SIX IS YOUNG for a child to lose his father, let alone to a death so diabolical and lingering as this. For Michael it was not the first time he had thought deeply about death. Barrie had opened the innings with their creative session down by the mermaids’ lagoon, with Peter Pan excited about death being an awfully big adventure. Now his own father was actually dying in a way that couldn’t look less of an adventure.

We know from notes written by Arthur to his sister Margaret that Barrie had advised Arthur to tell the oldest boy, George, everything. So Arthur had told George that ‘probably’ he was going to die, ‘tho’ always a chance’ not, and it hadn’t gone well. George was thirteen.

Margaret gave her advice – ‘better talk to G of other things’, she told him. He turned to Peter. He did not think of death as a glorious thing, rather it ‘was the end of a glorious thing, Life’. No. 3 son Peter said that he did see this.

Jack, it seems, had not been invited to give his opinion at all, having been reduced to floods of tears when his father had told him he was off for the big operation – ‘I remember very clearly indeed father walking me up and down the right hand (looking up the garden) path & telling me more or less what he was in for,’ he told Peter. ‘He drove me to tears – an easy matter!’ Michael wasn’t told that his father was about to die either – he hadn’t needed to be. When Arthur asked him ‘what gift [the boys] would like best’, his answer was simply: ‘Not to die.’

Barrie chose the holiday to address Jack’s future. He announced that he had received a letter from Captain Scott, telling him that he was thinking about another expedition to the Antarctic and asking him if he knew of a boy who could fill a vacancy at Osborne Naval College, the ‘under’ college in the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight where naval cadets spent two years before joining the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.

Barrie replied on 6 September, ‘My dear Scott, I know the right boy so well that it is as if I had been waiting for your letter.’ He had then pursued the project with gusto, recommending Jack to Scott for his heroic qualities, as ‘a fine, intelligent, quick boy with the open fearless face that attracts at first sight’. Thus was Jack, the only one to voice concern at Barrie’s increasing control over the family – Jack who adored his mother and, as Peter wrote, ‘loved and worshipped his father’ – removed from the scene. He endured a terrible time at Osborne – ‘The ragging and the bullying that went on was intolerably horrible,’ his wife later told the film maker Andrew Birkin, ‘and a little boy who had never been away from home was easy meat.’

Barrie’s arrangement effectively put Jack out of the family from 1907. He would always holiday at different times to his brothers – no holiday at Easter, one week at Christmas, six at the end of summer was the order at Osborne – so that they were rarely all together. His four brothers trod a different path – Eton and Oxford. And that cultural difference also left its mark – Jack matured earlier than the others and was always a little the outsider of the family.

The way did seem to be increasingly clear for Barrie, what with Arthur dying and Jack on the Isle of Wight. No one now stood in his way. Only the du Mauriers could have done, and other than Emma, none of them did.

The du Mauriers kept out of the picture all through the period in which Arthur was ill and dying – ‘I fear because it was “their side”,’ as Daphne wrote to Peter in 1963, meaning the Llewelyn Davies side, ‘so they did not feel responsible … I have a disquieting feeling that Daddy [Sylvia’s brother Gerald du M] mocked at them. Why? Some old resentment? Obviously the two families were never close.’

Did it matter much? Possibly not emotionally at the time. Half the problem for children in such a situation is being the centre of excessive attention. A child of a parent with a terminal disease is invariably the focus of endless activities and kindnesses, which can make the burden almost heavier to bear. What you want is the impossible return to normality.

While for Arthur,

as he wrote to his father towards the end of September.

In early November there was one rare moment – real hope for remission, some new-fangled electrical treatment – and Barrie brought fireworks down to Egerton House to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Night on the 5th.

But it was a mirage in the desert landscape of Arthur’s final days. The cancer spread.

Barrie was in almost constant attendance now, ‘lurking in the background’ as Dolly put it, and his notebook entries benefited: ‘A dying man’s fears of breaking down at the end’, ‘his wish for a second chance’, ‘The Widow’s Mite (Little man’s devotion to widow)’ … and so on. We shouldn’t be surprised. Writing was what he did. All life was his inspiration. Although Peter, as family historian and the first after Barrie to read all his notebooks, must have wondered at the extent to which his family had been used by him as material.

In February, Arthur suffered a serious haemorrhage, but rallied. Barrie repeatedly assured him that he would look after his family financially, an incredible commitment when one considers that four of the five would be seen through Eton College, the famous English public school. But of course the money kept pouring in, with new plays and Peter Pan repeating every Christmas season, and soon he would be single again.

At Easter, Jack, Peter and Michael, who again was suffering from a cold, were taken to Ramsgate to stay with Granny Emma, where before long Michael received a letter from his father:

Egerton House, Berkhamsted

April 15, 1907

 

My dearest Michael

 

My letters from my boys are indeed a pleasure to me when they arrive in the morning. I hope my boys are getting lots of happiness out of other people’s kindness to them and their own kindness to other people every day. It would be fine to have a magic carpet and go first to London, across from Euston to Holborn Viaduct or Victoria, & on to Ramsgate, and find what is going on at Royal Viaduct and all the other jolly places at Ramsgate. I expect you are having penny of fun and very fine weather, but that we are getting more flowers, especially primroses. My nurse is very good at finding primroses and violets.

 

Your affectionate Father

It was the last letter of Arthur’s life; he died three days later, aged forty-four. It was the du Maurier family’s unlucky number. Curiously, the telephone number of the clinic where he died was 4444.

It is unclear when Michael realised that his father had died. A few hours after the death he received a letter from Sylvia.

Papa Gibbs was the local chemist in Berkhamsted. Peter described how first Jack (twelve) and then he (ten) was informed of Arthur’s death by Granny Emma, who was sitting up in her bed with a lace nightcap on her head. The news was delivered

very simply, without circumlocution or excessive emotion … It was, as I remember it, a dull and windy day, and I recollect wandering up to the night nursery and staring out of the window for long minutes in vague wretchedness and gloom, at the grey sea and the distant Gull lightship … as likely as not I was digging on the sands as usual the next morning.

The strain on Sylvia after a whole year of Arthur in suffering and turmoil must have been considerable. As was the way, she went into mourning, dressing in black with a hat and lace veil over her face. Photographs show her despair. She was prescribed a sedative by the family physician, Dr Rendell. Two weeks later she had regained control over the conflict of emotion she will have been feeling to write plausibly enough to Dolly:

Dear darling Dolly,

 

I think of you so often & I know how you love Arthur and me & that helps me in my sorrow – you will love me always won’t you – and help me to live through these long years. How shall I do it I wonder – it seems to me impossible. We were so utterly and altogether happy & that happiness is the most precious thing on earth. We were not going to part. I must be terribly brave now & I know our boys will help me. They only keep me alive & I shall live for them and as always what Arthur wd most like in them. How he loved us all & he has been taken from us.

Kind Hugh Macnaghten – a dear friend of Arthur’s is going to have George in his house at Eton in September. This was a promise made by Arthur to Hugh some time ago & I am so grateful to Hugh for his love and generosity. I am grateful to many many friends. I will show it one day I hope, but just now I am full of deadly pain & sorrow & I often wonder I am alive. The five boys are loving & thoughtful & I always sleep with my George now – & it comforts more than I can say to touch him & I feel Arthur must know. He will live again in them I feel & that must be my dear comfort until I go to him at last. We longed to grow old together – oh my dear friend it is all so utterly impossible to understand.

My Jack is at Osborne [naval college] now & writes happy letters to me – I am going to pay him a visit when I am strong enough – I miss him very much – but they have all got to be men & love me & for Arthur’s sake I must fight that fight too.

I shall come to London later on – we are trying to let the house – it is too big for me and too full of pain & sorrow. I think of him almost always now as he was before the tragic illness & God gave him the finest face in the world.

 

Lovingly

I am Sylvia

The letter is remarkable in that Barrie’s name is absent from every context in which he made a significant contribution.

According to Mackail, Arthur left virtually no money at all. Egerton House was leased, there would have been next to nothing to finance Eton for George, who had sat for a scholarship and failed to win one. Again, Barrie’s plan was for Sylvia and the boys to move from the leased house in Berkhamsted to 23 Campden Hill Square, a three-storey terraced house a short walk from Kensington Palace, a very good address. The house currently has a value in excess of £8 million and even at 1907 prices would have been out of the question for Sylvia without serious financial input from the millionaire Barrie.

Yet she never mentions his name to Dolly in her letter, knowing her concern about Sylvia’s friendship with Barrie. Knowing that Dolly might think that it should be a matter of concern was an added burden for someone whose mind was already swimming with sorrow, self-recrimination and loss.

In these difficult circumstances Barrie did the best thing to settle everything down. He took the family to Scotland. From 23 July until September he rented Dhivach Lodge near Drumnadrochit, Invernesshire. Drumnadrochit lies many miles farther into the Highlands than Fortingall, between Fort Augustus and Inverness in the wooded hills high above Loch Ness.

Dhivach couldn’t have been a better choice – all wooded glades and becks and rushing falls, and magical gates leading to who knows where – vignettes which were always going to return in the boys’ dreams. To all except Nico, that is, for Nico never got beyond the perimeter of the magic wood: ‘When one – I at any rate – gets on to dreams, one is in a world of lovely non-comprehension,’ he wrote, though as it turned out Nico was the only one of the boys really to return, with great nostalgia, to the Scottish haunts as an adult.

Among Barrie’s many guests during the two months here in 1907 was George Skelton, whom he had come across in 1876 when he was writing plays to put on at school and Skelton was a young actor at the Dumfries Theatre nearby. Now he played Smee, Captain Hook’s bosun in Peter Pan, the human side of pirating – ‘a man who stabbed without offence’, as Barrie put it.

Also the actress Lilian McCarthy and her husband, playwright Harley Granville Barker, whose play Waste had been refused a licence by the Censor, which had made Barrie so furious he’d helped establish a committee to abolish the office. And Captain Scott, whose rousing conversation about a new expedition to Antarctica led Barrie to draft notes for a play about ‘the North or South Pole’ about an explorer returning to Antarctica in old age and dying in the snow: ‘We see his dream – succeeding ages represented by individuals getting nearer & nearer Pole, always having to turn back & die.’ All oddly predictive.

During the day and in spite of a great deal of rain, the boys did enjoy themselves hugely, ‘sometimes still chasing butterflies but fishing madly with worms most of the time in every burn within walking distance’, as Peter recalled. Barrie wrote to the actress Hilda Trevelyan on 26 August, ‘I do nothing up here but fish & fish & fish, and we ought all to be fishes to feel at home in this weather.’

Barrie made a note that ‘Michael coming to me cried one tear at Dhivach – I picture it remorsefully alone among hills & streams – Send his laugh to be friends to it & gay together.’

The boy now had a rod of his own and photographs show him dressed for the part – glengarry on head, trout basket slung around his shoulder, thigh-high waders and Harris Tweed jacket. In fact Barrie, with his guest list constantly on the turn, did much other than fish, leaving Michael to spend hours at a time fishing on his own, enjoying being apart from the world of death and distress in an activity which came naturally to him and was fun.

The main river forms the boundary on the eastern edge of the Lodge. One day Luath was swept into it and would have drowned, had not Sylvia run along the bank and got hold of him before he whirled past.

Next to the Lodge was a field with two donkeys, called Togo and Dewet, which the boys would ride, and sometimes they’d attach one to a donkey cart and drive down through the gorge at the back of the house covered with a magnificent, ancient woodland of oak and birch and dissected by a 30-metre high waterfall cascading into the river below. Otherwise, there were games of cricket and stories. ‘Michael, seven now, was at the best age for listening,’ records Mackail, especially when the stories were about a particular character that Barrie had started to call Michael Pan.

There were also outings to the Beauly, a river rising near the village of Struy and spilling into the sea a few miles west of Inverness beyond the town that gives it its name. Naturally, Barrie and the boys came here to fish. On a still, sunny day in July sitting on the banks of the Beauly at Eskadale you could believe you were 1,000 miles away on the Helford Estuary in Cornwall – wooded banks, blue water, undisturbed, here is enchantment of a gentle sort and would have appealed to the du Maurier soul in Michael for sure.

Barrie’s memory was of a different sort.

At last, maybe because it was the end of an era, what with George and Jack bound for Eton and Osborne Naval College respectively, all the boys carved their initials on a tree in ‘the arbour’, which is still there today.

But that was not the whole story of course, because the shadow of Arthur’s death remained over them, with Sylvia appearing in some of the photographs still in mourning. For all the fun and games, Peter Davies wrote that ‘the whole pattern of the Dhivach holiday seems to me to have had something rather deplorable about it’. The years 1907–10 he referred to as the seat of all his later neuroses. He was to commit suicide sixty years later by throwing himself under a train at Sloane Square tube station in London.

Seven-year-old Michael was further troubled now by his mother’s distress, the full depths of which may have been unfathomable to an adult, but were etched on her face as clearly to him as if she had written them down.

He started to react badly. ‘It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking,’ wrote Barrie of his nightmares, ‘and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it, probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up.’

The nightmares would become worse in his early teens, when Michael’s cousin Daphne would overhear her nanny saying to Mary Hodgson: ‘Michael has bad nightmares. He dreams of ghosts coming through the window.’ (The Rebecca Notebook, 1981)

But back in 1907 they proved useful to Barrie who, following Arthur’s death, was already making numerous entries about the boy in his notebook for a new work – story or play – provisionally entitled ‘Michael Pan’ to be written about Peter’s brother.

The work never came to anything, but the material didn’t go to waste, for Barrie had begun to incorporate Michael into Peter Pan himself as he developed the novel Peter and Wendy:

Sometimes … [Peter Pan] had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy’s custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him.

More unsettling is another notebook entry, perhaps because it suggests his view that children, on account of their remoteness from the world, are not as vulnerable to negative emotional experience as adults (hence his earlier suggestion that they should be told about their father’s impending death): ‘Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they met their dead father and had a game with him.’ This sort of suggestion, whether dreamed up by Michael or by Barrie, shows a level of unrest less than healthy.

Barrie would write that there was ‘a horror looking for Michael in his childhood’. Neither of them thought it might have anything to do with Barrie.

Dhivach Lodge was followed by a break for Sylvia and the boys with Emma du Maurier in Ramsgate, where Michael continued to fish. On 8 October he wrote to Barrie: