The tales long for a lost and heartless innocence, and are key texts in what has been perceived to be the golden age of children's literature, that series of great works running from The Water Babies to Winnie the Pooh. Yet out of his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family emerged Barrie's various versions of the Peter Pan story. That his remoteness involved a possessing hunger for company was his – and the boys' – tragedy. What facilitated the friendships was Barrie's zest for fantasy combined with a sense of self-enclosure about the man. Was he "in love" with George and then Michael? Was he attempting to return to his own boyhood through theirs? Did he love or lust after Sylvia? No one knows.
What motivated Barrie will always remain uncertain. Then George Llewelyn Davies died on the western front during the first world war and after the war, Michael killed himself, drowning in the arms of a friend at Oxford. When Sylvia herself succumbed to cancer, Barrie became the boys' guardian. Ansell left Barrie for a younger writer, Gilbert Cannan. As the sons grew older, his interest wandered from George to young Michael.
When Arthur died of cancer of the jaw, Barrie helped the family financially, sending the boys to Eton. To the mother, he was at least a very good friend and confidant what the father made of him is a little more opaque. Barrie became indispensable to the boys, a playful companion and teller of tales. He soon got to know the boys' beautiful mother Sylvia, and also her unfortunate husband, Arthur. It is possible their marriage was never consummated. Barrie was not so happily married to the actress Mary Ansell they themselves had no children. Already a highly successful writer, in 1897, while walking in London's Kensington Gardens, Barrie befriended the young Llewelyn Davies boys (five-year-old George, and his younger brothers Jack and Peter later came Michael and "Nico"). There's a sense that back then people were uninhibited by knowledge of inhibition. In watching or reading about Barrie's life, one discovers improbable strangeness. There was little he did not know about the guilt of authorship. Barrie presents a portrait of the Author as such, a paper man whose life passes between the event and the notebook that records it. His quirk is the knowing zest with which he exploited his past in books. It can be no surprise that this upbringing scarred him. But David would always win, destined as he was to remain forever 12 years old, while Barrie was condemned to grow up.
Young Barrie did his best to claim her distracted attention, calling her back by amusing her and consciously impersonating his dead brother. His mother took to her bed, too depressed to engage with her remaining children. When he was seven, his older brother David died in a skating accident. The story begins in James Matthew Barrie's childhood in Kirriemuir.
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