The Real Peter Pan (17 page)

On ‘several occasions’ at Amhuinnsiuidhe, according to Nico, when Michael disappeared off on his own, Barrie ran after him manically calling his name. ‘We’d hear this haunting, banshee wail, “Mi-i-ichael-l-l!”’ he wrote. ‘It was an extraordinary sound as it echoed through the hills. And of course Michael was always perfectly all right, and wondered what all the fuss was about.’
44

Nico, at age eight, was unaware of what was really going on. Heb
knew nothing of Kilmeny, the girl of poetic nature, the lover of solitude who wanders off alone at twilight and disappears into the wild among the hills, her friends looking in vain for her, their cries echoing around the glen.

He could so easily have suggested that Barrie had been playing around, but he did not. Even Nico, who understood little of the fantasy life that Barrie was leading, realised that this was serious, that it had something to do with the strangely deep relations between Barrie and his brother, in which he didn’t share. Nico’s description of Barrie’s call as a ‘haunting, banshee wail’ is utterly appropriate, however, for a banshee is a mythic spirit, a messenger from the underworld, an omen of death.

The basic premise of a mother returning from the dead to commune with her son cannot have been easy for Michael to assimilate in 1912. And yet, the impression we have is that he was an active participant in the passage of the narrative from Hogg’s ‘Kilmeny’ through du Maurier’s
Peter Ibbetson
to Barrie’s
Mary Rose.

Here was Barrie, one of our great theatrical geniuses, setting up a scene on a remote loch in the Outer Hebrides for a story worthy of consideration alongside the great myths, because like them the plaster out of which Barrie’s play is moulded was
real
, and the forces that charge it played on Michael for the rest of his short life. For Michael did go missing in the hills, and Nico remembers not one but
several
occasions when Barrie chased after him as if the boy was about to make his final communion with Nature, and like Kilmeny and Mary Rose, disappear into her folds.

At this stage Barrie had the Kilmeny legend, Sylvia’s death and her son Michael’s undying love for her, all providing the plot for his play, but no title, nor yet a name for the mother who would disappear and return from the dead to visit her son.

What the name and title would be – ‘Mary Rose’ – was cleverly appropriate, because ‘Rose’ was both a verb suggestive of resurrection and the name of Michael’s favourite flower (as revealed in another of Barrie’s Querist Interrogations), while ‘Mary’ was the name of the woman (Mary ‘Mimsey’ Seraskier) who returns from the dead in the du Maurier family myth.

Once again the playwright was confirming that his work is inspired by the supernatural currents in which he grew up and by his connection to the du Mauriers.

However, Mary Rose brings nothing back from ‘the other side’, no knowledge of ‘what only the dead should know’, nor even the poetic promise of Hogg’s ‘Kilmeny’, where ‘the glories that lay in the land unseen’ achieve expression in the immortal beauty of the girl, which, on her return, suffuses the glen:

After Kilmeny ‘left this world of sorrow and pain’ for the second time, ‘and returned to the land of thought again’, we are left in no doubt
of the glories in store for her on the other side. But the absence of a message of hope in
Mary Rose
led Mackail to point to a hollowness at the heart of the play: ‘Audiences wept, sniffed, swallowed and choked, without ever being able to explain what had reduced them to this state … nobody knew [the play’s] meaning.’

The meaning, and Barrie’s purpose in writing it, was plain to the playwright, however. Like all his works written after reading
Peter Ibbetson, Mary Rose
was an important episode in Barrie’s search for the Neverland, a world beyond the physical realities, but it would be a peculiarly dark reading of that ‘other’ world, a vision completely at odds with twelve-year-old Michael’s joyful response to it in the Scottish landscape.

Years later Nico wrote that Barrie had confirmed that it was here, at Loch Voshimid, that the real seed of
Mary Rose
was sown, but for Michael there were seeds sown in Amhuinnsuidhe for a lot more besides.

‘We leave here about the 17th, if all goes well’ wrote Nanny, before signing off her letter to Nancy. ‘Then Peter goes to Eton alone & George to Cambridge. Michael is now top of his school, & Nico is top but one of his class. I trust mother is keeping well, my love to you all, Dadge.’

A
T THE END
of the Easter holidays, 1913, Barrie's friend and colleague, the impresario Charles Frohman, who was a guest at No. 23, spotted Michael lost in a copy of
Child of Storm
, the newly published novel in Rider Haggard's
Allan Quatermain
series. He asked him whether he could borrow it for a moment, and on the fly-leaf, with the blue pencil that he always used, scribbled ‘a perpetual pass' for two seats for the Duke of York's theatre. One of the advantages of having Barrie for an adopted father certainly, but also a kindness delivered by Frohman with a few bright evenings in mind for Michael in advance of his first term at Eton, which loomed the following month

Eton College, located in Eton, Berkshire, near Windsor, was founded in 1440 as a charity school for seventy boys from
impoverished families who were given so thorough a classical education that at the end of their time they would be fit to go as scholars to King's College, Cambridge, founded the following year.

Since then the school has expanded considerably and kept its charitable status, but not its exclusive remit to educate poor boys.

Exclusivity remains very much part of its character, however. One of a handful of English independent schools that educates only boy boarders, Eton's scholars are known as Collegers because of this connection to King's, Cambridge and because in the old days they were the only boys to live on site. Non-scholars, known as Oppidans, were boarded out at homes run either by worthy townsfolk or Eton teachers, ‘oppidanus' being the Latin for ‘townsman' and Eton offering a thoroughgoing Classical education.

But this was clearly no longer the case by the time Michael joined. He entered as an Oppidan a term early and lived on site first as an Oppidan and then, after taking the Eton scholarship, as an Oppidan Scholar in the house of Hugh Macnagthen, his father's friend, a house known today as Jourdelay's.

Of the school's many hallowed traditions, some seem geared to sustaining exclusivity for the sake of it, particularly the tradition of playing sports of their own invention, which could not, at least originally, be played in a league with other major public schools. The Eton Field Game, Eton Wall Game and Eton Fives all have their own rules and special courts or pitches, and characterise an introspective school culture. Today, Eton Fives is the most widely played off-site, and recently an Eton Fives court opened to the general public in London. But it took more than 600 years.

Again, there is an Eton terminology running into hundreds of expressions meaningful only within the school; even school terms
are given their own name – three a year, as elsewhere, but inexplicably called halves.

Eton's shout is that it has educated nineteen British prime ministers and multiple generations of British aristocracy. It was the very fount of privilege in British imperial society. Criticisms of solipsism, snobbism and nepotism do not necessarily attach to individual pupils but have been encouraged by the workings of Pop in particular, that bastion of tradition, the Eton Society.

The development of Pop is perhaps most difficult to square with the school's original socialist blueprint. Members of Eton's most exclusive club – all boys, swells of one sort or another – rule the roost. Its president once had the power to cane (or ‘tan' as it was called) in the presence of, and at one time with the assistance of, other Pop members, the miserable miscreant to be clad in a pair of old trousers kept for purpose, so likely was it that it'd be cut to shreds.

To be fair, this abuse was not practised exclusively by Eton; rather a model copied in boys' boarding schools (prep-schools as well as public schools) up and down Britain right into the 1950s.

At Eton, however, the will to power and privilege was more obvious owing to the trappings – three-piece Eton tail suits, stiff collars and sleek black top hats were uniform; there was even a designated movement of hand to check the rim of the hat when passing a master. For members of Pop, classier shirts and striped ‘spongebag' trousers were
de rigueur,
along with coloured waistcoats instead of the usual black.

In 1920, Barrie described being taken to the annual cricket match at Lords between Eton and Harrow, another of Britain's leading all-boy public schools:

Besides taking advantage of the fagging system, members of Pop enjoyed all sorts of other privileges, meaningless except as an illustration of the position of power they held over their fellows – such as being entitled to furl their umbrellas, or sitting on the wall of Long Walk in front of the main building.

Wrote Barrie:

By far the most unappealing aspect of Pop, however, was that membership was controlled by Pop members themselves and with homosexuality rife in the school, favours could be emotionally quite expensive.

Nico, for whom membership of Pop would be a significant aim from the first half, recalled how he was ‘suddenly “taken up” by one or two “Knuts” in Pop who take me for walks'. No junior dared to refuse ‘walks'. Elder brother George had managed to get out of just such an invitation from a homosexual swell by convincing him that he'd been invited to walk with some other (presumably less dangerous) boy, which was then arranged.

Nico, more compliant, was amazed to discover that he was ‘put up for Pop at a very young age and only got one blackball too many'. Then one day a Pop friend asked Nico for an introduction to one of his friends, a very pretty boy who was also quite good at games, called Fitz-Wright. Suddenly Nico saw what a fool he'd been, let fly at the Pop ‘friend' and the next time he was put up for membership of Pop he got the maximum amount of black balls. He was also discriminated against when his name came up in other contexts, such as sports colours.

This sort of environment was hardly tailormade for a sensitive boy like Michael – ‘very reserved – not a seeker after popularity', as Clive Burt, a boy in the same year as he, recalled.

Macnaghten, Michael's housemaster and tutor, wrote that in May 1913 Michael came to Eton ‘very full of anxieties, a boy of a tender heart and delightful feelings, full of promise'. This was euphemism. Whereas Nico, when he arrived three years later, was in Michael's words ‘the heart and soul of the house', and ‘happy after the first five minutes', Michael became dreadfully depressed and in Nico's remembrance ‘more or less cried for the first two years'.

On 10 May, Barrie wrote to Turley Smith:

Typical Barrie tosh, but Michael's going off to boarding school cannot have been easy for either of them. Things became so bad for the boy in his first year that his nightmares returned. Barrie described an occasion when Michael's ‘Dame' – the term used to describe a woman who assists an Eton housemaster in looking after the boys' health and domestic arrangements –

Barrie decided to write to Michael every day and more or less did so for the five years he attended Eton and then when he went to Oxford. Some 2,000 letters were eventually destroyed by Peter, who found them ‘too much'.

In loco parentis
Barrie's interest was no longer in the acquisition of power over the family. He had that. His aim now was to be loved by Michael, ‘to know each other without asking questions', to dwell in Michael, so that Michael would dwell in him and together they could take a step into eternity. It was, as Michael's contemporary at Eton, Robert ‘Bob' Boothby, told Andrew Birkin, to be ‘a great love … something beyond ordinary affection'.

Michael's misery was in that sense an opportunity, for as Barrie's old friend, the poet and novelist George Meredith, for whom education and the emancipation of women were special subjects, wrote: ‘At this period, when the young savage grows into higher influences, the faculty of worship is foremost in him.'

If Barrie played his cards right, Michael would ‘turn to his father affectionately reverent' and to that end he first made a firm friend of Michael's tutor and housemaster, Macnaghten, and consulted Meredith for inspiration.

During the early 1900s, education was a question of the greatest importance. Meredith espoused Rousseau's ideal for minimum intervention in the life of a child initially. He even advised the parents of a lad who later became a friend of Michael not to disturb his freedom by teaching him to read before seven years of age. The philosopher
Rousseau's great contribution was to give expression to the freedom, innocence and contentment of childhood as the period of life when man most closely approximated to the ‘state of Nature' in which he might live a free and untroubled Garden of Eden existence.

Barrie had written about the consequences of society reverting to such a state as early as 1902 in his brilliant play
The Admirable Crichton.
The play told of the family of ‘a haughty, aristocratic English house, with everyone kept in his place' being shipwrecked and beached up on a desert island, whereupon the lowliest, the butler of the house, the admirable Crichton, takes charge. In the end, when they are rescued and returned to London, the old order is restored. Lady Mary does not forget who proved himself the best man on the island, but Crichton will hear nothing of it. ‘On an island, my lady, perhaps; but in England, no.' She replies, ‘Then there is something wrong with England.' Crichton has the last word, proving his supremacy: ‘My lady, not even from you can I listen to a word against England.'

Barrie wanted both a State of Nature and Eton – Crichton and a stable, class-conscious England. Meredith had no time for any system that would encroach on the freedom of the individual, and was much more modern than his younger fan and friend. But in his novel
The Ordeal of Richard Feveril
, to which Barrie (and quite possibly Michael under Barrie's direction) now deferred, Meredith is realistic:

Meredith's stylistic obscurity is the reason his prose isn't read today, though his position in the literary firmament of his day was secure. He was counselling that a boy is bound to fall under the influence of one system or another, that thirteen is a moment in time when he is at his most impressionable, and that whatever is impressed upon him will likely determine his future.

Like Sir Austin Feveril, Richard's father in Meredith's novel, during Michael's difficult time at Eton, Barrie ‘took care that good seed should be planted in [him], and that the most fruitful seed for a youth, namely Example, should be a kind to germinate in him the love of every form of nobleness'.