The Real Peter Pan (9 page)

By the time it was all over Barrie's friends wouldn't believe how they had been so led into the childish follies in which they became involved.

In 1905, when Sylvia and Michael came down to Black Lake Cottage, Michael was recruited as the team's mascot and photographed on the lawn being presented with the match ball by E. V. Lucas, there with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Audrey,
23
Michael looking ‘like he could be either a girl or a boy with his long hair and loose-fitting smock: an ideal Peter Pan', according to Kevin Telfer.
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But far and away the more significant event occurred after the Allahakbarries dispersed, and Barrie and Michael discovered that death by drowning in the mermaid's pool could be an awfully big adventure.

F
ROM THIS MOMENT
the definition of ‘boy' changed: ‘To be a real boy' was to pass over to the other side. It was a turning point. Henceforth, Peter Pan had one foot in the afterlife, a Neverland altogether more profound than Barrie had given the play's original audiences to imagine. The inspiration for it brought Peter's story to its third arena. After Kensington Gardens in London and the Black Lake in Surrey came the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

In the same year as Michael played Peter on the point of drowning in the mermaid's lagoon, 1905, Barrie wrote in his notebook: ‘Hogg's Queen's Wake – a sort of Rip van Winkle.' Hogg is James
Hogg, the Scots shepherd, born in Ettrick in 1770, who imbibed the great oral tradition of the supernatural at his mother's knee and was at his poetic best writing poems of the vernacular patterned on the old minstrelsy, such as ‘The Witch of Fife'.

As a young man with an ink-horn slung around his neck, Hogg had wandered the hills of Scotland's Arcadia, teaching himself to write and discovering a genius for poems that gave the whole world of Fairyland and floating thought, witchcraft and necromancy, a permanent substantial form.

Being spirited away to ‘the other world' is the main force of Hogg's poem ‘Queen's Wake', which Barrie had noted as the basis of a play. Embedded in it is the poem or ballad of
Kilmeny
.

Hogg is said to have fallen asleep one day out on the hills and dreamed the dream of Kilmeny, about a girl of poetic nature, a lover of solitude, who, wandering alone at twilight, is spirited away into the ‘land of thought' and disappears into the wild among the hills. Her friends look for her, their cries echoing around the glen. Their search is in vain, but long years later she returns to find a place in the land of living, and can remember nothing of where she has been:

Kilmeny, now too good and pure for this world, must inevitably return to ‘that silent shadow-world that marches a hand's breadth from our own'.
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Hogg carried Kilmeny's image in his mind's eye until the day he died. And the legend became a touchstone for Barrie. He alluded to it in various books, and often, as we shall see, in his relationship with Michael, and in the play
Mary Rose
, which many see as Barrie's best and which is still produced today, more faithfully than any production to be seen of
Peter Pan.

There are countless instances of men as well as women vanishing in the hill country of Scotland and then returning when all hope of their being seen again has disappeared. They haven't aged and they remember nothing. The fairies have taken them and then, perhaps having tired of them, returned them with all memory of the episode wiped from their minds, to the spot where they first disappeared.

As early as 1902 in
The Little White Bird
Barrie had rehearsed the possibility of dead young mothers returning as ghosts to see how their children fare. ‘There is no other inducement great enough', he wrote, ‘to bring the departed back.'

By April 1906, Barrie was writing to his close friend, the author and academic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known as ‘Q': ‘I do strongly believe in the return from the dead as a strong dramatic motive.'

In January 1906, he invited Sylvia and Michael to Paris again, but Sylvia declined, saying Michael was ill. Illness had also apparently prevented the boy from attending the first of the annual revivals of
Peter Pan.

By now it was obvious to everyone that Barrie and Michael had a special relationship. No. 5 son Nico would say that Barrie was in love with him, ‘as he was in love with my mother'.

Barrie was a self-made man of forty-six, a big name as an author and playwright. In 1906 alone he made £44,000, the equivalent of £3.5 million today (the Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Treasury, was paid one-tenth of that). He wrote about his fabulous wealth in a play,
The Accursed Thing
(1907), but, however accursed, it played a significant part in his main business, his relationship with Michael, which needed Sylvia's compliance.

He was, wrote Mackail,

Michael's illness was not going to stand in the way of his seeing him when he wanted to. Barrie commanded Frohman, now one of the most, if not
the
most, powerful impresario on Broadway and in London's West End, to transport
Peter Pan
to Michael's bedside in Berkhamsted. ‘Frohman waved his own wand, had dresses
and properties packed up, and sent some of the company down to Egerton House to act scenes from the play in Michael's nursery,' wrote Mackail, noting also that no one else on the planet could have got Frohman to do such a thing.

Barrie wrote of the event,

In May, Barrie repeated his invitation for Sylvia and Michael to accompany him to Paris. And she accepted.

The whole magical, emotional, ridiculous charabanc was careering out of control, perhaps looking unconsciously for an escape route from major upset.

Arthur provided one. Later the same month he noticed a slight swelling on the side of his face. He had taken himself to the dentist, and the dentist had made him an appointment with ‘an expert in cheek and jaw'.

Then another Arthur had shot himself. Barrie's agent, Arthur Addison Bright, had been caught diverting money from his clients' accounts into his. In Barrie's case, it amounted to £16,000. He hadn't even noticed the shortfall and argued for clemency.

This, besides causing great dismay for everyone concerned, meant that Sylvia and Michael would not now be accompanying Barrie to Paris. It was just as well. On 2 June, Arthur wrote to his sister, Margaret:

The operation involved the removal of Arthur's upper jaw and the roof of his mouth. Barrie dropped everything and put himself at Sylvia and Arthur's disposal, standing sentinel over Arthur in his decline, playing, as Peter put it, ‘the leading part in the grand manner'. While Arthur scribbled notes of what he was thinking about – his sons, ‘S's blue dress', Porthgwarra (where he and Sylvia honeymooned in 1892', etc. – Barrie made notes for a prospective work: ‘The 1,000 Nightingales: A hero who is dying. “Poor devil, he'll be dead in six months.”'

Barrie saw to it that he had the best possible treatment, and in October wrote to Dolly a little tersely after she expressed concern about Arthur's treatment:

Dolly might have been reassured to know that Treves was the surgeon who treated Joseph Merrick, the man known as the Elephant Man who had such severe facial and other deformities that he was exhibited in a penny gaff shop on the Whitechapel Road in London's East End, where Treves met him.

Thank goodness for Nanny, who was keeping everything on an even keel at home. While Sylvia was at Arthur's bedside at the nursing home at 12 Beaumont Street (next to where the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers is today), Michael's sixth birthday was approaching:

Barrie had been buying the boys presents to keep them happy. Sylvia, aware now that she really couldn't do without Barrie, felt the need to draw a clear line between reality and fantasy for Michael. But the difference between Michael and the other boys was that they knew the Neverland was make-believe, while to Michael make-believe and true were the same.

On the same day Arthur wrote
his
birthday letter to Michael:

Barrie ensured that he would. He ordered William Nicholson, the designer responsible for the costumes in
Peter Pan
to run up a Pan costume for Michael and get it down to Egerton House. As any
six-year-old would have been, Michael was knocked out by the gift and wasn't out of it for days.

Eleven days later, Arthur announced he was coming home.

Arthur had an artificial jaw fitted and was wearing a black eye patch, and it is unlikely that reading Biblia in his distorted voice to Michael (presumably some sort of bible study) will have been anything other than disturbing.

The reactions of the boys go unrecorded, other than Peter's, who
referred to the artificial jaw as ‘the most dreadful element in the whole sad story … a nightmare … it so soon became impossible to wear'.

In August, Barrie accompanied the family to Rustington. Arthur, Sylvia and ‘Jimmy', as Arthur began to refer to him, made ‘as odd a variation of the
mènage à trois
as ever there was', as Peter had to admit.

Granny Emma du Maurier had called the family together and rented Cudlow House, a large detached dwelling with plenty of privacy, occupied by Sir Hubert Parry before his family had moved to Knightscroft House on the opposite side of Sea Road.

In Arthur's words, the boys played ‘endless cricket and lawn tennis in the garden', Sylvia and Barrie too, though his underhand serve, while reputedly treacherous, demanded little of most opponents. And it was on this holiday that Barrie took the now famous photographs of Michael in costume as Peter Pan. In time they would be used as a reference for the sculptor commissioned to create the statue of Pan still to be seen in Kensington Gardens today.