The Real Peter Pan Read Online Free PDF

that a flower is the thing least likely to attract attention. They dress exactly like flowers. The beginning of the tulip weeks is almost the best time to catch them. 8
    8 J. M. Barrie in The Little White Bird (1902).

Chapter Four
1897: Spellbound
    I T WAS NOT until 1897 that the Llewelyn Davies family arrived at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of the gardens. After their wedding in 1892 and a honeymoon at Porthgwarra in deepest Cornwall, Sylvia and Arthur had set up home at 18 Craven Terrace in Paddington, close to where Arthur had been renting lodgings.
    Craven Terrace was ‘a dear little house (or Sylvia made it so), a sort of maisonette’, as Dolly Parry described it. Sylvia had a flair for design and created soft furnishings for their home as well as lovely clothes for herself and her sons, often evolved from whatever lay to hand. ‘I remember Arthur telling me that Sylvia gave away his trousers for plants which a man brought round on a barrow,’ wrote Dolly years later. In fact, money had been so short at this time, soearly in Arthur’s career, that Sylvia had been working for a well-known theatrical costumier, Ada Nettleship, who made clothes for the famous actress Ellen Terry (a great friend of du Maurier) in a dressmaking business set up by her father.
    Then, in October 1896, du Maurier had died and the family benefited from legacies, mainly derived from the huge sales of du Maurier’s second novel, Trilby , which tells of the fate of a young, bohemian artist’s model in Paris when a man by the name of Svengali inveigles his way into her life and exercises his hypnotic power over her. With more than a touch of irony, the royalties from Trilby brought Sylvia and her sons within Barrie’s orbit for the first time.
    The extra money also brought Nanny Hodgson on to the scene. At Craven Terrace, two children had been born to Sylvia in successive years – George on 20 July 1893, Jack on 11 September 1894. Her third son, Peter, was born on 25 February 1897, and as Sylvia now had three boys claiming her full-time attention, the decision was taken to employ a nanny.
    Mary Hodgson (Dadge to her family) was the eighth of ten children born to Thomas, a stonemason, and his wife Mary, at Kirkby Lonsdale. Nanny was twenty-one going on twenty-two when she arrived. Inevitably, being so close to the Kensington Gardens, she joined the throng between two and four each afternoon, with George and Jack conspicuous in bright red tam-o’-shanters, blouses and breeches, made by Sylvia, and little Peter in his perambulator pushed by Nanny. It was only a matter of time before Barrie caught George’s eye.
    He claimed first to have seen the four-year-old on the sward behind the Baby’s Walk. Originally George was, he said, ‘a missel thrush, attracted there that hot day by a hose that lay on the groundsending forth a gay trickle of water’. George was lying ‘on his back in the water, kicking up his legs’. 9
    The boy never tired of this story, and soon it was he who told it to Barrie rather than Barrie to him. All children were birds once apparently, and all children in this part of London were originally birds in Kensington Gardens:
    Solomon Caw, the wise old crow on Bird Island in the Serpentine, was responsible for choosing a bird for each new mother and sending it to her. And the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people sometimes forget that they no longer have wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney.
    Young George’s delight on a summer afternoon was to go with him to some spot in the gardens where the unfortunate mothers who have no children may be seen trying to catch one with small pieces of cake.
    That the birds know what would happen if they were caught, and are even a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every student of them. Thus, if you leave your empty perambulator under the trees and watch