan,’ and giving Peter the heartless line, ‘I forget people after I kill them.’

Hugh Walpole, who knew Barrie when he was an aspiring journalist, before he was writing books, had no hesitation in concluding that it was the plain truth Barrie was delivering: ‘Barrie tricked nine-tenths of us, and knew well that he was tricking us. He was his own murderer, murdered and detective in his own mystery story.’

In 1911, life with the Darlings was moving on and the focus
was no longer on Sylvia but on Michael alone. The first stage of his scheme – ‘to burrow under [Sylvia’s] influence with the boy, expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine’ – had been ‘relentlessly pursued’ and successfully achieved, as Barrie predicted it would be in
The Little White Bird
. Sylvia had throughout been ‘culpably obtuse to my sinister design, having instructed Nanny – ever a threatening shadow in the background – that I was to be allowed to share him with her’.

Now, noted Denis Mackail, Barrie had what he had wanted all along:

M
ACKAIL WAS THERE;
he knew them all; and although he was writing his biography guardedly (because that was the limitation of the arrangement he had with Barrie's executor, Lady Cynthia Asquith) the tenor rings unusually clear as regards Michael, and clearest about Michael taking the lead. That was the ironic position Barrie liked to adopt with him and initially it increased Michael's self-esteem considerably, as well indeed as giving Michael an influence on his work.

For example, on Michael's say-so the first notes appear in 1911 in Barrie's notebook for a murder mystery, later to be called
Shall We Join the Ladies?
The scene is a (so far) week-long country house
party – thirteen are present, twelve guests plus the host Sam Smith, a little old bachelor who sits there beaming on those present at dinner like an elderly cupid. So they think him, but they are to be undeceived, for each has been invited on account of their involvement with the host's brother, who has been murdered.

Barrie never finished the play, some say because he couldn't work his complicated twists and turns into a solution, though it was rumoured that Sam Smith (basically Barrie himself) was the murderer, and Barrie was unsure whether the admission was an ironic step too far in a play that would be watched by thousands. As with Socrates, someone might reach for the hemlock. The first act was produced on its own in a wider programme in 1921, and was (as ever) a hit.

There was the odd titled lady in the cast list and Lady Tree was among the top-line actresses who played them. Titled ladies were a Barrie speciality. It had not always been the case. Once, in the early 1890s, when things were a little rocky for him and Mary Ansell (Barrie had suffered three mental breakdowns during the period he was playing around with hypnotism and shadowing du Maurier), one of them offered them sanctuary in her home. ‘She flattered, she spoke honeyed words,' according to Mackail, and Barrie got it into his head that she fancied him. He made love to her in the only way he knew – with laboured, sentimental verbal blandishments – and she had recoiled. It was not at all what she'd intended to encourage, and Barrie was left with egg on his face. A polite retreat was not going to be enough. He had to
get
out
. Such humiliation the little man could barely countenance; he had caught sight of himself through her eyes and hadn't liked what he saw, and was deeply scarred.

The result was Lady Pippinworth in
Tommy and Grizel
and Lady
Sybil Tenterden in the play
What Every Woman Knows
– self-seeking, bumptious parasites on society.

But since he had become a success, titled ladies were more respectful to him, and when one in particular, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, asked him for ideas for a costume that would make her shine in a high society ball at the Albert Hall in aid of the National Theatre in 1911, he not only came up with some ideas, but engaged a designer to make it for her.

Now, on 20 April of the same year, it was payback time. He wrote to ask her

The Duchess was a good person to advise on this. In 1872, when the government ordered only the second audit of land since the Domesday Book, the ten leading Dukes in the Kingdom owned over 100,000 acres each, while the Duke of Sutherland, whose money came largely from coal, had 1,350,000 acres. By 1911, some of it had passed into the hands of the Duke of Westminster, but not enough to bother five young boys.

This holiday was meant to be special, the first in Scotland since Barrie had secured his own family. ‘I have in a sense a larger family than you now,' he boasted to Charles Turley Smith, the writer of books about schoolboys and member of the Allahakbarries. ‘Five
boys whose father died four years ago and now their mother last summer, and I look after them, and it is my main reason for going on. The Llewelyn Davies boys.'

By July the holiday was fixed and on the 10th Barrie wrote to his friend again:

Scourie is an unspoilt dream of a village on the far north-west coast of Scotland, a region of white sandy beaches, great boulder mountains, rushing rivers and literally hundreds of fishable lochs and lochans – formed, one cannot but think, from the myriad splashings of some giant who in myth leapt out of the sea at Laxford Bridge.

There are more than 300 of them, including the famous fishing grounds of the Laxford, Lochs Stack and More, and the Lower Duart, noted for its migratory run of fish from the frozen Atlantic.

You can't get much further away from the world of telegrams and
anger than this. Barrie wrote of it to Nurse Loosemore (surprising that he was still in touch with her so long after Sylvia's demise):

The 630 miles by rail, which will still take you more than twenty hours from London today, brought Barrie and the boys to Lairg, the railhead for the north-west on a similar latitude to Ullapool. Here the early twentieth-century traveller would linger for an hour or two before being bundled into the mail bus, in Barrie's time a horse-drawn waggon of some sort – not until the '20s did it become a red motorised van – a long and rather uncomfortable ride many miles up the single track mountain road to Scourie.

Once in the ultima Thule, one found the gable-stepped houses of the old village by means of a narrow country lane, which spilled out at its north end into the sheltered waters of the old harbour of Scourie, and the Duke of Sutherland's hotel and hunting lodge.

The Lodge, where the boys stayed with Barrie, is tucked behind the harbour in its own landscaped gardens. For fifty-odd years before Barrie took it, it had been home to Evander Maciver, the Duke's factor for the whole of Sutherland, unpopular to this day for his key role in the infamous Highland clearances, which robbed crofters of a living and led to misery in enforced exile abroad for untold numbers.

The hunting lodge and Scourie Hotel, known in Michael's day as the Stafford Arms, combined with a house known as Roseville to offer some sixty-three rooms. Scourie was not a stag-hunting centre.
People came for the fishing, particularly for the fly-fishing – dry, wet, and dapping with a large fly mimicking the action of flying insects such as daddy long-legs or, if there's a hatch in the area, mayflies.

Every day, ghillies would gather outside the hotel to attract the custom of the guests in return for a few shillings. Ghillies knew, then as today, where the fish lie in any of the 300-odd local lochs, which are split into forty-six beats. These men – all self-employed local fishermen – will also tell you which fly to use, and the best of them offer a lot more besides.

It is possible that Barrie found his ghillie on the way from Lairg, as the man's brother was for some time the mail bus driver.

Johnny Mackay turned out to be a lucky strike. He got to know all the boys and Barrie well, but hit it off especially with Michael, ending up his personal ghillie, firm friend and mentor, and reappearing later in his story.

A few months before he died in 1977, Mackay recounted how Barrie, while fishing with the humbler worm, ‘looked so scruffy that when the Duchess of Westminster saw him she thought he was a poacher and ordered him off her land; and he was too shy to say who he was, so he went'.

Barrie, no fly fisher himself, wrote that Mackay taught Michael ‘everything that is worth knowing'. Used to casting on a lawn in St John's Wood in London, the boy soon found that it was a different matter on water.

Mackay took him back to basics, explaining the stance that would best facilitate the smooth action required in a cast – now like a cricketer at the crease getting stance, grip and body action just right, now like an archer transferring the energy from bow to arrow, as his line snaked over his shoulder and he brought it up abruptly to fall at (hopefully) just the right spot. Michael, a good enough cricketer to
make the first XI at Wilkinson's, and with a wrist action soon to be celebrated in a natural aptitude for Eton Fives, picked up on it fast.

Mackay's niece, the sculptor Dorothy Dick, lives in Scourie today and remembers Johnny well:

Mackay was a magician with his casts and Michael began to appreciate the sheer beauty of the shape of them – the wand, as the fly rod is often known, snaking back and forth, back and forth, until whoosh, the line glides in a straight line down upon the water like a wingless bird.

For days Michael experimented with Johnny's techniques, finding those that suited him best, and the ghillie began talking to him about what was involved besides the cast – like how to read the water, how to recognise the different parts of a loch or river and how to unravel its meaning in the same way a trout has to do in order to survive. He also taught him how to recognise where currents have formed, how to cast across currents of different speeds, how to control how the fly line is affected by them, and particularly how to ‘mend' when the line gets caught up in them and begins to drag.

MacKay distinguished between those of his clients who wanted to know how to cast and those who wanted to be taught how to
fish
, and once it was clear that Michael was of the latter sort, their conversation turned to flies. As Dorothy recalls, ‘Johnny tied his own flies in a shed beside the house. I loved going into that shed.'

A year had passed since Sylvia had died. In all that time Michael, described by Barrie at this age as ‘the mysterious boy of the so open countenance … with the carelessness of genius', had found no activity that took his mind off his mother's death, until now. Within a few days of Mackay starting with Michael and Nico, Barrie was taking Nico out on his own to fish. Michael was no longer available.

On 18 August, Barrie wrote to Lady Lewis: ‘The fishing is extraordinary good, and Michael does fare better than almost any of the bags we see recorded in the papers…'

Fifteen days earlier, on 3 August, Michael had caught his first sea trout – 2½ pounds. He had waded downstream in the Laxford and cast to the tail of a pool. The fish had taken. He had given the line a short sharp pull backward and up to set the hook, and all his equipment had come alive, throbbing, surging with life. The fish had jumped out of the water and Michael had lowered his rod, giving it slack and then reeling it in, keeping the pressure on, waiting for the fish to tire. It was a battle he had no desire to win and yet knew he could not duck out now.

Afterwards Johnny told him he was a real fisherman now. But, for the first time that day, Michael felt alone. That night he took the sea-trout to bed with him, placing it on a chair by his side. Next day Barrie sent it to England to have it stuffed. But it arrived on a Bank Holiday. The shop was closed and it was taken to the gardener's cottage of one of the firm. The gardener's wife thought it was a gift from some anonymous friend and ate it. Barrie didn't dare tell Michael until he got his first salmon.

Scourie was a most memorable holiday, one of the best, for it started Michael, this young city boy of eleven years of age, on a relationship with nature and replaced something that had been missing since his mother had gone.

When he arrived home in Kensington, he was full of Scourie, but momentum was gathering beneath the wheels of discontent from various relatives, particularly Margaret Llewelyn Davies, as Dolly Ponsonby's diary record for the very day that Michael's sea-trout had arrived in England attests: