The Real Peter Pan (4 page)

I
T WAS NOT
until 1897 that the Llewelyn Davies family arrived at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of the gardens. After their wedding in 1892 and a honeymoon at Porthgwarra in deepest Cornwall, Sylvia and Arthur had set up home at 18 Craven Terrace in Paddington, close to where Arthur had been renting lodgings.

Craven Terrace was ‘a dear little house (or Sylvia made it so), a sort of maisonette’, as Dolly Parry described it. Sylvia had a flair for design and created soft furnishings for their home as well as lovely clothes for herself and her sons, often evolved from whatever lay to hand. ‘I remember Arthur telling me that Sylvia gave away his trousers for plants which a man brought round on a barrow,’ wrote Dolly years later. In fact, money had been so short at this time, so
early in Arthur’s career, that Sylvia had been working for a well-known theatrical costumier, Ada Nettleship, who made clothes for the famous actress Ellen Terry (a great friend of du Maurier) in a dressmaking business set up by her father.

Then, in October 1896, du Maurier had died and the family benefited from legacies, mainly derived from the huge sales of du Maurier’s second novel,
Trilby
, which tells of the fate of a young, bohemian artist’s model in Paris when a man by the name of Svengali inveigles his way into her life and exercises his hypnotic power over her. With more than a touch of irony, the royalties from
Trilby
brought Sylvia and her sons within Barrie’s orbit for the first time.

The extra money also brought Nanny Hodgson on to the scene. At Craven Terrace, two children had been born to Sylvia in successive years – George on 20 July 1893, Jack on 11 September 1894. Her third son, Peter, was born on 25 February 1897, and as Sylvia now had three boys claiming her full-time attention, the decision was taken to employ a nanny.

Mary Hodgson (Dadge to her family) was the eighth of ten children born to Thomas, a stonemason, and his wife Mary, at Kirkby Lonsdale. Nanny was twenty-one going on twenty-two when she arrived. Inevitably, being so close to the Kensington Gardens, she joined the throng between two and four each afternoon, with George and Jack conspicuous in bright red tam-o’-shanters, blouses and breeches, made by Sylvia, and little Peter in his perambulator pushed by Nanny. It was only a matter of time before Barrie caught George’s eye.

He claimed first to have seen the four-year-old on the sward behind the Baby’s Walk. Originally George was, he said, ‘a missel thrush, attracted there that hot day by a hose that lay on the ground
sending forth a gay trickle of water’. George was lying ‘on his back in the water, kicking up his legs’.
9

The boy never tired of this story, and soon it was he who told it to Barrie rather than Barrie to him. All children were birds once apparently, and all children in this part of London were originally birds in Kensington Gardens:

Young George’s delight on a summer afternoon was to go with him to some spot in the gardens where the unfortunate mothers who have no children may be seen trying to catch one with small pieces of cake.

The saddest sight is the birds who never find a mother. He chose
the original title of a book he published in 1902 called
The Little White Bird,
because ‘the little white birds are the birds that never find a mother’. Sad because Barrie never would have a child of his own flesh, though he had the fantasy of a boy called Timothy and wrote about him, wishing that he could have played just once in the Kensington Gardens, ‘and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper galleon on the Round Pond, [or] chase one hoop down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once…’

Barrie claimed that he had the fairy language from George after thinking back hard and pressing his hands to his temples.

‘“Fairy me tribber” is what you say to the fairies when you want them to give you a cup of tea,’ it emerged one day.

Barrie was pleased, but advised that ‘it is not so easy as it looks, for all the ‘r’s should be pronounced as ‘w’s.’

‘What would you say,’ George asked him, ‘if you wanted them to turn you into a hollyhock?’ He thought the ease with which they can turn you into things their most engaging quality. The answer is ‘Fairy me lukka’.

‘Fairy me bola’ means ‘Turn me back again’, and George’s discovery made Barrie uncomfortable, for he knew he had hitherto kept his distance from the fairies, mainly because of a feeling that their conversions are permanent.

Forsaking the realm of fairyland for a while, and indicating a change of subject by exposing his peculiarly large head to the elements, Barrie would gravely and reverently tell of some great explorer. Gallant tales of the search for the Northwest Passage, expeditions to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the exotic Orient and the dark continent of Africa provided a steady stream of adventure. On the little party a stillness would fall as all the time he spoke ‘as one fresh to
the world before ever he had time to breathe upon the glass’, and they listened, spellbound.

George would trail around after him, Jack sometimes tagging along, while Peter was not out of his pram and was a long way from realising that ‘Mr Barrie’, as he later put it, ‘became a unique influence in the lives of all of us, one that was to affect our destinies in ways as yet unknown.’

Nanny, being Nanny, feared this from the start and became less and less keen the more the boys were ‘taken over by this strange little man’. Walks with the children became ‘less pleasurable’, she told her family in Kirkby Lonsdale and later came to look upon Barrie as an intrusion.

T
HE BARRIES MET
Sylvia and Arthur at a high society dinner hosted by the leading London solicitor Sir George and Lady Lewis at their mansion at 88 Portland Place W1, on New Year’s Eve, 1897.

Before his death the previous October, du Maurier had been a regular guest of the Lewises since at least the 1860s; he was among their oldest friends. Sometimes hundreds would be invited to the Lewis parties, a mixture of peers of the realm and celebrities from the world of the arts. Occasionally there would be a much more select, high-profile evening, involving royalty. Party lists show, for example, that in March 1885 the Prince of Wales (Albert Edward, later Edward VII) was the principal guest, and du Maurier and his wife Emma attended with only a dozen or so others.

Barrie’s inclusion on party lists was singular and more recent – they show only one invitation earlier that same year (1897). At thirty-seven he was one of the most talked of figures in the literary world, with money pouring in from books and plays, in that very year to include a play based on his novel
The Little Minister
which it has been said earned him as much as £80,000, the equivalent of millions today. His invitation to the Lewises had seemed inevitable at some point.

But it was less inevitably to be accepted, for Barrie could be gauche in company. He and Mary by this time had begun to give little dinner-parties of their own at No. 133, so that their circle of friends was expanding all the time beyond the almost exclusively male band of friends that Barrie had enjoyed – mostly journalists and writers – up to the time he was married.

But even these little soirées could be difficult affairs, as very often Mrs Barrie was the only one who spoke.

Her husband’s prolonged silences were deafening. They defined him more completely than any feature other than his small stature, strong Scottish accent and persistent smoker’s cough. Said the writer Jerome K. Jerome:

On an earlier occasion, before he was married, a great lady had invited him to her castle in the country. ‘The house party was a large one,’ recalled Jerome. ‘There were peers and potentates, millionaires and magnates … Barrie did not say anything, but in the morning he was gone. No one had seen him leave, and the doors were still bolted. He had packed his bag and climbed out of the window.’

Increasingly, Mary Ansell found the situation difficult to bear, for he was as silent with her as in company. At first she assumed that all husbands were the same. ‘Those silent meals. Haven’t most of us experienced them? When the mind of your man is elsewhere, lord knows where, but nowhere in your direction.’

At such times she thanked God for Porthos.

Barrie’s male friends saw his silences as ‘full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force’
11
– a quirky aspect of a uniquely fascinating individual, whose equally sudden, radiant, garrulous form was worth waiting for.

Of people meeting him for the first time, some took his silences as shyness or uneasiness on his part. Others interpreted them as a sneering aloofness or presumptuous superiority. Yet others were not a little intimidated, as if he was someone who set out to conquer by silence.

Barrie would have said that all were to some degree justified in holding these views and was the first to admit that ‘my moods are as changeable as a hoary ocean. There are times I am the best of company, when my wit sparkles and cuts. At other times I walk in the shadows. Then let no one speak to me … for I am in a world of my own. Suppose I am ruminating with the mighty dead.’

It took a child to understand what that meant. ‘He was made of silences,’ Pamela Maude wrote in her autobiography
Worlds
Away
. ‘We did not find these strange, they were so much part of him … his silences spoke loudly. Mr Barrie did not talk and Mrs Barrie did not smile, and yet he was our companion.’

Children read his silences as detachment from the world of adults, a part of the magic aura he created around himself; as if he was off in another world, as Pamela recorded of a holiday she and her parents spent with Barrie in Scotland:

At the Lewises on New Year’s Eve 1897, there were no children present, but Barrie’s increasing fascination with Sylvia’s boys may be seen to have played a part in his decision to accept their invitation, even possibly to have moved it in the first place.

For if you wanted to meet du Maurier’s daughter ‘by chance’, the best way to do so was to get yourself onto one of the Lewis party lists. The Lewises had not sent an invitation to Barrie cold. He had met one of their two young daughters at the house of a mutual friend and suggested she and her sister might like parts to play in the copyright performance of
The Little Minister.
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The casting led to his inclusion on a party list in February 1897.

In time, the Lewises would be among Barrie’s greatest allies. Lady Lewis would be strong in her support of him. Barrie found special favour by contributing, even managing, the Lewises’ entertainments, producing revues featuring satirical skits on some of their famous guests. Sir George’s firm of solicitors, which gave Arthur his first briefs as a barrister, came to represent him. And a future head of the firm, Sir Reginald Poole, acted for his estate in a threatened conflict
with Sylvia’s boys, when three of them considered making a claim on it in 1937. But chiefly the Lewises earn their place in our story by playing matchmaker between Barrie and Sylvia in December 1897. Their names were next to one another on the seating plan.

That night, so he told the wife of Sylvia’s son Peter years later, Barrie found himself sitting next to the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and was overwhelmed, but for once he did not remain silent.

Intrigued by the way Sylvia put aside some of the various sweets that were handed around, secreting them in her purse, he enquired of her why. She explained that she was keeping them for Peter.

‘Peter?’

Sylvia told Barrie that Peter was her third son, born the previous February, who had been named after Peter Ibbetson, the hero and title of her father’s first novel.

Barrie then revealed that he had named his St Bernard dog, Porthos, after Peter Ibbetson’s St Bernard.

For Barrie this was unusually candid. He had not even told his wife that Porthos was named after Peter Ibbetson’s dog. Mary imagined that he had been named after one of the three musketeers in Alexandre Dumas’s famous novel. The nearest Barrie ever came to admitting publicly that the choice of name had anything to do with the dog in
Peter Ibbetson
was in a book he published in 1902,
13
where he admits, ‘I think I cut him out of an old number of
Punch
.’

Porthos in
Peter Ibbetson
had itself been based on du Maurier’s own St Bernard, named Chang after an eight-foot Chinese giant exhibited in the British Museum in the 1860s. Like other members of the du Maurier family, the St Bernard Chang appeared frequently
in his master’s illustrations in
Punch
, so that when the dog died in 1883, his fans were stricken.

The four-legged Chang had sat at du Maurier’s feet as he worked. The four-legged Porthos now sat at the feet of Barrie as he worked in the room above the front door at 133 Gloucester Road.

It is fair to say that George du Maurier had held a fascination for J. M. Barrie long before he met his grandchildren in Kensington Gardens. But for reasons that will fall clear he never liked to associate himself openly with the man.

Barrie had been electrified by
Peter Ibbetson
. In this he was far from alone. John Masefield, Poet Laureate in Britain from 1930, and sixteen years of age when the book was published, recalled the excitement of growing up at this time and how du Maurier delivered the era’s most acute desire:

During his apprenticeship as a young artist in Paris, and later in Belgium, du Maurier had become adept at hypnotism, a practice widespread in the 1850s, particularly among artists whose life-models were required to hold their position in situ for hours at a time. His friend Felix Mocheles wrote about their hypnotic exploits together,
which even extended to hypnotising at least one child that they had met in the street.
15

In the course of his experiments, du Maurier developed a method of light trance or self-hypnotism, which he like to call ‘dreaming-true’, and it was his skill in this area that he wrote about in
Peter Ibbetson.

Another friend, the artist Whistler, confirmed that

In the novel, Peter, a young architect, receives instruction from Mary Duchess of Towers – ‘the duchess of dreams’ – a woman who had learned the art of ‘dreaming true’ from her father. In the first instance, Peter focuses his mind on a memorable moment in his childhood:

In the course of his dream Peter becomes the boy he once was. With ‘newly aroused self-consciousness at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my bliss’, he spends ‘hours, enchanted hours’ reliving his idyllic childhood in Passy, which was then ‘a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris, facing the Bois de Boulogne’.

He rediscovers a long-forgotten friendship with a little girl called Mary Seraskier, known as Mimsey, a ‘sick, ungainly child’, full of gratitude and love that Peter should play with her. Peter is touchingly unaware that her little heart is so full of him that she would like to be his slave – she would, literally, die for Peter.

We also see him playing with two boys, pretending to be Athos, Porthos and Aramis in Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
, and Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s famous frontiersman novels, rousing tales of adventure about American Indians and early pioneers of the American West. While alone he would engage in island fantasies, his favourite book being
Robinson Crusoe
and next favourite
The Swiss Family Robinson.

But the real fun comes in the nearby Bois de Boulogne, not at all the pristine park it is now, and in particular beside a lake called the Mare d’Auteil, surrounded on three sides by ‘a dense, wild wood … The very name has a magic from all the associations that gathered round it at that time.’

How interesting, therefore, that Peter Ibbetson enjoyed boyish adventures in the park and the Mare d’Auteil just like du Maurier’s
grandchildren, Sylvia’s boys, did with Barrie, in Kensington Gardens and by the Black Lake in Surrey. And islands are his delight.