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| | | PETER PAN SEASON
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Go to the Listen Again page | | | | | |  | | Monday 27 December, 11.00am. | | | BBC Radio 4's season celebrating 100 years of Peter Pan | | | | J M Barrie:
Boy and Man | 11.00am
Monday 27 Dec 2004 |
| | |  | |  | An exploration of the childhood of J.M. Barrie, the man who never grew up, whose masterpiece Peter Pan is about a boy who never grows up. James Barrie was fond of saying that nothing important happens to a child after the age of twelve - a lesson personally learned.
The story is told through Barrie's own words including newly discovered material from his own notebooks. - J.M.Barrie is played by Bill Paterson.
It is common knowledge that Barrie was inspired to write Peter Pan after meeting the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens at the turn of the last century but the seed of the work was much earlier.
He was born in 1860 in the small Scottish town of Kirriemuir, the ninth of ten children whose father worked as a weaver but it was his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, who was the dominant person in his life. She herself had become a 'child mother' at the age of eight when her own mother died and she became responsible for her siblings. She is the model for Wendy in Peter Pan, the mother of the Lost Boys, and the Wendy House of the play grew out of their backyard washhouse where Barrie and his friend James Robb put on his first plays aged seven. His mother Margaret encouraged his story telling and they read voraciously together Robinson Crusoe and other adventures.
But the most significant event of his childhood was the death of his older brother David in a skating accident - an event from which his mother never recovered:
' Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, "My David's dead!" or perhaps he remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man ... he was still a boy of thirteen.'
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