The Real Peter Pan Read Online Free Page A

accent.
    At this stage a bowler hat and a stick completed the ensemble, creating an image strangely like that of Charlie Chaplin, the south London export to Hollywood whom Barrie would later entertain athome and invite to play Peter Pan on film (which, alas, never happened). Like Barrie, Chaplin was short, although at five feet five he had one and a half inches on the little writer.
    In those days, the Kensington Gardens were wild, the paths rougher than they are today; and it was quieter: no bandstand even played. It was ‘a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees’, as one regular user described it, and although in the distance one could just hear the rumble of horse-drawn vehicles along the Bayswater Road, on the northern border, it was a peaceful, rural retreat, remote from metropolitan London, which swept past it. There were even sheep grazing there.
    Entering the gardens from the south with his pretty young actress wife, Mary Ansell, and huge St Bernard dog, Barrie came at once upon the main north–south axis of the gardens. The Broad Walk was nanny-central between two and four in the afternoon, when Kensington Gardens was commandeered by a number of young, middle-and upper-class children, many of the latter gathering in the more select area at the top of the Walk, called The Figs.
    All perambulators seemed Gardens-bound then, although there were fewer people than you would see there today, and at first the Barries would walk in some solitude with their gigantic companion and, as they liked to do, play hide-and-seek and countless other games for a St Bernard’s delight.
    Porthos, for that was his name – vast, gentle and apparently melancholy, but not really – was more or less the child that they never had.
    After their marriage in 1894, which followed three nervous breakdowns and an emergency dash by Mary Ansell to Barrie’s bedside in the family home at Kirriemuir, ostensibly for a last goodbye, Barrie made a lightning recovery and a marriage ceremony was undertakenat the house (as was allowed under Scottish law). Afterwards, a much-recovered Mr Barrie and his new wife had honeymooned in Switzerland and bought the St Bernard there, and their London house the following year.
    The Barries’ home at No. 133 was a well-appointed, three-storey town house, the first outward sign of his success since buying a one-way ticket to London almost ten years earlier, clutching an article for the St James’s Gazette entitled ‘The Rooks begin to Build’.
    When he and Mary first lived there they wouldn’t see many people in the evenings, so the games with Porthos would continue, running breakneck races up and down the stairs, or playing ‘finding his favourite author’. Or Porthos might do the tricks his master had taught him, like drinking milk out of a tumbler, or shaking hands, or removing a glove from a pocket and bringing it back to him. And Mary would come alive and dance for Porthos, who would watch her every movement with solemn, worshipping eyes.
    Porthos was the child in their house, but he wasn’t the only one. It was, in the opinion of a few observers, all a bit ‘unnatural’. But it was perfectly natural for them.
    A toyshop en route to the gardens was a regular stall. Porthos would come to a halt there and wave his tail, so that one or other of them would buy him a toy. He liked dolls mostly, not balls. It all began after Barrie bought himself a toy for his own amusement.
    It represented a woman, a young mother, flinging her little son over her head with one hand and catching him in the other, and I was entertaining myself on the hearthrug with this pretty domestic scene when I heard an unwonted sound from Porthos, and looking up, I saw this noble and melancholic countenance on the broad grin. I shuddered and was putting the toy away at once, but he sternly struck downmy arm with his, and signed that I was to continue. The unmanly chuckle always came, I found, when the poor lady dropped