The Real Peter Pan (14 page)

The reduction from his usual ‘Dearest Jocelyn’ to ‘Dear’ matches the unusually restrained feel of Barrie’s letter, possibly in reaction to the wide publicising of his impending divorce, which will have been anathema to him – as Peter notes, the letter was written a fortnight after the storm burst. And he signs himself with just the kind
of neutrality Sir George would have advised, but it all makes a good fit too with the cooling of his relationship with Sylvia.

There is a sad photograph of Sylvia fishing the river in full mourning dress, including hat and veil, but in fact she seldom ventured more than a few hundred yards from the house. It was all butterfly chasing, bug hunting and line-and-hook worm fishing for the boys. Jack followed Barrie’s advice and found something better to do. Going on fifteen, but more mature than his older, Etonian brother George, he found amusement with the daughter of a local farmer.

A fortnight later Barrie confirmed that he was travelling to Zermatt at the end of August, where he would be staying with Gilmour and Mason at the Monte Rosa, a hotel frequented by the Alpine Club, including Edward Whymper who made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. They actually met the great man, which raised Barrie’s spirits and will have fascinated the boys when he wrote to them about it, but his own attempts at climbing met with abject failure. He resented the guide’s instructions and he soon called it a day, going walking instead with Gilmour while Mason climbed. At the end of September they moved on to Lausanne.

By this time Michael had joined Peter at Wilkinson’s in Orme Square and suffered the indignity of having tea with Milky and his wife at home in their rural retreat, a cottage close to E. V. Lucas’s place – Kingson Manor House – in Sussex. Audrey described Milky as a most genial man, but when Peter and Michael happened to be staying and were invited with Audrey to tea ‘a marked change came over their demeanour. They were positively subdued and never, in spite of Mrs Wilkinson’s cakes, quite natural again until we were well out in the road with the front door shut behind us.’

Entering Wilkinson’s had meant cutting off Michael’s long wavy tresses, the shearing seeming to add Samsonian proportion to the
moment of childhood loss already associated with graduation to the school.

But Michael would never lose the aura of mysterious innocence, open countenance and unconscious awareness that characterised his original state, even after Eton and the tragedies that were heaped upon of him – it was what Barrie loved about him and identified him as that innocent spark of Peter Pan, that betwixt-and-between boy, which Barrie had lost to shrewdness and canniness and old age. ‘He strikes me as more than old,’ said Cynthia Asquith who knew Barrie intimately, ‘in fact I doubt whether he ever was a boy.’

Losing his locks meant nothing to Michael, but Barrie was distraught to have missed the moment of matriculation and wrote a piece fantasising that he had indeed been there.

In fact, Barrie had not returned from Switzerland until the beginning of October, long after the winter term at Wilkinson’s had begun.
The date of his return was determined rather by the divorce hearing on the 13th.

Mary wrote to H. G. Wells that Barrie ‘came out badly in court. Three lies.’ First, that Mary had said the affair with Cannan was the only one she had had; it was not, nor had she said that it was. Second, that Black Lake Cottage was his property, when it had been Mary’s name on the lease, not his. Third, that he had lived happily with his wife.

Mary retreated to Black Lake Cottage. Barrie stayed with Mason at No. 17 Stratton Street: ‘Walking up and down when his friend set off for the House [of Commons], and still walking up and down when he returns. The silences are as long and overpowering as ever. And Mason, though the burden grows no lighter, is endlessly patient.’
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After six weeks of this, Lady Lewis found Barrie a flat at 3 Adelphi Terrace House in Robert Street just off the Strand, on a bend of the Thames affording a view of five bridges. Barrie slept there for the first time on 20 November: ‘I am in and it is all so comfortable and beautiful & all owing to you.’ Five months later, in better fettle, he wrote to Lady Lewis, describing the awesome feeling of looking out through the wide expanse of window across the Thames:

Some years later Barrie wrote to Thomas Hardy’s wife that Turner ‘when very young used to come to 8 Adelphi Terrace and paint panoramas of the river’.

Everything then seemed more settled, until, after a visit to the Lucases in their new home near Lewes, in Sussex, Sylvia collapsed again.

I
N HINDSIGHT, IT
was then that the countdown began. Occasionally she might summon the energy to walk from the house to the green in Campden Square and watch Barrie play cricket with Michael and Nico, but generally Sylvia was in bed, and the doctors were becoming increasingly concerned, although in the absence of any record, diagnosis, treatment or post-mortem, thirty years later Peter was baffled about what exactly was wrong with her.

‘While, thanks to the letters I know all about father’s illness I am strangely ignorant about mother’s. Can you tell me where the disease attacked her?’

Nanny replied only that it was too near the heart to operate, and when Peter pressed her further, she didn’t respond to the question.

Christmas 1909 was a low-key affair. Barrie was now in attendance, as he had been for Arthur. No arguments now as to his presence. The need was there, as in this case, where Barrie was despatched to pick up Peter from Eton where he had just sat the scholarship examination and was about to join George there (thanks again to Barrie) whether or not he won an award:

Michael sat with his mother in her darkened room whenever he could. It was also he who sat on the end of her bath chair on a rare trip to Kensington Gardens, guiding it while a helper pushed it from behind. On a visit to see his sister, Gerald du Maurier entered her room to find Michael sitting at a small desk in the corner doing his homework, tears flowing down his cheeks. As with his father, he didn’t need to be told.

But it wasn’t all tears. When Peter was informed that he had won a scholarship to Eton he was playing corridor cricket with his brothers. The joy this news gave Sylvia was very welcome, particularly as
Peter’s academic success lit up a link to Arthur’s side of the family, for Arthur was still sorely missed.

Sylvia had to be carried to bed now and was under 24-hour-a-day care by one Nurse Loosemore, who was suddenly faced with an extraordinary plan to deliver Sylvia to Ashdon Farm on Exmoor, on the borders of Somerset and North Devon.

To say that the farm, which is still there today, is remote and isolated is understatement. It lies alone in the valley of the River Oare, close to where John Ridd emerged in R. D. Blackmore’s
Lorna
Doone
, the novel that tells of the savage deeds of the Doone family who terrorised the country round about and escaped with their booty across the wild hills of Exmoor precisely where Sylvia now found herself.

The area is indeed beautiful. Francis Kilvert writes in his
Diaries
of Lynton, a small town six or so miles distant as ‘one of the loveliest nooks in the Paradise of this world’. But the journey from London – almost five hours on the train followed by a dozen or so miles in a car across what was then a poor moorland road – would have been exhausting for Sylvia.

Where did the idea come from? Nurse Loosemore couldn’t believe that Barrie and Dr Rendel, the doctor who had supervised the last days of Arthur, had agreed to such a crazy idea. Barrie had booked the farm for the whole summer.

Having delivered Sylvia and Nurse Loosemore to the farm he then left, returning for the odd weekend until the boys’ school holidays began. When the main force arrived, Nurse Loosemore warned Nanny Hodgson to make herself and the boys scarce ‘as
anything
might happen’!

It wasn’t long before Emma du Maurier herself appeared, to find out what was going on. Barrie took Peter in a car to pick her up at
Minehead station and after delivering her to her daughter beat a hasty retreat to Brendon, a hamlet a few miles away, where he took rooms. Emma was appalled to find Sylvia weakening rapidly.

A local doctor had been called, who asked fruitless questions and knew nothing of the history of the patient or her condition. Emma immediately insisted that Dr Rendell be telegraphed to send a replacement.

On 1 August Emma wrote to Sylvia’s younger sister May, ‘It is terrible to think of Sylvia so far from doctors … It is a nice house but hill all round, even from the lawn to the garden is quite a hill. This ought never to have been taken.’

While writing the letter a Dr Spicer arrived from London, the Rendell recommendation, his advent serving only to convince Sylvia that she must be very ill indeed. No one, not even the doctors, seemed to know what was wrong with her.

A month earlier, on 2 July, Emma had written to May implying that one of the doctors consulted had denied that Sylvia was as seriously ill as she had been said to be by the others, including Rendel. As late as that, there was no sense that Sylvia was suffering from a fatal disease.

Now, Emma was troubled, very troubled indeed. If it had been known by Barrie and/or Rendell that she had a terminal disease, would they have brought her to so isolated a spot? Yet that was what was done, and four weeks later she was dead.

The boys meanwhile were off almost every day walking with Barrie, watching buzzards circling high above the valley of the Lynn, eating huge teas of Devonshire cream and jam at Lynton, or fishing the Doone valley and bringing their catch back to Sylvia at tea time; then to her delight playing in the garden within sight of her room. She found she wanted to watch them rather than interact
with them now. Nico’s clowning around was simply too much for her in her little room.

Arthur’s brother Crompton also booked rooms in Brendon for a few days and took them climbing to the top of Dunkery Beacon, the highest point of Exmoor. The only other visitor was Maude Adams, the actress who played Peter Pan in America. She was invited by Barrie to meet Sylvia and the boys. Sylvia was barely able to raise a smile.

Shortly afterwards came the day, 26 August, on the morning of which she died. She called for a hand mirror and gave orders that her boys should no longer be brought in to see her. Dr Rendel, Barrie, Nurse Loosemore and Emma du Maurier were the only ones present at the end.

Barrie then told the children, one by one. He related later that Michael (ten), had broken into a rage and stamped his foot in fury, a credible response – the unfairness of losing the person he loved more than any other, the unfairness of it being so soon after the death of his father. Anger, too. All a common enough response from a child of his age to the loss of both parents.

Sylvia dying turned this already introspective child further inside himself, but not depressively. He was fast developing a way of dealing with life. The story of Michael’s life reads like a series of tests, which ultimately developed within himself an adamantine grasp of who he was and how much of himself he was prepared to share with the world.

Michael’s increasing retreat from the world that caused him so much distress was enhancing the aura of detachment which had set him apart from the start, and would impress many and make genius expected of him by some who described him as ‘gifted’ long before ever he produced anything of note. Barrie encouraged this by electing to discuss his own ideas with Michael (the
only
person
with whom he did this), seeking his approval even and discarding anything he didn’t like.

It was in this way that Barrie gave his heart to Michael, proud when he took the lead, happy when he could describe Michael as ‘the dark and dour and impenetrable’, which he often did, almost as if he liked to think he had met his match.

On the Saturday, the morning after Sylvia died, George (seventeen) walked in an atmosphere of gloom with Peter to the nearest village Post Office carrying a sheaf of telegrams for despatch to members of the family and close friends. Then George observed to his younger brother that after all things were considered, they had managed that morning to get up, wash, get dressed and have breakfast in spite of the great tragedy that had befallen them. It was not the end of the world. All four of George’s brothers looked to him as leader and Peter took his point, though years later he was

Jack’s feelings were not to be influenced by George, however much all the boys looked up to the eldest as leader. Barrie had told Jack that Sylvia agreed on her deathbed to marry him: ‘I was taken into a room where [Barrie] was alone and he told me, which angered me even then, that Mother had promised to marry him and wore his ring. Even then I thought if it was true it must be because she knew she was dying.’ To Jack, the thought of Barrie marrying his mother ‘was intolerable, even monstrous’, wrote Peter, who doubted that Sylvia had ever agreed to it.

The question now was what should happen to the boys, and Emma didn’t know what to think. ‘At a quarter to two [Nurse Loosemore] called me,’ she wrote to May, her youngest daughter, of Sylvia’s death,

Henry James, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, burying his brother William, who had died there on the same day, wrote at once to Emma on hearing of Sylvia’s death from a neighbour of his in England.

Henry had known the family intimately since the early 1880s, when Sylvia was fifteen, so fiery and uncontrollable that she was nicknamed ‘the blizzard’. Sylvia had insisted Henry join in the family fun and games. No one had ever invited this ‘benign, indulgent but grave’ man, ‘not often unbending beyond a genial chuckle’
39
to do such a thing before. With the du Mauriers he had come alive. ‘My dear dear Mrs du Maurier,’ he wrote on 11 September.

He had hit the mark, for Emma had been completely felled by the experience of watching her daughter die. At the back of her mind she knew that she, as head of the family, had to make a decision about the boys, but she couldn’t even decide for sure that she would be going to the funeral. Two days later, she wrote to May:

In the event, Jack, George and Peter travelled with Barrie in a van, along with Sylvia’s coffin, and at every stop along the way Barrie stood sentry outside it. Jack was glad when the funeral at Hampstead Parish Church was over. From there he went to stay with Sylvia’s elder brother, Guy, a career soldier, at Longmoor Military Camp in Hampshire, before returning to naval college in Dartmouth, where he found a letter from Michael, the only one to think to write.

Meanwhile Michael and Nico had been invited to stay at the rectory at Oare, where R. D. Blackmore’s grandfather had been rector and
Lorna Doone
had actually been written. They moved there with Nanny Hodgson after everyone left the farm to go to the funeral.

It was to the rectory that Crompton arrived on 1 September, with Barrie, George and Peter. He wrote that day to Emma:

On Wednesday morning, the day after the funeral, Barrie had taken George and Peter to Little’s, a shop in the Haymarket off Piccadilly in London, and bought eight-foot fly-rods, and fine casts and flies. This was a considerable step up for any fisherman. There would be no more catching trout with worm hooks. Real fishermen use flies.

The boys were ecstatic. ‘We were selfish little creatures,’ admitted Nico in hindsight, like Peter, a bit embarrassed that they had accepted the transition to orphan so readily.

Fly-fishing henceforth became the focus of every holiday and a significant part of Michael’s life, an activity that made a good fit with his nature, giving him more opportunities to withdraw into another world, a beautiful world, a world of silence and solitude in which he could still his feeling of loss.

The man who owned all the fishing in the area was one Nicholas Snowe, and Nicholas Davies (six) was persuaded by Michael to ‘intercede with him for fishing facilities on the grounds that they were of the same name – successfully too’, Barrie reported. ‘Michael was ten then and I remember we had a grand scheme of reaching Dulverton and fishing some water there.’ The Rivers Exe, Haddeo and Barle coalesce near Dulverton and it remains one of the great areas for salmon and trout fishing today.