The Real Peter Pan (20 page)
Read The Real Peter Pan Online
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
I
N 1915, IT
was the Tomdoun in Glen Garry. Barrie, Michael and Nico, the sole travellers that year, set off on the Scots Express from King’s Cross at 7.20 p.m., taking a sleeping berth to Spean Bridge, just short of Fort William, where they picked up the West Highland Railway going north through unforgettable scenery to Invergarry. Thence, they drove the single-track road ten miles west along the north side of Loch Garry, probably in a vehicle belonging to Peter Grant, the landlord of the remote Tomdoun, whose family built the hotel in 1893 and had it right into the 1960s.
The hotel is situated beside the single-track road on the side of a hill, its verandah overlooking a paddock and wide section of the
Garry waters. In 1746 the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart crossed the river by means of a ford, which disappeared when the river was dynamited into a deeper channel. On a summer’s evening there can be few more beautiful views from any hotel in the Highlands.
Scattered homesteads, a Kirk (still there) and a turning once led along the main road from the south to Kintail and onward for the Skye and Hebrides ferries, the Kyle of Lochalsh, the Sound of Sleat and the Sandaig archipelago, location of one of Scotland’s greatest literary love affairs, between Gavin Maxwell, an otter named Mij and the great Romantic poet Kathleen Raine.
It is stunning country and has always been one of those secret havens for fly fishers and naturalists, the deer browsing in the sands on the banks of the Loyne and the golden eagle flying from its eyries in the Quoich Forest. It also had something of a reputation as a resort for partially dispossessed boys of Empire to be hardy and learn to fish, boys deposited in English boarding schools by parents abroad in the Foreign Office or in the armed forces.
The fly fisher Geoffrey Braithwaite, whose
Fine Feathers
and
Fish
remains a collector’s classic and who was a regular at the Tomdoun in the first decade of the twentieth century, knew everybody in the Glen and recalled the simple fare at the hotel at the time Barrie and the boys were there:
Mutton broth, trout and then mutton, which one could seldom masticate with any ease. So far as bath was concerned, and you were fortunate enough to get there first, you might manage to find a trickle of tepid water and God help those who followed. The bedrooms were always spotlessly clean but had the oldest iron bedsteads and the mattresses so hard that only through real tiredness after a hard day’s fishing that sleep came one’s way.
The hotel wasn’t open all year round, only for the fishing season and the stag hunting. It was, in fact, as local inhabitant Ken Brown records,
both a family home and provided accommodation for the staff that worked on the farm the Grants owned. It also housed the telegraph office. There were four or five ‘suites’ to let, guests had a bedroom and adjoining sitting room and shared a bathroom/WC. Meals were provided, either in the private rooms or in the dining room. You took what was offered. There was no bar, but drinks could be taken in the drawing room.
It became a Mecca for real fly fishermen. You could get finer accommodation in nearby Glenquoich Lodge, with ‘Bear’ Ellice as host, partying with the great and the good of society. You could rent the more modest Kinlochquoich Lodge. But at the Tomdoun you were part of a legend.
Salmon fishing was the draw in those days before the dams went up, and once again Michael was in his element, fishing the Horseshoe, the pool on the stretch of river in front of the hotel, as well as Kingie Pool and the Tailings, which could be leased for a weeks at a time.
The hotel was manned by a team of expert ghillies, whose names recalled many of the Scottish clans: Hector MacDonald, Willie Ross, John and Neil Stewart, Ronald Gillies and Ian MacLennan were the regular ones, although when Barrie, Michael and Nico stayed there in 1915, every one of them was off doing something for the war effort, and their duties fell to Barrie who followed his charges with their coats and ginger beer.
As a branch line from Spean Bridge station offered service north up the Great Glen to Fort Augustus, terminating at a pier on Loch Ness, the trip also supplied an opportunity to revisit Dhivach Lodge
and reminisce about the last proper holiday with Sylvia after Arthur died, still only eight years ago.
On 15 August, Nico (now almost twelve) wrote to Nanny Hodgson, telling her of the nostalgic expedition:
We saw the fall in the burn and the place where Uncle Jim and George and Jack played cricket … In the arbour we found the initials of all our names still there … Was the flicker-show any good? Did you like Charlie Chaplin? I had a long letter from Jack. He went ashore on Gallipoli with a letter to the French Headquarters … I miss you here very much. I have caught five trout here and Michael 15. But then Michael –!!
Well love from
NICHOLAS LLEWELYN DAVIES
Tomdoun was clearly a hit, as Barrie returned with the boys in 1918. But Peter and Jack and the threat of war were never far from their minds. Deeply affected by a sense of doom for a whole generation of boys and concerned to do something, Barrie had financed a hospital at Bron Herbert’s Bedfordshire house, Wrest Park, for casualties of the war. He had also given E. V. Lucas’s wife, Elizabeth, £2,000 to set up a refuge and temporary hospital for women and children variously stricken and orphaned by the war in a large chateau at Bettancourt, in north-eastern France.
Now, from Tomdoun, he wrote to Bron’s sister, Nan, of a recce he had personally undertaken on French soil:
I went to see that little hospital I told you of. It is in a desolate chateau consisting largely of underground passages where French officers
wander and is on the Marne. The guns are to be heard in the distance all day, and I was usually wakened in the morning by aeroplanes. In the stillness they fill the world with sound. The patients are children and women, either extremely wounded or destitute and ill. One little boy had his leg blown off by a shell at Rheims, and so on. The villages in that part are in a dreadful condition, some of them have about one house standing in fifty. They were destroyed by the Germans in their rush for Paris. There are thousands of Germans buried thereabout, and a grim notice has been issued on the Marne ordering all people to chain up their dogs at night. The dogs have taken to wandering and digging. The Germans stayed in the chateau but didn’t damage it.
The Highlands are very lonely this year. Almost every able bodied man seems to have gone, and we are alone in a big hotel. I was loath to come but it seemed best for M. and N. I am wondering whether Bron has gone yet. Give him my love, and do let me hear from you and how things are going at Wrest. I wish I could be walking up the steps at this moment and seeing you come down the stairs in your nurse’s garments. This is a big job you have taken on and trying to keep at it so long, but at any rate there is no doubt that it was worth doing…
Barrie also wrote to Elizabeth Lucas at the Chateau in Marne along the same lines – how all the Highlands were ‘denuded of their young men [and] there are scarcely any tourists’ and that he ‘had to knit my teeth to come away at all’, adding ‘Michael would like me to take him to the chateau but I suppose better not … Now I’m off to read
War and Peace.’
Towards the end of August the party struck out 100 miles south to Kimelford, a village beyond Oban and opposite Mull, in the area of Gleann Mor (Glenmore), close to another archipelago of islands and sea lochs.
Where the dam is today ran the famous Pass of Melfort, a mountain trail cut into the rock along which an open coach drawn by five horses would transport some twenty or more passengers from M’Gregor’s offices near the Station Hotel at Oban, southwards to Glenmore.
The journey to the Cuilfel Hotel in Kimelford – the seventeenth-century drover’s inn which was the Barrie party’s destination – was reckoned in those days to be fifteen miles from Oban but took two hours to reach. So narrow was the pass and high the walls and deeply laid the adjacent rushing river that it is not at all clear from surviving photographs how any vehicle coming in the opposite direction could do anything but turn back.
The Cuilfel offered deep-sea fishing off the coast as well as sea-fishing in the tidal Loch Melfort, and fresh water fishing up in the hills above the village, where a multitude of lochs were stocked by the Cuilfel with the much-prized Loch Leven and Fontinalle, or Great American Brook Trout.
John McFadyan was the keeper of the inn. Tennis and hot and cold baths were supplied ‘and all conveniences connected with hotels’, which may seem a little vague. Normally, local ghillies were supplied to take people across the road from the inn and up into the hills for the day, but once again Barrie appears to have been happy enough to take on that role.
On a warm, windy day in summer the hills above the Cuilfel are a heady potion of clover, ling, alpine meadow flowers, white and purple thistles, bog-loving bulrushes and grasses, the odd crimson foxglove, underscored by the pungent nutty scent of bracken – warm, wet; the scent of fertility. It is a gem of a place, sheep grazing on the sides of gentle, round-topped hills, with serene freshwater lochs, like Lapis Lazuli dropped in their midst. You never know when you will find another such jewel over the rise.
Perhaps the pastoral beauty reminded Barrie of a visit he’d made with Peter on short leave in June to Montgomeryshire in rural Wales, for it was now that Michael began pestering him to take him to meet a family which had for some time been referred to as the ‘Welsh Lewises’, so to distinguish them from the solicitor Lewises of Portland Place.
On 1 September, he wrote from the Cuilfel to Eveline, the mother of the Lewis household at Glan Hafren, the large, detached, listed property at Penstrowed, just outside Newtown, where the family lived:
Dear Mrs Lewis,
I wish there were a few more like you, but it is perhaps better that you should remain unique … It has been rather grim in Scotland this year. The Highlands in many glens are as bare of population owing to the war as if this were the month before Creation. I have just Michael and Nicholas with me and they feel it too, but they climb about, fishing mostly, and if you were to search the bogs you would find me in one of them loaded with waterproofs and ginger beer … I wish we could hurl ourselves straight upon Glan Hafren, but we shall be here till the 8th and that only gives us an exact week before Michael returns to school, and we need that time in London. It shows how much we must have talked of you that he (the dark and dour and impenetrable) has announced to me that he wants to go to see you. I was never so staggered.
He was ‘never so staggered’ because as Medina, one of the daughters of the Welsh Lewises later wrote, ‘Up to then, Michael’s one idea of a holiday seems to have been fishing in Scotland.’ A date
was fixed for Barrie, Michael and Nico to visit Glan Hafren the following Easter.
The Welsh Lewises were very Welsh and very Lewis, so that, for example, Eveline’s husband, Hugh Lewis (1860–1921) was the son of Lewis Lewis (the younger) and grandson of Lewis Lewis (the elder), who took over a tannery in Newtown, which became the family business.
Hugh had studied at Cambridge University before returning to help run the tannery, and married Eveline Griffiths, Headmistress of Newtown County Intermediate School for Girls, where Hugh was Chairman of the Governors.
Hugh and Eveline had three daughters and two sons, one of whom, Hugh Griffith Lewis Lewis, died just before his eleventh birthday. In descending order, the other children were: Katherine Medina (Medina), Janet Ellen (known as Eiluned, which became her pen name), Eveline Mary (May), and Hugh Peter Meredith (Peter).
Hugh and Eveline played a large part in the life of Montgomeryshire, now a part of Powys. He was High Sheriff in 1902–03, Chairman of the County Council from 1910 to 1918. Both were JPs and Eveline was a County Councillor. Both were very involved in the Montgomeryshire Liberal Party.
They came into Barrie’s circle after Hugh became embroiled in a tussle as Chairman of the Education Committee, which had disowned responsibility for the management of the elementary schools of the county. In the course of the disagreement, George Meredith wrote in Hugh’s support, they became friends, after a difficult moment when Meredith appeared to think that they had abused his friendship (he was not an easy man), and eventually Meredith accepted Hugh and Eveline’s invitation to become godfather to their youngest child, Peter.
Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote a book about George Meredith, was deeply envious of the intimacy they enjoyed with his subject, writing to Mrs Lewis:
It must have been a wonderful experience to hear G. M. talk. For 18 months I literally lived with him in my thoughts, until I almost felt that I had known him. And the more I studied him & his works the more I admired his character. I suppose he had rather a sharp tongue; but his actions seemed to show how generous and immensely courageous he was. Anyhow, you will find it all in my book!
Very likely it was Meredith who gave Peter a copy of his friend Barrie’s book,
The Little White Bird
. He may not have read it because Peter was the one who, on Meredith’s advice, was not to be burdened with the toil of learning to read until he turned seven. If so, Eveline read it to him and Peter liked it so much he made a drawing, which Eveline sent to Barrie towards the end of 1912 with only ‘Glan Hafren’ for a return address, not wanting to seem like an autograph hunter.
Wrote Peter later, ‘As a small boy I drew a picture which I called “The Long Walk taking the Broad Walk for an outing (in a pram)”. Eveline was amused and decided she would send it anonymously to Barrie. Somehow he managed to trace the sender and correspondence followed.’
Something about the letter persuaded Barrie to respond, which he did with a copy of
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
. Correspondence with Mrs Lewis led to Barrie taking Peter Davies to visit the family in September 1914, when Peter was on short leave from Sheerness and after Michael had returned to Eton.