The Real Peter Pan Read Free Page B

the moving clouds, and from the coral grottoes is to be heard a sound, at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the Neverland, the mermaids calling to the moon to rise.
    Peter is afraid at last, and a tremor runs through him, like a shudder passing over the lagoon; but on the lagoon one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and he feels just the one.
    Next moment, with the lagoon suffused with moonlight and that smile on his face and a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last, Peter stands erect on the rock again and calls:
    ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’
    2 Barrie in Tommy and Grizel (1900).
    3 Peter Llewelyn Davies in the unpublished family history, which became known as The Morgue.
    4 The Seekers by Daphne du Maurier, unfinished and unpublished, was written in 1921 after Michael’s death.
    5 Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1993).
    6 The official line is that the stones indicate the old boundary line for the parish of Westminster
St Mary’s and the parish of Paddington.

Chapter Two
1860–1900: A Rich Harvest of Possibility
    M ICHAEL , THE FOURTH of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was born on 16 June 1900, at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of what were once the private gardens of Kensington Palace.
    Sylvia was a du Maurier, the third of five children born to Emma and George du Maurier. Her father had risen from a penurious and rootless childhood to become a famous cartoonist, notably for the society pages of Punch magazine, and the author of three bestselling novels: Peter Ibbetson (1891), Trilby (1894) and The Martian (1896).
    Before he had found fame on Punch , he had trained as an artist in Paris, smoked opium, exercised his beautiful tenor voice and engagedin séances and experiments in hypnotism. Arriving in London in 1860, he shared an apartment with James McNeill Whistler, mixed with Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Rossetti, Millais and Edward Burne-Jones and became something of a touchstone in London’s literary and artistic community, with Henry James his closest friend.
    Sylvia was her father’s favourite child. Brought up in an enlightened, bohemian atmosphere at New Grove House on the edge of sprawling Hampstead Heath, high above the city, she was ‘a graceful beauty, her charm enhanced by the endearing crookedness of her mouth and a tip-tilted nose’, according to the biographer Diana Farr. 7
    Her skin was white, her shoulders wide and splendid; her hair very dark, a fine frame for that pale face which in repose had a noble almost Grecian quality. But perhaps her most remarkable feature was her eyes, set wide apart with a serenity which attracted the young, the shy and the hesitant.
    Sylvia’s unusual beauty, charm and grace, matched by a mocking wit and sense of fun, were already welcomed in London society when, at twenty-three, she first met Arthur, her future husband. They were the perfect foil to Arthur’s dark good looks and more serious demeanour: ‘We used to think he was a young warrior in an Italian picture,’ the composer Sir Hubert Parry, a family friend, once said of him.
    Three years older than Sylvia and a rising barrister, Arthur was the second of seven children of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies and his wife, Mary. The family home was miles to the north in Kirkby Lonsdale, a village between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.
    The Llewelyn Davieses were Christian, highbrow, but politically progressive. Arthur’s father had been President of the Cambridge Union and more recently Chaplain to Queen Victoria. Ottoline Morrell, one of the original Bloomsbury set, wrote of him:
    He had been a friend of F. D. Maurice and Robert Browning and even Thomas Carlyle. He was a shy, sensitive reserved man, and had rather a stiff, dry, unsympathetic manner, but after a time I had broken the ice. I found this old man, sitting in his little study, a great solace