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from a distance, you will see the birds boarding it and hopping about from pillow to blanket in a twitter of excitement; they are trying to find out how babyhood would suit them. 10
    The saddest sight is the birds who never find a mother. He chosethe original title of a book he published in 1902 called The Little White Bird, because ‘the little white birds are the birds that never find a mother’. Sad because Barrie never would have a child of his own flesh, though he had the fantasy of a boy called Timothy and wrote about him, wishing that he could have played just once in the Kensington Gardens, ‘and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper galleon on the Round Pond, [or] chase one hoop down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once…’
    Barrie claimed that he had the fairy language from George after thinking back hard and pressing his hands to his temples.
    ‘“Fairy me tribber” is what you say to the fairies when you want them to give you a cup of tea,’ it emerged one day.
    Barrie was pleased, but advised that ‘it is not so easy as it looks, for all the ‘r’s should be pronounced as ‘w’s.’
    ‘What would you say,’ George asked him, ‘if you wanted them to turn you into a hollyhock?’ He thought the ease with which they can turn you into things their most engaging quality. The answer is ‘Fairy me lukka’.
    ‘Fairy me bola’ means ‘Turn me back again’, and George’s discovery made Barrie uncomfortable, for he knew he had hitherto kept his distance from the fairies, mainly because of a feeling that their conversions are permanent.
    Forsaking the realm of fairyland for a while, and indicating a change of subject by exposing his peculiarly large head to the elements, Barrie would gravely and reverently tell of some great explorer. Gallant tales of the search for the Northwest Passage, expeditions to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the exotic Orient and the dark continent of Africa provided a steady stream of adventure. On the little party a stillness would fall as all the time he spoke ‘as one fresh tothe world before ever he had time to breathe upon the glass’, and they listened, spellbound.
    George would trail around after him, Jack sometimes tagging along, while Peter was not out of his pram and was a long way from realising that ‘Mr Barrie’, as he later put it, ‘became a unique influence in the lives of all of us, one that was to affect our destinies in ways as yet unknown.’
    Nanny, being Nanny, feared this from the start and became less and less keen the more the boys were ‘taken over by this strange little man’. Walks with the children became ‘less pleasurable’, she told her family in Kirkby Lonsdale and later came to look upon Barrie as an intrusion.
    9 J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird (1902).
    10 Ibid.

Chapter Five
1897: Barrie Comes Out
    T HE BARRIES MET Sylvia and Arthur at a high society dinner hosted by the leading London solicitor Sir George and Lady Lewis at their mansion at 88 Portland Place W1, on New Year’s Eve, 1897.
    Before his death the previous October, du Maurier had been a regular guest of the Lewises since at least the 1860s; he was among their oldest friends. Sometimes hundreds would be invited to the Lewis parties, a mixture of peers of the realm and celebrities from the world of the arts. Occasionally there would be a much more select, high-profile evening, involving royalty. Party lists show, for example, that in March 1885 the Prince of Wales (Albert Edward, later Edward VII) was the principal guest, and du Maurier and his wife Emma attended with only a dozen or so others.
    Barrie’s inclusion on party lists was singular and more recent – they show only one invitation earlier that same year (1897). At thirty-seven he was one of the most talked of figures in the literary world, with money pouring in from books and plays, in that very year to