The Real Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon

Author:Piers Dudgeon [Piers Dudgeon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849549257
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-02-01T23:00:00+00:00

Shrouded in mist after a day of torrential rain, the track to Voshimid is hard going and very wet. The storm-laden river alongside can carry a man to his death faster than he might canter on horseback. After a good half-hour walking against the weather, the small, so-called ‘Weedy Loch’ emerges through the pall, and then Voshimid herself. The 200-year-old fishing huts where George and his girlfriend romanced are there still, as is the islet in the south-west corner, where, with Michael’s help, ‘we caught Mary Rose’, as Barrie put it.

Was it a case of beauty boiling over and the spirit of Michael’s beloved mother pouring through the mist towards him – of love bidding the son ‘to find the maid wherever she be hidden,’43 as the poet wrote?

However it happened, here Michael ‘caught’ the Ghost Mother, the first hint of which was noted back in 1894, and who now picked up a more modern echo in the tragic passing of his mother, Sylvia, to become the basis of Barrie’s play, Mary Rose.

A young married couple, Mary Rose and Simon, go on vacation to the Outer Hebrides, leaving their little son, Harry, behind with a nurse. They visit a small island, which has a bad name among the locals. People, including a young boy, have gone missing there. No one can hear the call of the island except for those for whom it is meant, but once it is heard it cannot be ignored. Mary Rose, who like Michael (and Kilmeny), has an elusiveness of which she is unaware, hears the call and disappears.

We learn that this is a repeat disappearance, the first occasion being in the same place when Mary Rose was Michael’s age, on a fishing trip with her father. Twenty days later she returned, unaware that she had been away, and her family never discussed the episode with her.

Now, after her second disappearance, twenty-five years pass before she returns, again unaware that she has been away. She looks for her son, but cannot find him. As a lad Harry ran away to sea. She dies, but her ghost continues to haunt the house, still seeking her son. Three years on, Harry returns and confronts his mother’s ghost…

On ‘several occasions’ at Amhuinnsiuidhe, according to Nico, when Michael disappeared off on his own, Barrie ran after him manically calling his name. ‘We’d hear this haunting, banshee wail, “Mi-i-ichael-l-l!”’ he wrote. ‘It was an extraordinary sound as it echoed through the hills. And of course Michael was always perfectly all right, and wondered what all the fuss was about.’44

Nico, at age eight, was unaware of what was really going on. Heb knew nothing of Kilmeny, the girl of poetic nature, the lover of solitude who wanders off alone at twilight and disappears into the wild among the hills, her friends looking in vain for her, their cries echoing around the glen.

He could so easily have suggested that Barrie had been playing around, but he did not. Even Nico, who understood

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