The Real Peter Pan (21 page)
Read The Real Peter Pan Online
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
The two eldest girls, Medina and Eiluned, were also away at
boarding school in Wimbledon at the time, but Barrie and Peter met Hugh and Eveline and the other two children, May and Peter, and thoroughly enjoyed the warm Welsh family atmosphere, likening it to the idyllic rural life of Dr Primrose, his wife Deborah and their six children in Goldsmith’s minor classic,
The Vicar of Wakefield
.
Meredith had died in 1909, so he couldn’t have had a hand in progressing the relationship between the two families, although it is of course possible that he had earlier confided in Barrie that he was Peter Lewis’s godfather. But there was a clear rationale for the meeting to happen on another level.
Wrote Medina: ‘I think that these holiday visits, which meant such an enormous amount to us, were also welcome to the boys, for as Eiluned has said they provided a background of family life, complete with sisters of their own age, which the boys had not known before…’
What’s more, Wales was the Llewelyn Davies’s native land. Barrie was in a very real sense bringing them home – home into a world that hadn’t changed in centuries and was not noticeably changed by the advent of war.
Unlike in other parts of the country, life at Glan Hafren continued more or less unimpaired.
Our coachman and gardeners were old, so not called up, and there were no munition works at hand to absorb our few maids. We had kept our horses and carriages, and were still able to get about, while so many other households – with only cars – were immobile. We did not farm but kept cows, chickens and pigs for our own use, so food was never short.
All this combined with the clear benefit of a traditional family
environment, which Barrie will have sensed Michael would enjoy, that led him to take the step (most unusual for him) of pursuing contact with the Lewises.
It should also be said that Eveline shared Barrie’s interest in the paranormal, which was then being re-examined in the new terminology of modern psychology.
There are letters from Eveline to, among others, the philosopher H. H. Price, Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford, and to Whateley Carrington, who was a parapsychologist with a particular interest in telepathy.
According to the family, Eveline herself was telepathic. Her letter discussed ideas put forward by Maurice Maeterlink in
The Unknown Guest
(1914). Carrington was riveted by her theory that linked ‘the telepathic, etc, phenomena with the concept of Deity, via what I should call the Common Subconscious or Mind or Spirit of Man’, as he wrote.
He corresponded with the Society for Psychical Research on her behalf: ‘She adopts the hypothesis of what we should now call a Common Subconscious … of virtually unlimited knowledge and powers, with which the individual “finite” mind may somehow or other “make contact”.’
Her idea seems to have been that the ‘Common Subconscious’ (what Eveline actually referred to as the ‘Infinite Unconscious’) can be a means of communication beyond the space-time continuum – in telepathy (in the present with another living person), in séance (with the past), in precognition with the future.
Dealing with phantasms and the like, Mrs Lewis writes: ‘We may take as an example of the point of contact some such simple idea as the perception of a room or place in which the individual is at the
time. Immediately the contact is made his idea of the room becomes enlarged by some addition from the Infinite Consciousness. This addition may be borrowed from the past or the future … Thus the individual may become suddenly conscious of some scene formerly enacted in that spot, or he may have a prophetic vision of events that are to come.’
How this connects with the concept of deity is that we live a kind of epiphytic existence on the Infinite Unconscious, which is more or less a projection of what people understand by the Deity. The psychiatrist Carl Jung later came up with a not dissimilar idea when ‘translating’ the work of German theologian Meister Eckhart into modern psychoanalytical terms.
There is no evidence that Eveline had read du Maurier, but the latter’s notion of a ‘sixth sense’, which survives after death, with its infinite knowledge and powers, is accommodated within her ideas, and Peter Ibbetson and Mimsey Seraskier’s plumbing of the mysteries of the Infinite Unconscious in their communication with past, present and future, which is at one point joyously telepathic, is precisely Eveline’s preoccupation.
So, Eveline understood the du Maurier family myth, which was one very good reason why their meeting was such a success.
It wasn’t long before the members of the Lewis family absent from their first meeting in 1915 were invited to Adelphi Terrace. On 20 June, Peter Davies wrote to Peter Lewis a playful letter after their visit, which also contained the information that ‘your mother and father and two sisters are coming to tea this afternoon’, Medina and Eiluned on leave from their Wimbledon boarding school.
So, Barrie had met the entire Lewis family by Easter 1916 when Michael and Nico were introduced to them for the first time. Yet,
according to Medina, it had been obvious that Barrie was anxious that the holiday might yet be a failure. Probably he was worried about how Michael would react, for in company that bored him he could be as moody as Barrie himself.
He needn’t have worried. All the children got on brilliantly. ‘Glan Hafren had never seen such days,’ wrote Peter Lewis.
As well as riding and occasional fishing, there were competitions in croquet and tennis (carefully drawn so that if possible each one of the Lewises would win in turn). There were also fancy dress teas. I can remember [my father] Hugh dressed in a genuine Chinese costume and Sir James appearing in a dressing gown and large cosy from the spare room with Dwr Poeth (warm water) embroidered in silk. Sir James became devoted to Eveline until he died.
Michael and Nico were at Glan Hafren again in September, without Barrie this time, and Michael wrote thanking Eveline on the 17th, as soon as they were home.
Dear Mrs Lewis,
We reached Paddington in safety, & y’day evening Sir Jas went off to Wrest [Nan Herbert’s hospital]. He is returning today. Thank you so much for the lovely time you gave us – I feel I ought to write to every one of you, but will you thank everyone for me. Nico is going to make an attempt to write.
… I am sending Medina a little letter for the Levanian [the magazine of Levana School, Wimbledon]. I hope she accepts it, as it is not so very often that I get my little things accepted. It’ll probably be the old old story. ‘Dear Sir, I fear the Levanian has no great use
for yr style of work, spicy and vivacious tho’ it be. Yrs very sincerely, K Medina Lewis, Editor Levanian.’
Please give my love to Mr Lewis and Medina, and Jane, and May, and Peter, and Sir John, and Peregrine,
Yrs Michael Llewelyn Davies
Michael got on with everyone, but especially Eiluned, whom he now addressed in his letters as Jane rather than Janet or any one of the variety of nicknames (besides Eiluned), from which he could have chosen – Luned, Bittie or Bits among them. She had been christened Janet Ellen but didn’t like either, and Michael wanted his own name for her. She was just five months younger than he.
In the 1970s, in response to a question about whether Michael ever had a girlfriend, Nico recommended Andrew Birkin, who was researching his film
J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys
to get in touch with Eiluned: ‘I’ve no idea whether she and Michael even held hands, but she might well have a clue as to his feelings towards girls.’
Eiluned was the one who perceived the true spirit of Glan Hafren and in her thirties captured it in a bestselling novel,
Dew on the Grass
(1934), still in print today. She was a poet as well as a novelist, and a journalist who rose to become assistant editor of the
Sunday Times.
Dew on the Grass
is the story of a rural childhood based on her own at Glan Hafren. It is an evocation of a lost world – not only of childhood, but of a whole way of living in rural Wales as she was growing up, when the year revolved around the seasons, the village, the church and the festivals. It was, as A. E. Housman put it in
A
Shropshire Lad,
a ‘land of lost content’, a land in which time stood still, life was one endless summer day and Eiluned was borne along by its very current.
There is little of Housman’s melancholia here, only Eiluned’s strikingly clear, joyous remembrance of what it was like to be Lucy, an imaginative little girl of nine years of age growing up in rural Montgomeryshire in the first decade of the twentieth century: a wholly natural, idyllic environment of which she and her three siblings – Delia (eleven), Maurice (six) and Miriam (three) – were intensely aware, but never consciously so.
For Lucy there was ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ and the latter ‘was often the most important of the two’.
Like when she drew imaginary pictures on the ceiling with one finger – pictures of knights on horseback, and ladies with flying hair, running, running as fast as they could through haunted woods … ‘They said that she looked like a half-wit, lying in bed, waggling her finger at the ceiling; but the moment they were out of the room she began again…’
Like playing games of hide and seek with her sisters and friends from the village in the endless garden and outbuildings – hiding in the coach-house terrified that ‘a groping hand might suddenly touch you, dreading the flight and pursuit: feet running behind, drawing nearer every minute…’ Knowing that it was ‘something infinitely disastrous that would catch you in the end’, but then becoming so lost in thought in the dark that time did stand still, and when they found her it was by the light of lanterns and the game was long over and the visiting children had gone home.
Like knotting a skipping rope around your waist so that it resembled a cartridge belt, drawing the elastic of your hat on to your chin, and choosing a pea-stick to become Hawk-Eye, Leather Jacket and La Longue Carabine in James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans
, which in those days of great adventure (before television) all children were reading, even girls.
Like playing with a pretend friend, Joseph, who when you went for walks and people said, ‘What a beautiful view,’ preferred ‘the muddy lanes that go twisting in and out, and the little trees blown crooked in the wind, and water where it lies on top of a weir and curves over the edge, gently, gently, before it goes crashing down below’.
Like writing plays for your brother and sisters to act out and poems to recite – ‘conscientious rather than inspired’ – always laughing and dancing, sometimes spontaneously for joy, and sometimes for the travelling harpist John Roberts, who, when he was through, turned his harp ‘a little towards the south-west, so that we heard a faint sighing in the strings as the breeze swept through them and passed on its way’.
Among her many poems, Eiluned wrote ‘The Birthright’, which puts what she laid before Michael at Glan Hafren perfectly:
We who were born
In country places,
Far from cities
And shifting faces,
We have a birthright
No man can sell,
And a secret joy
No man can tell.
For we are kindred
To lordly things,
The wild duck’s flight
And the white owl’s wings;
To pike and salmon,
To bull and hors
e,
The curlew’s cry
And the smell of gorse.
Pride of trees,
Swiftness of streams,
Magic of frost
Have shaped our dreams:
No baser vision
Their spirit fills
Who walk by right
On the naked hills.
Eiluned’s older sister Medina wrote modestly that the contact with JMB and the boys meant an enormous amount to them ‘in our quiet country life, broken only by boarding school. Of course to them, with their far wider circle, it meant much, much less.’
This was not the case for either Michael or Nico.
Nico was the life and soul of the games and wrote nostalgically to Eveline more than thirty years later, ‘Bless you for those many happy memories you were largely responsible for giving me…’
When Michael first arrived at Glan Hafren he was fifteen. Had he found Eiluned as a younger child, they would have been dubbed the heavenly twins. Now that he could reflect on his early youth, he believed, as he had just written in the
Eton Chronicle,
that the only true pleasure is happiness coming unconsciously from within. He loved Eiluned’s still-unconscious empathy with all that was beautiful about Glan Hafren. Children were children for longer in remote rural parts and Eiluned had lost nothing of her innocent charm. Though she and Medina were in their young teens, their mother told Medina years later that ‘watching
us on the lawn one day JMB had remarked, “It is so innocent, it almost hurts.”’
Michael’s short piece in the
Chronicle
in February had been about ‘pleasure –
voluptus
’. He’d quoted Keats, from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in support of the idea that pleasure pursued for its own sake must always ‘leave a heart high, sorrowful and cloyed’, and cited Maurice Maeterlink’s 1908 play about the Blue Bird (the ancient mythical harbinger of happiness) in support of the idea that true happiness is unconscious, and can only be found at home.
Now here was Eiluned at home, the epitome of all that he had written about happiness unconsciously pursued. When writing his ‘pleasure’ piece he’d had in mind the happiness he felt in the Scottish Highlands fly fishing. Now, at Glan Hafren, Michael had found a similar happiness, for the first time since his mother’s death, in female form.
He was over the original pain of his mother’s death. ‘It is a common phrase, “to indulge in the luxury of tears”,’ the fifteen-year-old wrote, ‘but until that luxury has been indulged in, it is not possible to realise how expensive this form of pleasure may become.’