1917–1921
In his Dedication to Peter Pan, Barrie wrote, ‘Sometimes … Michael liked my literary efforts, and I walked in the azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus to me with the comment “Not so bad.”’ The play went into rehearsal in September 1917, with Gerald du Maurier directing as well as giving the performance of his career as the jaded, lonely Will Dearth. Each of the eight characters who yearn for a second chance reflects an element of the author's own personality – particularly Mr Purdie, a solitary soul who must always be wooing some woman other than his wife. Psychoanalysis was beginning to sweep into fashion, and Barrie was one of its earliest victims; Dear Brutus, however, makes it clear enough that he himself was his own best analyst, and was under no illusion that a second chance to live his life over again would be any different from the first. He rejected Hardy's theory that people are governed by fate, and drew instead on a maxim from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as well as on his own theme of the black spot, or ‘Accursed Thing’, in The Will:
PURDIE. … It isn't accident that shapes our lives.
JOANNA. No, it's Fate.
PURDIE. …It's not Fate, Joanna. Fate is something outside us. What really plays the dickens with us is something in ourselves. Something that makes us go on doing the same sort of fool things, however many chances we get. … Something we are born with. … Shakespeare knew what he was talking about –
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Michael in fancy dress
The only character to benefit from his second chance is Dearth, who sighs to his wife in the first Act, ‘Perhaps if we had had children–Pity!’ The magic wood of the second Act grants him his wish and he is given a dream-child, Margaret. In an echo from The New Word and Barrie's last letter to George – ‘more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart’ – Dearth tells Margaret in passing that sons are ‘not a patch on daughters. The awful thing about a son is that never, never – at least, from the day he goes to school – can you tell him that you rather like him. By the time he is ten you can't even take him on your knee.’ The scene also contained an exchange for Mary Hodgson's benefit:
DEARTH. …I do wish I could leave you to do things a little more for yourself. I suppose it's owing to my having had to be father and mother both. I knew nothing practically about the bringing up of children, and of course I couldn't trust you to a nurse.
MARGARET (severely). Not you; so sure you could do it better yourself. That's you all over.
In his review of Dear Brutus in The Times, A. B. Walkley wrote:
‘When Mr. Dearth “comes to” and, suddenly realizing the loss of his dream-child, breaks into a sob, you catch your breath. … What Barrie can do with children and the love of them we all know. But surely he has never touched the theme with such tender and delicate felicity as he gives it here?’
Dear Brutus opened on October 17th; the following day Barrie was writing to Kathleen (now Lady) Scott, trying to persuade her to allow him to become guardian to her son Peter, aged nine. Lord Knutsford had advised Lady Scott that she should appoint a guardian in the event of her death, and had offered himself for the post. Barrie wrote to Kathleen:
‘The only change in Lord Knutsford's advice that I should like you to make is to substitute my name for his. If you have sufficient faith in me it is my earnest wish that you should do so. … He can't possibly love Peter more than I do, but he has the advantage of having [a] daughter, while I have no woman to work with me or to fall back upon should my end come before too long. Experience teaches me that the one drawback in my tending my boys is that I have no female influence for them; the loss to them is very great and I must tell you this bluntly, as I think its value increases as the boy grows into a man.’
Barrie wrote again to Kathleen a week later:
‘If it were just between [Lord Knutsford] and me I would beg you to risk making it me, but it would not be wise to make it either of us without further arrangements in case of our death. … This is so important to Peter that I think I am quite out-weighed. But I should like you to say in your will, or whatever the paper is, that it would be a pleasure to you to think that I was looked upon as an uncle to Peter to whom he would come whenever he wanted. I should try to be a good uncle to him.’
Peter Scott, aged 10
Kathleen took Barrie's advice, and neither man became guardian. However, Peter paid his godfather frequent visits at Adelphi Terrace House, writing in his autobiography, The Eye of the Wind:
‘The room in which he wrote was dominated by a huge open hearth piled high with wood ash, and with a high-backed settle in the inglenook on one side of it. … It was full of pipe smoke and books. As a very small boy I used to go there for tea, sometimes with my mother, sometimes alone and feeling very independent. … Barrie knew all about how to get on with children. Although there were often long silences I cannot ever remember feeling shy in his company.’
Barrie in the doorway of his Adelphi study. Relics of the Five are scattered about the room: Sylvia, George and Jack in the oval frame (see p. 54), George's catch at Lord's on the piano (p. 203) next to a drawing of Sylvia, and photographs of George, Michael (p. 296) and Nico (p. 200), hanging on the wall to the left
Jack's wife, Gerrie, was now staying with Barrie at Adelphi Terrace as Jack had been transferred to Portsmouth:
‘I used to sit in a corner of that huge study, as quiet as a mouse. Sometimes Barrie would talk a lot; at other times he'd be wrapped in silence, except for his cough. Most of the time he paced up and down the room, as if I wasn't there, and then suddenly he'd say something. I can't now recall the context, but I remember him asking me if I knew how Guy du Maurier had been killed. I said something like, “Yes, wasn't he shot?” And Barrie said, “Yes. He was shot. And he wandered about the battlefield for half-an-hour with his stomach hanging out, begging somebody to finish him off.” I was quite horrified. Why did he tell me? Was he deliberately trying to shock me? I never told my husband, I never told anybody because it struck me as being so queer, so cruel. Perhaps he had something on his mind, I don't know. He just told it to me point-blank, then went on with whatever he was doing.’
Another unpleasant surprise was in store for Gerrie. Although Mary Hodgson had been at Jack's wedding, she had stood at the back of the church, and had avoided meeting his new wife:
‘While I was staying at the flat, Barrie took me to meet Mary Hodgson at Campden Hill Square. We waited in a room for her, and then she came in and Barrie said, “Mary, this is Gerrie, Jack's wife –” She gave me a paralysing look but didn't say anything, so I tried to be pleasant and said, “Oh, Mary, do look at this something-or-other we've been sent as a wedding present”, whereupon she wheeled round and walked out of the room. Barrie didn't say a word to her; I think he was absolutely terrified of her. He knew how Michael and Nico loved her, and he wasn't prepared to put a foot wrong in their books.’
Peter had been expected back on short leave from France in the second week of October, but had failed to materialize at either Campden Hill Square or Adelphi Terrace. Barrie was just beginning to get anxious when he received word from him that he was staying with a married woman and her daughter at their home in Epping Forest. Knowing Barrie's ‘safety-curtain’ to the ways of the flesh, it would have been easy for Peter to have left it at that. Instead, he chose to acquaint his guardian with the truth. He was having an affair, not with the daughter, but with her mother, Vera Willoughby, a professional artist who was almost twice his age.
Barrie was ‘shocked to the core’.1 Apart from the moral considerations, he felt that such a relationship could only lead to unhappiness: Gilbert and Mary were proof of that. Peter, however, had made up his mind. He wrote to Mary Hodgson from Flanders on October 27th:
Peter in 1917
My dear Mary,
I don't know whether you have heard anything about my fall from the path of righteousness, but I presume you have. If it is so, I'd like you to know that I don't myself look upon it as a fall at all – that I know I'm doing right, in fact, and that though you will never be anything but very distressed about it, you will be wrong to be so. I'd sooner have had your approval than anyone else's, and that not only because you know me better than anyone else. But I'm afraid I never shall. Please don't worry about me more than you can help – I'm more pleased with the prospect of life than ever before, and rightly so, believe me. I seem to have made rather a mistake in being so open about it, but I really do believe you'll agree with me there. In any case, this is a sincere apology for not coming to see you when I was on leave. I think you will be able to understand that.
Yrs,
Peter.
Mary's disapproval of Peter's affair was about all that she and Barrie had in common. They had known each other for a quarter of a century, but despite all they had gone through, she no more approved of him now than she had during the boys' childhood days in Kensington Gardens. She admired him as a writer, respected him as a Baronet, but her disapproval of him as an influence in the boys' lives was as firmly rooted as ever. Her niece, Mrs Mary Hill, wrote in 1976:
‘When it was made known that J.M.B. had been made the children's Guardian, she was extremely upset. She only agreed to continue the running of the Campden Hill Square household because she had promised to do so to Mrs Arthur, and her motto in life was “A promise is a sacred thing.” This task she did not enjoy since she was responsible to J.M.B. … He indulged their every wish, and this she considered detrimental to their upbringing. Eventually the time arrived when she considered she had fulfilled her obligation to Mrs Arthur, and that the boys should be handed over to the sole charge of J.M.B. However, her resignation was not accepted, and for the sake of the two youngest, whom she always spoke of as “my babies” or “my boys”, she stayed on for as long as she could tolerate the situation. Her main concern was that her presence would become more of a hindrance than a help to the boys when they found their loyalties being continually divided between herself and J.M.B., particularly in the case of Michael.’2
Mary Hodgson
Mary Hodgson had offered her resignation in December 1916, but it had taken Barrie by surprise; Jack was still unmarried, Peter was one of the family, and Barrie did not relish the prospect of finding a replacement to run Campden Hill Square. The alternative was for the boys to move into Adelphi Terrace, but at that time he was still living in his comparatively small flat on the second floor. It is probable that this was the motivating factor in his acquiring the spacious top-floor flat – in readiness for Mary's next offer of resignation. But the offer was not forthcoming. Mary seemed to have readjusted to the situation, and looked set for a long sojourn at Campden Hill Square. Naturally any suggestion of her going would have to come from Mary herself: Michael and Nico would never forgive him if they felt he had compelled her to leave against her wishes.
An Etonian letter from Nico to Barrie
Whether by accident or design, Barrie now put into motion a scheme that could not fail to sting her into action. He proposed that the unsuspecting Gerrie should assume full responsibility for the running of 23 Campden Hill Square: she would be the new mistress, with Mary acting on her instructions. The arrangement was to begin shortly after Michael and Nico arrived back from Eton for the Christmas holidays. Gerrie herself had no suspicions that she was being used as a pawn: ‘He simply said, “You'd better go and live at 23.” My husband was due home on sick-leave over Christmas, so the idea was that we should move our things in when he got back.’
Michael, Nico and Mary formed a reception committee for Jack and Gerrie on the top step of 23 Campden Hill Square, Nico recalling in 1975:
‘We were standing outside the front door of 23, waiting to greet Gerrie and Jack, who were getting out of a cab. As they started to climb up the steps, Mary just turned her back on them and walked inside the house. Jack was furious, understandably, but Michael and I wouldn't hear a word against her. Don't forget she was the person in our lives – she was the mother. She terrified pretty well everybody else in the family, but to Michael and me she was wholly unique and wholly irreplaceable.’
Gerrie now found herself in ‘a quite impossible situation. Mary absolutely refused to speak to me. Everything was communicated via Michael or Nico, or written down as messages on bits of paper.’ Jack and Gerrie awoke on their first morning at Campden Hill Square to find one such message had been slipped under the bedroom door during the night. It was from Mary Hodgson to Jack: ‘Things have been going on in this room of which your father would not have approved.’ Gerrie was unable to discuss her predicament with the boys:
‘It was a completely taboo subject – besides, I was too shy, or maybe my pride got in the way. J.M.B. had told me I was in charge, and so I had to try my best. But I was completely outside my orbit – I was far too young and inexperienced, only a year or so older than Michael, though he was far, far more sophisticated than me. I tried on one or two occasions to be pleasant to Mary, to try and coax her into conversation, but she adamantly refused to address one word to my face. If I was standing next to Michael, she would convey her answers to him, always referring to me in the third person. She was completely demented.’
Barrie spent most of Christmas 1917 at Campden Hill Square, but naturally turned a blind eye to the tension. He wrote blithely to Peter Scott from Campden Hill to thank the boy for his Christmas present:
22 December, 1917.
My dear Scott
I am sitting here smoking the tobacco out of your pouch. It is a lovely pouch and I watch people in case they try to steal it. Who steals my purse steals trash, but if anyone tries to steal my pouch he had better watch out.
I am hoping to see you soon. I am with my boys and they are as rowdy as ever.
My love to your mother and you.
I am
My dear Scott
Your humble servant
Barrie.
The domestic imbroglio came to a head in early January. Barrie and the boys had gone out before breakfast, and Gerrie was alone in the house. She went downstairs and found a note from Mary Hodgson propped up against a frozen water-jug – ‘Either you leave this house or I do.’ Gerrie's reaction was immediate:
‘I started packing there and then, telephoned my husband who had gone to see a friend, he came back to help with the luggage, and by night-fall we were staying in a hotel off Knightsbridge. That evening I began feeling exceedingly ill. Jack phoned Barrie's doctor and said, “I think my wife's having a miscarriage.” The doctor said “Why?” My husband, poor young man, hadn't got a clue. So then he called another doctor, and they shovelled me on to a stretcher and removed me to a nursing home. It was a miscarriage, and I spent the rest of the time weeping and weeping – I couldn't stop – Sheer nerves. I never saw Mary Hodgson again. I think Barrie was absolutely delighted when Mary handed in her notice as a result of it all. Everything could be blamed on me, and he didn't lose face with the boys. I suppose Mary Hodgson stayed long enough until the flat was ready for them, and then he moved them in.’
Barrie responded to Mary's written letter of resignation with a letter of his own:
10 Jan 1918.
My dear Mary,
As I think you find it easier I am answering your note by another. I suppose I must accept your resignation very sorrowfully as the wisest step in circumstances that are very difficult. No need for me to repeat of what inestimable service to me have been your love and devotion to the boys, particularly to Michael and Nicholas who came into our hands when they were so young.
I earnestly hope that you will continue to see much of them in the future and be their friend thro' life. If you care to consult me about your own future I shall be very glad. I also hope you will now let me make the arrangement Mrs Davies asked me to make in the last weeks of her life and which I told you of a day or two after her death. It is entirely a matter between her and you, and I trust you will allow her earnest wish to be carried out.
Always your most sincere friend,
J. M. Barrie.
Nico and Michael at Glan Hafren
The ‘arrangement’ was a sum of £500, left to her by Sylvia, to which Barrie offered to add a further £500 of his own. Mary refused to accept either amount. She was mortified at the news of Gerrie's miscarriage, and suffered such guilt over her behaviour towards her that in later life she steadfastly refused to meet any of the boys' wives in case her innate jealousy once again mastered her better self.
Barrie took Michael and Nico down to Tillington, near Petworth in Sussex, to stay with E. V. Lucas, who had separated from Elizabeth and was living alone with Audrey. Lucas later remarked on the ‘minute thoughtfulness for others’3 that had begun to creep into Michael's character, an empathy evident in his handling of the current domestic crisis. Michael wrote to Mary from Tillington on January 20th, 1918:
Barrie and Michael
My dear Mary,
Do you mind if I try to reduce the painfulness of things by putting them down here in writing? I believe I can do it.
I am assuming that matters have gone too far to turn back now, through whose fault I will not say, tho' I shrewdly suspect it had a little to do with everybody.
Before going any further, let me assure you with the utmost assurance that it will not be at all possible for Nico and me to continue living at 23 with Jack & his wife – as you suggested. The proof lies in the last three weeks, whatever you say. This may be hard luck on Jack, but the fact remains, & when a man marries, his family is the one he is setting up for himself. You yourself said that Jack is having too much done for him. That is so, so why sh'd he be allowed to go on in this easy way, undisturbed and disturbing?
A locket given to Mary Hodgson. Top to bottom: Michael, Peter, George, Jack and Nico
It w'd be hardly possible for us to go on living at 23 even without Jack and Gerrie, unless you came back. As to this last it rests with your ‘pride’, & with your opinion as to the importance of maintaining 23 as a home for Nico.
(I hope all this doesn't sound callous. You know me too well to make that mistake.)
The present scheme I believe is to let things remain undecided for a month or two, so as to see which way to turn. As to whether going and living at the flat will be worse for Nico and me, that rests with our own strength of mind, don't it – and particularly with mine I believe.
And of course the chief reason of 23's importance was that you were there – & – do not say I am wrong – I am sure we shall see very nearly if not as much of you as before.
Let us weigh the past with the (??) future:
Past. We have seen you only in the holidays, which has not been very much. We have written about once a week or so (when old Nico could be roused).
Future. Of course we shall write as much if not more (when I can rouse old Nico). And in the holidays – mind you! – you're to come with your gingham & take up your quarters in the attic we'll have ready for you – if only to see my mustache grow! And besides that you will overcome yr dislike of travelling, & be dragged off in the summer holidays, or whenever we do disappear in the wilds. And – mind you! – this is absolutely serious – none of your absurd ideas of pride or absurd ideas of Uncle Jim not wanting you! That's what I call false pride, & harmful at that. Think how glad he'll be to get us off his hands for a time!
This frivolousness of pen really hides the most serious inwardness I've ever had. I'm going to draw up a form for you to sign.
The chief sadness this week then is the leaving of 23, & that was bound to come, so don't let us be cowards.
Also – & I know this is not my business at all – do take that paltry thousand to please Nico & me, if only to start a social revolution! We'd have made it a billion only that's not a billionth part enough. I know it's twice as hard for you as it is for us, and that's precious hard. Nico is unaware of the state of affairs, so please Mary don't make it harder by refusing anything.
AU REVOIR.
MICHAEL.
Peter wrote to Mary from Flanders two days later:
My dear Mary,
I've heard one or two disquieting rumours lately about 23. Will you please tell me what's really happened, please? Because whatever I am or am not, or am thought to be or am not thought to be, I will always do anything in my power to help you. It seems to me from what I've heard – which is very little – that things are happening otherwise than they might have happened had I been at home; Nico would be heart-broken if you were to go – Michael too, I think. But I know so little – I wish you'd write.
Yrs,
Peter.
By the time Mary received Peter's letter, the deed had been done. Campden Hill Square – ‘Little Old New Babylon’ as Michael used to call it – was to be closed down as a home for the boys, and by the Easter holidays Michael and Nico would be living with Barrie in his Adelphi Terrace flat. Mary appears to have faced up to her departure in good grace, judging by Barrie's letter to her of January 25th:
My dear Mary,
Thank you heartily for your letter, and for what you say about myself also, for I deeply appreciate it. No one knows, no one could know, so well as myself, what you have been to the boys, except indeed the boys themselves. What you say of the future is a great relief to me, for the uncertainty of life is before us all more than ever in these days, and the knowledge that if the need arose ‘The trust continues’ is the best that could be said to me. The practical matters we can talk over.
Yours very sincerely,
J. M. Barrie.
Barrie wrote to Elizabeth Lucas four days later, bringing her up to date with the domestic situation:
‘Michael's letter to Audrey has told you of our adventures at Tillington where we had a very happy time, and Michael discovered an old shop at Petworth and triumphantly bought a soap-dish for his room here [at Adelphi Terrace]. That room is not finished yet, indeed three rooms are still in confusion which will give you some idea of the difficulties with workmen nowadays. … I had begun to feel in my bones tho' that it was all too fine a flat for me and that for my lonely purposes all I really needed was this room and the bedroom. … However the way has been cleared by trouble at Campden Hill. Mary is going sometime in February. This means Michael and Nicholas making this their home, as my idea is to put caretakers into Campden Hill for a little and then store the furniture and dispose of the lease. Of course it is a great thing to me to look to having Michael and Nico here tho' they are so much away. A sad thing is that Michael is now 17½ and in a year or less is eligible for the army. The depression of it all! I shy at thinking of it but it has no doubt a great deal to do with the gloom in which one seems to get enveloped.’
Audrey, Elizabeth and E. V. Lucas
Barrie wrote to Elizabeth again on February 20th:
‘I emerge out of my big chimney to write to you. I was sitting there with a Charlotte Brontë in my hands (when I read her I think mostly of Emily) and there was a gale on the roof; it is probably not windy at all down below, but with the slightest provocation the chimneys overhead in their whirring cowls go as devilish as the witches in Macbeth, whom they also rather resemble in appearance. … As I had to do without you this time, and scorned to put anyone in your place, the decoration of this room is perforce all my own. … The floor is matting, with rugs by Michael Llewelyn Davies, Esq. … There are no pictures beyond tiny ones, the books and wood crying out against our experiments therewith. … Naught else but in the fireplace two old settles and piles of firewood. …
Barrie curled up on his wooden settle, from the painting by Sir John Lavery
‘I had an odd thought today about the war that might come to something, but it seems to call for a poet. That in the dead quietness that comes after the carnage, the one thing those lying on the ground must be wondering is whether they are alive or dead. Out there the veil that separates the survivors and the killed must be getting very thin, and those on the one side of it very much jumbled up with those on the other. … Perhaps it is of this stuff that ghosts are made. These be rather headachy thoughts. I expect the lot on the other side of the veil have as many Germans as British, and that they all went off together quite unconscious that they had ever been enemies. To avenge the fallen! That is the stupidest cry of the war. What must the fallen think of us if they hear it.’
Gripped by the idea of the veil, Barrie set to work at once on another one-act play inspired by George, A Well-Remembered Voice. It concerns a mother, still grieving the death of her son, Dick. Her mourning is for all the world to see: she wears black, leaves Dick's ‘sacred’ fishing-rods lying around the study, and holds futile seances in an effort to get in touch with him ‘on the other side’. Her husband, Mr Don, is an extension of the father in The New Word: outwardly unemotional, he seems to be more interested in his newspaper than his wife's seance. She does not resent his apparent indifference; she knows that ‘a son is so much more to a mother than a father’. After the seance is over, Mrs Don goes to bed, leaving her husband alone in the study.
Barrie, standing by his study windows, where he would gaze for hours at the seven bridges visible across the Thames. ‘Charing Cross Bridge is the ugliest of them all,’ he once commented, ‘but I never want to see it pulled down. It was across that bridge that the troop-trains took our boys to France.’ The framed photograph on the sill is of Michael (p. 113)
He stands fingering the fishing-rods, then wanders back into the ingle-nook. … Through the greyness we see him … in the glow of the fire. He sits on the settle and tries to read his paper. He breaks down. He is a pitiful lonely man.
In the silence something happens. A well-remembered voice says, ‘Father’. MR DON looks into the greyness from which this voice comes, and he sees his son. We see no one, but we are to understand that, to MR DON, DICK is standing there in his habit as he lived. He goes to his boy.
Peter Scott's painting of Barrie in his ingle-nook
MR DON. Dick!
DICK. I have come to sit with you a bit, father.
(It is the gay, young, careless voice.)
MR DON. It's you, Dick; it's you!
DICK. It's me all right, father. I say, don't be startled, or anything of that kind. We don't like that.
Evidently DICK is the taller, for MR DON has to look up to him. He puts his hands on the boy's shoulders.)…
DICK. I say, father, let's get away from that sort of thing.
MR DON. That is so like you, Dick! I'll do anything you ask.
DICK. Then keep a bright face.
They talk matter-of-factly about the old days, Eton and cricket and fishing; although Dick talks in the manner of George, his character is closer to Peter Pan – indeed the whole scene is reminiscent of Peter's last meeting with Wendy. The ‘crafty boy’ roams about the room, always changing the subject when Mr Don looks as though he is in danger of becoming too emotional. The sight of his old fishing-rods prompts a memory:
DICK. … Do you remember, father, how I got the seven-pounder on a burn-trout cast? … It was really only six and three-quarters. I put a stone in its mouth the second time we weighed it! … When I went a-soldiering I used to pray – just standing up, you know – that I shouldn't lose my right arm, because it would be so awkward for casting. (He cogitates as he returns to the ingle-nook.) Somehow I never thought I should be killed. …
MR DON. Oh, Dick!
DICK. What's the matter? Oh, I forgot. … Haven't you got over it yet, father? I got over it so long ago. I wish you people would understand what a little thing [death] is. …
MR DON. Tell me, Dick, about the – the veil. … I suppose the veil is like a mist?
DICK. The veil's a rummy thing, father. Yes, like a mist. But when one has been at the Front for a bit, you can't think how thin the veil seems to get; just one layer of it. … We sometimes mix up those who have gone through with those who haven't. … I don't remember being hit, you know. I don't remember anything till the quietness came. When you have been killed it suddenly becomes very quiet; quieter even than you have ever known it at home. Sunday used to be a pretty quiet day at my tutor's, when Trotter and I flattened out on the first shady spot up the river; but it is quieter than that. I am not boring you, am I? … I wish I could remember something funny to tell you. … Father, do you remember little Wantage who was at my private* and came on to Ridley's house in my third half?…
MR DON. Emily Wantage's boy?
DICK. That's the card. …
MR DON. She was very fond of him.
DICK. Oh, I expect no end. Tell her he's killed.
MR DON. She knows.
DICK. … That isn't the joke, though. You see he got into a hopeless muddle about which side of the veil he had come out on … and he got lost … (He chuckles) I expect he has become a ghost!… Best not to tell his mother that. … Ockley's name still sticks to him. … He was a frightful swell you know. Keeper of the field, and played at Lord's the same year. …
MR DON. What did you nickname him, Dick?
DICK. It was his fags that did it! … His fags called him K.C.M.G.
MR DON. Meaning, Dick?
DICK. Meaning ‘Kindly Call Me God!’ … Father, don't feel hurt though I dodge the good-bye business when I leave you. … I'll just slip away.
MR DON. What I'm afraid of is that you won't come back. … When will you come again?
DICK. There's no saying.
As at the end of Peter Pan, Dick returns to the Neverland beyond the veil. The critic W. A. Darlington observed that in A Well-Remembered Voice ‘for once in Barrie's writings there is an admission that the feeling between father and son can be deeper and truer even than that between a son and his mother’.4 Or, perhaps, a boy and his nurse.
Michael was now in Pop, VI Form, Football XI, and co-editor of the Eton College Chronicle – ‘writing leaders and poems galore’,5 boasted Barrie with pride to Charles Turley Smith. To enter more fully into his life, Barrie took out a regular subscription to the Chronicle, which enabled him to follow the boys' activities. Michael had implied to Mary Hodgson that the Easter holidays at Barrie's flat were being looked upon as a ‘trial period’. In his only surviving letter to Michael, Barrie was clearly at pains to make the flat as attractive as possible for their return:
Michael in Pop at Eton
29 March 1918
Dearest Michael,
Pretty lonely here for this week-end, ‘Bank holidays’ are always loneliness personified to me, but I think that you & Nico are almost on the way [home] and rejoice with great joy. Nico said you might get off on Monday after all, but I'm not counting on it, too good to be true. I got your dressing-table out [of Campden Hill] all right & have been trying various plans to make the rooms nice. I have brought a few – very few – things from 23, but of course everything I've done is very open to re-arrangement – in fact it is wanted. … Your account of the boys' musical in the Chronicle makes me want to see the M.S. thereof. Would it be possible for you to get the loan of it?
Loving,
J.M.B.
Michael
Nico was now fourteen, and the last of the Five to overtake Barrie in height, reaching five foot four in May, which allowed him the distinction of wearing tails at Eton instead of a bum-freezer. Barrie wrote to him from Adelphi Terrace:
‘I must say it is pretty awful to think of you in tails. “Bringing his tails behind him” doesn't Mary say about her lamb? I would really rather you grow down instead of up, back into the blue suit & the red cap, heigho! You will have to be more of a comfort than ever to me in my old age, especially when I give at the knee permanently. … I want to come down as soon as M & you fix a good time. Could you wear only one tail the first time so that I can get used to the idea gradually?’6
Barrie communicated the ‘painful news’ of Nico's tails to various friends, adding to Elizabeth Lucas: ‘Seems so little time since he was in blue and red, and we were all flying about in Kensington Gardens.’7
Michael was due to enlist on November 12th, 1918. On November 11th, Germany capitulated with a suddenness that caught the world unawares – not least Barrie, who was in France on an official tour, and spent Armistice night in Paris. He wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis on November 22nd:
‘So it actually is ended! … “It is finished” rather than “we have won” . … It was dear of Peter [Lewis] to say that about Michael. You can guess how thankful I am. I don't think he will be wanted for the army now, and I'm going to Eton on Sunday … to “go into his future”. He writes “I'll do anything you like. P.S. How about my going round the world?” They marched at Eton with their bath-tubs as drums and the night ended with Michael getting 500 lines (for standing on his head on a roof when he should have been in bed!).’
Nico in the Eton O.T.C.
Michael's suggestion of going round the world was indicative of his mood: he had no desire to break away from Barrie, whom he still loved as few sons love their father, but he had a not unnatural desire to roam before deciding on a future. E. V. Lucas later wrote, ‘He seemed to have everything at his feet, and one used to look at him and wonder what walk of life he would choose; but he gave few signs, being, for all his vivid interest in the moment, more in the world than of it, an elvish spectator rather than a participant.’8 Eiluned Lewis recalled that Michael wanted to go to Paris, as his grandfather, George du Maurier, had done, living the Bohemian life in an artist's studio and developing his passion for drawing. Macnaghten and Barrie did not agree. They felt he should first go to Oxford and secure a degree; to please Barrie – always Michael's priority – he conceded defeat, matriculating at Christ Church in January 1919. In return, Barrie gave him a motor car and a country cottage as a token of independence, though the cottage was rarely used.
Barrie and Cynthia Asquith
During the summer of 1918, Barrie had engaged a secretary. That she could neither take shorthand nor type was of small account, since the woman in question was Lady Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of the former Prime Minister, whom Barrie had met at a dinner party. Lady Cynthia was aged thirty – the same age as Sylvia had been when Barrie met her at Sir George Lewis's dinner party in 1897. Like Sylvia, Cynthia had an elusive beauty that artists strove to capture but rarely achieved; like Sylvia, she had, at that time, two boys – the younger, Michael, being the same age as George had been when his red tam-o'-shanter first caught Barrie's eye in 1897; unlike Sylvia, she had tremendous ambition: to write, to paint, to act – to do virtually anything that would bring her in enough money to maintain her expensive family. She had been married seven years to Herbert (‘Beb’) Asquith, the eldest surviving son of H. H. Asquith. Like Arthur, he had studied for the Bar; unlike Arthur, he had failed, and had turned to more artistic pursuits, none of which brought in much money. He had enlisted in 1914, and was now serving as a gunner in the army, fighting in France.
The entry of Cynthia Asquith into the scheme of Barrie's life was a gradual process,* which at present held decidedly less significance for Barrie than for his new secretary. His life still revolved around ‘my boys’.
Peter was demobilized early in 1919. He had won the Military Cross in the previous year, but it was little compensation for his three-year ordeal. Mackail wrote, ‘He had been through something more than a furnace, and what was left of him was for a long while little more than a ghost; a shattered remnant that even Barrie couldn't help.’ Peter continued to live with Vera Willoughby, helping her to run an antique shop in Soho. Barrie wrote to Nico at Eton:
‘Michael has told you of the trouble connected with Peter, but I want you to know that tho' it is a real trouble which has caused me much pain for a long time, I hope it will all vanish by and by. Also I love him just as much as ever, and he has all his old dear ways and he comes here a good deal & will come more, and I look forward to us all being all together again. He is as fond of you as in the old days. … He speaks a lot about you to me, and I tell him you are a joy and a pride to me, but of course I never mention such things to you. No, no, I keep it dark. … Michael speaks of learning to swim when he comes back [from Oxford], as he is to have a punt at Christ Church next term. He rode his machine to Berkhampstead on Saty and was escorted over Egerton by the lady now there. … Alas once more the Savoy looms without my favourite company. I think I shall ask for potatoes with a Nico in them and a half bottle of Michael 1900 vintage.’9
Michael
Nico, like Michael, shared most of his adolescent problems with Barrie. He wrote to him from Eton on March 23rd:
Dear Uncle Jim,
…I am afraid this has not been a very happy half for me. I expect my tutor will tell you in my report, which I expect will be bad. Otherwise I will tell you everything. It is a long affair. My tutor is very sick about it but I don't think you would mind. I hope to heaven you won't. It is about me going about with a smaller boy named Wright. He is under 2 years younger and a good bit lower in the school. My tutor says it does both him and me harm, which I will never believe. He jaws about Sentimentality also, which is rot. Wright's people don't object in the slightest and I don't think you will. … I can quite see there would be a lot of harm if I led him into bad ways and used bad language, but as I do neither of them in any way and nor does he, where's the harm? It enfuriates me. In these sort of cases I feel quite helpless without Michael here. … The chief reason why I go about with him so often, and is the only reason, is that I like him better than anyone else in my tutor's. He is good looking, and because of that my tutor says I am so to speak in love with him, whereas it is just perfectly natural friendship. I have been in despair about everything lately.
Loving
Nico
Nico recalled that Barrie's response to such problems was invariably calming and sympathetic:
‘He was never harsh or critical – he always tried to offer advice as a friend, not as a parent, even when I was very young (which, incidentally, is one reason why he got on so well with children – he always treated them as equals). From the time Michael left Eton, I wrote to Uncle Jim every day, which led to my pouring out my thoughts and problems to him – not to a father, not to a brother, rather to a very intimate friend. I think Michael looked on him in much the same way. He was always extraordinarily easy to talk to – I never remember thinking, “Oh, Lor – what's Uncle Jim going to say when he finds out?” On the other hand, we never talked about the so-called “facts of life”, and when, a year or so later, I did go through a more or less bi-sexual stage, I never mentioned it to him. But then how many boys would mention such things to their parents?’
Oxford had one great consolation for Michael – a renewal of his friendship with Roger Senhouse. Another Eton contemporary who had joined him was Robert (later Lord) Boothby:
Michael and Barrie at Glan Hafren
‘Michael was the most remarkable person I ever met, and the only one of my generation to be touched by genius. He was very sensitive and emotional, but he concealed both to a large extent. He had a profound effect on virtually everyone who came into contact with him – particularly Roger Senhouse, who was also a great friend of mine. I don't think Michael had any girl-friends, but our friendship wasn't homosexual; I believe it was – fleetingly – between him and Senhouse, yet I think Michael would have come out of it. Michael took me back to Barrie's flat a number of times, but I always felt uncomfortable there. There was a morbid atmosphere about it. I remember going there one day and it almost overwhelmed me, and I was glad to get away. We were going back to Oxford in Michael's car, and I said, “It's a relief to get away from that flat”, and he said, “Yes it is.” But next day he'd be writing to Barrie as usual. … It was an extraordinary relationship between them – an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him. Michael was very prone to melancholy, and when Barrie was in a dark mood, he tended to pull Michael down with him. … I remember once coming back to the flat with Michael and going into the study, which was empty. We stood around talking for about five minutes, and then I heard someone cough: I turned round and saw Barrie sitting in the ingle-nook, almost out of sight. He'd been there all the time, just watching us. … He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius.* Yet there's no doubt that Michael loved him; he was grateful to him, but he also had an affinity with him that ran very deep.’10
Barrie on the roof of Adelphi Terrace House, photographed by Jack
In the early summer of 1919, Cynthia Asquith took a temporary respite in her secretarial duties as she was expecting a third child. She and her husband had been lent a house at Thorpe, in Suffolk; she wrote to Barrie, inviting him to stay. Barrie replied on June 20th:
Dear Lady Cynthia,
I don't suppose I shall be able to get down. I want to come but I shd have done it before Michael got back. They shrink, these boys, from going anywhere, the death of their parents is really at the root of it, and down in my soul I know myself to be so poor a substitute that I try to make some sort of amends by hanging on here when there is any chance of my being a little use to them. Even in admitting this I am saying more to you than I do to most.
Yours
J.M.B.
The excuse was both for Michael's sake, and for his own. Michael was due to set off for Paris at the end of the month, and Barrie liked to be with him when he was in London. A fortnight later he wrote to Nico at Eton (2 July 1919): ‘Michael, [Clive] Burt, Senhouse and Boothby are actually off to France! They are at this moment dining together early at Waterloo. I can't conceive easily a more delightful prospect for four happy undergrads.’ Boothby recalled, ‘We had tremendous fun. We climbed a tree in the Champs Elysées and sat in it all night and waited until the peace procession marched by. … Michael loved Paris: he could speak fluent French, and I think he had a romantic idea of setting up his easel on the left bank and becoming an artist.’11 ‘Paris was choc-a-bloc, you couldn't get a room anywhere’, remembered Clive Burt. ‘Then Michael suggested we try the Hotel Meurice as Barrie always used to stay there, and Bob Boothby thought he too could pull a few strings as his Uncle was “well-known” at the Meurice. We went along, presented our credentials, and were summarily ejected; retired to a turkish-bath, and eventually ended up in one of those rooms favoured by prostitutes where two could sleep while the other two roamed the streets, then changed over.’12
Barrie's first left-handed letter
When Michael returned from his Parisian exploits, he found Barrie absorbed in writing a new play. The first notes had been made in 1892: ‘Play: The Haunted House – on all ghosts really mothers come back to see their children.’ The theme had recurred at regular intervals throughout Barrie's notebooks and works during the intervening twenty-seven years, and he was now distilling them into Mary Rose, the story of a young mother who disappears on an island in the Outer Hebrides, returning years later to search for her son. Like Peter Pan, she has remained the same age as on the day she vanished, but her son has grown into a man, whom she no longer recognizes. Although Barrie was gripped by the subject, he found the writing physically painful as he had developed a form of writer's cramp in his right hand. He had been naturally left-handed as a child, and therefore found little difficulty in the switch. For the first time since his school days, his handwriting became legible, though he liked to claim that he thought more darkly down his left arm.
The Paris visit had whetted Michael's appetite for freedom, and throughout his next year at Oxford he was restless and dissatisfied. Senhouse introduced him to some of his Bloomsbury friends, taking him to Ottoline Morrell's home, Garsington Manor, for week-ends. Lytton Strachey found Michael ‘a charming creature – and what is rarer, an intelligent one … the only young man at Oxford or Cambridge with real brains’.13 But Michael shied away from becoming part of a set. Dora Carrington later wrote to Strachey of another boy who ‘reminded me of Michael Davies. He had a strange character: he hardly expanded even when the whole party became wild and tipsy. He was very anxious to be thought a man and put on a charming expression trying to look severe and unconcerned.’14 In the spring of 1920 Dora Carrington wrote to Strachey from Oxford observing that Michael was ‘unhappy and moody. Perhaps that is just the gloom of finding Barrie one's keeper for life.’15
Mary Rose began rehearsals at the beginning of April 1920, with Nico, now aged sixteen, in constant attendance. Michael, however, had set off on a forty-mile hike with a new Oxford friend, Rupert Buxton. Buxton had been head boy at Harrow, with as many academic distinctions to his credit as Michael had acquired at Eton. Clive Burt remembered him as having ‘a kindred spirit to Michael: very musical, very poetic’.16 Robert Boothby had a different opinion:
Michael at Garsington Manor with (left) Dora Carrington and Julian Morrell
‘Buxton was exceptionally clever, but he had a morbid influence on Michael: he was dark, gloomy, saturnine, with an almost suicidal streak in him. I remember Michael asked me, “Why don't you like my being friends with Rupert Buxton?” And I said, “The answer to that is doom – I have a feeling of doom about him.” My friendship with Michael and Senhouse was almost perfection, and those Oxford days were the happiest of my life. We were gay together, always gay; but when Buxton came along, the gaiety left.’17
Fay Compton as Mary Rose
Meanwhile Mary Rose had opened at the Haymarket, with Fay Compton in the title role giving the performance of her career, and many of the critics hailing the play as Barrie's finest work. He had also started work on a murder play, which he was writing to please Michael, who had first suggested it. But Michael appeared to have lost interest; or rather, was preoccupied with establishing his own independence. ‘Barrie tried not to see it,’ wrote Mackail, ‘and was wretched and miserable when he did. … He needed this boy's love also, more than anything on earth, and had known for years that he had it. But now, though [Michael] still only wanted to help him, he seemed to be shying away. … Poor Barrie again. And this time poor Michael. Seven when his father died; an orphan at under ten. So quick, and clever, and so extraordinarily attractive. But now so unhappy too.’ At the end of June, Michael took matters into his own hands: he informed the authorities that he would be leaving Oxford and going to the University of Paris in the autumn. Barrie's reaction is unrecorded, but he can hardly have welcomed the thought of Michael spending most of the year in France. Perhaps he would change his mind, as he had done over a similar impulse to leave Eton. Barrie determined to make this year's summer holiday an outstanding success. He rented an entire island for August and September: Eilean Shona, off the west coast of Scotland. ‘A wild rocky romantic island it is too’, he wrote enthusiastically to Cynthia Asquith on August 13th, ‘it almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores. … Superb as is the scene from the door, Michael, who has already been to the top of things, says it's nought to what is revealed there – all the western isles of Scotland lying at our feet. A good spying-ground for discovering what really became of Mary Rose.’
Evan Talbot, Audrey Lucas, Michael and Barrie on the shore facing Eilean Shona
To make the holiday the more attractive, Barrie had suggested that Michael and Nico might like to bring along a few of their friends. Roger Senhouse came, somewhat apprehensively, since, on a previous visit to Adelphi Terrace, Barrie had not addressed a single word to him. Nico brought two Eton friends, and Elizabeth and Audrey Lucas were also included in the house party. However, Barrie's enthusiasm for the holiday soon began to wane, and by August 17th he was writing to Cynthia:
‘This island has changed from sun to rain, and we have now had about 60 hours of it so wet that you get soaked if you dart across the lawn. It's dry for the moment and anon I will be observed – or rather, I won't be, for there is no one to observe me – playing clock-golf by my lonely self. I am mostly by my lonely self. … The others are out sea-fishing … and the party is merrier without me. … Michael has been drawing more sketches of me, and they are more than enough. He has a diabolical aptitude for finding my worst attributes, so bad that I indignantly deny them, then I furtively examine myself in the privacy of my chamber, and lo, they are there.’
Barrie wrote again to Cynthia on September 7th:
‘We are a very Etonian household, and there is endless shop talked, during which I am expected to be merely the ladler out of food. If I speak to the owner of the puppy [Roger Senhouse] he shudders but answers politely and then edges away. Our longest conversation will be when he goes –
‘He:$(with dry lips but facing the situation in the bull-dog way) “Thank you very much for having me. Awfully good of you.”
‘I:$“Nice to have you here.”
‘(Exeunt in opposite directions)
Barrie ‘playing clock-golf by my lonely self’ on Eilean Shona, photographed by Nico
‘Do my letters seem aged? I certainly feel so here. I have a conviction that they secretly think it indecent of me to play tennis, which however I am only suffered to do as a rare treat. They run about and gather the balls for me, and in their politeness almost offer to hold me up when it is my turn to serve. By the way, what an extraordinarily polite game tennis is. The chief word in it seems to be “sorry” and admiration of each other's play crosses the net as frequently as the ball. I fancy this is all part of the “something” you get at public schools and can't get anywhere else. I feel sure that when any English public school boy shot a Boche he called out “Sorry”. If he was hit himself he cried, “Oh, well shot”.’
In November of the previous year Barrie had been elected Rector of St Andrews University: a three-year appointment, which required him to make an address to the students at some point during the three years. He had not yet decided on a subject, but hours of arguing and debate with Michael and his student friends on Eilean Shona helped to formulate his ideas. Barrie was fond of a pretence towards the old accepted values, but his notebook shows that the views of a younger generation were not wasted on him:
— Age & Youth the two great enemies. … Age (wisdom) failed – Now let us see what youth (audacity) can do. The 2 great partners in state shdn't be Tory, Liberal or Labour – but Age & Youth. … Rectors all advise work, labour sublime outlook, &c. This really not in touch with young men they used to be. No one can bridge that gulf (boys at Eton cheered General but said ‘Silly Ass’). Youth already knows nearly as much as Old & feel far more. Old advising young with advice rather a mockery just after War which young men died for. … They shd put statesmen who make war in front line. They shd be convicting me in dock (instead of my addressing) & condemning.
Michael at Eilean Shona
— Present Day – War Result – The Young – Plays – Litre &c. Might be speech or play with scene laid a few years hence. Present discussions of immorality of plays &c is all muddled ∵ the two sides (really old & young – i.e. Before & After War) don't understand (admit) that they have different views of what constitutes immorality. As dif[ferent] as ours from, say, an African tribe (This really the great result of war which at first didn't seem to show itself. It isn't those who fought agst their elders, but those who have been growing up since the war agst outlook of others (the soldiers are merely discontented). In short, there has arisen a new morality which seeks to go its own way agst the fierce protests (or despair) of the old morality. No argument can exist between the two till this is admitted. In present controversy it isn't admitted – the Old screams at the New as … vile ∵ not Old's way – and New despises Old as played out and false sentiment. When they admit that the other has a case to state, then … they can argue – not before.
— This sentimentality is deep in it and is the flag of the Old (at least in New's opinion). From Art the two seek different things. In the Old's plays, novels &c, what public wanted was to be made to like characters so much that the work had to have happy endings – to be sympathetic was the one aim of the artist. Undoubtedly this often led to sloppiness & insincerity in the works of great writers – all must end happily at any cost. We were brought up to this.
— The New no longer ask for this. They don't care tho' characters end miserably or not – they don't want to be sympathetic with them, they enjoy seeing them stripped of their qualities as much as the Old liked them to be emphasized. It may be a mood (but it is perhaps something better), but they are out for dissection, exposure, they have lost simple faith – probably the War is main cause of it – they query everything. Perhaps they accept too little & we accepted too much.
Barrie at work on Eilean Shona
— In a play they cd be shown in action as things will be a few years hence, when by the passing away of the old (or a revolution) they have established their new morality and new laws of the land. The Sentimental-Sympathetic may be illegal – the old put out of way & little statuettes of them kept instead. There may be Class A, Class B people, &c. A love scene might be under accepted conditions that to propose marriage is Class B and ‘living together’ Class A – and more honoured because more difficult to go on with. The end of it shd not be satire but leaving the idea open that New may be better than Old. We can't be sure that they are wrong & we right – we who seem to have made the greatest mess of things that has ever been made in the history of the world.
Sonnet written by Michael on the summit of Eilean Shona
At the end of the holiday, Michael decided to return to Oxford instead of going to Paris. The reasons for his last-minute change of heart are unclear: in all probability it was his own decision, though Elizabeth Lucas may have had a hand in the matter. Barrie wrote to her on October 17th:
Michael on Eilean Shona
‘It was nice of you to have that talk with Michael and I have no doubt that for the time at least it had a steadying effect. All sorts of things do set him “furiously to think” and they seem to burn out like a piece of paper. He is at present I think really working well at Oxford and has at any rate spasms of happiness out of it, but one never knows of the morrow. I think few have suffered from the loss of a mother as he has done.’
Barrie's transcription (with proof corrections) as it appeared in his St Andrews Address, Courage, with ‘secure’ and ‘duty’ changed to ‘serene’ and ‘beauty’
December 1920, and Barrie was again attending rehearsals for Peter Pan – its sixteenth consecutive annual revival. More lines were being added from his notebook, jotted down in curious juxtaposition with notes for his St Andrews address:
— P. Pan. Child: ‘Mother, what hour was I born?’ ‘½ past 2 in the morning.’ ‘Oh, mother, I hope I didn't wake you.’
— Patriotism. As world grows smaller, views of P[atriotism] shd be more world-wide. The men out there were realising this on both sides as they faced each other.
— Hook. Eton & Magdalen. … Studied for Mods. Took to drink in 1881, elected M.P. following year, &c.
— T. Hardy great when political swells are dead, rotten & forgotten.
— So far as self is concerned, neither school nor university of any importance to me. … Nothing disgusts me more than people beslavering me with praise, but I think an individual may have done me harm by thinking too little of me.
— Good subject for Rectorial address might be the mess the Rector himself has made of life. … First piece of advice, don't copy me.
— Great thing to form own opinion, don't accept hearsay. Try to get at what you really see in it all. Question authority. Question accepted views, values, reputations. Don't be afraid to be among the rebels. … Speak scornfully of the Victorian age. Of Edwardian age. Of last year. Of old-fashioned writers like Barrie, who accept old-fangled ideas. Don't be greybeards before your time – too much advice is to make you so.
— Youth shd demand its share in running of the country (tho' we have no intention of giving it them). Look around & see how much share Youth has now that the war is over – they got a handsome share while it lasted.
— P. Pan. ‘I thought it was only flowers that died.’
— Play Title – ‘The Man Who Didn't Couldn't Grow Up’ or ‘The Old Age of Peter Pan.’
Barrie at his desk in Adelphi Terrace House
After spending Christmas in Paris with Nico and Elizabeth Lucas, Michael returned to Oxford. Barrie wrote to Elizabeth Lucas on February 27th, 1921:
‘Michael will be back soon, but contemplates a reading-party with another undergrad in Dorset, and that will be much better for him than London. He is working hard and really enjoying his life at Oxford for the present at least. He has the oddest way of alternating between extraordinary reserve and surprising intimacy. No medium. In his rooms at Oxford lately he suddenly unbosomed himself marvellously. One has to wait for those times, but they are worth while when they come.’
Barrie spent Easter with Cynthia Asquith and her family at Stanway, the home of her parents, Lord and Lady Wemyss, then moved on to Dorset, where Michael was staying in a little inn at Corfe Castle, reading for his finals with Rupert Buxton. The rest of the holiday was spent in London, with only Nico and his gramophone for company: ‘You and your Jazz! I heard the Jazz Band at the Coliseum one night & thought it so abominable that I nearly got up in my seat and yelled!’18 Nevertheless, like Peterkin's hammer, Barrie missed the blare when Nico returned to Eton: ‘Once again I take up the pen at the beginning of a new half and thus indite thee. With melancholy heart I saw the iron horse glide away with you from Paddington, but must be must be, and at any rate we had a grand time.’19
Michael's last letter to Nico: ‘Be mild’
Work was Barrie's constant hedge against loneliness during the term-time, and with Michael also back at Oxford, he now concentrated his energies on rehearsing the murder play he had written for him, Shall We Join the Ladies? The play was to be performed at the opening of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art's new theatre on May 27th with a glittering cast: Irene Vanbrugh, Marie Löhr, Fay Compton, Dion Boucicault, Charles Hawtrey, Sybil Thorndike, Cyril Maude, Leon Quatermaine, Lady Tree, Lilian McCarthy, Nelson Keys, Madge Titheradge, Norman Forbes, Hilda Trevelyan, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Gerald du Maurier. Even Frohman had never gathered such an assembly; and all for the sake of a one-act play written to please Michael. Twenty-one in a few weeks' time, the first night would be as much a tribute to his coming of age as to the opening of R.A.D.A.'s theatre.
On Thursday, May 19th, Cynthia Asquith worked at the flat until six o'clock, then went to have dinner with a friend, leaving Barrie alone to write his nightly letter to Michael. Despite their occasional differences, the daily exchange of correspondence between Barrie and Michael had continued without interruption, and recently Cynthia had arranged a ‘great cave’ of Michael's letters into chronological order, starting with his first effort, written as a child of five.
At about eleven o'clock Barrie put on his hat and coat, took the letter and went down in the lift to post it. He was about to leave the building when a stranger came up to him. He introduced himself as a reporter from a London newspaper, and wondered whether Sir James could oblige him with a few more facts about the drowning. Barrie looked blankly at him. What drowning? The reporter then realized that Barrie was unaware of the news received from Oxford less than an hour before: that two undergraduates, Rupert Buxton and Michael Llewelyn Davies, had been drowned while bathing in the River Thames at Sandford Pool. Their bodies had not yet been recovered, but the tragedy had been witnessed by two men working at a near-by paper mill.
Barrie needed no further details. He knew that Michael could barely swim a stroke, knew that none the less he had gone on trying, knew that Buxton was his closest friend. There could be no mistake. He walked back to the lift, returned to his flat and shut the door. Some time later he telephoned Peter and Gerald du Maurier. Later still he rang Cynthia Asquith, telling her, in a voice she scarcely recognized: ‘I have had the most terrible news. Michael has been drowned at Oxford.’20 When she arrived at the flat, she found him in a state of complete shock. Peter and Gerald were also there, but Barrie was inconsolable: he simply did not hear them. He refused to go to bed, and when Cynthia returned early next morning, she found that he had spent the entire night pacing up and down the study. Peter went down to Eton to break the news to Nico and bring him back to the flat. When Barrie saw him, he cried out, ‘Oh, take him away, take him away!’21 Nico wrote in 1975:
‘Strangely, I don't remember feeling hurt by this, rather did I understand in some way how my very closeness to Michael made his more or less uncontrollable grief even more uncontrollable. … My first duty was to go and break the news to Mary Hodgson, who was working as a midwife for Queen Charlotte's Hospital. I was riding on the top of the bus when I saw her, walking along the street. I ran back to her, and she immediately knew what had happened by the look on my face. We stood in a doorway and sobbed together.’
Most of London's newspapers carried the story on their front pages. The Evening Standard's coverage was typical:
THE TRAGEDY OF PETER PAN
SIR J. M. BARRIE'S LOSS OF AN ADOPTED SON
‘There is something of the wistful pathos of some of his own imaginings in the tragedy which has darkened the home of Sir James Barrie. Almost the first remark of friends, on hearing of the death of the adopted son of the dramatist to-day … was: “What a terrible blow for Sir James !” The young men, Mr Michael Llewelyn Davies and Mr Rupert E. V. Buxton … were drowned near Sandford bathing pool, Oxford, yesterday. The two undergraduates were almost inseparable companions. Mr Davies was only 20 and Mr Buxton 22. … The “original” of Peter Pan was named George, [who] was killed in action in March 1915. … Now both boys who are most closely associated with the fashioning of Peter Pan are dead. One recalls the words of Peter himself: “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”’
The two bodies were not recovered until Friday afternoon, and an inquest was held at Oxford the following day. It was established that the pool, or weir, was a known danger spot: a large memorial overlooked it, commemorating two students who had been drowned there in 1843. The men who had witnessed Michael's death testified that the pool was ‘as still as a mill-pond’ at the time of the tragedy. ‘I heard a shout’, stated one. ‘I looked in the direction and saw two men bathing in the pool in difficulties. … Their heads were close together: they were sort of standing in the water and not struggling.’ ‘Did you form the impression that they were clasped?’ ‘Yes, that was my impression.’22 Since it was known that Michael could not swim, the jury returned a verdict of accidental drowning and ‘expressed the opinion that Mr Buxton lost his life in his endeavour to save his friend. The Dean [of Michael's College] in making this communication to the Coroner completely broke down with emotion.’23 It was rumoured among some that the accident had been suicide. Boothby was ‘convinced that it was a mutual suicide pact’. ‘Perfectly possible,’ wrote Peter in his notes for the family Morgue, ‘but entirely unproven.’ Nico commented, ‘I've always had something of a hunch that Michael's death was suicide. He was in a way the “type” – exceptionally clever, subject to long fits of depression. I'm apt to think – stressing think – that he was going through something of a homosexual phase and maybe let this get a bigger hold on his thinking than it need: I have no knowledge of Rupert's leanings in this direction, but I would guess they preferred each other's company to anyone else's.’ Barrie himself mentioned suicide in later years to Josephine Mitchell-Innes as the possible cause of Michael's death; yet a part of him refused to accept any such notion. Had not Sylvia entrusted him to his care? ‘I do not want my Michael to be pressed at all at work – he is at present not very strong but very keen and intelligent: great care must be taken not to overwork him. Mary understands and of course J.M.B. knows & will be careful & watch.’
Following the inquest, Michael's body was brought back to Adelphi Terrace, where it remained until the funeral. Barrie had not slept for two days and nights: he ‘looked like a man in a nightmare’, wrote Cynthia in her diary. She called in his doctor, Sir Douglas Shields, who persuaded him to take a sleeping draught. For the rest of the time he remained shut away in his bedroom, refusing to see anyone. ‘No praise or gratitude can possibly be too great for Cynthia during these days’, wrote Denis Mackail. ‘It may be said … that it was she who preserved his reason, for throughout that almost unimaginable week-end there were moments of terrible danger.’ The ‘terrible danger’ was Barrie's overwhelming desire to end his own life – a life rendered utterly pointless without Michael.
On Monday, May 23rd, 1921, Michael was buried in Hampstead Churchyard, close to the graves of his mother and father. A few weeks before, Barrie had written in his notebook:
Death. One who died is only a little ahead of procession all moving that way. When we round the corner we'll see him again. We have only lost him for a moment because we fell behind, stopping to tie a shoe-lace.
The Llewelyn Davies grave in Hampstead Cemetery
Barrie after Michael's death. ‘For ever and ever I am thinking about him.’
* i.e. Prep-School.
* *Janet Dunbar gives a much fuller account of Cynthia Asquith's role in Barrie's life in her 1970 biography, J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image. Cynthia herself wrote Portrait of Barrie in 1954.
* Nico disagreed with this view. He wrote, ‘I am quite unable to admit that J.M.B.'s influence was “unhealthy”: oppressive maybe and over-constant – and I can believe that Michael was relieved to get away from the flat, as many many undergraduates have felt as they were speeding from their home with a friend back to Oxford. But so far as I am concerned, speaking as the fifth brother, I'm glad I lived with that odd little man rather than living in poverty, or, for that matter, with virtually any other person I have ever known.’