12

1908–1910

Barrie had seen little of Sylvia and the boys during the summer of 1908, but he now made amends by announcing his Christmas present to them: a three-week ski-ing holiday in Switzerland, staying at the Grand Hotel, Caux. George wrote to Sylvia from Eton on hearing the news:

Sunday, December 13th, 1908.

Dearest Mother,

I have asked my tutor about clothes for Switzerland. He said you have to have a knickerbocker change suit (a good warm one), sweaters and thick stockings. … From what he said about it it sounded topping fun to be in Switzerland. … The journey will be pretty exciting, I expect. I expect to be ill going from Dover to Calais, or wherever you cross the Channel. It will be rather funny travelling on Christmas Day. … Is Mrs Barrie coming? Perhaps she'll prefer to go Motor Touring or something else. We shall be a whacking party. It is kind of Uncle Jim to do it all. I hope Alphonse'll come! [Barrie's chauffeur]

Your loving son,

        George

George tobogganing at Caux. The faceless rider behind him is Gilbert Cannan: his face has been blotted out from the negative with paint (JMB)

Mary was indeed included on the holiday; so was Gilbert Cannan, at Barrie's invitation. ‘A rather odd party,’ wrote Denis Mackail with a touch of understatement. ‘Yet Cannan not only had an intense admiration for the host's genius and attainments, but was extremely popular with the boys.’ Mackail went on to state that Barrie was too unobservant and preoccupied to notice his wife's growing infatuation with Cannan. Nico later remarked on ‘how astonishingly simple/ignorant = un-knowing Barrie was about what went on around him in the so-to-speak dirty things of the world. … He frequently employed a safety-curtain which he would pull down between his own mind and the facts of life in the world around him.’ Nico's argument seems at odds with Barrie's remarkable perception evidenced in so much of his writing, particularly in his notebook observations. That Mary Barrie and Gilbert Cannan were fond of each other's company was obvious enough to contemporaries. ‘If Sylvia saw,’ wrote Mackail evasively, ‘then either it wasn't her business or else she also saw – one has to admit this – how the situation was playing into her hands. Temptation here, as well as elsewhere. The money again.’ According to Diana Farr's Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy, Cannan later alleged that ‘Sylvia encouraged and abetted his affair with Mary Barrie, making it easy for them to meet and see each other unknown to Barrie’. Even Jack, at thirteen, was aware of their growing relationship, asking Barrie at Caux, ‘Why is Mr Cannan always with Mrs Barrie?’1 The reply is unrecorded. Perhaps he did not see; perhaps he did not see because, like many people in the same situation, he did not want to see; or perhaps he viewed what he saw as being no less innocent than his own flirtations with other women. While at Caux, he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland:

Nico lugeing at Caux (JMB)

January 9th, 1909.

My dear Milly,

… The world here is given over to lugeing. I don't know if you have a luge, you have everything else. It's a little toboggan, and they glide down on it for ever and ever. And evidently man needs little here below except his little luge. Age annihilated. We are simply ants with luges. I say we, but by great good luck I hurt myself at once, and so I am debarred. …

I hope … that I am to see you soon and explain you to yourself.

Yours always,

    J. M. Barrie.

Michael's December 1908 entry in Barrie's Querist's Album

Nico's own memory of Caux was restricted to a tobogganing collision in which a pair of steel-pronged boots ‘pranged my little bum’. Peter was equally oblivious to the soap-opera activities of Gilbert and Mary:

One evening at dusk I was summoned to J.M.B.'s room, to find him sitting, in a somehow dejected attitude, at the far end of the room, in the half-light. As I entered he looked up, and, in a flat, lugubrious voice said: “Peter, something dreadful has happened to my feet,” and glancing down I saw to my horror that his feet were bare and swollen to four or five times their natural size. For several seconds I was deceived, and have never since forgotten the terror that filled me, until I realised that the feet were artificial (bought at Hamley's), made of the waxed linen masks are made of, and that I had been most successfully hoaxed. … To that winter also belongs the story which J.M.B. used sometimes to tell in after years, of how Nico, then aged five, attracted the admiring attention of one of the lady guests at the hotel, who exclaimed: “My word, you are a lovely boy!” So he was, too, … but this was the last way to curry favour with a young Davies, and Nico duly retaliated with a face of fury and the comprehensive nursery repartee: “Oh, ditto!” …

‘Near the end of the stay at Caux, Sylvia became alarmingly unwell, suffering great pain (I think close to the heart). … An English doctor who happened to be staying in the hotel was approached, and either refused outright to advise, or at any rate made himself as unhelpful as he could, on the grounds that he was on holiday. … From this time forward Sylvia, though sometimes better for shorter or longer periods, was never completely well.’

Guy and Gerald du Maurier in their youth

On his return to London, Barrie gave Gerald considerable help in producing a play written by Sylvia's brother Guy under the pseudonym of ‘A Patriot’. Entitled An Englishman s Home, the play warned Britain of the threat posed by the expansion of Germany's navy, predicted an invasion, highlighted the average Englishman's indifference to the situation, and suggested that in all probability he would not respond to a call to arms until the invading Germans were trampling over his prized garden blooms and battering down his own back door. It was hailed by Lord Roberts as being the finest piece of propaganda he had ever seen, and the play's phenomenal success brought a measure of comfort to the ailing Sylvia. ‘My beloved Guy,’ she wrote from Campden Hill Square, ‘the world is writing and talking of nothing else but your play. I am, alas, in bed, and cannot go, but I think of you all day. … Mummie tells people the author's name is a profound secret, but in my heart I know she tells everyone she meets!’ George wrote to Sylvia on his return to Eton: ‘The chap in my carriage had been to “An Englishman's Home” on Saturday night. He thought all but the ending* very good. Of course the ending does rather spoil the lesson – it makes one think that even if the Germans did have a high old time for a bit, England would win in the end all right. I suppose it had to be put in to please the average public.’ A fortnight later George himself was playing at war games with the Eton school corps: ‘The Field Day on Thursday was rather fun. … I shouldn't think my firing would be very dangerous in actual warfare! It's rather fun seeing an enemy skulking along about 500 yds off, and potting at him. After about 30 minutes' engagement we retired at a double until we fell in with the rest of our company and marched back to Aldershot Station where we had lunch (rather a good one). We had a topping rag in the train coming back to Eton.’

The Eton College O.T.C. on a Field Day exercise in 1909. George is in the front line, extreme right

In April 1909, Barrie revisited Edinburgh University, the scene of so much loneliness in his youth, to receive his second honorary LL.D. (St Andrews University had given him an honorary degree in 1898). The function lasted for over six hours, with Barrie dressed in an elaborate ceremonial gown – ‘the gayest affair,’ he wrote to Sylvia, ‘all red and blue, and if Michael had met me in a wood he would have tried to net me as a Scarlet Emperor. … The five missed the chance of their lives in not encountering me in the streets arrayed in my glory.’² By Easter, Sylvia had recovered enough to take the boys down to Ramsgate to stay with their grandmother. Nico wrote impatiently to Barrie: ‘Dear James … You are a big swank not to come sooner Come hurry up the train is coming From NICO THE END.’ Doubtless Barrie was eager to join them, but he was working at Black Lake with Gilbert Cannan, who had recently been appointed to the newly formed Dramatic League, of which Barrie was a founder member, dedicated to the setting up of a National Theatre in England. Cannan was also still performing his duties as Secretary to the Committee seeking the abolition of the Censor, and Mary Barrie, after years of exclusion from her husband's work, had learnt to use a typewriter and was proving an invaluable help to both men.

Nico, aged 4

birthday card from Nico to Barrie

Barrie's plans for a Peter Pan statue had also been making progress; he had commissioned the sculptor Sir George Frampton, R.A., to carry out the work, and had given him the photographs of Michael taken at Rustington to serve as a model. Barrie wrote to Sylvia from Black Lake on April 11th: ‘Frampton was very taken with Mick's pictures & I had to leave them with him. He prefers the Peter clothes to a nude child. It will take him at least two years. George's wife can unveil it. I don't feel gay, so no more at present, dear Jocelyn.’ Barrie's dejection persisted throughout the early summer; he was offered a knighthood, but, despite Sylvia's urgings to accept, he turned it down. He wrote to her again at Ramsgate on June 17th, the day after Michael's ninth birthday:

Dearest Jocelyn,

…How I wish I were going down to see Michael and Nicholas. All the donkey boys and the fishermen and sailors see them but I don't. I feel they are growing up without my looking on, when I grudge any blank day without them. I can't picture a summer day that does not have Michael skipping on in front. That is summer to me. And all the five know me as nobody else does. The bland indifference with which they accept my tantrums is the most engaging thing in the world to me. They are quite sure that despite appearances I am all right. To be able to help them and you, that is my dear ambition, to do the best I can always and always, and my greatest pride is that you let me do it. I wish I did it so much better. … I am so sorry about those pains in your head.

Your affectionate

    J.M.B.

The only heartening piece of news received by Barrie this month was that George had been given his ‘Sixpenny’ – colours awarded to the best eleven cricketers under sixteen. ‘Perhaps no one who has never got a colour of some sort at Eton can comprehend the satisfaction it gives,’ wrote Peter later; ‘a successful love affair is possibly the only comparable triumph in after life.’

Michael aged 9, in Paris for the second season of Peter Pan

Peter Pan was revived for a second season in Paris at the beginning of July, and Barrie went over to spend two weeks with Frohman, then returned to London for another series of Censorship Committee meetings. By July 25th he was back at Black Lake Cottage, writing in low spirits to his old friend Quiller-Couch, who had written congratulating him on What Every Woman Knows and giving him news of his son, the Pippa:

‘I'm glad you got some entertainment out of What Every Woman Knows. The first act I always thought really good … [but] the rest is rather of the theatre somehow, ingenious enough but not dug out of myself. It isn't really the sort of man I am. I fancy I try to create an artificial world to myself because the one I really inhabit, the only one I could do any good in, becomes too sombre. How doggedly my pen searches for gaiety. …

‘The Boy! To think he is leaving Winchester instead of putting on his pinafore. To-morrow he will be leaving Oxford. An English boy has almost too good a time. Who would grudge him it, and yet he knows too well that the best is past by the time he is three and twenty.’

Barrie continued to work alone at Black Lake, preparing a speech he was due to give before a Government Committee set up to investigate the censorship issue. Mary Barrie was in London, and intended travelling down to the cottage on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28th – the last day of the run of What Every Woman Knows. On Wednesday morning, however, the Black Lake gardener, Mr Hunt, chose to cripple Barrie's life by exposing him to the reality of Mary's relationship with Gilbert Cannan. The cottage staff had known about it since the previous November, when Gilbert and Mary had stayed at Black Lake in Barrie's absence; Hunt had held his tongue for eight months, and might well have remained silent altogether had Mary not irritated him by criticizing his gardening skills. The essence of Hunt's revelation and its inevitable result were later recounted by Barrie in the Divorce Court, in answer to questions from his barrister, Mr Barnard, K.C.:

Mary Barrie with Luath at Black Lake

BARNARD. Towards the end of July this year Mr Hunt made a communication to you as to what happened the previous November?

BARRIE. Yes.

BARNARD. What did he tell you?

BARRIE. He said his wife took up tea in the morning to Mr Cannan, and he was not in his room. She then went with tea to my wife's room and knocked and heard my wife saying, ‘Gilbert, Gilbert!’ She then returned to Mr Cannan's room and entered it. He was not there and the bed had not been slept in.

BARNARD. What did you do [after hearing Hunt's communication]?

BARRIE. On the same day I went to London and telegraphed my wife to meet me. She was going to come down that afternoon, but I telegraphed her to wait until she had seen me.

BARNARD. Did you tell your wife what Mr Hunt had said?

BARRIE. I told her and she said, ‘It is all quite true.’ I said, ‘If it is all quite true, we must go and see Sir George Lewis about it.’

BARNARD. Sir George was not only your solicitor, but the friend of both of you?

BARRIE. Yes. …

BARNARD. What took place at the interview?

BARRIE. My wife said it was the only time it had ever taken place, and they had both been in a state about it. I said, ‘If you will come back I will forgive you. No one would ever know anything about it.’ She said it would all be pretence. I should be thinking of her all the time, but he was the only person in the world——[Here Barrie hesitated, and was prompted by the President of the Court, Sir John Bigham]

PRESIDENT. That she loved?

BARRIE. Yes. That he was the only person in the world to her.

PRESIDENT. She meant that she was in love with him?

BARRIE. Yes. She said that it would be a much more ignoble thing to go back to me in those circumstances.

BARNARD. Did you then offer to separate by deed if she would promise to have nothing more to do with him?

BARRIE. Yes.

BARNARD. And she refused.

BARRIE. Yes.3

The court transcript indicated little of the anguish suffered by all concerned in the two-month period between Hunt's revelation and the divorce case in October. Divorce was a scandalous business, but Mary was determined to cling to her one glimpse of happiness and marry Cannan. A number of Barrie's friends supported her, including H. G. Wells. Mary wrote to him in early August:

Postscript doodle from H. G. Wells to Mary Barrie

‘He seems to have developed the most ardent passion for me now that he has lost me; that frightens me. … Poor thing, he is distracted and I am dreadfully sorry; he says he knows I would be happier with G.C. and that we ought to marry, one moment, and the next clamours for me. Anyhow I am to have money and that will help things somewhat, but I have no fear for my happiness, none at all.’ Cannan himself was well aware of the damaging effect that his involvement as co-respondent in a divorce case would have on his literary career, particularly when the petitioner happened to be the most successful writer in the country. He hoped, somewhat naïvely, that Barrie would see his way to allowing him to ‘share’ Mary, thus avoiding an actual divorce. Even Maurice Hewlett, one of Barrie's oldest friends, seemed to think that Barrie was being unreasonable in insisting that Mary should put aside Cannan altogether as an alternative to divorce. He wrote to her in August:

Mary Barrie at the time of her divorce. She later wrote to Peter Davies: ‘J.M.'s tragedy was that he knew that as a man he was a failure and that love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced, and it was this knowledge that led to his sentimental philanderings. One could almost hear him, like Peter Pan, crowing triumphantly, but his heart was sick all the time.’

‘I think J. is behaving very badly – impossibly, according to my way of looking at things. He must have been talked over by old [Sir George] Lewis – a loathsome Jew. … I envy Cannan the chance he has of making life good for you. I don't see how I can meet J. after all this. It amazes me that Mason hasn't made him more of a gentleman.’

Barrie took refuge in A. E. W. Mason's London flat shortly after the storm broke, where, Mason later told Peter Davies, ‘he would walk up and down, up and down all night in his heavy boots until the sound of it drove everyone within hearing almost as frantic as the miserable little figure itself’.

Sir George Lewis doubtless advised Barrie to restrain his friendship with Sylvia until the divorce was over, since there was a not unreasonable chance that her name might be dragged into the proceedings by Mary Barrie. To Mary's credit, she never once cited her husband's long association with Sylvia, and made no public defence of her infidelity. Nevertheless, Barrie acted on Lewis's advice and went with Mason to Switzerland, while Sylvia took the boys away for a summer holiday at Postbridge in Devon. Sylvia's own reaction to the collapse in Barrie's marriage is unrecorded. Peter Davies wrote:

‘Whether Sylvia regarded the divorce as, ultimately, a simplification of the relation in which she stood to him, or the exact reverse, who can say? … That [she] found him a comforter of infinite sympathy and tact, and a mighty convenient slave, and that she thankfully accepted his money as a gift from the gods to herself and her children – all that is clear enough. I think that she laughed at him a little, too, and was a little sorry for him, with all his success, as anyone who knew him well and liked him was more or less bound to be. I mean sorry for him in a general way, quite apart from the pity which his misery over the fact and machinery and publicity of divorce must have stirred in any generous breast.’

Barrie wrote to Sylvia from Switzerland, asking her to send him news of the boys and her own health. Sylvia replied evasively, ‘I wish I could walk more, … but the hills try me now’, then added that ‘Michael (Saint) is going to Wilkinson's with Peter [next term] – you will think of me when I have to cut his hair – he is longing and longing for the moment’. Peter Davies commented:

‘I can't clearly remember Michael's hair unshorn; but photographs show that he had the most entrancing curls, so that Sylvia's anguish and his own delight at the idea of losing them are equally understandable. … I have pretty clear recollections of the Postbridge holiday, … George and I worm-fished insatiably in the Dart. … Jack, I think, was less easily amused (more adult, perhaps), and occasionally sought the company of a neighbouring farmer's daughter. … It must have been dreadfully boring for Sylvia, but no doubt it was very healthy for all of us. To counteract that we stole an occasional Egyptian cigarette (Nestor) from the pink cardboard packets which Sylvia used, and smoked it surreptitiously behind the hedge that bounded the garden. … I think it was this summer, too, that George began to shock me to the core by strange locutions picked up at Eton. Obscenity and profanity would mingle horrifically and fortissimo in impassioned oaths when a big quarter-pound trout escaped after being hauled out of the water, wriggling irresistibly. Many public school boys acquire a certain eloquence in this kind of language, though by no means all; and George, in no sense a dissolute or ill-living boy, had unquestionably a marked talent for it, which he was from the age of sixteen at all times ready to display in suitable surroundings. … I may record that I soon discarded the youthful blush of shame, and became my brother's apt pupil. Of Sylvia herself at Postbridge I remember very little. I think she rarely went more than a few hundred yards from the house.’

Sylvia fishing the River Dart near Postbridge, Devon

Barrie continued to write to Sylvia from Switzerland, but his letters made no mention of his impending divorce. ‘I can't write of it,’4 he wrote to Pauline Chase, and Peter Davies commented: ‘I doubt if he exposed his wounds much to anyone, being in most ways an exceedingly reserved character himself.’ There remained one outlet for his anguish, however. While in Switzerland he wrote a one-act play, The Twelve-Pound Look, in which he portrayed himself as Harry Sims, a successful ‘what-you-will’ who is about to receive the honour of a knighthood. He engages a typist to answer his letters of congratulation, but when she arrives, he finds that she is none other than his ex-wife, Kate. Recovering from his surprise, Harry (‘strictly speaking, you know, I am not Sir Harry until Thursday’) is intrigued to learn the identity of the lover who caused the break-up of their marriage, and is crushed at the discovery that there was no such glamorous person:

KATE. There was no one, Harry; no one at all. … You were a good husband according to your lights. …

SIR HARRY (stoutly). I think so. … I swaddled you in luxury.

KATE (making her great revelation). That was it. … How you beamed at me when I sat at the head of your fat dinners in my fat jewellery, surrounded by our fat friends. …

SIR HARRY. … We had all the most interesting society of the day. … There were politicians, painters, writers——

KATE. Only the glorious, dazzling successes. Oh, the fat talk while we ate too much – about who had made a hit and who was slipping back, and what the noo house cost and the noo motor and the gold soup-plates, and who was to be the noo knight. … One's religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success. … I couldn't endure it. If a failure had come now and then – but your success was suffocating me. … The passionate craving I had to be done with it, to find myself among people who had not got on.

SIR HARRY (with proper spirit). There are plenty of them.

KATE. There were none in our set. When they began to go downhill they rolled out of our sight.

SIR HARRY (clinching it). I tell you I am worth a quarter of a million.

KATE (unabashed). That is what you are worth to yourself. I'll tell you what you are worth to me: exactly twelve pounds. … (She presses her hand on the typewriter as lovingly as many a woman has pressed a rose.) I learned this. I hired it and taught myself. … and with my first twelve pounds I paid for my machine. Then I considered I was free to go, and I went.

The critic W. A. Darlington wrote: ‘Just as in Tommy and Grizel [Barrie] made the worst of himself into a sentimentalist, so now he made the worst of himself into Sir Harry Sims, the successful man in every worldly respect and yet a failure in his private life.’5 The play is not, however, as autobiographical as it might seem, for Mary, unlike Kate, relished her husband's success to the full. The real cause of the break-up of their marriage was perceived by Meredith's son, Will, who wrote to Charles Scribner, Barrie's American publisher, in an effort to ‘contradict false rumours’:

‘The whole truth is that Mrs B is a woman – with a woman's desires – which for many years she had controlled (& she had no children, which made it harder). Barrie is a son born to a mother – long after the rest of her family – & as so often is the case – with genius but with little virility. Now – people are now saying that Mrs Barrie had many lovers. This is false – I am certain of it – I have good authority.^* … She was, as it happens, overcome by this man for whom she has left Barrie. She loves the man, as a young woman loves a man – & still loves Barrie as a mother loves a helpless child. Barrie urged her to return to him & give up the other – she, having at length after long battling against it, given in to the longing of her heart after a virile man, & no doubt the secret woman's longing for the birth of a child, would not.’6

Barrie's impotence was much rumoured in his lifetime, some wag dubbing him ‘the boy who couldn't go up’, but it remains a matter of speculation. Mary later confided to Hilda Trevelyan that she had enjoyed ‘normal marital relations’⁷ with her husband in the early days of their marriage, but Diana Farr, in her 1978 biography of Cannan, quotes an entry from John Middleton Murry's journal, written in 1955: ‘What we were given to understand by Gilbert and Mary was that Barrie was guilty of unmentionable sex behaviour towards Mary. Knowing Mary I should say that any sexual approach towards her would have come into such a category for her. And I am pretty certain that Gilbert had no sex-relation with Mary at any time.’ Diana Farr qualifies this provocative statement by pointing out that Middleton Murry was a surprisingly poor judge of character, and that he did not know either Mary or Cannan until many years later.

Barrie returned from Switzerland towards the end of September, in time to escort Michael to his first day at Wilkinson's preparatory school:

‘When he was nine I took him to his preparatory, he prancing in the glories of the unknown until the hour came for me to go, “the hour between the dog and the wolf”, and then he was afraid. I said that in the holidays all would be just as it had been before, but the newly-wise one shook his head; and on my return home, when I wandered out unmanned to his tool-shed, I found these smashing words in his writing pinned to the door:

Michael, aged 9 (JMB)

THIS ESTABLISHMENT IS NOW PERMANENTLY CLOSED

‘I went white as I saw that [he] already understood life better than I did.’⁸

Another boy being jostled forward for Barrie's attention was Captain Scott's son, who was to be christened Peter, after Peter Pan. Scott had written to Barrie while the latter was in Switzerland, asking him if he would be Peter's godfather, and Barrie readily accepted. However, the date of the christening, October 13th, conflicted with another appointment – Barrie's own divorce case. A number of fellow writers had banded together and written a private letter to every editor in Fleet Street, reminding them that Barrie himself had been a journalist, and requesting them, ‘as a mark of respect and gratitude to a writer of genius’,9 to abstain from exploiting the news value of the case since he is ‘a man for whom the inevitable pain of these proceedings would be greatly increased by publicity’. Among the signatories to the letter were Henry James, A. E. W. Mason, Maurice Hewlett, Arthur Wing Pinero, William Archer, H. G. Wells and Beerbohm Tree. The Press responded generously, with only The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror covering it in any detail. The undefended suit was soon over, Mrs Hunt's rambling evidence about taking cups of tea in and out of bedrooms at Black Lake being interrupted by the Court President with a curt ‘That is quite enough.’ Mary Barrie claimed in a letter to H. G. Wells that Barrie ‘came out badly in court. 3 lies. First, never said it was the only time. 2nd. It is my cottage, lease is in my name and I bought it with my money. 3rd.^* It is seven years since we separated and that does not spell happiness until 18 months ago’. ¹⁰ The matter of the ownership of Black Lake was academic: Barrie had no further desire to visit it. ‘Never go back on happy footsteps,’ he told the Duchess of Sutherland; ‘be brave in your farewell – as you were brave in your crucifixion.’¹¹ Nor did he wish to go on living at Leinster Corner. At present he was installed in A. E. W. Mason's flat, but presently Sir George Lewis's wife found him one of his own in Adelphi Terrace House, between the Strand and the Thames. The flat was on the third floor, overlooking Bernard Shaw's residence, but this was more than compensated by a fine view of the river. Lady Lewis and E. V. Lucas's wife, Elizabeth, set to work on Barrie's behalf, organizing the move, while Barrie turned to the only life that was now left to him: Sylvia and her boys – ‘my boys’.

End of Mary's letter to H. G. Wells: … ‘does not spell happiness until 18 months ago. This has damaged us a lot in the eyes of the public but with our friends, well, they all knew better. My love to you both, Mary Barrie’

Barrie and Henry James on their way to the Censorship Committee hearings on August 6th, 1909 – nine days after Hunt's revelation about Mary Barrie's affair with Cannan

Two days after the divorce case was over, Sylvia collapsed on the stairs at Campden Hill Square. Peter was in the house at the time: ‘I happened to be about … and Mary Hodgson, red-faced and agitated, tended her and shooed me away, not before I had received an impression of direness and fatality, and a sense of shocked misery and half-comprehending desolation, which has remained with me ever since.’ Doctor Rendel, who had been the family doctor for many years, was called and gave Sylvia an examination. Mary Hodgson asked if she could do anything, and he replied, ‘It is a grave matter – say nothing to the family.’ A specialist was consulted, who diagnosed cancer – ‘too close to the heart to operate’ – but once again, Mary Hodgson was sworn to secrecy. She later wrote to Peter Davies:

‘It was impressed on me that your Mother – on no account – was to talk about her illness to me & that at all costs she must not know how ill she was. Life was to go on as usual and the Boys were just to be told Mother had to stay in bed and rest for a long time. … Nurse Loosemore came, an excellent nurse – who not unnaturally resented my presence in her domain. Occasionally there was a duel of words – your mother insisting that her children should come into her bedroom at all times and that their noise & chatter cheered her.’

The secret was well kept for a time: Sylvia's elder sister Trixie wrote to her sister May a few days later, still giving Barrie's divorce precedence as the main topic of interest:

Felden, Boxmoor.

[October 17th, 1909]

Darling May,

…I am so distressed about Sylvia & shall go and see her soon. But I am not surprised, she never seemed to rest at all, & I expect when holidays come is quite tired out – at her age and after all she went through with Arthur it was bound to come to something, but I hope a rest will show improvement. As regards Mrs Barrie I think you have endlessly mistaken what I said to you, & what has now happened is only after all a perfectly natural sequence. It is a pity the man is so young, but those things do happen & I hear from Sylvia that he is very much in love with her & I sincerely hope there may be a baby or two. I do think she deserves something to make up for what she has probably suffered in seeing J. entirely wrapped up in someone else's children when it was very obviously his fault that she had none – Human nature is human nature after all & will out. … I was surprised that my most straight-laced friend Mabel wrote & said she was so glad that Mrs B. had someone to be fond of her now – & that if J. was unhappy he deserved it – tho' poor little man one knows well he is simply the victim of circumstance & of his own kindness.

I have by the bye often heard you & Coley [May's husband] say she might be forgiven if she did seek consolation. Well well.

Yr loving

    Trixie

George, at Eton, was seemingly unaware of his mother's illness:

Thursday, November 18th [1909]

Dearest Mother,

…It was topping having Mr Barrie down here on Sunday. I have grown a lot, as now I simply tower above him. I'm reaching the goal of my ambition – six feet of height! We went for a walk and then had tea with my tutor [Hugh Macnaghten]. He [Barrie] was very sad, of course, but he seemed to buck up a bit at times. Mr Mason does seem to be kind to him, getting all his clothes at blood tailors and things. The flat seems rather jolly too. We shall have to go and see him a lot next holidays, and cheer him up. I'm hoping he'll be able to come down here on St Andrew's Day with Mr Mason.

I suppose I'd better be getting some blue serge pattern to send you. … Pray remember that one has to be rather à la mode in London! My taste in socks is settling down from loudness to real good taste. My last pair is quite a dream! Such an exquisite blue, you know, a trifle dark and subdued. I always rather liked blue! I've also got a lovely dark green Jaeger pair, which I feel certain you'll adore. I think I'm rather a coming man!

Your loving son,

    George

Adelphi Terrace House in Robert Street, off the Strand. Barrie's flat was on the third floor; he later moved to the top-floor flat with the angled window

At the end of November, Barrie moved into his new flat in Adelphi Terrace, decorated for him by Elizabeth Lucas and Lady Lewis, who had also found him an indispensable manservant in the shape of ‘the inimitable’ Harry Brown, as Peter called him, ‘who was to do so much for his comfort in the years that followed, and would soon be on intimate terms with all of us, calling Nico “Tuppence” and generally brightening the atmosphere’.

George and Jack returned at Christmas to find their mother more or less permanently confined to her bedroom, attended by Nurse Loosemore. A consultation with a third specialist had produced further anxiety. Mary Hodgson told Peter later, ‘By this time your Mother was worried and restless. I had gone down stairs out of the way – returning – Dr R[endel] … shook his head sadly. At this moment your Mother's bell rang gently. The rest of the gathering were in the School Room. Your Mother said, “Shut the door, Mary. You are the only one I trust – what did Dr Rendel say?” I replied, “Nothing,” and she lay back bitterly disappointed.’ By early spring, Sylvia was obliged to use a Bath-chair, lifted by two carrier men. Barrie was in constant attendance, resuming the role he had performed only three years before at the bedside of the dying Arthur. Sylvia's illness was less intense – a gradual winding down of the body and spirit rather than a series of operations, but no less harrowing to witness. Some days she was able to go outside and watch Michael and Nico playing cricket with ‘Uncle Jim’ in Campden Hill Square, but for most of the time she remained in her room. Barrie paid for an ‘Electrophone’ to be installed by her bed – an ingenious device which enabled her to dial any theatre of her choice and listen to the performance on a pair of headphones. George wrote to her from Eton:

‘How are you? You never say anything about how you're getting on. What rot it is to think you've never even seen this room. … How soon shall you go out in your bath-chair? I do hope I'll be able to wheel you on leave. … How I envy you being able to listen on the electrophone at night. I feel just like it myself. “Ah! now listen.” “What is it?” “Um–um–um–la, la, la, la, etc.” “Divine!” Or again: “Let's have ‘The Arcadians' Electrophone?” “Yes.” “Put us on to the Shaftesbury, please.” “Oh yes, they're just finishing that decent song – ‘Oh, what very charming wea-ther.’” “Perfect!”’

George may have been aware of Sylvia's condition, and have felt that frequent happy letters from Eton were the best possible tonic for her. Michael, although only nine, certainly had intuitive forebodings: Gerald du Maurier later told his daughter Daphne how, on one of his visits to see Sylvia, he noticed Michael sitting at a small desk in the corner of her bedroom, doing his homework, the tears rolling down his cheeks and splashing onto the paper.

At Easter 1910, Nico went to stay with Mary Hodgson for a short holiday in Morecambe. Sylvia wrote to him from her sick-bed:

Sylvia's sketch of Nico

23 C.H.S.

22nd [April, 1910]

Darling,

Today Peter & Michael & Nurse & I went twice to Kensington Gardens. Michael sometimes sits at the end of the bath chair & guides it while the man pushes it behind. Will you guide it sometimes when I get back? It is very hot & I must get you a thin coat. I wish I could sit on the sands with you & throw stones into the sea! Dear darling Nico, I have got to be carried to bed now. I wish I could run upstairs instead! What would nurse say!

Goodnight my dear little boy.

    Loving & loving,

        Mother

Captain Scott was now busily preparing for his second expedition to the Antarctic, but did not disdain to join Barrie, Michael and Nico in games of exploration in Kensington Gardens. In his Dedication to Peter Pan, Barrie described them as ‘our Antarctic exploits when we reached the Pole in advance of our friend Captain Scott and cut our initials on it for him to find, a strange foreshadowing of what was really to happen’. With Barrie acting as one of his financial sponsors, Scott left England in early June, setting out on his attempt to become the first man to reach the South Pole. There appears to have been some argument between the two men shortly before Scott sailed, but, whatever the cause, Barrie remained a fervent supporter of the expedition throughout the three years of its duration.

George with his housemaster and tutor, Hugh Macnaghten

By the end of June, Sylvia appeared to be making a slight recovery, but was still not strong enough to travel down to Eton. This was left to Barrie, who had grown particularly fond of Arthur's old colleague and George's housemaster and tutor, Hugh Macnaghten. ‘Hugh was a queer one,’ wrote Peter in his Morgue, ‘as queer in his own way as J.M.B. in his, and the two ways had something in common. Hugh was too good to be wise.’ Macnaghten's House was considered to be the best at Eton, and George was, at sixteen, a major asset to it in the realm of sport. His tremendous popularity among the other boys was evidenced by his early election to Pop – Eton's élitist social club, membership of which is normally restricted to boys in their final year. As a full-blown Eton blood, George was a known figure to every boy in the school, yet it never went to his head. ‘He had absolutely no vanity,’ recalled a contemporary, ‘no conceit whatsoever. It was quite extraordinary – almost unique in my experience – for someone quite so successful. He was a tremendous blood at Eton, but you'd never have known it. He wasn't a great talker, but he had great charm. He was rather shy, rather reserved, but his sense of humour was exquisite.’12 Barrie was, not unnaturally, overwhelmed with pride in this boy who was making such a graceful transition from the child in the red tam-o'-shanter to the gay young Etonian who still retained so much of the bright boy-knight about his looks and personality. Little wonder that he availed himself of every opportunity to visit him, taking him out for the day, or watching him play cricket from the side of the field. Many boys of George's age might have found the constant companionship of a strange little man something of an embarrassment among their peers; it would seem that George felt quite the reverse. On July 1st he wrote to Sylvia, ‘I've written to Uncle Jim to fulfil his telephone promise and come down tomorrow. I do hope he'll be able to do so. I'm feeling very keen to see his best silk socks! I hope it isn't going to rain to stop him coming or anything of that sort.’ Peter later commented on George's use of the term ‘Uncle Jim’, which Michael and Nico had been using for some time, ‘symbolizing the intimacy which had so rapidly increased since 1907, until he was closer by far to us, as well as directing our destinies, than any of our real uncles. … J.M.B. is now clearly seen in the role of leading uncle, if not step-father; perhaps guardian angel best describes him.’ It was a role that Sylvia utilized with increasing frequency. Peter was in his last term at Wilkinson's, and was due to join George at Eton in the Christmas half. He had taken a scholarship exam, but since Barrie had already guaranteed all the boys' fees, there was no anxiety over the result. Sylvia wrote to Barrie on July 6th as he was about to set off for Eton and collect Peter after his exam:

23 Campden Hill Square,

Kensington.

Dear J,

…Will you do something for me? I want 1½ doz. white collars (George wears the shape) for Peter & 2 doz. white ties (also like George), as they are best bought at Eton. The shop is called New & Lingwood. Ask for collars for tails & Peter will know what size & can try one on if wanted. He must bring them home with him.

I so liked your letter about G & P! I have thought so much of Peter & am wondering how he has done. … I suppose George can't be let off camp for his delicate mother's sake.

Affec:

        S.

A few days later, Wilkinson interrupted Peter in a game of ‘corridor cricket’ to announce with some surprise that he had brought off his Eton scholarship, albeit twelfth on the list. In recording his ‘puny triumph’ in the family Morgue, Peter apologized for ‘dwelling a little on this, the solitary distinction, such as it was, that I ever attained in my mostly mis-spent life. That it gave pleasure to Sylvia in her last sad weeks has always been to me a source of secret satisfaction.’

By July, Sylvia was convinced that she was seriously ill, despite the assurance of her family and doctors to the contrary. In an effort to elicit the truth, she proposed taking her five boys on holiday into the wilds of Devon – a scheme that met with Barrie's approval, but filled Emma du Maurier with horror. Mary Hodgson later explained to Peter, ‘Your mother insisted on going out of town with her family, thinking it would finally decide matters if they would not let her go. Dr R[endel] said, “If Sylvia wishes to go, she should have what she wishes.” Nurse L[oosemore] said Dr R and J.M.B. were quite mad & eventually told me to make myself & the boys scarce on the journey “as anything might happen”.’ The house selected for the holidays was Ashton Farm, a lonely farm-house in the valley of the River Oare, miles from the nearest doctor, but selected by Sylvia because it would provide excellent fishing for her boys.

Dolly Ponsonby visited her shortly before she left London. ‘I think she was in a black gown, and lying on the sofa. I realized then that she was not going to live, and I remember going back and telling my husband, and weeping.’13

The journey to Ashton made an exhausting day for Sylvia: five hours by rail to Minehead, then fifteen miles across Exmoor by car. ‘At Minehead there was a climax’, wrote Mary Hodgson to Peter. ‘Your Mother insisted that the two youngest and myself [instead of Nurse Loosemore] should travel in the car. … Nurse Loosemore barely spoke to me thereafter. At Ashton, I only saw your mother at odd times. I think the powers-that-be thought I was not to be trusted, and were probably wise in that view.’ Barrie was obliged to stay not at the farm-house but in rooms in the neighbouring village, since Emma du Maurier had announced her intention of coming down to be with her daughter and sleep in the only spare room. Nevertheless he was in daily attendance, sitting with Sylvia as he had sat with Arthur, revising his manuscript of Peter and Wendy, or recording his thoughts in his notebook:

Emma du Maurier in 1910 – a widow for the past 14 years

— Peter Pan. Revise. What time of year, summer winter autumn? Peter doesn't understand – ‘There's only spring.’

— Michael saying ‘If good in heaven will God sometimes let me go down to Hell to play?’

— The dying. Friends around talk of other things. Wonder about dying, when silent really making preparations for dying – for the journey.

— Death. One thinks of the dead as a bird taking lonely flight. If saw we would realise it is always one of a great flock of birds.

— Play. Man who brings up 4 girls as guardian (better than boys?).

— The Second Chance: ‘Beware, or you may get what you want.’

Emma du Maurier arrived at the farm-house at the beginning of August, and wrote regular accounts of Sylvia's condition to her daughter, May:

‘[August 1st, 1910] … It is terrible to think dear Sylvia is 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. Today Sylvia is staying in bed, she seems quite to wish to. She seems glad I have come and hopes I can stay and of course I shall, but you can imagine what I feel. [August 5th] … Dr Spicer came this morning. … When Sylvia heard the doctor was to sleep here (for we all think it a great mistake if he didn't) she was angry and then began to cry, and said “I believe I am very ill”, so you can imagine how dreadful that was. … Dear Sylvia has such bad nights, even with trional, and she looks so wan and thin, it breaks my heart to look at her. … She doesn't wish the boys ever to be kept away from her; of course they are out all day until tea time, and when they are in the garden she can see them. [August 24th] … Dear Sylvia had a bad night and seems very languid and weak this morning. Yesterday afternoon she seemed more comfortable and wished to hear the gramophone and the boys came in. However too many of them soon tire her. Dear little Nicholas is very good but of course he is lively and wants to jump about and climb on the backs of the others and all that is too much in her room. After tea they play games in the garden and it amuses her to watch them.’

Sylvia (JMB)

Peter Davies recalled how George and Jack, both wearing new suits, went into the room where Sylvia lay on a sofa, and ‘how she greatly enjoyed their stylish appearance and exclaimed with delight: “What a pair of young rakes!” Crompton visited the farm-house for a few days, our only other visitor being Maude Adams, whom Barrie brought down for a night or two that she might see and be seen by Sylvia and “her boys (my boys)”. For the rest of the time we went our ways blithely enough, I seem to remember. The remote and beautiful Doone valley, a few miles from Ashton, was among our regular fishing-places … and we made almost daily expeditions, sandwiches in pocket, up the valleys of the Lynn and the Oare. … In the evenings we would take the day's catch of small trout in to show Sylvia, as she lay, so much frailer than we knew, on a sofa or in her bed. … From now onwards, while we fished and golfed and walked furiously, or made expeditions to Lynton and ate huge teas with bilberry jam and Devonshire cream, or on idle days watched the buzzards circling slowly, high above the valley of the Lynn – while, in fact, we went our boyish ways – Sylvia weakened rapidly, and I think she never again left her room.’

Faced with the inevitable, Sylvia once again attempted to draft a Will, though it was not found until several months after her death:

‘Sylvia's Will.

‘I would like everything to go on as far as possible as it has been lately. Twenty-three [Campden Hill Square] to be kept up for the dear boys with Mary (whom I trust with my whole heart) looking after them.

‘At any time I know friends who love them will come & stay sometimes – one at a time – & see them & be with them for a little just as if I was there. What I wd like wd be if Jenny* wd come to Mary & that the two together would be looking after the boys & the house & helping each other. And it would be so nice for Mary.

‘I would like Mama & J.M.B. & Guy & Crompton to be trustees & guardians to the boys & that May & Margaret would give their dear advice & care. … I would also like the advice of dear Hugh Macnaghten. … J.M.B. I know will do everything in his power to help our boys – to advise, to comfort, to sympathise in all their joys & sorrows.

‘At present my Jack is going into the Navy – if he should grow to dislike it and if there was anything else, I know he (J.M.B.) would do all that was best. I want all the boys to treat him (& their uncles) with absolute confidence & straightforwardness & to talk to him about everything. I know he will understand always & be loving & patient. I hope from my soul that they will be happy & lead good lives & be as much as possible like their most beloved father & I also hope that if they marry they will be good & tender husbands & fathers & be with their wives as happy as he & I were. … They have all been the most splendid & beloved & affectionate & open sons & I know they will go on being affectionate brothers & help each other all they can in the years to come. I do not want my Michael to be pressed at all at work – he is at present not very strong^† but very keen & intelligent: great care must be taken not to overwork him. Mary understands & of course J.M.B. knows & will be careful & watch.

‘I do not wish any of my dear boys to look at me when I am dead – it is a great mistake I think – let them remember me at my best & when I could look at them – that must have been the best time always because I love them so utterly.

‘I will be cremated & buried with my Arthur at Hampstead next to beloved Papa. Perhaps Mama or May will keep my trinkets & give them to the wives of my five boys when the time comes. … I would like Mama to go over my letters in case anything has to be kept – otherwise I would like everything burnt.

‘I do not want any of my boys to go to my funeral, nor do I want it made into a long gloomy day for them.’

Sylvia (JMB)

Peter wrote in his Morgue: ‘On the morning of the day Sylvia died, … Nurse Loosemore told us she was not well enough to see us, as she usually did before we went off on our various activities, but that she sent us all her love and would see us in the evening. Jack went off in the car to Minehead with Lloyd [a golfing friend] to play golf, George and I set out on our usual all-day fishing expedition. I question whether any of us, even George, the eldest and much the most intimate with J.M.B., felt more than a vague sense of oppression – certainly no clear forebodings.’ Denis Mackail related how Sylvia, ‘as she lay there in bed, … asked for a hand-mirror. She looked in it, and laid it down. “Don't let the boys see me again,” she said.’14 Sylvia's last moments were recounted by Emma du Maurier in a letter to her daughter May, written on the afternoon of August 27th, 1910:

‘At ¼ to 2 [Nurse Loosemore] called me, and the doctor was holding dear Sylvia's hands and asked me to fan her, but I didn't know the end was so near. She was breathing with great difficulty and I couldn't bear to look at her, then they called in Mr Barrie and I saw what it was and it was all over in about a ¼ of an hour. It was her breathing that was exhausted, not heart failure. The doctor, nurse, Mr Barrie and I were the only ones in the room. … Darling Sylvia looked perfectly lovely – so calm and happy, and those who love her can only be thankful she is at peace.’

After spending that morning fishing with George, Peter decided to walk home alone:

‘It was a grey, lowering, drizzly sort of day, and I walked fast, and was pretty blown, I remember, by the time I reached the top of the steep footpath which led from the river-valley up to the house. As I went in at the gate, it struck me that there was something peculiar in the aspect of the house: in every window the blinds had been drawn. Somehow or other the dreadful significance of this sombre convention conveyed itself to my shocked understanding, and with heart in boots and unsteady knees I covered the remaining thirty or forty yards to the front door. There J.M.B. awaited me: a distraught figure, arms hanging limp, hair dishevelled, wild-eyed.

‘In what exact words he told me what I had no need to be told, I forget; but it was brokenly, despairingly, without any pretence of philosophy or resignation or the stiff upper lip. He must have been sunk in depths far below all that, poor Jimmy; I think it was I that propelled him, as much as he me, into the room on the left of the little entrance hall, where we sat and blubbered together. Good cause for blubbering too, for both of us; but I remember, and wish I didn't, sobbing out “Mother! Mother!” at intervals during the sad and painful scene, and realising, even as I did so, that this wasn't altogether natural in me – that, though half involuntary, it was also a half-deliberate playing-up to the situation. I can forgive myself now, after thirty-five years, for this rather shameful bit of nervous reaction: the rest of it, the tears and misery and desolation, were genuine enough. … I am almost sure … that I went in to look my last on Sylvia as she lay dead in the room on the ground floor which had been made into her bedroom. … All I retain … is a dream-like, cloudy sense of going in and standing for a matter of seconds, confused, unhappy, frightened, looking and yet not looking at the pale, lifeless features, and then of escaping to I know not what limbo in some remote corner of the house … Nico, then aged six and three quarters, has a memory of approaching the door of Sylvia's room, meaning to go in as had been his habit after tea each day, and of being shooed away with significant gruffness by one of his kind brothers, probably Michael. … He very well remembers Mary Hodgson trying to explain things to him, and how she laid the responsibility on God, adding hopelessly enough, to soften the blow, that sometimes people who were so spirited away were brought back, and it might be that she would come back at Christmas. And he remembers, thereupon, crying out in misery, half hysterically, “Cruel God! Cruel God!”

‘Of how the word of death was spoken to George, when he came back that evening from his day's fishing, I know nothing; or to Michael, then a little over ten years old, and the most highly strung and impressionable of us.’*

Jack recalled his own memories in 1952:

‘When the car fetched … me back from Minehead, I was taken into a room where [Barrie] was alone and he told me she was dead. He also 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. I was then taken in to see her and left with her for a bit. She looked quite natural, as she'd always been so pale, very lovely and asleep.’¹⁶

Sylvia's ‘engagement’ ring

When Nico married in 1926, Barrie gave his wife some of Sylvia's jewellery, including a diamond and sapphire ring which, he told Nico, he had given to Sylvia ‘as we would have been married had your mother lived’. The abortive betrothal, if true, was never made known to Sylvia's family in her lifetime, and there is no mention of it in any surviving correspondence. Peter was sceptical that such an engagement had ever taken place:

‘J.M.B. was quite capable of imagining, and of coming in the end to believe, such a might-have-been. … No doubt there must have been conversations between them during those [last] months about the future, and about what they were to be to each other; and she may well have given him the thought of marriage – if it could be called that – to play with. But by then … he already had reason to suspect that her disease might prove fatal, and I guess that she too, though never told, suspected it also. At any rate that's how I see it. Others may well say, and doubtless did, that it would have been the most natural thing in the world: that she was already more intimate with him than with any other living being, that he had adored her for years and loved her children, that she was taking so much from him that she could scarcely refuse if that was what he wished, and in fact it was much the best solution. All this is true enough. But I think that to Jack … the thought was intolerable and even monstrous; so much so that he could not refrain from expressing himself in the most forcible manner to that effect when J.M.B. in an unguarded moment spoke to him of it. To me too, I confess, the idea of such a marriage is repugnant. Up to a point, perhaps, this is mere sentimentality. The two sublime creatures of one's childhood die when one is too young to have much sense of reality, and the naïve impression remains, so that in after life no one who survives to meet the more calculating glance of one's maturity can ever move in the same dimension as the enchanted dead. … But it does seem to me that a marriage between Sylvia, the widow, still so beautiful in her forty-fourth year, of the splendid Arthur, and the strange little creature who adored her and dreamed, as he surely must have dreamed, of stepping into Arthur's shoes, would have been an affront, really, to any reasonable person's sense of the fitness of things. And I do not believe that Sylvia seriously contemplated it. … Let me not be thought unmindful, in writing what I have written, of the innumerable benefits and kindnesses I have received, at one time and another, from the aforesaid strange little creature, to whom, in the end, his connection with our family brought so much more sorrow than happiness.’

The morning after Sylvia's death, George and Peter were dispatched to the nearest village with a sheaf of telegrams addressed to relatives and friends:

‘As we walked down the hill on this gloomy errand, … George remarked to me, perhaps merely speaking his thoughts aloud, … that in spite of the tragedy that had come upon us, we seemed to have got up and washed and tied our ties and put on our boots and eaten our breakfast all right: that it wasn't, in fact, the end of the world. Life went on. Physically speaking, we were much as before. … For an instant I was shocked, … but further reflection persuaded me that there was something in what he said. … It was not indifference or resignation or fatalism that George, aged seventeen, was expressing, but a sort of rough-and-ready working philosophy, based on an instinctive sense of proportion. … I knew quite well that he was feeling things at least as deeply as I was myself. But he was the eldest brother, and felt his responsibility.’

Michael fishing (JMB)

As there were still another three weeks of the summer holidays left to the boys, it was decided that Michael, Nico and Mary Hodgson should remain at Ashton Farm while George, Jack and Peter accompanied Barrie and their mother's coffin back to London for her funeral. Jack later told his wife of the ‘hideous five-hour train journey, and how every time the train stopped at a station, Barrie got out of the carriage and stood with bowed head in front of the guard's van where the coffin was, draped in purple cloth, as if he was on sentry-duty’.17 Peter remembered virtually nothing of the funeral, writing in his Morgue:

‘Grotesque that one should retain so little of all that, and yet that one should clearly remember going with J.M.B. and George, presumably the morning after the funeral, to an old-fashioned … shop in the Haymarket … to purchase exciting, slender 8-ft fly-rods, and fine casts and flies, with which to divert ourselves during the remainder of the holidays! For it had been decided, by those who took charge of our destinies, that George and I should go back with J.M.B. [to Devon], there to fish till Eton and Wilkinson's claimed us. … And I dare say it worked well enough, and that the new rods helped, as no doubt J.M.B. with generous cunning knew that they would, to do the trick. At any rate one seems to remember quite enjoying oneself, flogging the little upland streams and hauling out the little trout, and putting the lowly worm behind one for ever.’

‘Sylvia … leaves with us an image of such extraordinary loveliness, nobleness and charm – ever unforgettable and touching’, wrote Henry James to Emma du Maurier on hearing the news of her death.

‘Mrs Darling was now dead and forgotten’, wrote J. M. Barrie in Peter and Wendy, watching her boys fishing the summer streams.

* Guy's original ending gave triumph to the Germans (thinly disguised as the ‘Nearlanders’), but Barrie and Gerald, catering for the box-office, replaced it with a last-minute British victory.

* Diana Farr states that Mary later told Cannan's sister, in a moment of bitterness, that ‘he had not been the only lover, but simply the one who was “unlucky enough to be caught.”’

* The 3rd ‘lie’ refers to Barrie's ‘Yes’ in answer to the question, ‘Did you live happily with your wife?’ Mary's point that ‘it is seven years since we separated’ would seem to indicate some sort of marital happiness prior to the autumn of 1902 (the publication of The Little White Bird and Barrie's trip to Paris with Sylvia).

* Mary Hodgson's sister.

† A reference to the fear that Michael might be suffering from tuberculosis.

* Barrie told a later friend, Mrs Hugh Lewis, that Michael had ‘broken into a rage and stamped his feet in a fury of words’ upon hearing the news of his mother's death.¹⁵