Free The Real Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon Page B

redskins.
    â€˜The lost boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimedin seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I’m captain,’ says Peter.
    The central conflict in the play between Captain Hook (initially called Captain Swarthy in the games) and Peter Pan – ‘Most of all I want their captain, Peter Pan. ‘Twas he cut off my arm.’ – was also formed here. Barrie took the role of Captain Swarthy and Porthos played the pirate’s dog (or a tiger in a papier-mâché mask).
    Hook – a ‘dark and sinister’ man – is deemed ‘by those in the know’, as Barrie also confessed, ‘to be autobiographical’. He is his doppelgänger, a strange mix of menace and ‘a touch of the feminine’, he admitted, adding with disarming wit: ‘it sometimes gave him intuitions’.
    â€˜No. 4 [Michael] rested so much at this period that he was merely an honorary member of the band,’ wrote Barrie to the boys, ‘waving his foot to you for luck when you set off with bow and arrow to shoot his dinner for him; and one may rummage in vain for any trace of No. 5.’
    Nico, still three years away from being born, would miss out on Black Lake altogether and his character would be utterly different to those of the others. He was never to penetrate the Neverland on this side of the curtain.
    But Barrie lost no time in involving Michael wherever and whenever he could. In the area of the Black Lake that Barrie dubbed ‘the haunted groves of Waverley’ (with reference to the nearby ruins of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey), Michael became the agent for the reintroduction of certain fairy tale elements into the proceedings. Here, in the midst of the most adventurous of games, ‘we cassocked our first fairies (all little friends of St Benedict) in white violets’.
    Long before Michael could even walk he was credited withdiscovering Tinkerbell: ‘It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail was like by twilight,’ recalled Barrie.
    As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves he saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. It must not be thought, however, that there were any other sentimental passages between No. 4 and Tink; indeed, as he got to know her better he suspected her of frequenting the hut to see what we had been having for supper, and to partake of the same, and he pursued her with malignancy.
    On that first Black Lake holiday in the summer of 1900, the boys stayed with their parents a dozen or so miles hence in the village of Burpham, and it was here that Michael’s formal initiation into the Pan cult took place.
    â€˜Do you remember a garden at Burpham,’ Barrie wrote to the grown-up boys more than twenty years later, ‘and the initiation there of No. 4 when he was six weeks old, and the three of you grudged letting him in so young?’
    Michael was in all right. He had never been out.
    20 Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. Barrie (1941).
    21 Diana Farr, Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy (1978).

Chapter Nine
1901–03: Unrest Within the Family
    P ERHAPS IT WAS actually watching Sylvia mother her new baby that first made Michael Barrie’s favourite, or that she and Barrie secretly hoped that he would show signs of having inherited the du Maurier ‘spark’. Certainly, Barrie feted Sylvia as a mother. Enacting the transmutation of Sylvia into Grizel, as one of Barrie’s notebooks reveals, Sylvia was to him ‘a woman who will always look glorious as a mother … a woman to confide in (no sex, we feel it in man or woman). All secrets of womanhood you felt behind those calm eyes.’ One can imagine what this meant to a woman who bore five sons in ten years.
    Barrie’s reverence for the mother