The Real Peter Pan (5 page)

More uncanny still, Peter Ibbetson even had an Uncle Jim figure in his life in the Bois de Boulogne, who captivated him with fairy tales.

Le Major Duquesnois lives on the edge of the park and befriends Peter: ‘He took to me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me … and told me a new fairy tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years. Scheherazade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck from a bowstring!’

Again like Barrie, when he is tired of fairyland Duquesnois would tell Peter and his young French friends tales of adventure and high heroism (some of which he had, unlike Barrie, actually lived), ‘of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days – never of St Helena; he would not trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how, virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore.’ On the little party of Duquesnois’s followers, as on Barrie’s young followers in Kensington Gardens, a solemn, awestruck stillness would then fall.

At some point Sylvia will surely have recognised Barrie as the man in the park that George and Jack had told her about, the little man who would hypnotise with his eyebrows, enchant them with his fairy stories and amuse them boxing with his St Bernard dog. And because she knew the story of Peter Ibbetson well, she may even have addressed Barrie as Le Major Duquesnois that very night.

But she wouldn’t have exposed him. It was in Sylvia’s nature only to have mocked him gently. She would have loved that he was so ardent a fan of her father’s dreamland. That
Peter Ibbetson
was Barrie’s source remained their little secret.

A
FTER THEIR FIRST
meeting the two families began to see a great deal of one another, though mainly when Arthur was out at work. Everyone knew of the association and began to speak of the Barries and the Davieses in the same breath. Barrie and his wife would walk the boys home from the park almost every day, Mary Ansell befriending Sylvia while her husband continued his fun and games with the boys upstairs in the nursery.

At the start Sylvia seems to have treated him a bit like a useful second nanny, who would keep her children amused for hours on end. As for Mary, Sylvia enjoyed her company at first. There was a shared interest in interior design, and there is no doubt that the friendship helped pave the way for what happened next. But it is
clear that Mary knew nothing about
Peter Ibbetson
, and it is likely that Barrie didn't at first appreciate just how deeply Sylvia herself was caught up in
Peter Ibbetson
. This came out between them over the ensuing months and strengthened their bond considerably.

Sylvia had been her father's model for the Duchess of Towers. Indeed, she had a spiritual life that owed everything to her father's psychic ability and to the close relationship they had enjoyed with one another.

When Sylvia's third son, Peter, was researching a history of the family he caught wind of this and wrote to Sylvia's close friend, Dolly, about it.

Dolly tried to guide Peter to it without betraying Sylvia's confidence: ‘Always [Sylvia's] reserve about what she cared about was very strong. She had an inner life of her own, which is what gave her her great interest.'

This was typical of the du Mauriers. There was an unspoken rule in the family, where fun and laughter were paramount, never to tax people with anything too deep. ‘One must never be
au serieux
about anything,' observed Sylvia's sister Trixy's husband, Charles Hoyer Millar. ‘The family in general had a rooted dislike to serious topics of any kind, at all events in the presence of each other.' Deep thoughts were not avoided, however. On the contrary, there were special words for them in their vocabulary, like ‘main talks' or ‘psychological politics'. Deep thoughts were in fact at the heart of what the du Mauriers were about.

Chief among these were psychological and supernatural matters. Daphne couldn't keep quiet about them in her fiction, and once spelled them out in her non-fiction, writing in
The Rebecca Notebook:

It was almost all too much for Dolly not to mention in her diary something about her paranormal beliefs and skills, though characteristically they had been told to her in absolute confidence: ‘Sylvia couldn't talk about things she really felt to those who were not very close to her. She had an inner life of her own, & was to me always interesting.' The entry for Sunday 15 October 1892 reads: ‘Talked a good deal with sweet Sylvia, who told me a good deal about her family etc.' There then follows instructions about how to hypnotise someone, clearly copied down after Sylvia had described the process to her:

The truth was that Sylvia's secret inner life made her who she was,
the Sylvia she shows us in the dreamy photographs that Barrie took, her undemonstrative moments, as if she was away in another world, which she was when the mood took her.

Wrote her son, Peter, ‘People of both sexes told of the indelible impression she left with them of something rarer than mere charm, and deeper than mere beauty.' Arthur's brother, Crompton, ‘as a rule pretty reticent, once, shortly before his death, tried to talk about her to [Peter's wife] and me; and it was as if he spoke of a being of more than earthly loveliness'.

It was this ‘more than earthly' aura that Peter was referring to when he wrote that he suspected Sylvia inherited ‘a good deal' from her father, which made her anything but ordinary like her mother (du Maurier's wife, Emma, had done everything in her power to dissuade her husband from meddling in the paranormal).

This, Sylvia's most beguiling feature, brought her ever closer to Barrie as bit by bit it emerged how bound up she and her father were together, both in life and in the writing of du Maurier's books.

The physical similarity between Sylvia and the dream duchess in
Peter Ibbetson
is striking, and although the hypnotic heroine of du Maurier's second novel,
Trilby
, had been loosely based on a seventeen-year-old girl named ‘Carry' who had been hypnotised on many an occasion by du Maurier as a young man, Sylvia had modelled for the illustrations of Trilby in the book.

Barrie became fascinated by the way du Maurier had captured Sylvia in book form as an artist might capture his subject on canvas. And, in his desire to win her over, he now captured Sylvia in an autobiographical novel he was writing.

Before they met, the two main characters in his novel
Tommy
and Grizel
had been based on himself and his wife, Mary Ansell. After meeting Sylvia he had been so affected that he'd floundered
with the writing of it and made the decision to follow du Maurier and model Grizel on Sylvia instead.

When Bernard Partridge came to illustrate the characters in
Tommy and Grizel
for publication in
Scribner's Magazine
, Barrie told him he could give him a real-life model for one of them. ‘Mrs Llewelyn Davies, whom she is meant to be a bit like is willing to sit to you for this and she has some idea of the dressing too. If you like this idea would you communicate with her about it?'

The physical similarity of Sylvia and Grizel is clear in the text. Just as du Maurier gave Sylvia's nose to Mimsey in
Peter Ibbetson
and described it as ‘rather tilted at the tip', so now Grizel has Sylvia's ‘tilted nose'. Grizel's gray eyes are also Sylvia's – ‘unusually far apart, [which] let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth'. Diana Farr observed that ‘perhaps Sylvia's most remarkable feature' was her ‘eyes, set wide apart'. Meanwhile, Dolly wrote at this moment in her diary, ‘Sylvia has got one of the most delightful, brilliantly sparkling faces I have ever seen. Her nose turns round the corner – also turns right up. Her mouth is quite crooked.' In
Tommy and
Grizel
Barrie gives Sylvia's characteristic mouth to Grizel too:

Not to have grown up completely was the greatest thing – for the time of childhood is the unforgettable emblem of the bliss to which
Peter Ibbetson aspired when dreaming true. Childhood is a time when what is dammed up later flows off without restraint, when things ‘go of themselves', when there is no need to do this thing or that thing or find a way, or achieve a result.

And it was the little bit of the child left in Sylvia which soon crystallised in Barrie's mind his most famous idea. ‘Genius is the power to be a boy again,' Tommy announces in the novel. Tommy had made up his mind. He was going to write a book of his own about a boy –

The moment he conceived the idea he knew that it was the idea for him.

So much a feature of the lives of Sylvia and her boys was Mr Barrie now that in the summer of 1899 he thought nothing of showing up uninvited at Rustington-on-Sea on the Sussex coast where Sylvia, Arthur and the boys were holidaying. Dolly Parry's family owned the Mill House there, which was really no more than a cottage, but right on the shore, ‘an enchanted place,' Peter Davies recalled, ‘with the windmill in working order and lofts and sacks of flour to play about among.' For the past eight years, this had been a more or less regular occurrence.

Barrie took his camera with him and turned out to be quite the little photographer, taking pictures on the beach of the boys as they changed from their bathing costumes, with Sylvia – towels swirling around her in the wind – drying and dressing them.

O
CCASIONALLY IN HER
travels through her children’s minds Sylvia would find things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing, so Barrie tells us, was the word ‘Peter’.

Peter Pan had first entered her children’s minds one sunny, autumnal day in the gardens, around the same time as Michael was conceived. The boys were standing on the banks of the Serpentine when Barrie pointed to a drowned forest at the bottom of it. Peering over the edge, they could see trees growing upside down. At night, so Barrie told them, there were also drowned stars in it. And beyond the bridge nearby, which crosses the Serpentine into Hyde Park, there is the island on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls, the island where lives wise old Solomon Caw.

‘No one,’ Barrie said, ‘no one who is human can land on that island, except of course Peter Pan (and he is only half human).’

‘Of course you may write to him on a piece of paper,’ Barrie told them, ‘and then twist it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it will reach Peter’s island after dark.’

By the time they were home and the paper boats were well on their way to the island, George, Jack and Peter were rapt with wonder at Barrie’s tale of how Peter Pan had got there.

For all of one week of his life, he had been a boy just like them. But then one night, looking out of the open bedroom window he had seen trees far away, which were doubtless the Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens, eventually to find his way onto the island. It is wonderful that he could fly without wings, but the place itched tremendously, and perhaps we could all fly if we
were as dead-confident-sure of our capacity to do it, as was bold Peter Pan that evening.

At first, George had not been so sure about this and was unable to remember ever wanting to escape the nursery and return to the Gardens. But Barrie told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples as usual, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, George did distinctly remember a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. It was quite natural that Peter had been a little wild yet, having been a bird before he was human, and, as George added, being still very itchy at the shoulders, where his wings used to be.

Over the ensuing days, weeks, months and years, the story of Peter grew and grew between them. To play as other children play he would have to leave the island,
but Solomon warned him there is no second chance for a boy who flies away to the island of dreams. And now that he had lost faith, he found he could fly no longer. That was when the poet Shelley came to the rescue.

All true poets are half-and-halfs like Peter Pan – ‘They are never exactly grown up,’ Barrie wrote. ‘They are people who despise money except what you need for today, and Shelley had all that and five pounds over. So, when he was walking in Kensington Gardens he made a paper boat of his banknote, and sent it sailing on the Serpentine. It reached the island at night: and the lookout brought it to Solomon Caw.’
17

Shelley’s five-pound note persuaded the thrushes to build Peter a boat in which he contrived to leave the island. It took many months during which Peter paid all the thrushes sixpence a day, but eventually he launched the boat and sailed to the Gardens, and with the help of the fairies there, flew home. This was not in the end a wise thing to have done, but at least it confirmed his destiny.

As for Michael, on the day he finally did break through the film that obscures the Neverland, Barrie was with George on the coast of Patagonia, whither they had gone to shoot the Great Sloth, known to be the largest of animals, though they found his size to have been underestimated.

Besides George (seven), Barrie and the sloths, there were George’s father (Arthur) and mother (Sylvia) and nanny (Mary Hodgson). It made for quite a party, as Barrie recalled:

George, Jack and Peter had known for some time that a baby was expected and Sylvia had prepared them by telling them they must be good or the baby wouldn’t be. Agitated about what they should give him, they settled on their Methuen button, memento of Field Marshal Paul Methuen’s exploits in the Boer War. Sylvia was pleased, though she didn’t appreciate the sacrifice they were making. Otherwise,
all
the talk had been whether it would be a boy or a girl.

In his notebook
18
Barrie suggests that George, Jack and Peter, now going on seven, six and three, wanted a boy and he sent them a jeering message – ‘One girl is more use than twenty boys!’ – which is what Peter Pan says to Wendy in the Peter Pan play. Sylvia admitted, ‘I’m wanting a girl.’ But she was so good at boys, so a boy it was.

Michael turned out to be the most beautiful and happiest baby of all, so beautiful he could have been a girl. Sylvia fell in love with him at first sight, as did everyone, and he kept his baby curls until he was at least seven.

A few days later Sylvia let Barrie know that Solomon had selected well and Uncle Jim responded with a present of a rocking horse and a letter.

‘Jocelyn’ was now Barrie’s pet name for Sylvia. It had a special significance. Before du Maurier died he speculated that his extrasensory receptivity would be inherited by someone in the family, conjuring the idea that ‘a little live spark’ of his own ‘individual consciousness’ might be handed down as it were genetically. This posthumous inheritance became the subject of his third and final novel,
The Martian
, published in 1896, the year of his death. In it, he appeared to be suggesting that Sylvia was to be a mediator. Her father called the hero of the novel (who is a lightly disguised version of himself) Barty Jocelyn. Jocelyn was Sylvia’s second name.
His legacy would thus be inherited by someone
in the Jocelyn line
. In June 1900 it was one reason to look with singular optimism upon Michael’s birth.

If Sylvia felt that it was down to her now to take her father’s legacy into the next generation, in Barrie she found an ally to help her, and so he had taken to addressing her in letters ‘Dear Jocelyn’. Soon she was signing her letters to him, ‘Your Jocelyn’.

From Barrie it was praise indeed that Sylvia had been ‘very very nearly a boy’ herself. To be a boy was the highest compliment he could have paid her. Not only was genius ‘the power to be a boy again’, as he’d said, but also the line was straight out of her father’s novel,
Trilby
, which because it was applied to the artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall herself, was a reference whimsical enough to amuse Sylvia that she was falling under his spell, as Trilby did under Svengali’s.
19