Free The Real Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon Page A

wood, as the unthinking may at a cross-road take a familiar path that no longer leads to home; or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you still belonged: soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for it vanishes if one needs to look for it.
    A time came when I saw that No. 1 [George], the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided the lingering faith of No. 2 [Jack]; when even No. 3 [Peter] questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better [Michael and Nico, the latter born in 1903], but their day was dawning.
    The Black Lake experience was an extraordinary fillip to the whole fantastic Neverland adventure, just as the Mare d’Auteil had clung to the young du Maurier’s mind in the Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps it was so effective because Barrie was returning the boys to the du Maurier collective unconscious as expressed in the family myth.
    For that is what Peter Ibbetson became for the family, a kind of source-myth, and not limited to the blissful experience of the lost joy of childhood. In the novel it emerges that Mary, Duchess of Towers, is Mimsey Seraskier, the little girl who was besotted with Peter in their childhood – she is ‘the one survivor of that sweet time’. They fall in love. She shows him how they can dream true together, Mary’s ‘warm life-current mixing’ with his, a telepathic union offering rapture unadulterated by the physical world. Peter is overwhelmed with the joy they experience together: ‘Was there ever … ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I feel now?’
    Du Maurier, it seemed to readers at the time, had found a way into a timeless ‘other world’ just out of reach, tinkering with the idea that our terrestrial, mundane life is a mere front for true mystical being. He was a Romantic through and through and had an exquisite, spiritual sense of beauty. And now he had found a way to induce in himself a state that could replicate ‘such as moves in sweet melodies, such as entrances in Chopin’s Ètudes, and in Schubert’s Romances’.
    When John Masefield wrote that du Maurier’s ‘effect upon that generation was profound – I can think of no book which so startled and delighted the questing mind’, he gave Peter Ibbetson’ s public reception its proper context. In the milieu of the family, du Maurier had an even stronger influence. ‘He affected us all greatly,’ admitted Daphne, who owed her success to it from the moment in Alexandria when she dreamt she went to Manderley again and ‘was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers…’ ( Rebecca , 1938)
    Although the first notes for the play of Peter Pan did not appear in Barrie’s notebook until the spring of 1903, the adventures that informed so much of the action unfolded here at the Black Lake: ‘I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan ,’ Barrie confessed to the boys years later.
    You had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib. That is what must have happened, but I cannot remember doing it … The play of Peter is streaky with you still … A score of Acts had to be left out, and you were in them all.
    Out of Black Lake, characters and episodes fell onto the page. When Peter Pan, Wendy, John and Michael arrive in the Neverland ‘the chief forces of the island’, which emerged from the games, are introduced. ‘[They] were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the