The Real Peter Pan (3 page)

M
ICHAEL , THE FOURTH
of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was born on 16 June 1900, at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of what were once the private gardens of Kensington Palace.

Sylvia was a du Maurier, the third of five children born to Emma and George du Maurier. Her father had risen from a penurious and rootless childhood to become a famous cartoonist, notably for the society pages of
Punch
magazine, and the author of three bestselling novels:
Peter Ibbetson
(1891),
Trilby
(1894) and
The Martian
(1896).

Before he had found fame on
Punch
, he had trained as an artist in Paris, smoked opium, exercised his beautiful tenor voice and engaged
in séances and experiments in hypnotism. Arriving in London in 1860, he shared an apartment with James McNeill Whistler, mixed with Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Rossetti, Millais and Edward Burne-Jones and became something of a touchstone in London's literary and artistic community, with Henry James his closest friend.

Sylvia was her father's favourite child. Brought up in an enlightened, bohemian atmosphere at New Grove House on the edge of sprawling Hampstead Heath, high above the city, she was ‘a graceful beauty, her charm enhanced by the endearing crookedness of her mouth and a tip-tilted nose', according to the biographer Diana Farr.
7

Sylvia's unusual beauty, charm and grace, matched by a mocking wit and sense of fun, were already welcomed in London society when, at twenty-three, she first met Arthur, her future husband. They were the perfect foil to Arthur's dark good looks and more serious demeanour: ‘We used to think he was a young warrior in an Italian picture,' the composer Sir Hubert Parry, a family friend, once said of him.

Three years older than Sylvia and a rising barrister, Arthur was the second of seven children of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies and his wife, Mary. The family home was miles to the north in Kirkby Lonsdale, a village between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.

The Llewelyn Davieses were Christian, highbrow, but politically progressive. Arthur's father had been President of the Cambridge Union and more recently Chaplain to Queen Victoria. Ottoline Morrell, one of the original Bloomsbury set, wrote of him:

Besides the intellectual prowess and unsympathetic manner, the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies was an original member of the famous Alpine Club, and was the first to climb the highest peak within the Swiss frontier (the Dom, 14,911 feet). He was also a supporter of women's rights and workers' rights, a champion of trade unionism and had nerve enough to lambast imperialism from the pulpit while the Queen herself was in the congregation – the reason he found himself living hundreds of miles to the north in 1889 as Rector of Kirkby Lonsdale.

Dolly Parry, one of Sir Hubert's daughters, wrote of the appointment:

For his part, John Llewelyn Davies was never in the least bitter and grew to love Kirkby and his walks over the Fells, where he turned the vicarage into a hive of reformatory endeavour.

Dolly's close association with the family had begun with her mother's great liking and admiration for Arthur's sister, Margaret, who was General Secretary of the Women's Co-operative Guild from 1889 to 1922. The intellectual and social achievements of the Llewelyn Davieses knew no bounds. Arthur's Aunt Emily founded Girton College, Cambridge, and his own list of accomplishments, before being called to the Bar, included Junior and Senior Scholarships at Marlborough School (a major English public school), Minor and Foundation Trinity Scholarships at Cambridge University, where he took a First Class Degree in the Classical Tripos and won the Lebas Essay Prize in 1884, the First Whewell International Law Scholarship in 1887 Law, and the Inner Temple Pupil Scholarship in Common Law in 1889.

His brothers Crompton and Theodore had both been Apostles at Cambridge – members of a secret society to which only select undergraduates were elected and which would shortly include the philosopher G. E. Moore (
Principia Ethica
), the poet Rupert Brooke, and many members of the Bloomsbury set, such as John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his brother James.

Crompton's story is an especially adventurous one. He became a successful lawyer, friend of Lloyd George and supporter of Sinn Féin and married Moya O'Connor, an attractive, dynamic woman who smuggled guns during the War of Independence and was reputed to have been one of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins' many lovers. Crompton actually helped Collins draft the Free State constitution and knew him well. After he was ambushed and shot through the head in August 1922, Crompton was
appointed Arbitrator and Inspector General in Land Matters for the Free State.

Arthur and Sylvia were a handsome couple with diverse and attractive strains in their character and background, which seemed to predict a lasting, dovetail attraction between them, rather than any serious kind of conflict, and a rich harvest of possibility for the generations to follow.

Fate, in the shape of Mr Barrie, was to determine otherwise.

M
OST AFTERNOONS FROM
his house at 133 Gloucester Road, James Matthew Barrie, a boyish figure with a round, full, sensitive-looking head and a faraway look in his eyes, would make his way by means of Palace Gate on the south side of the Kensington Gardens on to the Broad Walk, dressed in overcoat and scarf to protect his chest. His constant pipe-smoking had produced a ticklish cough, which friends associated with him as surely as his thick, high-pitched Scottish accent.

At this stage a bowler hat and a stick completed the ensemble, creating an image strangely like that of Charlie Chaplin, the south London export to Hollywood whom Barrie would later entertain at
home and invite to play Peter Pan on film (which, alas, never happened). Like Barrie, Chaplin was short, although at five feet five he had one and a half inches on the little writer.

In those days, the Kensington Gardens were wild, the paths rougher than they are today; and it was quieter: no bandstand even played. It was ‘a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees’, as one regular user described it, and although in the distance one could just hear the rumble of horse-drawn vehicles along the Bayswater Road, on the northern border, it was a peaceful, rural retreat, remote from metropolitan London, which swept past it. There were even sheep grazing there.

Entering the gardens from the south with his pretty young actress wife, Mary Ansell, and huge St Bernard dog, Barrie came at once upon the main north–south axis of the gardens. The Broad Walk was nanny-central between two and four in the afternoon, when Kensington Gardens was commandeered by a number of young, middle-and upper-class children, many of the latter gathering in the more select area at the top of the Walk, called The Figs.

All perambulators seemed Gardens-bound then, although there were fewer people than you would see there today, and at first the Barries would walk in some solitude with their gigantic companion and, as they liked to do, play hide-and-seek and countless other games for a St Bernard’s delight.

Porthos, for that was his name – vast, gentle and apparently melancholy, but not really – was more or less the child that they never had.

After their marriage in 1894, which followed three nervous breakdowns and an emergency dash by Mary Ansell to Barrie’s bedside in the family home at Kirriemuir, ostensibly for a last goodbye, Barrie made a lightning recovery and a marriage ceremony was undertaken
at the house (as was allowed under Scottish law). Afterwards, a much-recovered Mr Barrie and his new wife had honeymooned in Switzerland and bought the St Bernard there, and their London house the following year.

The Barries’ home at No. 133 was a well-appointed, three-storey town house, the first outward sign of his success since buying a one-way ticket to London almost ten years earlier, clutching an article for the
St James’s Gazette
entitled ‘The Rooks begin to Build’.

When he and Mary first lived there they wouldn’t see many people in the evenings, so the games with Porthos would continue, running breakneck races up and down the stairs, or playing ‘finding his favourite author’. Or Porthos might do the tricks his master had taught him, like drinking milk out of a tumbler, or shaking hands, or removing a glove from a pocket and bringing it back to him. And Mary would come alive and dance for Porthos, who would watch her every movement with solemn, worshipping eyes.

Porthos was the child in their house, but he wasn’t the only one. It was, in the opinion of a few observers, all a bit ‘unnatural’. But it was perfectly natural for them.

A toyshop en route to the gardens was a regular stall. Porthos would come to a halt there and wave his tail, so that one or other of them would buy him a toy. He liked dolls mostly, not balls. It all began after Barrie bought himself a toy for his own amusement.

Once Porthos was let off his leash in the gardens, his master would play with him, and soon children would gather round to watch. The huge dog, up on his hind legs, was as tall as the little man in the
bowler hat. Man and dog boxed, circled, and stopped to go off running, then walked on again to play hide-and-seek among the trees.

Pamela Maude, daughter of West End actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, who were starring at the time in Barrie’s hit play
The Little
Minister
remembered: ‘Mr Barrie had a pale face and large eyes and shadows round them; he looked fragile. But he was strong when he wrestled with Porthos.’

But then all of a sudden he’d stop and become like ordinary people again and make jerky jokes or do tricks with match-boxes or talk about cricket. He tried to show Pamela’s sister Margery how to bowl and to bat, but she always refused to learn; she stood with a stubborn look on her face and her hands on her hips. ‘I am a girl,’ she said, ‘and girls don’t play crickets.’

Mr Barrie’s face showed he thought girls were stupid.

Pamela remembered that his wife Mary ‘was lovely’.

Mary, the daughter of a licensed victualler and a woman who kept a boarding house on the south coast, had given up a promising career in the theatre to become Barrie’s wife. She had even had her own company at one time. The sight of children about her husband soon began to arouse mixed feelings. ‘I am not quite happy with them,’ she wrote with honesty.

Truth was that Mary far preferred dogs to children. ‘An animal is so helplessly itself … perhaps my love for the dogs, in the beginning, was a sort of mother-love…’

Few had much either good or bad to say about Mary Ansell. Dolly described her as ‘commonplace, 2nd rate & admirable’.

Besides having an interest in cricket and playing with toys, Barrie confessed to having taken a few simple lessons in conjuring in a dimly lit chamber beneath a shop from ‘a gifted young man with a long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a barber’s pole from my pocket, saying at the same time, “Come, come, sir, this will never do.”’

The barber’s pole was successfully extracted from many a child’s mouth in the Kensington Gardens, even though the difficulty of disposing of it Barrie found considerable.

Then there was the magic egg-cup. ‘I usually carried it about with me, and with its connivance I did some astonishing things with
pennies; but even the penny that costs sixpence is uncertain, and just when you are saying triumphantly that it will be found in the eggcup, it may clatter to the ground…’

The next moment he was pretending to hypnotise a child with his eyebrows. He had an unusual ability to elevate and lower his eyebrows separately, like two buckets in a well, while gazing into the face of a child intently with his large, morose, staring eyes, not unlike those of Porthos. It was a trick that almost never failed to give him a chance to check a screaming boy’s tears.

The boy would stop mid-scream and consider the unexpected movement without prejudice, his face remaining as it was, his mouth open to emit the frozen howl if the trick did not surpass expectation. The fair-minded boy was giving the odd little man a chance. It was all Barrie needed. Next minute he was telling him about fairies as though he knew all about them.

He had a favourite haunt called the Story Seat and told a new fairy tale there every afternoon for years. Asked when was the first fairy, he would say: ‘When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.’

Nannies would press their charges upon him, making no connection at all with the stories coming out of the Old Bailey about Oscar Wilde and his young friends.

Indeed, so innocently was he regarded that, in 1902, Lord Esher, Secretary to His Majesty’s Office of Works, who was responsible for the gardens and who for reasons perhaps best kept to himself took to calling Mr Barrie ‘the furry beast’, presented him with his own key so that he could go there whenever he liked, even unattended after lock-out time.

‘Lock-out time is fairy time in the gardens,’ Barrie would tell his young charges.