The Real Peter Pan (25 page)
Read The Real Peter Pan Online
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
Nanny became increasingly concerned. But what could she do? Her loyalty to Arthur and Sylvia remained as strong as ever, she could not bring the family into disrepute by taking her fears to someone outside. Anyway, who would listen? But something had to be done.
When Nico went as a boarder to Eton in 1916, she had decided to offer her resignation. Barrie saw immediately that that would not do. He did all in his power to persuade her to stay. She agreed reluctantly.
Then all of a sudden, on 24 June 1917 – Midsummer’s Day – he moved from his flat on the third floor of Adelphi Terrace House (fifth if you looked at it from the Embankment side) to a studio
apartment on the top floor of the same building, large enough to accommodate Michael and Nico.
No expense was spared in its redesign by Edwin Lutyens. A large study room ran the length of the apartment to huge casement windows looking out over the Thames, making it even more like the Captain’s bridge than the flat below.
The walls were mahogany-panelled. Large brown wooden bookshelves were installed. The overall impression was one of brown-ness. Immediately to the right on entry was a large inglenook fireplace, into which Barrie, at just over five feet, could wander without bending and tuck himself away on a hard settle, to read in the light of a log fire. The floor of the room was covered with matting, and later rugs chosen by Michael. In one corner stood a polished iron stove, where Barrie liked to brew tea when his manservant was not in attendance.
‘Somehow the apartment seems just like him,’ wrote a visitor.
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Dark, bookish, imposing, hard, it would not be out of place in the opening scene of
Faust
as the ‘high-vaulted, narrow Gothic chamber’ where we first see the scholar sitting restless at his desk.
Without consulting Nanny, Barrie arranged for Jack and his new wife, who were married in September, to take over the running of Campden Hill Square.
When the young couple arrived, Nanny, unprepared and piqued at the assault on her authority, turned her back on the young couple and refused to speak to Gerrie, who was to take her place. Jack was furious, but Nico and Michael wouldn’t have a word said against her.
Nanny refused to talk to Gerrie. Tensions ran wild between the two factions. Matters became fraught.
Then one night Nanny pushed a note under the door of Jack’s bedroom, which read: ‘Things have been going on in this room of which your father would not have approved.’
It is not known what Jack made of it, but the response within the family was shameful. Gerrie later recalled that Edward Coles, husband of May du Maurier, and therefore Michael’s uncle, read the note and quipped: ‘She probably heard the bed squeaking.’
A joke in bad taste, but the likelihood was that sex was the last thing going on in that room. Much more likely, given Nanny’s choice of phrase and the plays Barrie and Michael were now engaged in – one about George coming back from the dead, and the other about Sylvia – is that the ‘things’ going on in the room of which Arthur would not have approved, were séances. Would Nanny have stood by for so long had Barrie and Michael been having sex? I think not!
But why did no one do anything? ‘Because they were intimidated,’ said Gerrie to Andrew Birkin in 1975. ‘All the other relations said they were intimidated.’
Certainly, Barrie could be intimidating if it suited him. We have already met with Dolly Ponsonby’s wariness of him, the alarming way he ‘sees right through one’. Mackail recalled that he would meet your conversation with an expression ‘horribly like a sneer … Oh, yes, we have suffered. No, don’t let’s remember … the faint, Caledonian grunt with which our desperate observations are received.’
There’s a wonderful description by the cricket writer Neville Cardus in his autobiography
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of a weekend he spent in Barrie’s Adelphi apartment a couple of years after Michael’s death, interesting because it gives us Barrie as he was at his most intimidating. Nico described it as ‘vividly true and to me extremely funny’.
Cardus had written to Barrie about Kathleen Kilfoyle, a young actress he had seen playing Mary Rose. When Barrie replied, he told Cardus he had for years been reading his books and articles on cricket and invited him to Adelphi Terrace. Cardus accepted. By this time, Barrie’s butler, Harry Brown, had been replaced by Frank Thurston.
Cardus arrived on a Friday evening and was shown to his bedroom by Thurston.
This Thurston I have subsequently found out was a grand and sterling character, he spoke various languages, and would correct any loose statements about Ovid that he chanced to overhear while he was serving dinner. He had a ghostly face; he was from a Barrie play – so was Barrie, and the flat, and everything in it; the enormous cavern of a fireplace, the wooden settle and old tongs and bellows, and the sense the place gave you that the walls might be walked through if you had been given the secret. Barrie trudged the room smoking a pipe; on the desk lay another pipe already charged, ready for immediate service; he coughed as he trudged and smoked, a cruel cough that provoked a feeling of physical pain in my chest; and his splutterings and gaspings and talk struggled on one from the other.
At last he came to sit facing me in front of the smouldering logs, and for a while the silence was broken by groans only to be heard in our two imaginations – the groans of men separated for ever by a chasm of shyness and uneasiness. Until midnight we lingered on. He offered me no refreshment. Thurston apparently went home to sleep each night. Or perhaps he merely dematerialised. Barrie knew I had dined on the train, but a nightcap would have been fortifying to me, I am sure; for already the spell of the flat high amongst the roofs of Adelphi was gripping me.
Next morning, having been given the information, ‘unnecessarily as I still think’, that it was Michael’s room he’d been sleeping in, Thurston came into his bedroom with tea and showed Cardus the bathroom, ‘the most unkept I have ever known’.
The towels were damp and soiled; and round about the shelves were one or two shaving brushes congealed in ancient soap. A rusty razor blade on a window ledge was historical. Barrie had his private bathroom; the unclean towels puzzled me. Was it the custom to bring your own towels when staying with distinguished people for a weekend? I dried myself as best I could, and now Thurston directed me to the breakfast-room, where he attended to me in complete silence.
On the Sunday, after a dinner party the previous night enlivened occasionally by E. V. Lucas’s ‘low chuckles’, Thurston again served tea in his bedroom and informed him that Barrie had gone away until Monday. Cardus spent the day in the parks, dined in Soho and let himself into the flat just before midnight.
Not a sound. A cold collation had been laid for me on the table, with a bottle of hock and a silver box of cigarettes. I explored the bookcases, almost on tiptoe; there was a row of volumes of the Scottish philosophers – Hume, Mackintosh, Hamilton. I sat at Barrie’s desk but got up immediately for fear I might be caught in the act. The great chimney corner, with no fire in it, glowered at me.
At breakfast, to his surprise, he was met by Barrie’s sister Maggie, who invited him in her boudoir on the Tuesday evening to take part in a little musical ‘conversazione’.
On the Monday night he was met again with a bottle of hock and
light meal, but this time, as he sipped his wine in the cold silence of the flat, he heard the lift arriving outside the flat door and the metal concertina gates opening, ‘and presently the door opened and a young man entered, in a dinner jacket’.
Without a sign of curiosity at my presence or at the absence of others, he remarked to me that it had been a lovely day. He sat on a couch, smoked a cigarette, and talked for a few minutes about the cricket at Lord’s; he hadn’t yet been able to look in at the match himself, but he had enjoyed my account of Saturday’s play in the ‘M. C.’ I was liking him very much when he arose, and with an apology left the room and the flat. To this day I do not know who he was – probably young Simon out of
Mary Rose.
The following night Barrie was present but excused himself from his sister’s musical ‘conversazione’ as he was tone deaf. However, he took Cardus to Maggie’s boudoir, ‘remotely Victorian in fragrance and appearance [with] an upright piano with a fluted silk front’, before escaping. There followed a rendering of a work of Maggie’s own, entitled
1914–1918
, ‘with a battle section in the middle and a finale of bells and thanksgiving. She next sang a number of Scotch songs in an expressive if wan voice. When the music was over she asked me about my early life and of my struggles.’
Next morning Maggie was at breakfast waiting for him and admitted to having been ‘in communication with my mother “on the other side” and that my mother and she had loved one another at once, and that my mother was proud of me and that they, the two of them, would watch over and take care of me. I was naturally ready to perspire with apprehension.’
Thurston then appeared and brought one scene to an end and the final one into focus. Barrie wished to say goodbye before Cardus left.
He was in bed in a bandbox of a room, bare and uncomfortable – what little I could see of it through thick tobacco smoke, for his pipe was in full furnace as he lay there, frail in pyjamas, like a pygmy with one of those big pantomime heads. He hoped I had enjoyed my stay and would come again; the flat was open to me at any time: I had only to give him short notice. Thurston carried my suitcase down the lift cage. He got me a taxi. In my highly emotional condition – feeling I had emerged from another dimension, and only just emerged – I forgot to tip him.
W
HEN NEVILLE CARDUS’S
long weekend was over he concluded: ‘I prefer my Barrie plays on the stage in front of me, where I can see what they are doing.’ But those closer to him were ‘on stage’ most of the time.
After nothing happened when Nanny passed the note under Jack’s bedroom door, she issued an ultimatum to Gerrie to leave Campden Hill Square. She and Jack repaired to a Knightsbridge hotel, where Gerrie suffered a miscarriage. Nanny broke down, resigned and refused compensation of £1,000, made up of £500 left to her in Sylvia’s will and £500 put up by Barrie.
On 20 January 1918, from Tillington in Sussex, where Barrie had taken Michael and Nico to stay with E. V. Lucas and Audrey (Lucas had by this time separated from his wife Elizabeth) Michael wrote to Nanny in an effort to conclude the whole dreadful business. He expressed the fear that it was a callous letter, but there is a certain maturity here, which at least wrapped the whole thing up, and before we reach judgement on his style we should remember our innocence of the often-patronising way family–staff relations were dealt with in those days.
Michael is not disloyal to Barrie, although his hand in the whole business lurks beneath the surface of the letter. He doesn’t give the impression that it was his adoptive father’s deeply laid strategy that brought him to Adelphi Terrace, and yet he attends to Nanny’s fears of what will become of him there with telling candour: ‘As to whether going and living at [Barrie’s] flat will be worse for Nico and me, that rests with our own strength of mind, don’t it – and particularly with mine I believe.’
My dear Mary,
Do you mind if I try to reduce the painfulness of things by putting them down here in writing? I believe I can do it.
I am assuming that matters have gone too far to turn back now, though whose fault I will not say, tho’ I shrewdly suspect it had a little to do with everybody.
Before going any further, let me assure you with the utmost assurance that it will not be at all possible for Nico and me to continue living at 23 with Jack & his wife – as you suggested. The proof lies in the last three weeks, whatever you say. This may be hard luck on Jack, but the fact remains, & when a man marries, his family is the
one he is setting up for himself. You yourself said that Jack is having too much done for him [by Barrie]. That is so, so why sh’d he be allowed to go on in this easy way, undisturbed and disturbing?
It w’d be hardly possible for us to go on living at 23 even without Jack and Gerrie, unless you came back. As to this last it rests with your ‘pride’, & with your opinion as to the importance of maintaining 23 as a home for Nico. (I hope all this doesn’t sound callous. You know me too well to make that mistake.)
The present scheme I believe is to let things remain undecided for a month or two, so as to see which way to turn. As to whether going and living at the flat will be worse for Nico and me, that rests with our own strength of mind, don’t it – and particularly with mine I believe.
And of course the chief reason of 23’s importance was that you were there – & – do not say I am wrong – I am sure we shall see very nearly if not as much of you as before. Let us weigh the past with the future:
Past. We have seen you only in the holidays, which has not been very much. We have written about once a week or so (when old Nico could be roused).
Future. Of course we shall write as much if not more (when I can rouse old Nico). And in the holidays – mind you! – you’re to come with your gingham & take up your quarters in the attic we’ll have ready for you – if only to see my mustache grow! And besides that you will overcome yr dislike of travelling, & be dragged off in the summer holidays, or whenever we do disappear in the wilds. And – mind you! – this is absolutely serious – none of your absurd ideas of pride or absurd ideas of Uncle Jim not wanting you! That’s what I call false pride, & harmful at that. Think how glad he’ll be to get us off his hands for a time!
This frivolousness of pen really hides the most serious inwardness I’ve ever had. I’m going to draw up a form for you to sign.
The chief sadness this week then is the leaving of 23, & that was bound to come, so don’t let us be cowards.
Also – & I know this is not my business at all – do take that paltry thousand to please Nico & me, if only to start a social revolution! We’d have made it a billion only that’s not a billionth part enough. I know it’s twice as hard for you as it is for us, and that’s precious hard. Nico is unaware of the state of affairs, so please Mary don’t make it harder by refusing anything.
AU REVOIR.
MICHAEL.
Nine days later, Barrie wrote to Elizabeth Lucas:
Michael’s letter to Audrey has told you of our adventures at Tillington where we had a very happy time, and M. discovered an old shop at Petworth and triumphantly bought a soap-dish for his room here. That room is not finished yet, indeed three rooms are still in confusion, which will give you some idea of the difficulties with workmen nowadays. I have got into the study now, however, and at last the chimney behaves and certainly it is a very attractive room, and the little kitchen off it is good too. I had begun to feel in my bones tho’ that it was all too fine a flat for me and that for my lonely purposes all I really needed was this room and the bedroom. Brown could have done for me so, and I had quite planned letting the rest with its own door. However the way has been cleared by trouble at Campden Hill. Mary is going sometime in February.
Michael was now co-editing the
Eton Chronicle
. On 29 March, Barrie wrote a little sadly about how he was missing him:
Dearest Michael,
Pretty lonely here for this week-end, ‘Bank holidays’ are always loneliness personified to me, but I think that you & Nico are almost on the way [home] and rejoice with great joy. Nico said you might get off on Monday after all, but I’m not counting on it, too good to be true. I got your dressing-table out [of No. 23] all right & have been trying various plans to make the rooms nice. I have brought a few – very few – things from 23, but of course everything I’ve done is very open to re-arrangement – in fact it is wanted. The Red Cross sale catalogue is just out & is a most interesting volume as you will see. The sale begins on the 8th … We can go to Christie’s and see the things before the 8th. Your account of the boys’ musical in the
Chronicle
makes me want to see the M.S. thereof. Would it be possible for you to get the loan of it?
Loving,
JMB
By Easter 1918, Michael and Nico were installed at Adelphi Terrace, and Barrie was hard at work on
Mary Rose.
Barrie’s oddly unsettling corruption of Hogg’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Kilmeny’ poem, began during the 1912 holiday at Amhuinnsuidhe and was now to be filtered into
Mary Rose
by means of Barrie’s archaic idea of the ‘little gods … tricky spirits’ that looked after him.
They first appear in the play as ‘seekers’ responsible for making ‘the call’ to Mary on the island at Voshimid – ‘soft whisperings from holes in the ground – “Mary Rose, Mary Rose”.’ Then ‘in a fury as of storm and whistling winds that might be an unholy organ [which] rushes upon the island, raking every bush for her. These sounds
increase rapidly in volume till the mere loudness of them is horrible,’ writes Barrie in the stage directions to the play.
They have a counterpart – ‘You have forgotten the call,’ says Harry to his mother in the end. ‘It was as if, in a way, there were two kinds of dogs out hunting you – the good and the bad.’
‘Unseen devils’ appear and disappear time and again in the play, and they are not confined to Barrie’s script. A seeker is ‘one that keeps step, as soft as snow’ with each of us, and if, like Michael, your ‘childhood may have been overfull of gladness; they [the seekers] don’t like that’, wrote Barrie in 1922.
Before long Michael was himself writing a poem from a Scottish island in which ‘the white mists eddied, trailed and spun like seekers’, and Daphne, who came under Barrie’s influence strongly after Michael’s death, would, far in the future, write a poem called ‘Another World’ in which they are ‘the loathly keepers of the netherland’ and she hears ‘their voices whisper me from sleep’.
Daphne leaves us in no doubt that this is a different Neverland to the one Hogg ascribes to Kilmeny, rather the nightmare one of Barrie’s own gloomy imagination, but it is impossible to be sure to what degree he deliberately darkened Michael’s mind or believed what he impressed upon him. He was, as Peter wrote, such ‘a fantasy-weaver that anyone he made much of ended up by either playing up to him or clearing out’.
The author Jon Savage
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concluded that the Barrie boys, whose lives had been ‘filleted’ for Barrie’s plays, had been the subject of an ‘act of transference, if not possession’ by Barrie. If you can make people believe something of your dream, it will cleave to their perception of reality. Every magician, every religious leader, every politician knows
this to be the case. But Michael had the literary image to hand that explained his situation best. As ‘the foster-child of Silence and slow Time’ held on the sculpted surface of Keats’s beautiful Grecian urn, Michael was trapped within Barrie’s morbid works.
In the opening stage direction to
Mary Rose
, Barrie explains that what the resurrected Mary Rose cannot tell us of ‘what only the dead should know’ is available for us all to see in the ‘disturbing smile’ of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. Two years later he pointed to Michael as the one who ‘half knows’ this secret – ‘something of which [his fellows] know nothing – the secret that is hidden in the face of the Mona Lisa’.
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Once, lingering long in the lonesome hills of Amhuinnsuidhe, Michael’s smile had been closer to the beauteous visage of the mythical maiden caught by Hogg in ‘Kilmeny’ than to the Mona Lisa’s ironic, or as Barrie would have it ‘cynical’ smirk, almost a sneer. But because of the gloom inherent in having as one’s keeper a man who wandered over his world ‘lone as incarnate death’, the boy was rapidly fulfilling Barrie’s projection of him as ‘the dark and dour and impenetrable’.
The nature of the gloom under which he lived is nowhere more obviously found than in the story of Mary Rose, whose ghost prowls about the cold house looking for her son, ‘searching, searching, searching’, just as Michael once prowled around the house searching in his nightmares for ‘the old enemy. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking,’ Barrie wrote. ‘I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me…’
Not only had Barrie elected to write a play about summoning up a dead mother to visit her son, a woman whose role he had usurped,
but he had co-opted the son in the venture and connected his mother’s state of mind to his experience of nightmare. There was a storm cloud gathering. Even while he was moving into Adelphi Terrace, life was becoming increasingly dark for Michael.
Meanwhile, the War Office was still asking for more men.
Michael’s housemaster Macnagthen recorded that his star pupil was not faring well under the pressure, though Macnaghten didn’t know the half of it: ‘It was a time of great strain: the war was still raging; his friend Roger Senhouse, who was half a year older, had left, and Michael was uncertain whether to stay on another Half. He was obviously unwell.’
In the middle of May, Macnaghten called Barrie down to talk things over. Michael told them he wanted to leave at the end of the summer term. He was going to enlist in the Scots Guards and at the end of the war, he was going to study art in Paris, as his grandfather du Maurier had done before him.
Barrie had wanted him to try for the Cambridge scholarship, but taken by surprise by his frank and forthright message it was arranged that Michael would leave Eton at the end of the Half.
The regiment was Peter’s idea. He had written on more than one occasion that Michael shouldn’t underestimate what it was like for an Etonian in the ranks: ‘Without accusing myself of snobbishness, I feel in this battalion like a survivor of a dead race, and sometimes wonder if I’m being pedantic when I speak the dialect which is my native tongue.’
Peter’s concern reminds us of a significant aspect of life in 1918, the class war. Michael was an
ingenu
when it came to the big wide world. Also, he was increasingly forthright in his approach to people. It was Peter’s view that his life would have been made miserable by the more streetwise squaddies.
So, he would join the Scots Guards. But not before one last summer holiday with rod and gun this time (good practice at the expense of the grouse): Edgerston and Tomdoun again: ‘Leading a bucolic life up here,’ reads a letter from Barrie to Gilmour.
The great event is going out in a dog-cart to bring home the lamb. We won the lamb in a raffle, but always when we go for it, it is ‘up in the hills’, so we keep going. Fine hay crop, but no fishing owing to the want of rain. Michael shoots grouse. He will be going to Bushey for Scots Guards in November … The war news heartens one up a bit.
Meanwhile, Michael was persuaded to think again about leaving Eton. ‘Subsequently,’ wrote Macnaghten,
he wrote in the quiet of the holidays asking if he might return. He was welcomed back, and the record of his last Half is, ‘A wonderful Captain [he was made Head of House]: he worries, but his judgment is unerring, and his actions swift as lightning: the most admirable boy who has ever been in the house.’
And then in October the war was obviously ending – Bulgaria, Turkey, then Austria bailed out, and on 9 November the Kaiser abdicated. It was over.
Michael had been spared.