The Real Peter Pan (28 page)
Read The Real Peter Pan Online
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
T
HE FIRST SUGGESTION
of an unbalanced state of mind was evident very publicly on 4 December 1918, in Rupert’s last year at Harrow, when he found his way into the pages of
The Times
in a most mysterious set of circumstances. A letter, unsigned and unstamped, had apparently been left for him at his house at the school. It read, ‘You will be well advised to walk up Peterborough Hill alone at 10 minutes past 7 on Sunday night. Your help is needed.’
Peterborough Hill lay only a few yards from Rupert’s house at the school. He sent a note to his housemaster, Archer Vassall, enclosing the letter and informing him that he was keeping the appointment. He had then mysteriously disappeared. Vassall and another master had watched the road for some time, but nothing was seen of the
boy. The police were called in after he failed to appear on the last train from London.
The following day, a Monday, another letter, in the same hand as the first, was, according to
The Times
, received at Rupert’s home, ‘stating that he was safe, but that his brains were needed. The letter concluded – “Ill if he refuses, well if he agrees.”’
The next anyone heard was apparently from Buxton himself. A telegram from Newcastle, signed ‘Rupert’ was received by his school and by his father stating that he would shortly be returning to London.
Extraordinary, one might think, that a national newspaper would be interested in carrying such a story. Being
The Times
, one might be tempted to conclude that Rupert’s aristocratic and public school background was the reason for the interest of a newspaper which then appealed to the upper classes. But in fact
The Times
report followed an article the previous day (3 December) in the
Daily Mail,
which made the point that Rupert’s disappearance was ‘engaging the attention of New Scotland Yard officials and the police throughout the county’. The article also made some interesting points about the letter and about Rupert that
The Times
omitted.
In the
Mail
, the Headmaster admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the letter. Only a few of Rupert’s friends had seen it: ‘[Rupert] showed the letter to one or two other boys who … advised him not to take any notice of it.’ So, Rupert had taken the letter with him and it was never produced for Scotland Yard to investigate who might have sent it.
On 9 January 1919, a second, shorter article appeared in
The Times
newspaper, following a statement about his earlier disappearance made by Buxton’s father, who had eventually found Rupert at King’s Cross Station ‘in a fainting condition’. According to
The
Times
, Rupert ‘had, in the doctor’s opinion, been suffering from overstrain resulting in some measure from preparing for a scholarship examination at Oxford … He is already much better and it is confidently expected that a short period of rest will completely restore his health.’
In a case, without any solution or explanation in the offing, the
Mail
saw fit to mention a childhood accident that might explain it. Rupert ‘was seriously injured cycling near Walton Abbey in August 1912, the shaft of a dogcart with which he collided penetrating his forehead…’
Buxton did not return to Harrow after the episode. ‘Since then he has been having a “rest” with his elder brother,’ wrote his housemaster to the Provost, the senior academic administrator at his Cambridge college. ‘He is quite recovered and there is no reason to anticipate a recurrence. The episode above appeared to have been entirely a medical question and does not in any way reflect on his character.’
The headmaster’s letter to the Provost admitted that the episode was ‘still unexplained … I think myself that there was something histrionic and self-conscious about that strange episode at the end – but he was overwrought at the time, and not his normal self.’
The provost then wrote to Charles W. Cassington at Harrow, presumably a master, but one who unfortunately had only just returned to the school and wrote back that ‘I am afraid I can’t tell you much,’ except that ‘all his story about the escapade was an illusion with no truth in it … His family are rather cranks, as you know…’
This rather unkind, blanket dismissal of the Buxtons was probably levelled at their religious convictions. The family was not simply religious, they were evangelical. Rupert’s grandfather built St Thomas’s Church, at Upshire, close to the family’s two homes, as the focal
point of their evangelical mission – prayer meetings, bible society, Band of Hope, etc – and he himself appointed a chaplain to run it.
‘The keystone of Victor Buxton’s life,’ read Sir Victor’s obituary in the
Essex County Chronicle
, ‘was his entire dependence on God. He believed firmly and joyfully in the personal guidance of Christ.’
Rupert’s mother Anne was the daughter of the Rector of Feltwell, near Thetford in Norfolk. Catherine Marsh, the evangelical writer and propagator of the Gospel among working people, was a close family friend. One of Rupert’s early poems was entitled ‘In Memoriam Catherine Marsh’.
Between 1915 and 1919, the family, like many others during the war, suffered a number of bereavements and it was in the context of death that Rupert’s beliefs found form, just as it had been for Barrie.
In 1915, Rupert’s grandfather Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton died and the following year his brother Jocelyn was wounded during the Battle of the Somme and went missing, strangely, only after he’d been rescued and delivered to the front-line hospital service station.
Rupert was just sixteen when he wrote:
My own darling Mother. This must be a very trying time for you and darling Father. You have always been so gentle and comforting to us all in our troubles; I wish I could return that sympathy.
I was sitting out in the garden when your letters came: all the wonderful peace of God’s love was on the flowers. Do you know, I always like to think that He loves the flowers just as much as us – in fact we are all His garden flowers! Well, He seemed to whisper down through the evening scents of roses and carnations, that He would take care of our precious flower Jocelyn … Just as, when we pick a rose it soon fades; so when the life is picked from one of His Roses, it droops and dies – to revive in the great cool calm depths of Heaven’s garden.
And the wonderful flower is revived by His gentle hands, and, the Night of Rest freshens its beauty for Tomorrow’s Life.
I am glad you like the ‘Dewdrop’, though there is no depth to it: it was only a pretty sketch. Yes, I wrote a poem last night which I think is my best. But I will not send it to you as it is one that ought to be said – at least I think so; because it is the most serious I have written.
… May God’s great gentle eyes look down and watch over our darling Jocelyn, as they watch over us; and may he give us all his Calm, and perhaps a little of His Wisdom for the trying days that are coming…
(Later)
My precious Mother,
I had not posted my Sunday letter to you when I got yours. My own dearest Mother, I know how awful it is to find another hope shattered: but, surely there is absolutely no reason to give up hoping as strongly as we did before.
Look at these statements:
From Captain Grey: ‘Several men state that he [Jocelyn] was wounded in the shoulder, and that they saw Pte Ryecroft bring him into our trench’.
From a man in his section; ‘This is to certify that I saw the above person (Rycroft) bringing in 2nd Lieut Buxton from the front of our barbed wire into the trench… (Pte. Gordon)’
Capt. Grey again: ‘Several of his section informed me that he was brought into our trench from “No man’s land” by his servant who was also wounded.’
Lieut. Norris: ‘There is every reason to believe he was brought in
safely as I was given to understand by one of our chaplains who knew him well, that he saw him arrive at the first dressing station…’
I do wish we were at home now, so as to be able to help somehow, but God will take care of him wherever he is, and if He has taken him, it is for his good…’
Later in July, Rupert learned of his grandmother Lady Victoria Buxton’s death. On 27 July, he wrote that he was sorry to hear about ‘darling Granny … but don’t you think she would be better out of this emptiness of life, to go and join Grandfather Beyond. Perhaps this will be so.’
In November Rupert’s brother Clarence was decorated with the Military Cross (for bravery) at Buckingham Palace. On 29 January 1917, Rupert wrote to his mother:
It is great news that I hear from your last two letters. How splendid that we shall all be together again – and how happy our dear Jocelyn [presumed dead] will be when he sees us all in church and sitting down to Sunday lunch; for he will be there too, and the circle will join hands with Heaven and those who will never die.
What a splendid fact it is – the Communion of Saints – the Communion of Souls. The continued taking part in all one’s doings: the sharing of one’s hopes, and the sharing of our disappointments. How glorious it is to think of him looking down to earth and joining in our prayers – which to us his soul ‘beacons from the abode where the eternal are’.
This last is a quote from Shelley’s ‘Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats’, in which the poet exhorts us not to mourn Keats, who is ‘made one with Nature’, where ‘envy and calumny and hate and
pain’ cannot reach him. He is not dead; it is the living who are dead. His being has been withdrawn into the one Spirit, which is beauty.
Rupert echoed these ideas in a Sonnet, which begins:
Eternity! Man clutches at an hour,
Feverish, to fill a quest of emptiness,
While in him all thine ages, limitless
Stretch through death’s sunset in a mist of power.
Why, in the tide-washed pool of mortal time
Stays he to bathe, while God’s infinity
Lies all around him, and earth’s vanity…
Death, for Rupert, was the gateway to heaven, much to be desired: ‘…beyond Death’s surf-washed crest Lies the blue ocean of a dreamless Rest!’
On 22 August, he wrote to his brother Clarence about their friends killed in the war: ‘I think they are with us – actually taking part in our thoughts, moulding them, inspiring them, guiding them with the great love which they have found in Heaven.’
In a 24-stanza narrative poem, ‘The Pilgrimage of Thala’, Rupert told of a boy making his way gloriously into the presence of God by drowning:
XIX
…he must either die upon the rock
Or dive into this iridescent lake,
And drown himself beneath its flowing rills.
He chose the latter course, and throwing off
His flask of wine and precious hunting knife,
(He knew not why), he plunged into the pool
To drown himself at once, and yet for aye.
XX
But look what wondrous thing has come to pass!
Instead of suffocating beneath the wave,
He glided thro’ the [slumbering] rills of green,
Down thro’ the water, further, till he thought
He must be dashed against the bottom rocks.
But no! Thro’ lovely flowers of blue and green
He glided, sinking more – and sinking yet!
Oblivion came, and after that he slept:
Yet onward thro’ the limpid green he sank –
And died – yet lived in spirit one more day
Till two great scenes could shew him all this life,
And what it comes to in the sight of God.
Buxton found the image so deeply affecting that he illustrated these stanzas with a photograph of a real pool cut from a magazine.
It was but a short step from believing wholeheartedly in the glory beyond oblivion to welcoming it with open arms. By 30 September 1917, he was of the opinion that ‘it was a terrible existence we are in’.
From the Monitors Room, Harrow he wrote to his mother:
We have had very good views of the raids from here. Last night was a wondrous scene. There was a big silver moon and the sky was of that strange pale gold colour which seems to remind me of the Past. Great banks of saffron rested on the horizon.
And there, amongst all this beauty; the scintillating, sinister beauty of soaring star-shells and crackling shrapnel; the blue green flashes of guns on the ground, and the darting, dashing lights of our air squadrons.
It is a terrible existence we are in, Mother.
There is something so dreamlike about it, so like a nightmare from which we will awaken. But no, not now.
One staggers under the accumulated weight of sorrow which afflicts this sad sweet earth of ours.
Then, in May 1919, his father, who couldn’t drive, bought a car and tried it out on the Warlies estate with one of his employees, who couldn’t drive either. Somehow, Sir Victor fell out of the car onto the road and was run over by it. So serious were his injuries that he had to have a leg amputated. Gangrene set in and he died.
The family was then crippled by a tax bill and were forced to sell Warlies to Dr Barnardo’s.
By the time Rupert arrived in Oxford he was understandably in quite a distressed state. His landlord at the Christ Church Deanery commented on this in a letter to Lady Buxton:
I wish I had helped him more when he was with me. But I have always had a horror of forcing any man’s confidence and though I think that this is an error on the right side, I have always felt that I have missed many opportunities. It haunts me rather, that he was often depressed and unhappy when he was with me, and I never succeeded in doing anything for him.
But then Rupert had met Michael and the depression had lifted. Rupert’s thoughts about death were the thoughts of the Romantic poets he loved. Michael read Keats and Shelley as deeply as did his new friend. He empathised with glorious Shelley in particular, the poet touched by the maddening hand of the supernatural who searches restlessly for reconciliation with his lost vision of a world free of decay and change, through ultimate union with Nature.