The Real Peter Pan (7 page)

When John Masefield wrote that du Maurier's ‘effect upon that generation was profound – I can think of no book which so startled and delighted the questing mind', he gave
Peter Ibbetson'
s public reception its proper context. In the milieu of the family, du Maurier had an even stronger influence. ‘He affected us all greatly,' admitted Daphne, who owed her success to it from the moment in Alexandria when she dreamt she went to Manderley again and ‘was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers…' (
Rebecca
, 1938)

Although the first notes for the play of
Peter Pan
did not appear in Barrie's notebook until the spring of 1903, the adventures that informed so much of the action unfolded here at the Black Lake: ‘I have no recollection of writing the play of
Peter Pan
,' Barrie confessed to the boys years later.

Out of Black Lake, characters and episodes fell onto the page. When Peter Pan, Wendy, John and Michael arrive in the Neverland ‘the chief forces of the island', which emerged from the games, are introduced. ‘[They] were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins.

‘The lost boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed
in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I'm captain,' says Peter.

The central conflict in the play between Captain Hook (initially called Captain Swarthy in the games) and Peter Pan – ‘Most of all I want their captain, Peter Pan. ‘Twas he cut off my arm.' – was also formed here. Barrie took the role of Captain Swarthy and Porthos played the pirate's dog (or a tiger in a papier-mâché mask).

Hook – a ‘dark and sinister' man – is deemed ‘by those in the know', as Barrie also confessed, ‘to be autobiographical'. He is his doppelgänger, a strange mix of menace and ‘a touch of the feminine', he admitted, adding with disarming wit: ‘it sometimes gave him intuitions'.

‘No. 4 [Michael] rested so much at this period that he was merely an honorary member of the band,' wrote Barrie to the boys, ‘waving his foot to you for luck when you set off with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him; and one may rummage in vain for any trace of No. 5.'

Nico, still three years away from being born, would miss out on Black Lake altogether and his character would be utterly different to those of the others. He was never to penetrate the Neverland on this side of the curtain.

But Barrie lost no time in involving Michael wherever and whenever he could. In the area of the Black Lake that Barrie dubbed ‘the haunted groves of Waverley' (with reference to the nearby ruins of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey), Michael became the agent for the reintroduction of certain fairy tale elements into the proceedings. Here, in the midst of the most adventurous of games, ‘we cassocked our first fairies (all little friends of St Benedict) in white violets'.

Long before Michael could even walk he was credited with
discovering Tinkerbell: ‘It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail was like by twilight,' recalled Barrie.

On that first Black Lake holiday in the summer of 1900, the boys stayed with their parents a dozen or so miles hence in the village of Burpham, and it was here that Michael's formal initiation into the Pan cult took place.

‘Do you remember a garden at Burpham,' Barrie wrote to the grown-up boys more than twenty years later, ‘and the initiation there of No. 4 when he was six weeks old, and the three of you grudged letting him in so young?'

Michael was
in
all right. He had never been out.

P
ERHAPS IT WAS
actually watching Sylvia
mother
her new baby that first made Michael Barrie's favourite, or that she and Barrie secretly hoped that he would show signs of having inherited the du Maurier ‘spark'. Certainly, Barrie feted Sylvia as a mother. Enacting the transmutation of Sylvia into Grizel, as one of Barrie's notebooks reveals, Sylvia was to him ‘a woman who will always look glorious as a mother … a woman to confide in (no sex, we feel it in man or woman). All secrets of womanhood you felt behind those calm eyes.' One can imagine what this meant to a woman who bore five sons in ten years.

Barrie's reverence for the mother in Mrs Davies irritated Mary
Ansell, who disliked children. In a letter to No. 3 son Peter, many years later, she blamed the absence of children in their own family on Barrie's impotence, but we should also harken to Pamela Maude's view of her and Mary's confession that she didn't like them.

One is inclined to close both eyes and ears and seek sanctuary in the undeniable truth that Barrie was happiest when being a child in the company of other children. As Tommy in the novel, remembering that all children were birds once, he says as much to Grizel:

However, Barrie's games produced their own pressures, which as yet went unnoticed by the boys, who were dancing to a different tune to the grown-ups, who themselves were divided as to where their position should be on the issue.

Sylvia, who already shared the wild, free spirit of a boy, was all for the Black Lake experience, particularly as the first holiday followed hard on the birth of Michael and she needed all the rest she could get.

But Arthur, the father, was not so sure. He looked forward to spending time with his boys when he wasn't at work, and
found it irksome that he almost always found them at play with ‘Uncle Jim'.

Arthur began picking holes in Barrie's plans, drawing attention to hidden dangers of boys playing with bows and arrows and so on. But how could he complain, so happy were they in Barrie's company?

Nevertheless, Barrie must have been aware of the tension his presence was creating.

The following Easter, Arthur and Sylvia holidayed with the three eldest boys in the Isle of Wight, leaving Michael with a cold in the care of Nanny Hodgson at home. This was the first of many illnesses: health concerns for the boy perpetuated throughout his childhood. On a later occasion it would become so serious that TB was feared and Michael was transferred to Ramsgate for six months, to the seaside home of du Maurier's widow, Emma, in East Kent.

At the end of July 1901 the whole family made it down to Black Lake, this time staying at a farmhouse in Tilford for about six weeks. This was far closer than they'd been at Burpham and the boys were at Barrie's cottage every day, the distance made easier by his purchase of a steam-car, until eventually a Lanchester, the first of its sort coming out that very year, and a new chauffeur called Frederick, took over.

If Edwardian England was one long hot summer before the First World War engulfed it and almost destroyed a generation, 1901 was when it began, and was surely the most memorable part of it for the boy castaways of Black Lake Island. Happy and carefree they went naked most of the time ‘that strange and terrible summer', as Barrie referred to it. He took scores of photographs and made an elaborate, illustrated book with extended captions and called it after them:
The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island.

Two copies only were hand-printed and bound, specifically for
Michael's benefit, so Barrie wrote in the preface – ‘If it teaches him by example lessons in fortitude and manly endurance we shall consider that we were not wrecked in vain.'

One of the two was given to Arthur to read and he left it on a train. This was Arthur's role, it sometimes seemed.

The last piece of news that year was bad, the death of Porthos. He was replaced by a black and white Newfoundland, Luath, dull and apathetic of nature but no less a character. He began by catching hedgehogs in the garden of Black Lake and bringing them to the boys as if to announce he wanted to be part of the games. In time he became the model for Nana in the play of
Peter Pan
, crossing gender for the purpose.

Barrie liked to point to a particular picture of Luath nannying the boys at Black Lake, a clear forecast of his role in the fictional Darling nursery, captioning it: ‘We trained the dog to watch over us while we slept.' In it Luath is sleeping in a position that is a careful copy of his charges. ‘Indeed,' wrote Barrie, ‘any trouble we had with him was because, once he knew he was in a story, he thought his safest course was to imitate you [the boys] in everything you did.'

In London that same year the Barries moved closer to the Davieses, an address on Leinster Terrace at the corner of the Bayswater Road, situated on the north side of the Kensington Gardens and looking over the park.

Leinster Corner, as the house became known, was a two-storey, semi-detached building with a small garden in front and a larger one behind, with formal pond and fountain and at the far end a building where Barrie would write
Peter Pan.

Mary Ansell saw their move and the death of Porthos as the beginning of the end: ‘Buried with Porthos,' she wrote, ‘was the first seven years of my marriage.' And Leinster Corner was walking distance to the Davieses, which made her husband's ‘philanderings' (her word) with the boys ever more easy. The Davieses had in fact also moved, but only across the street to No. 23 Kensington Park Gardens.

Mary's heart pained further when in November Barrie took Sylvia and Michael on holiday to Paris, leaving both her and Arthur at home. This was to be a trend into the future, and it devastated Arthur:

Arthur's letter makes pathetic reading. His purpose in writing to his father had been to discuss Christmas, and clearly, by 1902, there was doubt that Sylvia and Arthur would be spending it together.

Forty-four years later, Peter, compiling the family record, read the letter and wrote to Nanny Hodgson for her opinion, ‘Did JMB's entry
into the scheme of things occasionally cause ill-feeling or quarrelling between father and mother?'

Nanny replied with devotion, diplomacy and a commendable lack of clarity: ‘What was of value to the One had little or no value to the Other. Your Father's attitude at all times was as “one Gentleman (in the true sense) to Another.” Any difference of opinion was
never
“Public Property” – in the Home.'

Would Barrie wake up and acknowledge that his dream was intruding on the reality of Arthur and Sylvia's marriage and threatening it? Or was their marriage not the reality? No one was quite sure any more where the fantasy began and reality ended.

Cousin Daphne wrote to Peter that Arthur could not have been hurt deeply by Barrie taking Sylvia off, that it was normal in those days for a married woman to enjoy the attentions of an admirer without the relationship becoming intimate.

But how often was that extended to going on holiday together?

It is a significant matter because, as it augured badly for the marriage, the tensions would have found their way in to the minds of the children, even if only subconsciously. A ‘state of tension' was already being felt between Sylvia and her sister Trixy over Barrie's interference in their lives, as a number of letters show.

The feeling was that Barrie had insinuated his way into Sylvia's affections against Arthur's wishes and that she had encouraged him, and that Arthur had bottled up his feelings, perhaps to the detriment ultimately of his own health.

But that is to ignore what was plainly also on the table, namely Sylvia's wild, free personality, which she had never been one to hide and which Arthur knew about before they married, and indeed must have been part of what attracted him to her.

Peter recognised this and commented that his mother's ‘wit
and individual attraction owed something to her heritage from Mary Anne Clarke, the memory of which survived'. Mary Anne Clarke was the boys' ‘naughty great-great-grandmother', later to be the subject of a novel by the boys' cousin Daphne. She was the nineteenth-century kiss-and-tell mistress of the Duke of York, a flirt and a bitch of the first order, whose fortune she owed to her betrayal of the Duke.

Another analysis came from Dolly:

The boys were devoted to their mother and only her second son Jack saw the situation with Barrie in less than positive terms:

By 1903 George and Jack were attending Wilkinson's. In March Sylvia became pregnant with her fifth son, Nicholas (known as Nico), who would be born on 24 November.

Peter (six) and Michael (three) became main participants in the
Kensington Garden games and Michael in particular began making up for lost time.

‘At three,' Peter reminded Dolly years later, ‘Michael was one of the most lovable people in the world. And he was the world to Uncle Jim.' As soon as he was able he was off with Barrie in the Gardens, picking up all the stories and mythical topography that was ingrained in the minds of the two eldest brothers.

On 11 May, Barrie wrote to both Peter and Michael a thank-you letter after Sylvia had arranged for them to give him a birthday present:

Barrie was now pinning photographs of the boys on his wall at home and confessing his love for them. Then in August the whole family were down again to Tilford. ‘New and old stories for them. New and old games. Other visitors coming and going at the Cottage, expeditions in the Lanchester, or still sometimes on bicycles, to friends in the neighbourhood; and Barrie, whatever else he was doing, thinking more and more of the play,' as Mackail wrote.

One of the trips out in the car was to see Dolly, who had by this time herself married an Arthur, a diplomat and later Liberal and then Labour Member of Parliament, eventually to become a Labour Lord – 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, a beautiful twelfth-century Augustine Priory.