1915–1917
On March 22nd, 1915, seven days after George's death, Rosy Rapture, or the Pride of the Beauty Chorus opened at the Duke of York's Theatre, preceded by The New Word. Nico thought Gaby's revue the most glittering piece of entertainment he had ever witnessed in his life: ‘I must have seen it over twenty times, and knew every song off by heart – particularly “Some Sort of Mother”, which must be the best tune Jerome Kern ever wrote. Of course I was only eleven, but to me it was just about the most wonderful thing Uncle Jim had ever done. Unfortunately no one else agreed with me, and it was a more or less total disaster.’
Frohman was due in London at the end of May, but Barrie begged him to come earlier in the hope that he might have ideas on how to salvage Rosy Rapture. The ‘Beaming Buddha’ agreed, and booked himself a passage on the Lusitania, despite the threat of attacks by German U-boats. When he boarded the liner on May 1st, he was asked, ‘Aren't you afraid of U-boats ?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘only I.O.U.-boats.’1 Ethel Barrymore sent him a last-minute cable, imploring him not to sail. But Frohman had made up his mind. Barrie needed his help, and he would go. On May 7th, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish coast, and sank within twenty minutes. When Frohman was offered a place in one of the lifeboats, he refused. ‘Why fear death?’ he is reputed to have said. ‘It is the greatest adventure in life.’2 His body was later washed up below the Old Head of Kinsale and taken back to America for burial.
Frohman on board the Lusitania
Frohman was once asked what he would like to have written about him after his death. He replied, ‘All I would ask is this: “He gave Peter Pan to the world.” … It is enough for any man.’3 His claim was fully justified: had it not been for Frohman's daring and vision, there would have been no Peter Pan, and for Barrie his death meant not merely the loss of one of his greatest friends (in Peter Davies's opinion, ‘the only non-Davies whom he knew how to love’), but the end of a unique theatrical partnership. Frohman's faith in Barrie had been absolute; his biographers wrote: ‘It was often said in jest in London that if Barrie had asked Frohman to produce a dramatization of the Telephone Directory, he would smile and say with enthusiasm: “Fine! Who shall we have in the cast?”’ Barrie's grief at the news of Frohman's drowning was genuine enough; but, as with Captain Scott, he took a characteristic pride in his association with another ‘heroic’ death, particularly as Frohman had chosen to echo Peter Pan's ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ as his last words. They were attested by the actress Rita Jolivet, who survived the disaster and publicized them in an interview. Barrie, however, could not resist changing them to a closer approximation of the text. He wrote to Pauline Chase, ‘His last words … were really, I feel sure, “Death will be an awfully big adventure.”’ 4
At the end of May, Lord Lucas joined the Flying Corps, despite the handicap of his wooden leg, and Barrie assumed much of the responsibility for the maintenance of ‘Wrest in Beds’. The work was rewarding, but it lacked glamour; he hankered after the opportunity to play a larger role – something that would bring him into contact with the fighting at the Front. There had been various reports in the press of starving, homeless children wandering around the French countryside near Reims. The image appealed to Barrie's imagination: he talked it over with his friend Elizabeth Lucas, and suggested that she might like to set up a temporary orphanage for them. Elizabeth responded to the idea, and Barrie gave her an initial £2,000 with which to set the scheme in progress. She managed to acquire the loan of Bettancourt, a large château to the south-east of Reims, and transformed it into a home for the orphaned children. Barrie now had the ideal excuse to visit the war zone for himself, albeit not the Front Line. He wrote to Gilmour from the Château de Bettancourt on July 26th:
Barrie and orphan at Bettancourt
‘I had very easy travelling all the way, indeed semi-regal, owing to the good graces of the Scotland Yard people. We are about 18 miles from the Front & 120 from Paris. … You can hear the guns from Rheims direction in the north. … Aeroplanes make a great stir over our heads. … The Germans occupied the Chateau in their rush for Paris & it is now becoming a child's hospital. One boy had a leg blown off by a shell at Rheims. His parents wept to see him but they bored him – so he wandered off to play. A significant note – The drummer went round the other night to warn the villagers all dogs must be chained up at nights. This because the dogs have developed a grim hunt for bodies which they scrape up in the night. I'll be back in a week.’
Barrie returned to England at the beginning of August and took Michael and Nico up to Scotland for their annual fishing holiday. As there were only three of them this year, they moved from hotel to hotel instead of renting a house. Barrie spent most of his time writing letters, in which he gave vivid accounts of his visit to France, illustrated with more macabre details of the wounded children and starving dogs. Nico chronicled the Scottish holiday in a letter to Mary Hodgson:
Glengarry,
Invernessshire.
Sunday 15th August 1915.
Dear Mary,
Thank you very much for your 2 letters. We went to Dhivach last Monday. We saw the fall in the burn and the place where Uncle Jim and George and Jack played cricket. … In the arbour we found the initials of all our names still there. … Was the flicker-show any good? Did you like Charlie Chaplin? I had a long letter from Jack. He went ashore on Gallipoli with a letter to the French Headquarters. … I miss you here very much. I have caught five trout here and Michael 15. But then Michael— — — — — —!!
Well love from
NICHOLAS LLEWELYN DAVIES
Barrie's friendship with the ‘Welsh Lewises’ had been largely confined to a lengthy correspondence with Mrs Hugh Lewis – the mother of the boy who had sent him a drawing of Peter Pan in 1912 – but earlier this summer he had taken Peter to spend a few days at the Lewises' home, Glan Hafren, in Wales. Barrie wrote to her from Scotland on September 1st:
Dear Mrs Lewis,
I wish there were a few more like you, but it is perhaps better that you should remain unique. … It has been rather grim in Scotland this year. The highlands in many glens are as bare of population owing to the war as if this were the month before Creation. I have just Michael and Nicholas with me and they feel it too, but they climb about, fishing mostly, and if you were to search the bogs you would find me in one of them loaded with waterproofs and ginger beer. … I wish we could hurl ourselves straight upon Glan Hafren, but we shall be here till the 8th and that only gives us an exact week before Michael returns to school, and we need that time in London. It shows how much we must have talked of you that he (the dark and dour and impenetrable) has announced to me that he wants to go to see you. I was never so staggered.
Glan Hafren, 1915: Peter Lewis, Barrie, and Peter Davies
‘The dark and dour and impenetrable’ was a description that Barrie was fond of using when referring to Michael. It was, of course, only one aspect of his character, but Barrie took a curious pride in it: he liked to boast that Michael had grown out of him, was beyond his reach. It was a form of self-mockery, born of self-defence, and is poignantly evident in the closing pages of Neil and Tintinnabulum, in which Michael is no longer the boy Neil, but the adolescent Tintinnabulum:
Michael and Nico playing clock-golf
‘Tintinnabulum's opinion of himself … is lowlier than was Neil's; sometimes in dark moods it is lowlier than makes for happiness. He has hardened a little since he was Neil, coarsened but strengthened. I comfort myself with the curious reflection that the best men I have known have had a touch of coarseness in them. … He had to refashion himself on a harsher model, and he set his teeth and won, blaming me a little for not having broken to him the ugly world we can make it. … By that time my visits [to Eton] were being suffered rather than acclaimed. It was done with an exquisite politeness certainly, but before I was out of sight he had dived into some hilarious rumpus. Gladly for his sake I knew my place. … His letters from school tend at all times to be more full of instruction for my guidance than of information about where he stands in his form. … On important occasions he even writes my letters for me, requesting me to copy them carefully and not to put in any words of my own, as when for some reason they have to be shown to his tutor. He then writes, “Begin ‘Dear T.’ (not ‘Dearest T.’), and end ‘Yours affec.’ (not ‘Yours affectionately’).”…
‘You readers may smile when I tell you why I have indited these memories and fancies. It was not done for you but for me, being a foolish attempt to determine, by writing the things down (playing over by myself some of the past moves in the game), whether Tintinnabulum really does like me still. That he should do so is very important to me as he recedes farther from my ken down that road which hurries him from me. …
‘On the whole, I think he is still partial to me. Corroboration, I consider, was provided at our parting, when he so skilfully turned what began as a tear into a wink and gazed at me from the disappearing train with what I swear was a loving scowl. … He no longer needs me, of course, as Neil did, and he will go on needing me less. When I think of Neil I know that those were the last days in which I was alive.’
Michael's unhappiness at Eton had lasted nearly two years, but by the autumn of 1915 he had begun to assume a nonchalant façade that masked his inner feelings. Sebastian Earl, a contemporary at Eton, remembered him as having ‘a quite remarkable lightness of touch, lightness of imagination. He had tremendous charm – a romantic charm, never sentimental. I think his greatest gift was his wit. … He was wholly un-Etonian – it didn't seem to rub off on him at all.’5 Another Etonian friend, Clive Burt, described him as ‘a cat that walked alone. He was always very reserved – not a seeker after popularity or great friendships, though both were open to him. He was, of course, quite brilliant – I believe Hugh Macnaghten, his tutor, thought he was the most remarkable boy he had ever taught in all his years at Eton.’6
While still only fourteen, Michael wrote an essay on ‘What makes a Gentleman’, in which Macnaghten perceived ‘a kinship in spirit to his guardian’. Part of the essay read:
‘I believe I am right in saying that John Ball made use of the following couplet in his discourses:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
“Who was then the gentleman?”
‘Doubtless Ball used the word gentleman in the more degrading sense, denoting one of the upper classes – I think he was wrong. Adam was no gentleman, not because he was not Lord Adam, but because he gave away his wife in the matter of the apple. …
‘Laurence Oates, a very gallant gentleman, went out into the blizzard because he knew he could not live and wished to give his friends a better chance. He was a gentleman because when he knew he was being brave he did not say “I'm a hero and I'm going to die for you,” but merely remarked he was going out for a bit, and left the rest to their imagination.’
One of Michael's greatest admirers at Eton was another boy in Macnaghten's House, Roger Senhouse. Roger was a year older than Michael, and, in view of his later relationship with Lytton Strachey, clearly had a crush on him. Towards the end of his life, Roger kept a desultory form of Journal in which he recorded occasional scraps of autobiography. In 1967 he wrote:
Roger Senhouse and Michael at Eton
‘Michael Ll. D. … was the one profound influence in my life, from the moment of our first meeting in his room. … I became so wrapped up in Michael that I faltered, soon I began to fail in concentration on my work, believing things would come as easily to me as to Michael, concentrating my energies in trying to please him, my mentor, tho' one year younger than me. … Hugh Macnaghten had been quick to observe the fantastic influence that genius had over me. … He even told J.M.B., who came so regularly to visit Michael, bringing him the most delicious home-made chocolate cakes, how obsessed I was with him. … This led to my taking Extra Books in Trials in a futile attempt to keep some sort of pace with Michael. … Macnaghten was slightly jealous of our friendship, almost worshipping Michael himself & always encouraging me to prevail upon him when depressed “because I know how very close you are to him”.’
Michael wrote to Mary Hodgson from Eton for her (37th) birthday, enclosing a pen-knife:
H. Macnaghten's.
Thursday. [October 14th, 1915]
Dear Mary,
I am writing this on Thursday because I shall be so busy tomorrow, to beg your acceptance of this little votive offering, a trivial little token of my regard for you, I assure you, etc etc etc. It is not very pretty, but it is the best Eton & I could do. … Have you seen much of Peter? I expect we shall yet be reduced to calling him, respectfully of course, the Social Subaltern. I've not heard from Jack, tho' I write every Sunday. Tears come to me eyes as I think of this pathetic instance of brotherly loyalty. … Miss J. Mitchell-Innes was kind enough to motor over & have tea with me. I fear alas she was not impressed. … Talking of TEA, I'd like one of those chocolate cakes. You can stick a Belgian flag in it if you think cakes are an extravagance. Now I must work.
Yrs
Michael
December 1915: the second Christmas of the war. Peter Pan was again revived, though only George Shelton as Smee remained from the original 1904 cast. This year it was decided to drop the Lagoon Scene: partly for economy, partly because Peter's curtain line, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’, was felt to be somewhat inappropriate under the circumstances. Barrie spent New Year's Eve alone in his Adelphi Terrace flat, where he had begun work on a new play, A Kiss for Cinderella. He wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis at Glan Hafren: ‘Here I am all alone as M. and N. are in bed and I've come back to the flat for tonight. Christmas evening was even gayer as I had to come in to town and Brown and his wife were away, so I had to make my own fire and dinner (eggs) and bed. The fire was worst, as there were no sticks, but I found a straw basket Mrs Brown goes to market with – or rather went, for it will accompany her no more.’ His notebook entry took a less frivolous turn:
Unity Moore as Peter Pan in the 1915/16 and 1916/17 revivals
—Dream. That in own bed & awakened by unknown horror – dark, know something cautiously moving bed clothes – I move body slightly – movement of thing stops. Long pause. Then it resumes, gentlest possible pushing of me – I resist without pushing back. Pause. Pushing resumed. Elec[tric] lamp near me, I set teeth for courage to turn on light – queer idea I won't be able to do it – I push out hand to – hand is stopped by something limp which doesn't push but just prevents – later it makes my hand always miss lamp – I feel being pushed now – no sound of breathing. Then feel stronger attempt evidently to push me out of bed. At last I rushed from darkness to mother's room (she has been dead many years) & cried to her abt my degenerate self – thing I have evolved into was trying to push me out of bed & take my place. Till that moment of telling I had no idea what the thing was.
Glan Hafren, 1916. Standing, l to r: Michael, Eiluned Lewis, Medina Lewis. Sitting: Nico, May Lewis, Barrie
Michael had been intrigued to meet the ‘Welsh Lewises’ ever since the previous summer, when Barrie and Peter had returned from Glan Hafren with glowing reports. Mrs Lewis invited them to pay another visit at Easter, and this time Michael and Nico went too. Peter Lewis's three sisters, Eiluned (variously called Jane or Bittie), Medina and May were home on holiday from boarding school, and Michael was entranced by them: ‘they are so utterly a family out of a book’, he wrote to Mary Hodgson. For Barrie, Glan Hafren provided a regular retreat such as he had not enjoyed since Black Lake. Medina recalled in 1977:
‘J.M.B. found The Vicar of Wakefield atmosphere a welcome change to London. He was very nervous that this first Easter holiday with us might be a failure – he was so anxious to give the boys pleasure; but after the visit he told my mother how much they had enjoyed it, and that even Michael “the dour and impenetrable” (I distinctly remember those adjectives) had said he wanted to come again. I'm sure their visits meant far more to us than to them; and yet I think we made an amusing change for the boys from the sophisticated, theatrical life they were so used to living in London. I feel they looked on us as sisters, which of course they'd never known before. We were girls who were friends rather than girl-friends. Watching us playing on the lawn, J.M.B. once said to my mother, “They're so innocent, it almost hurts.”’7
Michael, Medina and Peter Lewis
In September 1916, Nico left Wilkinson's and joined Michael in Hugh Macnaghten's House at Eton. Now that Michael was happier, Barrie alternated his daily letters between the two boys:
September 24th, 1916.
Dearest Nico,
It is great and good and splendidiferous your liking Eton from the start. Michael is to let me know a good day for coming down to see you. … Think of Michael having a fag! I think when I come down we shall have to sit on his head so as to prevent his becoming too uppish. He will be calling out ‘Boy!’ just to show off. … I miss you awfully.
Loving,
J.M.B.
In addition to his daily letters to Barrie, Michael wrote frequently to Mary Hodgson
Nico was allowed to share a room with Michael, thus forestalling the homesickness that Michael had endured, and Barrie began writing Nico a serial story entitled ‘The Room with 2 Beds’:
14 Nov 1916.
The Room with 2 Beds
(cont'd)
(Have you read the grand new serial?
The best place to begin is the middle.
Synopsis of preceding chapters – Sherlock and What Ho go down to Eton.
Principal characters –
Sherlock, aged 91.
What Ho, aged 5.
Davies Bros, and other kids.)
‘Have you a plan?’ I enquired anxiously.
‘Have I a plan!’ he repeated with a lick of disdain. In short, he had no plan. The Eton Case baffled him.
Sherlock H was baffled!
But not for long.
‘Our first step, What Ho,’ he said, … ‘is to get you entered for a pupil at My Tutor's house.’
‘Me!’ I astounded.
‘There will be no difficulty,’ he clapped, ‘your intelligence is of such a juvenile character that you will easily be mistaken for a scug.’
He was right. He was always right. …
‘Next,’ Sherlock fluttered, ‘you must be made fag to Davies major.’
‘I can't,’ I said, ‘Bowman is his fag.’
‘You must get rid of Bowman,’ he annunciated. …
At that moment the unsuspecting Bowman passed, chewing a banana mess, which ran down his person.
Sherlock lifted him like a puppy by the collar & dropped him over the bridge into the river.
‘Your way is now clear,’ he said, wiping his hands. …
Loving
J.M.B.
With Michael and Nico both at Eton, Barrie spent most of his time at Adelphi Terrace, developing his Dream notes into a one-act play entitled ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraik’.* Mr Lapraik is two men: the young man he used to be, and the worldly success he has now become (just as Neil and Tintinnabulum represent two sides of Michael's character). The young Mr Lapraik returns, ghost-like, to inform the now ageing Mrs Lapraik that he is her husband. She asks who is the older Mr Lapraik – the man she believes to be her husband:
LAPRAIK. He is what I have grown into, my dear. I am what he used to be. … Look at me, Nora, what do you see?
MRS LAPRAIK. I see the man who married me so many years ago. My lover! A boy he seems to me now. You are somehow that boy come back. …
LAPRAIK. I am that boy come back to look for his fine ideas and conduct and aspirations of twenty-five years ago – to see what the man I became has made of them.
Michael with his house cricket cup
Lapraik then tells his wife how he had lain asleep, to be awakened by ‘something bending over me, pushing me stealthily. … I knew that the degenerate thing I had become was trying to push me out of this shell that is called me, and to take my place’ [Barrie's italics].
Work on ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraik’ alternated with the continuing saga of Sherlock H., What Ho, and Michael and Nico's twin-bedded room at Eton:
16 Nov 1916.
The Room with 2 Beds
(cont'd)
Chap 10 – Fags & the Fag System.
I was a fag!
I was Major Davies's fag!
In passing I ought to mention that quite a number of boys have this melting title. … The honour is naturally much coveted, and it amused me to notice that the small brother of Davies always referred to him proudly as ‘my Major’. …
I find it will be impossible to convey any adequate account of the strange happenings at Eton … without first saying a few words about Fags and the Fag system. …
The origin of the word Fag is interesting: Anglo-Saxon F, Sanscrit A, Rumanian G. To be fagged = To be tired out – ‘that tired feeling which comes if you don't use our lotion.’
One of the oldest traditions of Eton is that no senior … must let himself get tired or, in the vox populum, fagged. He therefore hires a scug (Anglo-Saxon 
, meaning a cheese-paring, or, more accurately, an infinitesimal piece of the rind) to get tired for him. … The senior lies in bed reading O. Henry while his fag does all the tiring things for him, such as attending chapel. …
Endless tales have been written of the bullying of fags. At Eton the ‘bully’ is an institution, [and] it is his duty to kick the little ones. This makes them hardy. …
(To be cont'd)
J.M.B.
Nico, aged twelve, responded to Barrie's serial with a saga of his own that moved at a decidedly faster pace:
‘The Room’ etc.
My dear Uncle Jim, 17th November 1916.
The Dynamite King
CHAPTER II
The Deadman's Rock
‘Let us dine out to-night Smith’ I cried.
‘No’ he rapped ‘I want to stay here in order to tug the lobe of my left ear.’
‘Shall I leave you?’ I queried.
‘No, something may happen.’…
Suddenly to my horror I saw a ghost come up from the sea! Ah! How I struggled to get loose. Then the ghost advanced and touched me. I shivered! Then, to my relief & astonishment it said ‘Rise up Petrie’
I knew the voice so well.
IT WAS NAYLAND SMITH.
‘My Aunt Sempronia's whiskers!’ he said, you're as white as—Good Lord! That creature's moving, he said, pointing to the dead man. It was alive!
IT WAS THE DYNAMITE KING = FU-MANCHU!
Order your next week's copy!
Much love,
Nicholas
Llewelyn
Davies.
Barrie and Hugh Macnaghten at Eton
Michael wrote to Mary Hodgson on December 10th: ‘My tutor [Hugh Macnaghten] told me he wished I was like Nico; he says he's the heart & soul of the house, so you can see Nico's firmly settled in that quarter. The point is that he's far far heartier than I ever was or shall be.’
There was little to brighten Barrie's world during the term-time, apart from his weekly instalments of ‘The Dynamite King’ and his letters from Michael. The last months of 1916 were particularly savage: Lord Lucas shot down over German lines and killed; both his nephews killed; ‘Wrest in Beds’ burnt down; and the hospital at Bettancourt closed as Elizabeth Lucas was too exhausted and ill to continue its organization.
At nineteen Peter Davies had become eligible for the trenches, but scarcely had he arrived on the Western Front than he found himself in the thick of the bloodiest conflict of the war: the Battle of the Somme. After two months he was invalided home, suffering from eczema and shell-shock, from which he recovered by the following Easter; the mental wounds, however, left their scars for life. Of the four surviving brothers, Peter's desolation at the death of George had been the greatest; Barrie had written to Charles Turley Smith, ‘I feel painfully for Peter between whom and George there was a devotion not perhaps very common among brothers.’ With George dead, his parents dead, and no real communication with Barrie, Peter had lived for two years in a void, now filled with little but the memory of mud, and bodies, and bits of bodies. In later life he took meticulous care to suppress all evidence of his own past: his Morgue consists almost entirely of letters relating to his ancestors, his parents, his brothers, Barrie – everyone but himself. Since he also published Denis Mackail's official biography, he was able to censor his role to a minimum. One letter that survived this suppression was written by Crompton's wife, Moya, at the time of Crompton's death in December 1935:
Peter in 1917. He wrote to Barrie frequently, his letters spanning his initial enthusiasm to the full horror of the trenches: ‘Not long ago I can remember rather looking forward to taking part in a fight. My curiosity has been satisfied, and I shall never have any such desire again. Honestly, Uncle Jim, I can't write about it – I don't believe anyone could, and I'm not particularly anxious that anyone should. There isn't a single attractive feature from beginning to end. Modern artillery fire is damnable beyond all powers of description …’ Peter's letters have now been transcribed, and can be found at www.jmbarrie.co.uk
‘Crompton mentioned your name, Peter, in his second or third last letter to me. … He said you were always a very special person to him, that he felt a loving intimacy with you beyond what he felt for almost anyone else, and I remember him telling me in the early years of our marriage more than once “Peter is the One”. You were certainly his favourite of the five sons of your beautiful mother, of whom he never spoke without a break in his voice.’
An Etonian letter from Nico to Eiluned Lewis
Davies major and minor returned to London for the Christmas holidays, spending much of their time in the Adelphi flat as Peter was being nursed by Mary Hodgson at Campden Hill Square. Barrie wrote to Mrs Thomas Hardy on December 29th: ‘I have my boys home now for the holidays … and the flat is for the nonce a noisy spot. Just listen for a moment and you will hear another plate go smash.’ While Nico pursued his hectic social life of Christmas parties, Michael gratified Barrie by reading the various manuscripts awaiting his inspection. It was Barrie's proudest boast that Michael, while still a school-boy, had jumped ‘from being astride my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to [becoming] … the sternest of my literary critics. Anything he shook his head over I abandoned. There was for instance that little tragedy Mr Lapraik, which I liked until I foolishly told Michael its subject, when he frowned and said he had better have a look at it. He read it, and then, patting me on the back, as only he and George could touch me, said, “You know you can't do this sort of thing.” End of Mr Lapraik.’8
Michael wrote to Eiluned Lewis at Glan Hafren on January 15th:
MONDAY
the ? January
in the year 1917 of grace.
Dear Jane,
I choose the prettiest in your bright constellation of names; … Sir James, Davies minor, & yr humble servant have just returned from Brighton, with its poisonous people piers post-cards picture-palaces & penny in the slots. Have you ever been there? I trow not, else you would not be the purre & innocent maiden that you appearrr. … Peter D. is now at Sheerness, preparatory to France again, & Jack D. in the North Sea. Nico D. is entirely the young Etonian that you w'd expect. He grows in all directions. Believe me, madam, I am, hoping this finds you as it leaves me etc –
Yr obdt servt
Michael Ll. Davies
At the end of the month, Michael and Nico returned to ‘the Room with 2 Beds’ and Barrie to the loneliness of his Adelphi flat. Having abandoned ‘Mr Lapraik’, he started work on a new one-act play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals: ‘Three nice old ladies and a criminal, who is even nicer, are discussing the war over a cup of tea.’ The criminal is the Old Lady of the title; her medals are the regular letters she receives from her son, fighting for King and Country; her crime is that she has no son: the envelopes, ‘all addressed in pencil … with the proud words “Opened by Censor” on them' – cantain blank pieces of paper.
Gary Cooper in the 1930 film version of The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, re-titled Medals, in which Cooper plays the Old Lady's ‘son’, loosely based on George. Barrie lived to see fourteen screen adaptations of his works, including Cecil B. De Mille's 1919 epic, Male and Female
Early in 1917, Barrie learned that all was not well between Mary and Gilbert Cannan, whom she had married in 1910. There were rumours that Cannan had seduced Mary's maid and made her pregnant, though Mary herself was still childless; now, it seemed, he had taken up with another woman, leaving his wife in reduced circumstances. Kathleen Scott, who had retained her friendship with the Cannans, told Barrie that Gilbert was losing his reason and had already been admitted to several mental homes for short durations. Barrie never liked to discuss his own broken marriage; he knew where the fault lay, and if ever a word was raised against Mary, he would contradict it with a flat statement: ‘She was perfection.’9 Nor did he blame Cannan. ‘I always held that he had many fine qualities,’ he wrote to Kathleen, ‘and I hope they will yet bring him to port.’10 Mary's pride did not allow her to approach her former husband for money: instead, Barrie wrote to her on March 5th:
My dear Mary,
It would be silly of us not to meet, and indeed I wanted to go to you all day yesterday. I thought perhaps you would rather come here, and of course which ever you prefer is what I prefer, but that is your only option as I mean to see you whether the idea scares you or not. Painful in a way the first time but surely it need not be so afterwards. How about coming here on Wednesday to lunch at 1.30? If you are feeling well enough I wish you were doing war work. There must be posts you are so particularly fitted for. We could have some talk about that. All personal troubles outside the war seem so small nowadays. But just one thing I should like to say, because no one can know it so well as I, that never in this world could a young literary man have started with better chances than Mr Cannan when he had you at the helm.
Yours affectionately,
J.M.B.
(Gloria Swanson), thinly based on The Admirable Crichton
Prompted by a suggestion from A. E. W. Mason, Barrie had exhumed his notes on The Second Chance (see page 150) and was turning them into a full-length play under the title Dear Brutus. The idea sprang from Old Solomon Caw's warning to Peter Pan in The Little White Bird: ‘In this world there are no second chances.’ Evidently Mary Cannan thought otherwise, for, according to Elizabeth Lucas, she took Barrie's offer of help to mean a second chance of marriage. But Barrie stood by the moral of his play: that people who are given a second chance invariably make the same mistakes again. He offered to pay her an annual allowance, and to see her once a year, but further than that he would not go.
Meanwhile Jack Davies was pursuing his first chance of marital bliss. His ship was based in the Firth of Forth, and while on shore-leave in Edinburgh he had met and fallen a victim to an ‘extraordinarily pretty’ nineteen-year-old daughter of a Scots banker, Miss Geraldine Gibb. Without consulting Barrie, Jack proposed to her, and Geraldine – or Gerrie, as she was known – accepted. Jack wrote to her from H.M.S. Octavia on March 25th:
Jack in 1917
‘I can honestly hardly believe my stupendous luck. Fancy being engaged to you! … I cannot see the point in being engaged for years & years can you? It seems such unutterable waste of very good time. Perhaps (your word is law) you think otherwise, in which case yours so very humbly has only to be told. But, bien aimée, & these loathsome details have to be faced, my Guardian has to be talked to gently on the everlasting question of dibs. Lord but it's unseemly to mix up filthy lucre in a question of any sort, but it has to be done, doesn't it, & knowing the dear little man as well as I do this sort of question has somewhat naturally never cropped up before & I'm hanged if I know what he'll say. He's infernally wealthy himself but knows me – or rather knew me before I met you – & so knows my wonderful incapacity for keeping money. Still, I shall see him this next visit to town & as I know so well he's one of God's own, I have the highest hopes. … We've a house in London that no one lives in now as we're all away. It's quite small but my mother did it all & it's most wonderful inside. … I wonder, will it be OURS one day? As a sailor one has such a mighty small use for a house in London – still, it's for one of the family Davies, so why not us? … The family will fight for you if I know anything of them. My particular pal is Nicholas – the youngest, whose smile you liked [on the photograph] in my cabin. He's a bird & will ask to take you straight to his heart. George, John,* Peter, Michael & Nicholas – we're all saints! Poor old George was killed in France. He was a wonderful person. That really was a case of “they whom the Gods love die young.” Peter is one of God's own. Michael is at present rather trying, but he'll get over it.
Just 16 & full of Eton you know, but withal a good fellow. And Nico. He'll never be trying. … Mother you really would have adored. Everyone did. Father died when I was 12 & Mother never really got over it. They were wonderful people, I suppose really rather too perfect to go on. But I should so have loved to go to Mother & say, “Here's a daughter for you at last.” She always longed for a daughter but never had one. She was so lovely herself that it seems a great pity she hadn't a daughter like her. There are so very few people I can ever talk to about this sort of thing that I know you'll forgive me. … Are you happy to know that someday you'll be Mrs John Llewelyn Davies herself? To me it's so wonderful I'm beaten all of a heap!’
Geraldine Gibb
Jack went to London at the beginning of April to put his case to Barrie. He wrote to Gerrie on April 4th:
‘I haven't seen the little Baronet yet, but am lunching with him today. … My pay's about £230 & I also have about £180 & with your £100 that's £510. Wonderful mathematician. Now if I can only persuade Guardy to add £200 – which is such an utter flea-bite to him – I really don't see why the deed shouldn't be done. But I have a grizly feeling he'll be “un peu difficile” to put it mildly. He's the dearest fellow in the world, but he knows me!’
Jack wrote again the following day:
Michael's only surviving Eton letter to Barrie. He rarely signed his letters with anything less formal than ‘Yours’, even to Mary Hodgson
‘You'll have to take a big pull on yourself to bear this news bravely. I spoke to my Guardian about you & he says that to gain his consent & help we are to wait a year. It's a grizly thought I know, but when you think what his help means to us, I think we can do it, don't you? … Cause if we go against him & get married he'll never help us. I know him well enough to be sure of that. … One thing, if by any chance I got shifted from [Edinburgh] … I think the little Baronet could probably get me shifted back again all right. He has untold influence if only he'd use it & not have some silly idea about seeing if separation would make any difference to us. Of course it does make a filthy difference, but not in the way he means! … Damn all hard-headed & so-called level headed Guardians. No, I don't mean that because he's been so almighty good to us. I'm an ungrateful beast, but it's so infernally hard to wait. … Michael and Nico are having tea in here now, & pulling my leg hard about you. One has just said, “Don't put crosses at the end, it isn't done.” He got a matchbox in the chest!’
At the end of the Easter holidays, Michael and Nico returned to the playing fields of Eton, while Peter was dispatched back to the chaos of the Somme. Barrie had long planned to visit George's grave behind the Western Front, and in June he received the necessary permissions from the War Office, together with directions on how to locate it. He had hoped that Thomas Hardy would accompany him, but Hardy declined: ‘I have had to come to the conclusion that old men cannot be young men, and that I must content myself with the past battles of our country if I want to feel military.’11 Barrie therefore set out alone, though under military escort. Although he wrote to a number of friends telling them that ‘the only time I was in any danger was searching for George's grave, which I found’,12 he gave no indication of his emotions. Doubtless Housman expressed them for him (and countless others) in A Shropshire Lad, which Barrie had read ‘year in, year out – over and over again’13 since its publication in 1896, when he spoke of the ‘lads that will die in their glory and never be old’.
Barrie in his ingle-nook. The sofa had the reputation of being the most uncomfortable in London. The photograph on the far right is of George at Eton; his cricket cap hangs below it
When Michael and Nico came back to London for the summer holidays, they found that their guardian had moved to the top floor of Adelphi Terrace House. The new flat was considerably more spacious than its predecessor, the largest room commanding a spectacular view of the River Thames from four panoramic windows. Barrie turned it into his work study – not so much on account of the view, but because of its vast fireplace, or ingle-nook, wherein he could curl himself up on a wooden settle. There was an added attraction: being only five foot three, he could clear the chimney beam without lowering his head, while most other mortals sustained mild concussion every time they penetrated the ingle-nook.
The annual fishing holiday was reduced to a fortnight in August as Michael and Nico had to go off to the Public Schools camp on Salisbury Plain – no longer the ‘bit of a spree’ that it had been in George's day: most of the boys would be putting their training into practice in the near future. Despite his nonchalance, the prospect of the trenches was beginning to weigh on Michael: he would be eligible within a matter of months. Macnaghten wrote in his report that he had been ‘strangely difficult’ during the past term. ‘He never means to be rude, but he is too clever not to see the weak points in his Tutor [i.e. Macnaghten himself] and others, yet his judgement is unerring: the cleverest boy I have had in my house.’14
In the middle of August, Barrie, Michael and Nico went up to Scotland to fish, travelling by way of Edinburgh for their first glimpse of Jack's inamorata, Gerrie. Barrie gave a fanciful account of the prologue to the meeting in a letter to Lady Juliet Duff on August 14th:
‘We were all outwardly calm, but internally white to the gills; Nicholas kept wetting his lips, Michael was a granite column, inscrutable, terrible; I kept bursting into inane laughter, and changing my waistcoats. So the time of waiting passed, the sun sank in the west and the stars came out with less assurance than usual. What is that? It is the rumble of wheels. Nico slips his hand into mine. I notice that it is damp. Michael's pose becomes more Napoleonic, but he is breathing hard. The chaise comes into view. I have a happy thought. They are probably more nervous than we are.’
Jack
In 1976 Gerrie recalled:
‘I was – well, yes – nervous, I knew he'd come up to vet me, but I don't think I was in awe of him. My mother was horrified that I should marry someone who was mixed up with Barrie – she said, “I don't trust that man.” He didn't cut that much ice in Scotland – he was certainly no prophet in his own country. The only reason my mother tolerated the idea of our marriage was that she adored Gerald du Maurier. Barrie and the two boys came up on the train from London – we met them at the station, had dinner at the North British Hotel next to the station, then they caught the next train to go and fish up in the Highlands. It was an extraordinary dinner: I don't think the Bart said a single word throughout the meal – certainly not to me. Michael talked to me – he was very considerate, tried to make me feel relaxed. He was very attractive, very charming, and had the most wonderful smile. All the boys made feverish conversation, but the Bart never said anything. Nor did I.’
Barrie's letter to Lady Juliet Duff concluded with a transcript of an imaginary conversation between Jack and Gerrie after the first meeting:
Gerrie
| Jack. | Buck up, Gerrie, that's the worst over. |
| Gerrie. | Oh dear, I was so nervous and they were all so calm. … I took to Nicholas at once. I feel I can get round him. |
| Jack. | Rather. What about Michael? |
| Gerrie. | He alarms me. Did anybody ever get round Michael? |
| Jack. | I can't say I ever did. … The third chappie [i.e. Barrie] is the important one. |
| Gerrie. | (gasping). I know. Oh, Jack! |
| Jack. | Yes, he's a bit like that. His heart's all right. |
| Gerrie. | His face is so expressionless. … He never smiled once. |
| Jack. | I bet you he thought he was smiling all the time. That's the way he smiles. … He's really rather soft. We can all twist him round our little fingers. … You see he is essentially a man's man. He doesn't know what to say to women. They don't interest him. I think he's a woman-hater. … What are you to wear for dinner? |
| Gerrie. | Does it matter? He won't notice. |
| Jack. | No, but Michael will. He takes Michael's opinion on everything. All depends on Michael. If Michael says ‘Let them marry next week’ … Uncle Jim will fix it up. If on the other hand Michael says ‘Delay for three years,’ it will be fixed that way. |
| Gerrie. | Oh, if he should say that! |
| Jack. | He won't. |
| Gerrie. | How can you be sure? |
| Jack. | I should kick him. |
Jack and Gerrie were married on September 4th, 1917 – less than three weeks after their ordeal at the North British Hotel.