The Real Peter Pan (27 page)
Read The Real Peter Pan Online
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
F
IRST A ROMANTIC
, second a Victorian, it wasn’t clear that he was going to find his way in the turmoil of a revolution that was gathering not only in Bloomsbury – especially as an artist, which Michael now planned to be.
The Romantics, and beauty per se, were out. In the 1850s, when Michael’s grandfather was studying to become an artist in the Swiss painter M. Gléyre’s studio in Paris, nothing could have been further from the case, what with the Impressionists and soon the Pre-Raphaelites finding their way. But in 1900, the year Michael was born, Picasso had pitched up in Montmartre and with Georges Braques forged Cubism, their purpose to ditch Impressionism and make an abrupt break with the past: ‘We were trying to move in a direction opposite to [it],’ Picasso said.
That was the reason we abandoned colour, emotion, sensation, and everything that had been introduced into painting by the Impressionists, to search again for an architectonic basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it … I hate the aesthetic game of the eye and the mind played by those connoisseurs, those mandarins who ‘appreciate’ beauty. What is beauty anyway? There’s no such thing.
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However, one boy who pitched up at Christ Church in October 1919 was deeply sympathetic to Michael’s natural Romantic bent.
Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton was born on 10 May 1900, just one month before Michael, the youngest of seven children – one sister and five brothers – of Sir Thomas Fowell Victor Buxton, the 4th Baronet Buxton, who had died in the year Rupert arrived at Oxford.
The family was at that stage wealthy. Rupert’s grandfather, 3rd Baronet Sir Thomas Fowell (1837–1915), Governor of South Australia, had bought Warlies, a country house near Waltham Abbey in Essex, and built another house close by at Woodredon.
Before he arrived at Oxford, Rupert was for six months at Cambridge University. No record remains as to why the transfer took place. He had been Head Boy at Harrow School in north-west London, and before that attended Summer Fields prep school in Oxford.
He was an unusual and enlightened boy who had been writing poetry since he was eight. He was also musical. He had belonged to the Choral Society at school and written with verve to his mother about such as Chopin’s
Études
, Mendelssohn’s ‘Messiah’ and the German composer of opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck.
He arrived at Oxford with the highest references. His headmaster wrote:
He was one of the best boy-examples and boy-influences I have ever known at school: the protector of the young, the friend of all, even those with whose opinions he was least akin. His own opinions were, and I expect still are unsettled – but they were all built on the foundation of love and service to others.
His housemaster Archer Vassall concurred – Buxton was ‘a charming boy of the highest ideals, taking a great interest in philanthropic and social work, and a “minor poet” of some competence’.
Buxton’s consideration for others had extended at school to never using his privilege as Harrow Head Boy of beating other boys. This was unheard of in any English public school at the time. His social conscience also led him to make friends with people outside his own class, ‘strange, out-of-the-way people such as pavement artists and street hawkers’, as one Harrovian put it, and to go into London for days at a time on philanthropic quests.
Rupert’s letters to his family, particularly to his mother Anne, Lady Buxton (née O’Rorke), whom he addresses at first as ‘My dearest Mother’, then ‘My own darling mother’, are deeply loving. It is through his letters to Anne that we can draw a detailed portrait of Rupert.
He hadn’t liked the idea of going to Harrow and it isn’t clear why it was chosen for him, as at least two of his brothers went to Eton. One of them, Maurice, a year and a half older, Michael certainly will have known. After taking the scholarship exam at fourteen, Rupert wrote to his mother, ‘I’m not sure that I’m frightfully impressed with Harrow, although I suppose I shall get to like it.’ However, by December he wrote to his brother Roden, ‘I am enjoying myself like anything at Harrow and am awfully glad I went there after all.’
Like Michael, he loved Scotland and fishing. On 3 July 1915, he wrote to his mother envious of her going to Scotland to see Roden, who was based there. Mother and son embarked on a fishing expedition together – ‘I can imagine how glorious the scenes must have been up there, as I think Scotland is easily the prettiest and most magnificent country I have ever seen.’
Being a boarder at Harrow, any opportunity to see his mother had been a great bonus, but frequently she seems to accept his invitations to attend concerts and the like. He took to sending his poems to his grandmother – Mrs O’Rorke of St Mark’s Square, Regent’s Park, asking for criticism. But by 14 November 1915 (aged fifteen), he was sending his mother three books of his poetry –
I should like you to keep [these], they were mostly written when I was in bed. I have been reading a good deal of Shelley while in bed … he has written some marvellous things … I have been made a member of the Literary Society – whatever that is! I believe you write a paper on a given subject and at the next meeting read it out, when it is discussed … that will be certain agony!
The boy was intensely affected by Nature’s beauty. On 20 February 1916, he wrote:
I woke up this morning to see the most lovely sunrise – I wonder whether you saw it? The whole of the Eastern sky was one great block of crimson – no fur clouds – but just this flawless sheen! And the dew was heavenly. Next holidays we must have some nocturnal expeditions – do you remember that blissful morning last Easter, when we all went – that is to say, all at home – to the badgers’ holes? How we saw lots of cubs, badgers, foxes, but far best – a perfect forest sunrise
– as though veils of boiling gold were thrown over the trees – it was gorgeous! You must come down here (Harrow) as soon as you can – if possible on a fine day…
Your Devoted son Rupert.
His mother wasn’t able to visit, owing to a bad cold. She sent Aunt Lulu instead.
On 12 March, Rupert wrote again:
My darling Mother, We had a most gorgeous concert last night – Plunket Green, Louise Dale, Ida Kiddus and the Russian singer Boris Lansky. It was absolutely glorious! Plunket Green of course was perfectly marvellous, but I think I liked the Russian the best. He sang in Russian, which is a lovely language to hear. And we had Maud Valerie White accompanying her own songs.
The boy was of course also interested in politics and like everything else he was interested in, he wanted to share it with his mother: ‘I’m sending you Wells’ book. I should advise you to read the chapter called “The Labour Market”. I think it’s awfully good. Yes, you must come down for the concert.’
But again – 19 March 1916 – Anne disappoints him; she is in bed with flu. Rupert, a Signaller in the school army corps, then turns to a subject that was particularly exercising his young mind:
I wonder what you think about conscientious objectors to the war? I think theirs is the most appalling position that any one could be put into … and as for the childish fury of those brave English people who brand them as cowards – well – it’s merely mad!
… (At Harrow) there was a young temporary master who was both medically unfit for the war and a conscientious objector: he had the moral courage (which was, it is true, unnecessary) to say out, what he thought about it – and the school in body, with that particularly babyish inconsistency which forgets the facts and remembers only impressions, branded him a coward, refused to be taught by him, wrote a petition to the headmaster (which was received!) that he should be sacked, with the result that he was sacked! … This is Harrow’s latest achievement and in spite of my being an Harrovian, I think it perfectly loathsome. Please don’t tell anyone about it.
On 26 March 1916:
I am awfully glad you are better again. Today is an absolutely perfect day. I woke up this morning to a sudden freshness in the bluest of skies and softness of early morning [air]. At last Spring is here in earnest. I went round my form-master’s garden this morning; he is a very enthusiastic gardener; and the daffodils were perfectly gorgeous! And the anemones, croci … were all looking their best in the glow of a real Spring morning; he had some lovely little irises out – tiny little purple flecks, with splendid gold centres. I do love a garden.
At Oxford, Rupert lodged in the Christ Church Deanery with a family friend later to become the Bishop of Ripon. In due course he would take rooms in college at Peck 6:8, across the quad from Michael. He passed his First Public Examination in Holy Scripture in Hilary term 1920. He then passed the preliminary examination of Second Public Examination in Modern History in Trinity term
the same year. At some point in the spring of 1920 Michael and Rupert, described
as 6 ft 2 in. tall, athletic and ‘of gigantic physical strength’,
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met. Before the beginning of Trinity term, they took themselves off for a reading holiday in preparation for their exams. On 4 April, Buxton wrote to his mother:
I had a most successful time in Surrey with Michael Davis [
sic
]. I am sorry to say that I did not get through a great deal of work as the county was so lovely, and there was such a lot to do. Our last few days were the best – actually the last two. We took an expedition walking from the neighbourhood of Chichester to Beachy Head, the whole length of the South Downs … We did thirty-five miles a day, I have never known such a walk for views – south bound over the hills to the sea and naturally over the whole expanse of Sussex and Surrey on a narrow grassy plain with steep sides covered with primroses, violets, cowslips and anemones. A most inspiring place to walk and I can well understand the enthusiasm of Belloc and Kipling for the ‘Great hills of the South County’ and the patriotism that they breed.
Then, the following month – tragic news. Oxford undergraduate Alastair Grahame, the only child of Kenneth Grahame, author of
The Wind in the Willows
, committed suicide by lying across the railway line that runs down the east side of Port Meadow, an ancient grazing ground between the Thames (known as the Isis in Oxford) and the railway, to the north-west of the city.
There was already a literary association with the river here. In 1862 a lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up it with three young girls — Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell.
Alastair Grahame’s story is a wretched one. He, like Michael, had been born in 1900 and attended Eton before Christ Church, though this had not been his first public school.
The Wind in the Willows
(1908) had not been made from the spark his father had got from Alastair in quite the same way as
Peter Pan
had been inspired by the Davies boys, but Grahame had given his son to believe that the character of Toad was based upon him. Like
Peter Pan
, it became a children’s classic (both in book form and as a play written by A. A. Milne) at a time when the cult of the child was identified with all that was glorious about Edwardian England.
The attention it brought Alastair was especially unwanted, partly because he was born blind in one eye and with a squint in the other. To compensate, but in the process adding to his discomfort, his parents were determined to show that he was genius material. They exaggerated his gifts and pushed him hard in ways that didn’t suit him, so that he developed a frustrated, angry temperament when he didn’t measure up.
So unruly did Alastair become that when as a child he walked in Kensington Gardens – at the same time as Michael and Nico played there – complaints were received about his slapping and kicking other children. Only his father’s bedtime stories about Mole, Ratty and Toad could calm him.
Antipathetic, squinting, half-blind and easy meat for bullies, he lasted at his first public school, Rugby, one term only. When Eton took him he had an emotional breakdown and in 1916 left. Afterwards, somehow, he was found a place at Oxford, where he was still referred to as Toad: ‘Of course I was not surprised at the news,’ wrote a friend after Alastair passed Mods, ‘for we were both determined that nothing else should happen, were it only for the Toad’s sake.’
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Whereupon he had lain down on the tracks and a train had run over him.
The coroner’s report stated that Alastair had lain down on the tracks and waited for the train; it had not knocked him down. But they recorded a verdict of accidental death anyway. Student suicide was not something any college wanted to acknowledge, and in those days, the establishment got what it wanted.
His death will have touched Michael more than some; because Alastair’s close friend and confidant leading up to his suicide had been Rupert.
The man with the film star looks – Rupert did seriously consider becoming a film actor – had befriended the temperamental, seriously reserved, physically damaged boy. They were not mere acquaintances. Rupert had taken him on, taken him home to Woodredon, let him play the organ at Warlies (which Alastair greatly enjoyed). Then, one month after Rupert and Michael returned from their working holiday in Dorset, Alastair had committed suicide.
Bob Boothby told Michael that he had made a mistake about Rupert Buxton and thought he should ditch him. He said he recognised a ‘dark force’ in Rupert, and in an interview with Andrew Birkin sixty years later referred to him as saturnine, gloomy, sinister and very possessive. But, even in the light of Alastair’s death, many assumed that Boothby was just jealous.