5

1898–1900

15, Old Cavendish Street, W.

14 Aug. 1892.

Dear Miss du Maurier,

And so you are to be married tomorrow! And I shall not be present. You know why.

Please allow me to wish you great happiness in your married life. And at the same time I hope you will kindly accept the little wedding gift I am sending you … It reaches you somewhat late, but that is owing to circumstances too painful to go into.

With warmest wishes to you and Mr Davis,

Believe me, dear Miss du Maurier,

Yours sincerely,

    J. M. Barrie.

P.S. To think that you don't know about Peterkin!

This ‘characteristic whimsicality’ (as Peter Llewelyn Davies later described it) is dated one day prior to Sylvia and Arthur's wedding date, the address being Barrie's at that time. It was, in fact, written some time in 1898, on the back of a piece of 133 Gloucester Road writing paper, and delivered to Sylvia by hand. The mis-spelling of ‘Davies’ was probably unintentional, but both the slip and the letter itself—not to mention the gift—must have proved mildly irritating to Arthur.

Sylvia (JMB)

George (JMB)

Now that the ice had been broken, Barrie started seeing more of George and Jack, both at home and on their daily walks in Kensington Gardens. But it was George who won his closest affection, and their friendship soon started to blossom in the pages of Barrie's notebook:

— George admires me as writer ∵ [= because] thinks I bind & print.

— George burying face not to show crying.

— Little White Bird book described to me by George.

— L.W.B. Telling George what love is … in answer to George's inquiries abt how to write a story.

— L.W.B. What George said while walking me round the Round Pond (abt what to have for his birthday—ship—greek armour—book &c)—I sneer.

— The queer pleasure it gives when George tells me to lace his shoes, &c.

— L.W.B. The boys disgrace one in shops by asking shopkeeper abt his most private affairs. Shopkeeper &c takes me for their father (I affect rage).

This was the key to their relationship: they were like father and son, yet Barrie was spared the tiresome role of being the stern disciplinarian. He later elaborated on ‘the particular pleasure this gives me’ in The Little White Bird, disguising George as ‘David’:

George, with Arthur and Jack in background (JMB)

‘“Boy, you are uncommonly like your mother.”

‘To which David: “Is that why you are so kind to me?”

‘I suppose I am kind to him, but if so it is not for love of his mother, but because he sometimes calls me father. On my honour … there is nothing more in it than that. I must not let him know this, for it would make him conscious, and so break the spell that binds him and me together. … He addresses me as father when he is in a hurry only, and never have I dared ask him to use the name. He says, “Come, father,” with an accursed beautiful carelessness. So let it be, David, for a little while longer.

‘I like to hear him say it in front of others, as in shops. When in shops he asks the salesman how much money he makes in a day, and which drawer he keeps it in, and why his hair is red, and does he like Achilles, of whom David has lately heard, and is so enamoured that he wants to die to meet him. At such times the shopkeepers accept me as his father, and I cannot explain the particular pleasure this gives me. I am always in two minds then, to linger that we may have more of it [or] to snatch him away before he volunteers the information, “He is not really my father.”

‘When David meets Achilles I know what will happen. The little boy will take the hero by the hand, call him father, and drag him away to some Round Pond.’

George (JMB)

Just as Tommy and Grizel chronicled Barrie's failing marriage and his own inability to grow up, so The Little White Bird follows his relationship with George and his own profound yearnings for fatherhood—or, perhaps, motherhood. Like Tommy, the new novel would evolve slowly over the next four years before being published in 1902.

The book is narrated in the first person by Barrie, who thinly disguises himself as Captain W—, ‘a gentle, whimsical, lonely old bachelor’, who also happens to be a writer, given to long walks in Kensington Gardens with his St Bernard dog, Porthos. His unfulfilled ambition is to have had a son of his own, whom he would have called Timothy. He becomes involved with a needy young couple, acting as their anonymous benefactor when the opportunity arises. On the night their child is born, Captain W— meets the husband pacing the streets while his wife, Mary, is in labour. The husband assumes that the Captain is ‘an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass, it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally’. Therefore when the father tells the Captain that their baby is a son, he is obliged to pretend that he too now has a son—Timothy. Without ever revealing his true identity as their anonymous benefactor, the Captain continues to take a vicarious interest in the progress of their boy, David. One day he sees the mother about to sell her possessions to a pawnshop because she has no money with which to buy clothes for her child. The Captain contrives to meet the father, and blithely informs him that since his own son Timothy has recently died, he has no further use for Timothy's clothes. Barrie's style of narration up to this point has been one of dry, laconic humour, but in the following passage, in which he describes ‘the last of Timothy’, he quarries the depths of his own frustrated paternity to a degree that is almost embarrassing (to some even nauseating), and yet is such a cry from the heart that it all but transcends sentimentalism by its very sincerity:

George ‘waiting for the dawn’ (JMB)

‘Timothy's hold on life, as you may have apprehended, was ever of the slightest, and I suppose I always knew that he must soon revert to the obscure. He could never have penetrated into the open. It was no life for a boy.

‘Yet now that his time had come, I was loth to see him go. I seem to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the sun, his true father, lapt him in his dancing arms, he sent his love to a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper galleon on the Round Pond; fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long summer day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate chambers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes into another and golden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been quite like other boys there would have been none braver than my Timothy.’

George (JMB)

David's mother, Mary, is closely modelled on Sylvia. She guesses that Timothy was merely a figment of the Captain's imagination, and that it is he who has been their mysterious benefactor. She sends him invitations, but he refuses to visit her unless David is first allowed to visit him alone in his chambers—without the disapproving presence of David's nurse, Irene (a somewhat caustic portrayal of Mary Hodgson). Mary agrees, and the Captain sets about winning the boy to himself: ‘It was a scheme conceived in a flash, and ever since relentlessly pursued—to burrow under Mary's influence with the boy, expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine.’ As David grows older, the Captain comes to look upon him as his own son. ‘It would ill become me to attempt to describe this dear boy to you, for of course I know really nothing about children, so I shall say only this, that I thought him very like what Timothy would have been had he ever had a chance.’ But despite his growing affection for David, the Captain feigns indifference towards the boy's mother. ‘When Mary does anything that specially annoys me I send her an insulting letter. I once had a photograph taken of David being hanged on a tree. I sent her that. You can't think of all the subtle ways of grieving her I have.’

George (JMB). In The Little White Bird, Barrie wrote? ‘I work very hard to retain that little boy's love; but I shall lose him soon; even now I am not what I was to him; in a year or two at longest, … [he] will grow out of me’.

Unfortunately for Arthur, the real-life J. M. Barrie took precisely the opposite attitude towards George's mother. Far from declining invitations to visit her and the boys at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, he availed himself of every opportunity—regardless of whether an invitation had been extended or not. In the Davies family he had found what he had been searching for all his adult life—a beautiful woman who embodied motherhood, a brood of boys who epitomized boyhood—and he did not mean to let them go. What objection could Arthur offer to the intrusive little Scotsman? He knew well enough that he presented no threat to their marriage, that he was ‘quite harmless’. Sylvia was devoted to Arthur, and in a curious way Barrie also found himself devoted to their mutual devotion. He could flatter Sylvia, even flirt with her, yet feel secure in the knowledge that she would never put him to the test.

While making notes for The Little White Bird, Barrie continued to toil away on Tommy and Grizel. He wrote to Quiller-Couch: ‘Oh, that final “canter up the avenue”. They [the publishers] should see the author belabouring the brute. I see the finish not so far off … but it cracked somewhere about the middle and needs a deal of sticking-plaster yet.’1 Until now, Barrie had sketched the adult Grizel, Tommy's neglected wife, from his own wife. But the resulting portrait lacked charm. ‘What is charm, exactly?’ asks Alick in What Every Woman Knows. Barrie's reply was a succinct description of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. ‘Oh, it's—it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.’

It is hard to decide which Mary Barrie found the more galling: to have Grizel based upon herself and her own private anguish, or to find her role as model usurped by Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. Whatever her feelings on the matter, she had little choice but to move aside; her husband had found his sticking-plaster:

— T & G. Revise. G's nose tiptilted (really more as if point cut off). She is square-shouldered—woman who will always look glorious as a mother, (so I think of her now, always so). A woman to confide in (no sex in this, we feel it in man or woman). All secrets of womanhood you feel behind these calm eyes & courage to face them. A woman to lean on in trouble.

— Revise. G's voice richness of contralto? like child's voice that has never known fear, boy's. Merry, infectious, cd soothe, be mothering.

— Revise. Grizel's crooked smile.

— Grizel. Trill in voice, gurgles like stream in gay hurry. Cooing voice.

Sylvia, from the portrait by Charles Furse

Having decided to incorporate Sylvia into the character of Grizel, Barrie found it necessary to rewrite whole chapters at a time. One such chapter was almost entirely devoted to her description, under the title ‘Grizel of the Crooked Smile’:

One of Bernard Partridge's illustrations from the American edition of Tommy and Grizel. Barrie confessed to not knowing what most of the characters looked like, but said he could be of some help when Partridge came to draw Grizel: ‘Mrs Llewelyn Davies, whom she is meant to be a bit like, is willing to sit for you for this, and she has some idea of the dressing too’. The illustrations did not appear in the British edition, doubtless to spare Mary Barrie further loss of pride.

‘When the winds of the day flushed her cheek she was beautiful, but it was a beauty that hid the mystery of her face; the sun made her merry, but she looked more noble when it had set, then her pallor shone with a soft radiant light, as though the mystery and sadness and serenity of the moon were in it. The full beauty of Grizel came out at night only, like the stars.

‘I had made up my mind that when the time came to describe Grizel's mere outward appearance I should refuse her that word beautiful because of her tilted nose. … Her eyes at least were beautiful, they were unusually far apart, and let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth. And she had an adorable mouth … the essence of all that was characteristic and delicious about her seemed to have run to her mouth, so that to kiss Grizel on her crooked smile would have been to kiss the whole of her at once. … There were times when she looked like a boy. Her almost gallant bearing, the poise of her head, her noble frankness, they all had something in them of a princely boy who had never known fear.’

After an initial resentment towards Sylvia, Mary tried to win her friendship. Nor was she wholly unsuccessful. Sylvia could afford to be generous, and besides, the two women shared an interest in clothes and interior decoration. But Mary's character was altogether too pathetically flamboyant for Sylvia's taste: she would offer introductions to her famous husband (without her famous husband's permission), and talk loudly about his wealth (which displeased him even more); she would order writing-paper with her initials monogrammed thereon, and was in the habit of being singularly rude to shopkeepers and servants. Her frustration had turned her into a snob. ‘I loathe snobbishness so much that I hate to write of it,’2 commented Barrie to Quiller-Couch, though he himself was to have the accusation levelled against him in due course.

The Balloon Woman, a familiar sight outside the gates of Kensington Gardens. From Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) illustrated by Arthur Rackham

What Mary needed was some surrogate activity to which she could devote her energies. The Barries had never intended to live in London all the year round, and Mary therefore decided to look for a country house: a secluded retreat for her husband and herself, miles from the city—and the Davies family. Barrie made no objections; the search kept her occupied, and allowed him to get on with his own life.

George and Jack had now started day-school at Norland Place in Holland Park Road. Arthur would accompany them in the mornings on his way to the Temple, leaving Mary Hodgson to pick them up after lunch. Some days Barrie would meet them on their way home from school and take them off to Kensington Gardens. Although Sylvia had given her blessing to the affair, Mary Hodgson did not greatly approve of his intrusion. She was the boys' nurse, not Mr Barrie; how could she be expected to retain her authority over the boys when he so obviously gloried in their waywardness. Barrie was well aware of her hostility—indeed he exulted in it. He and George were companions, but Mary was a grown-up, an outsider. Naturally when George and Jack misbehaved, Barrie turned a blind eye; to have taken Mary's side would have been tantamount to a betrayal. Mary Hodgson's reactions to The Little White Bird are unrecorded, but she can have had little difficulty in recognizing the identity of David's nurse, Irene:

‘I was now seeing David once at least every week, his mother, who remained culpably obtuse to my sinister design, having instructed Irene that I was to be allowed to share him with her, and we had become close friends, though the little nurse was ever a threatening shadow in the background. Irene, in short, did not improve with acquaintance. I found her to be high and mighty, chiefly, I think, because she now wore a nurse's cap with streamers, of which the little creature was ludicrously proud. She assumed the airs of an official person, and always talked as if generations of babies had passed through her hands. She was also extremely jealous, and had a way of signifying disapproval of my methods that led to many coldnesses and even bickerings between us, which I now see to have been undignified. I brought the following accusations against her:-

‘That she prated too much about right and wrong.

‘That she was a martinet. …

‘On the other hand, she accused me of spoiling him. …

‘That I am not sufficiently severe with him, leaving the chiding of him for offences against myself to her in the hope that he will love her less and me more thereby. …

‘Of not thinking of his future.

‘Of never asking him where he expected to go if he did such things.

‘Of telling him tales that had no moral application. …

‘Of fibbing and corrupting youthful minds.’

Mary Hodgson

One of the ‘tales that had no moral application’ concerned George's baby brother Peter. According to Barrie, all children were birds once, and ‘the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because [children] sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney’. Peter, however, was still able to fly because his mother had forgotten to weigh him at birth. He therefore escaped through the unbarred window and flew back to Kensington Gardens:

‘If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape, but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half way up the chimney. …

‘Children in the bird stage are difficult to catch. David knows that many people have none, and his delight on a summer afternoon is to go with me to some spot in the Gardens where these unfortunates may be seen trying to catch one with small pieces of cake.’

Peter Pan as a baby (Rackham)

As the saga developed, an inherent defect in the story became evident. If Peter could fly, how was it that he remained singularly immobile in his perambulator? In order to solve the dilemma, a second Peter began to emerge, who soon became as real as his earthbound namesake. This second Peter was called Peter Pan, named after the Greek god who symbolized nature, paganism, and the amoral world. Whether this was a deliberate joke to provoke Mary Hodgson's preference for stories with a ‘moral application’, or merely an allusion to Peter's gay and heartless character, or a multitude of other possibilities, is open to speculation. Cecco Hewlett sometimes accompanied them in the Gardens, and his father, Maurice Hewlett, had just published a play entitled Pan and the Young Shepherd, which opened with the line, ‘Boy, boy, wilt thou be a boy for ever?’ This may have been a pure coincidence, but Barrie almost certainly knew of its existence, as he and Hewlett were close friends. Whatever the origins, Peter Pan soon became the topic of endless discussion between Barrie and George, recorded by Barrie in The Little White Bird:

The frontispiece to The Little White Bird. ‘C. Hewlett's Tree’ at top left is where Cecco lost a penny, went back to look for it after Lock-out Time and found threepence. ‘Where Peter Pan landed’ is now the site of the Peter Pan statue. ‘The shade of Pilkington’ celebrates Mr Wilkinson, headmaster of Wilkinson's private school in Orme Square, and precursor of Captain Hook

‘I ought to mention here that the following is our way with a story: First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of [his], recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking hard.’

Having escaped from the nursery, Peter Pan, still believing himself to be a bird, returns to the island in the Serpentine from where he originated, presenting himself before the birds' potentate, Old Solomon Caw, for reinstatement. But Old Solomon points out the regrettable fact that Peter is no longer a bird but a human baby:

‘“I suppose,” said Peter huskily, “I suppose I can still fly?”…

‘“Poor little half-and-half!” said Solomon, “you will never be able to fly again, not even on windy days. You must live here on the island always.”

‘“And never even go to the Kensington Gardens?” Peter asked tragically.

‘“How could you get across?” said Solomon. He promised very kindly, however, to teach Peter as many of the bird ways as could be learned by one of such an awkward shape.

‘“Then I shan't be exactly a human?” Peter asked.

‘“No.”

‘“Nor exactly a bird?”

‘“No.”

‘“What shall I be?”

‘“You will be a Betwixt-and-Between,” Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out.’

Peter Pan puts his case to Old Solomon Caw (Rackham)

Thus Peter Pan becomes an outlaw, living on the island in the Serpentine. Sometimes he rows across to Kensington Gardens in a bird's nest to watch real boys at play, or to join in adventures with the fairies after Lock-out Time. It is the fairies who teach him to fly without wings, and now and again he flies home to watch his mother weeping for her lost child, and is moved by her tears; but always the freedom of the Gardens calls him back. However, eventually he resolves to return home ‘for ever and always’, despite the fairies' pleas to stay:

Peter Pan rowing across the Serpentine (Rackham)

‘He went in a hurry in the end, because he had dreamt that his mother was crying, and he knew what was the great thing she cried for, and that a hug from her splendid Peter would quickly make her to smile. Oh! he felt sure of it, and so he flew straight to the window, which was always to be open for him.

‘But the window was closed, and there were iron bars on it, and peering inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm round another little boy.

‘Peter called, “Mother! mother!” but she heard him not; in vain he beat his little limbs against the iron bars. He had to fly back, sobbing, to the Gardens, and he never saw his [mother] again. What a glorious boy he had meant to be to her! Ah, Peter! we who have made the great mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance. But Solomon was right—there is no second chance, not for most of us. When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.’

While the oral story of Peter Pan continued to evolve at a leisurely pace, Barrie utilized the bones of the idea in his revisions of Tommy and Grizel. In the following scene, Tommy Sandys is about to send his new manuscript to his publishers. He shows it to his wife, Grizel—who in this instance reflects Mary Barrie rather than Sylvia:

‘She kissed the manuscript. “Wish it luck,” he had begged of her; “you were always so fond of babies, and this is my baby.” So Grizel kissed Tommy's baby, and then she turned away her face. … If he had not told her about his book it was because she did not and never could understand what compels a man to write one book, instead of another. “I had no say in the matter; the thing demanded of me that I should do it and I had to do it. Some must write from their own experience, they can make nothing of anything else; … I don't attempt to explain how I write, I hate to discuss it; all I know is that those who know how it should be done can never do it. … You have taken everything else, Grizel, surely you might leave me my books. … I must write. It is the only thing I can do. … Writing is the joy of my life… [and yet] if I could make a living at anything else I would give up writing altogether.”…

Bedford's illustration of Peter Pan running through the woods of the Never Land

‘“It was not that I did not love your books,” she said, “but that I loved you more, and I thought they did you harm.”…

‘The new book, of course, was “The Wandering Child.” I wonder whether any of you read it now. Your fathers and mothers thought a great deal of that slim volume, but it would make little stir in an age in which all the authors are trying who can say Damn loudest. It is but a reverie about a little boy who was lost. His parents find him in a wood singing joyfully to himself because he thinks he can now be a boy for ever; and he fears that if they catch him they will compel him to grow into a man, so he runs farther from them into the wood and is running still, singing to himself because he is always to be a boy. That is really all, but T. Sandys knew how to tell it. The moment he conceived the idea … he knew that it was the idea for him. He forgot at once that he did not really care for children. He said reverently to himself, “I can pull it off,” and, as was always the way with him, the better he pulled it off the more he seemed to love them.

‘“It is myself who is writing at last, Grizel,” he said as he read it to her.

‘She thought (and you can guess whether she was right) that it was the book he loved rather than the child. She thought (and you can guess again) that in a subtle way this book was his autobiography.’ On April 26th, 1899, Barrie strangled Tommy to death on an iron spike and wrote ‘The End’ across the 464th page of manuscript. It had been almost ten years since he had started making his first notes, and three years since the publication of its forerunner, Sentimental Tommy. The reading public had eagerly awaited its sequel, but they found Tommy and Grizel altogether too morbid and bitter, and despite a few enthusiastic notices the book had a poor reception. Barrie's account of The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up had been a comparative failure.

*      *      *

In August 1899, the Davieses went down to Rustington for their annual holiday. Arthur's work at the Temple allowed him little time to see his sons, and he looked forward to spending the summer weeks alone with his family. There were no Parrys as neighbours this year, Dolly having married Arthur Ponsonby, a British attaché at Copenhagen, in 1898. However, there was no shortage of company; after a brief holiday in Germany, the Barries decided that they too would take the sea air throughout August, renting a house less than half a mile from the Davieses' mill cottage. George and Jack were delighted: it meant that they could spend whole days with Mr Barrie, not just the odd afternoon snatched now and then after school. The Peter Pan stories continued to develop; so too did an endless variety of games: Scottish games learnt by Barrie as a child—spyo, smuggle bools, kick-bonnety, peeries; games of his own invention, such as egg-cap and capey-dykey; and of course cricket, played between wickets improvised wherever he happened to be: trees in the park, chairs on the lawn, sand castles on the beach. Barrie had a natural flair for virtually any game that required a keen eye, whether it was billiards, croquet, or clock-golf, and his enthusiasm was soon shared by the boys.

George (JMB)

And Arthur played the perfect gentleman, remaining quietly in the background. In 1948, Peter Llewelyn Davies wrote to Mary Hodgson: ‘It is clear enough that father didn't like him, at any rate in the early stages. Did J.M.B.'s entry into the scheme of things occasionally cause ill-feeling or quarrellings between mother and father?’ Mary Hodgson replied, ‘What was of value to the One had little or no value to the Other. Your father's attitude at all times was as “One Gentleman (in the true sense) to Another”. Any difference of opinion was never made “Public Property” in the house. … The Barries were overwhelming (and found your mother's help, grace & beauty a great asset in meeting the right people, etc.)—aided by Mrs du Maurier—always ambitious for her favourite daughter. … The du Mauriers in a way stood in awe of your Father. There were times when he defied the lot—& stood alone—and his Wife stood by Him!’ Despite the unspoken resentments, the holiday drifted along in a more or less care-free fashion. Sylvia wrote to Dolly at the British Legation in Copenhagen on August 8th:

Sylvia and Peter on the beach at Rustington in 1899 (JMB)

Darling Dolly,

Your dear letters were a great joy, please write many more of them & sometimes in the midst of Kings & Queens, think a little of the poor barrister's wife at Sea Mill with all the winds of heaven blowing her about & a great many noisy but beloved sons jumping on her. …

Your friend George hurt his poor little finger badly yesterday—he got it pinched in a deck chair so hard that his little nail was wrenched off—He was very brave, but it was dreadful & I ached for him. I will send you a photograph of him quite soon—they are so good I think, but I haven't ordered any yet. …

Now dear Dolly I haven't any news—you know better than I how charming this little place is & how windy it is & how Sylvia goes in and out of the Mill cottage & looks after the 3 little boys with red caps, but when all is said & done Rustington can never be the same without you. …

I am,

    your loving Sylvia

In sending this letter to Peter Davies in 1946, Dolly Ponsonby wrote:

‘It conveys her so completely—at least to me. It recalls so visibly the Mill House, the sea, the wind and the little boys in red tarn o'shanters. You were too young to remember it. It is too subtle to be conveyed in writing. But the calm and beauty of her, and her delicious whimsical sense of humour, sewing perhaps in a tiny cottage sitting-room with those rampageous boys tumbling about her—I shall never forget it.’

Jack, Sylvia and Peter on Rustington beach (JMB)

On November 25th, 1899, Sylvia celebrated her thirty-third birthday. Barrie gave her an amethyst necklace, set in gold, and inscribed with her middle name, ‘To Jocelyn’. As she was normally known as Sylvia, Barrie adopted ‘Jocelyn’ as his own private pet-name for her. The necklace was accompanied by a card:

To a Crooked Lady on her 33rd Birthday.

At thirty-three she's twice as sweet

As sweetest seventeen could be,

At sixty-six I'm sure she'll beat

The record made at thirty-three.

So sure am I her crooked ways

Will baffle Time and all his tricks,

Impatiently I count the days

Till Jocelyn shall be sixty-six.

Sylvia and Peter (JMB)

The Boer War had broken out in October, and Sylvia's elder brother Guy, a professional soldier, left for South Africa to command a Mounted Infantry company. But to his three young nephews, six thousand miles away, the war meant little more than shouting ‘Kruger!’ at old men with chin beards in Kensington Gardens. During one of their walks with Barrie, George noticed a pair of grey stones engraved ‘W ST. M’ and ‘13a P.P. 1841’. These were boundary stones, still in existence today, marking the various parish boundaries within Kensington Gardens. The initials on this particular pair marked the border between the Parish of Westminster St Mary's and the Parish of Paddington. George asked Barrie what they were for, and his explanation was somewhat more exotic. He told him that when Peter Pan found dead children in the Gardens after Lock-out Time, he would dig a grave and bury them, preferably in pairs, erecting a tombstone to mark the spot. The initials ‘W St. M’ and ‘P.P.’ indicated the mortal remains of Walter Stephen Matthews and Phœbe Phelps, two babies who had fallen from their perambulators while their nurse was looking the other way. Evidently Peter Pan had quite an appetite for grave-digging, and was sometimes rather too quick with his spade—hence the profusion of gravestones in Kensington Gardens. Moreover, when children died—a common occurrence in Victorian days—Peter would ‘sing gaily to them when the bell tolls’,³ dancing on their graves and playing riotously on his pipes to make them laugh; at other times he ‘went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened’.⁴ Their initial destiny was some unspecified after-life, later developed into the Never Never Land—a child's paradise, haven of the Lost Boys, abounding in pleasures designed to gratify a boy's appetite for blood. Such visions of delight led George to make the not unnatural declaration, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure!’

The Peter Pan ‘gravestones’ in Kensington Gardens (Rackham)

Sylvia was now expecting her fourth child, but to Barrie the event held all the novelty of a first-born. George, Jack and Peter had each to some extent been moulded before his arrival in their lives, but he would be able to share in the birth of this new child as if it were his own. It was hoped by Arthur that the newcomer would be a girl, and Barrie started to make notes for a story about an unborn child—Barbara:

Sylvia (JMB)

— Barbara. Children chorus she's expected (excited) but not come yet tho' mother doing all kinds of things preparing for her—she's like ghost, there & not there—when she comes father in agony, says it may mean mother dying &c (mother recovers?). Story told for children as if of a real strange child they can't see yet (a child's ghost story in a sense. They discuss it—how children come, &c). The way she prepares children for new-comer (all their talk to me) pretend wants boy again—I send jeering messages—she wants girl (Barbara)—my White Bird a book, hers a baby. (His work is like babies to him—evidently he can't have babes).

— A mother dying when her child born—they pass each other in their dif[ferent] voyages (the one landing, the other setting sail)—seem to hail each other, all well—the only times we are confident, beginning & end.

— Ghost Story (Idea that ghosts shd be much more frightened at us than we at them). A young married woman dies—Haunts house to look after children—they grow up, age, &c—She always young—doesn't know them.

Barrie had already started working on the manuscript of The Little White Bird, and he did not have to wait long before finding a ready slot for these notes. When the narrator, Captain W—, meets the expectant father in the street, he comments to himself:

‘Poor boy, his wife has quite forgotten him and his trumpery love. If she lives [through childbirth] she will come back to him, but if she dies, she will die triumphant and serene. Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a bright “All's well,” and pass on.

‘But afterwards?

‘The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, “How is it with you, my child?”

‘What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. … All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly so afraid of them as they are of us.’

Bird Island, on the Hyde Park side of the Serpentine, where ‘all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls’ (Rackham)

On June 16th, 1900, Sylvia gave birth to her fourth boy. Barrie wrote to her on the 21st:

My dear Jocelyn,

It is very sweet and kind of you to write me from the throne, which is what I take your present residence to be. He is a gorgeous boy, is Delight, which was your own original name for him in the far back days of last week or thereabouts when you used to hug Peter with such sudden vehemence that I am sure he wondered whether you were up to anything.

I don't see how we could have expected him to be a girl, you are so good at boys, and this you know is the age of specialists. And you were very very nearly being a boy yourself.

May he always be a dear delight to you and may all your dreams about all of them come true.

Ever yours,

    J.M.B.

All the boys so far had been given names of special family significance, but for their fourth son Arthur and Sylvia had no particular namesake in mind. Like Peter, the new baby was not christened, and as with all the boys he was given only one name: Michael.

Michael and Sylvia (JMB)