The Real Peter Pan (41 page)

Michael at twelve. Scourie had replaced something he’d been missing since his mother died and he was enjoying life more than he had for a very long time.

Barrie and Michael pictured before the long journey to the Outer Hebrides in 1912: ‘He wore his fishing basket on his back all the time, so as to be able to begin at once.’

Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, wild country, nothing but salmon, deer, whales and white-tailed eagles. Michael was no longer looking at the landscape, he was living it.

In Loch Voshimid, Michael ‘caught’ the Ghost Mother who became the basis of Barrie’s play
Mary Rose
– about a mother who returns from the dead to visit her son.

August 1914, on the eve of war: Barrie wearing his favourite fishing hat at Auch Lodge, Bridge of Orchy.

The Orchy, brimming with salmon and trout as it sweeps through the glen to Loch Awe.

Tomdoun, where Barrie and Michael stayed in 1915 and 1918. On a summer’s evening there can be few more beautiful views from any hotel in the Highlands.

Eiluned Lewis, whose sense of the spirit of Glan Hafren moved Michael. Nico felt that if Michael didn’t have an affair with her it was ‘a tinge of a clue’ to his brother’s sexuality.

Michael’s intimate friendship with Roger Senhouse and new friendship with Eiluned made this a ‘strangely difficult’ time.

Michael in ‘Pop’, aged seventeen, at Eton. Meanwhile, at home with Barrie, he had become ‘the sternest of my literary critics’.

Michael in a boat at Edgerston with fellow Oxford student Robert Boothby (standing), who described him as ‘introverted, moody … a very desirable undergraduate’.

Barrie in the inglenook of his Adelphi Terrace flat, where Boothby described the scene as ‘morbid’.

Michael at Garsington Manor with (left) Dora Carrington and Julian Morrell. Lytton Strachey wrote of Michael: ‘He would have been one of the remarkable people of his generation.’