The Real Peter Pan (31 page)

There was never any likelihood that Rupert’s sister would go anywhere near him; nor did she. The letter seems to corroborate Peter’s view that Barrie’s state of mind was stable, but it was in contrast to Denis Mackail’s view – ‘He never got over it. It altered and darkened everything for the rest of his life’ – and to Barrie’s own statement in a letter to Dundas a year after the tragedy: ‘What happened was in a way the end of me.’ But then Peter was aware that it wasn’t long before Barrie was making notes for a story based on the tragedy.

To be entitled
Water
or
The Silent Pool
or
The 19th
, it told of a dream he had of Michael returning from the dead. The boy was unaware that he had been drowned until ‘the fatal nineteenth’ approached again and he realised the inevitability of his death being repeated and went with Uncle Jim, holding his hand, into Sandford Pool – ‘He said goodbye to me and went into it and sank just as before…’

Chillingly, he then added – ‘Must be clear tht [sic] there is nothing suicidal about it.’

T
HE RECENT REVELATIONS
and prosecutions of high-profile figures for sexual offences are bound to make one wonder whether Barrie’s motivation in the matter of the Llewelyn Davies boys was sexual. Even in his day there were many who assumed that it was. According to Nico, the youngest of the boys, it was common talk on the literary cocktail party circuit.
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Homosexuality was illegal in England, even between consenting adults, until 1967, when the age of consent was set at twenty-one. Only occasionally would a court case break through the surface of Victorian respectability, most notably in 1895, just as Barrie began frequenting Kensington Gardens, when there were three.

The first of the trials of Oscar Wilde was brought by Wilde himself
against the Marquess of Queensberry, who left a card at his club accusing him of ‘posing as a sodomite’ after the Marquess became aware that Wilde was having an affair with his son, the poet Lord Alfred Douglas. It opened at the Old Bailey on 26 April. The prosecution paraded a motley squadron of some dozen young male witnesses – many but not all of them rent boys – to testify that Wilde and Alfred Taylor (Wilde’s procurer), were indeed guilty of twenty-five counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to commit gross indecencies, though sodomy wasn’t specifically among them. Wilde therefore lost his case against Queensberry, and the Crown prosecution indicted Wilde with gross indecency and brought him to trial at the Old Bailey. This second trial produced a hung jury, but a third saw Wilde convicted and sent to prison for two years, an experience that assisted his passage to an early death at forty-six.

The aggressive nature of the Crown’s prosecution of Wilde is said to have been linked to a homosexual affair between Liberal Prime Minister Archibald Philip Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, and the eldest of Queensberry’s fetching sons, Francis Douglas. Queensberry is said to have threatened to expose this affair if the Crown didn’t deal severely with Wilde. Rosebery, whose wife, the daughter of a Rothschild banker, had died and left him a bachelor some years before, suffered severe depression right up to Wilde’s conviction, whereupon he made a remarkable recovery.

This is worth mentioning because Rosebery’s private secretary was Barrie’s closest friend, Thomas Gilmour, which suggests among other things that Barrie will have been privy to the whole case and well aware of the risks that a prominent citizen ran by importuning young boys.

Barrie himself became a correspondent of Rosebery, writing to him after the dust had settled, on 2 November 1897:

In Wilde’s case, it is likely that more than one of his sexual encounters were with boys below the age of consent, which for heterosexuals in Great Britain and Ireland was sixteen. The abuse of minors was rampant. In a letter to Leonard Woolf in 1907, the Bloomsbury sexual anarchist Lytton Strachey wrote:

When Michael’s cousin Daphne du Maurier was fourteen she wrote a story about Barrie,
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whom she knew very well, she didn’t think twice about giving him a procurer – ‘depressive Mr Tibbs’, who picks up a boy called Maurice, a thinly disguised Michael Llewelyn Davies, in the West End of London close to the Trocadero, and takes him to meet Tommy Strange, who, we learn, ‘likes young gentlemen’.

The Trocadero itself would hardly have suited Barrie as a point of
procurement. In those days cinemas were the more discreet pick-up joints, dark to the eyes of the law if not always to eagle-eyed managements. ‘Barrie must have slipped into thousands of cinemas in his time,’ his official biographer Denis Mackail recorded, but for some reason ‘had to abandon one of the nearest to the Adelphi’.

In 1921, while the film of a night time shoot of London was being edited by a newsreel production company, a keen pair of eyes recognised Barrie lurking about in the area around the Adelphi. To everyone’s surprise there he was, snuggled up in hat, scarf, and raincoat, refreshing himself at a coffee-stall at two in the morning.

The question posed was why would a 61-year-old man, who would never normally frequent a coffee stall, let alone at two in the morning, be propping one up around the corner of his apartment? Not only (to Barrie’s embarrassment) did the news clip show at countless cinemas up and down the country, but a frame from it appeared in the press, with caption-writers wondering at Barrie’s habit to prowl about the streets and patronise coffee-stalls in the small hours.

Perhaps we should be charitable: Michael had died but six months earlier.

When one looks at his autobiographical novel
The Little White Bird
, even hardened Barrie supporters throw up their hands when they read his description of the night he spent with young David, purportedly Michael’s elder brother, George. The episode is pages long, but this is typical:

In the book, Timothy is the name Barrie gives to the child he longs to have fathered and many readers at the time felt not outraged but sorry for him. Self-exposure beneath a veil of whimsy and sentimentality worked for Barrie and won him many a reader’s sympathy. But you never knew where the whimsy ended and the darker self took over. Critics gave him the benefit of the doubt: ‘Barrie, in the manner of Lewis Carroll and his nude photographs of little girls, was consciously innocent,’
65
wrote James Harding in the 1980s.

There were indeed plenty of relationships with children other than the Llewelyn Davies boys, clearly innocent. One very special one was with Bevil – ‘my favourite boy in the wide wide world’ – the son of the writer and academic Arthur Quiller-Couch. Barrie engaged Bevil in adventures, taking photographs of them and making them into a book, exactly as he did with the Davies boys.

And long after Michael, his great love, passed from his life, Barrie was to be seen with a boy close to hand, sometimes friends’ children, but also sometimes a boy with just a name and very little pack drill. One of these was Dick Rowe, ‘a little boy’ who appeared in
his company on a holiday to Scotland as late as 1933 and was still his consort two years later – brought along with him ‘from the flat’.

In time, Barrie had a baronetcy and a great deal of power. He was also of course a celebrity, and the Peter Pan association ensured constant homage from parents who desperately wanted their children to meet him. So much so that when, in August 1933, he was staying at Balnaboth, just north of Kirriemuir in Scotland where he was born, and was giving one of his regular young friends (his secretary’s son, Simon Asquith) a birthday tea party, who should come over from nearby Glamis Castle but their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of York with their children, Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, our future Queen who was seven. ‘Crackers on the table, and games in the garden afterwards,’ were the order of the day, led by the very artist of children’s games, Sir James M. Barrie himself.

He liked to be with children. They made him the child he once was.

So successful was the birthday party that he was invited to Glamis the following day, for Princess Margaret’s birthday, and was chosen to sit next to the birthday girl at tea. He recalled later that observing some of her presents on the table, they

Whatever little secrets passed between them thereafter, Margaret clearly fell under his spell. Barrie was told that when later his name
had been mentioned, she had responded immediately: ‘I know that man. He is my greatest friend, and I am
his
greatest friend.’

Barrie would see Margaret again, in London, when she was five. In a house in Regent’s Park there were more games in which Barrie once again played a leading role, before confessing to her that he had taken the generous words she had uttered about her favourite present being ‘yours
and
mine’, and those about each being one another’s ‘greatest friend’, and put them in his play,
The Boy David
– his final play as it turned out. By way of compensation, he told her, she would receive a penny for every utterance of her two phrases on stage. She didn’t forgot this and in due course he received a letter from her father, by then King George VI, to the effect that if Barrie didn’t pay up he’d be hearing from His Majesty’s solicitors. Barrie responded to the effect that a proper Agreement would be drawn up by his solicitor, Sir Reginald Poole, and a ceremony was planned for the signing by himself and Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace, when a bag of pennies would be handed over. But it never happened, because Barrie died before it could.

For the weaver’s son from Kirriemuir this latter-day conjugation with royalty must have seemed a climax of sorts. But it is also instructive because, as in the case of the Llewelyn Davies boys and like most writers, life was for him the ground of his art and he lived life principally for his work, living it to invigorate and inspire his plays and novels. Theory was no good to him at all.

Also, to be fair, any judgement should be undertaken in the context of the time, not of our time. The Child was of special interest to late Victorian and Edwardian writers. Industrialisation had led to exploitation of children in the cotton mills of the north, and in 1839, almost half the funerals in London were for children under ten years of age. The Romantic ideal of the Child – the innocent soul
untrammelled by ‘the regular action of the world’ – celebrated by Wordsworth and earlier by Rousseau, had given way to nineteenth-century exploitation, guilt and sentimentalism.

Dickens had mourned the loss of the idyll in
Oliver Twist,
in Little Nell’s death in
The Old Curiosity Shop
and in Johnny’s death in Great Ormond Street Hospital (to whom Barrie gave the
Peter Pan
copyright) in
Our Mutual Friend
. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Child had come to represent something deep in us that had been sacrificed to materialism. As never before the symbol of the Child fascinated and gripped people dimly conscious that if what had been sacrificed were to be lost for good it would be Man’s undoing.

In England, a number of adult males besides Barrie formed friendships with children outside the family that were inspirational and remained sexually pure. For example, John Millais, with what the newspapers called ‘his schoolboy manner’, had a relationship with Beatrix Potter when she was a little girl. Millais was one of a group of adult males, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s husband and Quaker politician John Bright, who came alive in the company of young Beatrix, with her innocence, beauty and shy contemplative manner.

But there was also speculation about unscrupulous males turning the Cult of Child to lascivious advantage. The critic John Ruskin was divorced after he began a bizarre relationship with the artist Kate Greenaway, who liked ‘to play child’ with him and indulge in baby talk. The reason Ruskin (sixty-four) contacted Greenaway (twenty-nine) in the first place was that he found her drawings of pubescent girls irresistible. Likewise, the reason the Reverend Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll’s friendship with the young Alice Liddell and her two sisters, famously the inspiration for
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
came to an abrupt end was that he began taking plainly provocative photographs of them.

To begin with, the fact that such relationships were creatively inspirational put parents at their ease, as no doubt Barrie’s creative intentions put the Llewelyn Davies boys’ mother, Sylvia, at her ease.

We watch as Sylvia falls over herself to facilitate his plan, while others (her husband Arthur, sister Trixy, mother Emma, the boys’ Nanny Mary Hodgson, and Sylvia’s close friend Dolly) become exasperated at how compliant she is.

We watch, too, as Barrie appears to derive a tremendous sense of power from the process of capturing Sylvia and the boys on the pages of his novels and plays.

And we listen to those who knew Barrie and Michael at the time, including in particular Denis Mackail, who was in a unique position to know and made the point, that while Michael and Barrie drew closer and closer, ‘perhaps it isn’t always Barrie who leads or steers’.