Neville Cardus’ stay at Adelphi Terrace

[mb0521]

I’m extremely puzzled about two events after reading Piers Dudgeon’s interesting book The Real Peter Pan. Both involved Neville Cardus’ very strange weekend with, or as it happens,without Barrie. He mentions that he stayed in Michael’s old bedroom but that ‘the towels (in the bathroom) were damp and soiled; and round the shelves were one or two shaving brushes congealed in ancient soap. A rusty razor blade on a window ledge was historical. Barrie has a private bathroom; the unclean towels puzzled me’. Why, after great expense refitting his Adelphi Terrace flat did he leave this bathroom in such a state?He had a butler after all! Was the bathroom left exactly as it was when Michael used it?
Also, Cardus also mentions a strange event when he was left alone in the flat and ‘presently the door opened and a young man entered, in a dinner jacket’. He says that they talked about cricket and that he was a very likeable young man but that he never found out who he was. Dudgeon doesn’t go further. Who could this have been? Two very strange occurrences!

[andrew]

The young man in the dinner jacket was - according to Nico - Nico. Search for "Cardus" in the database and you'll find the following (in a letter from Nico to me, circa November 1975, i.e. very early on in our entanglement):

"There's a superb 4/5 pages of a sort of nightmare weekend at JMB's Adelphi flat [in Neville Cardus' Autobiography], which is vividly "true" and to me extremely funny. I in fact appear in the account though no one would realise this, but it brings back so very vividly some of the scruffy things I took absolutely for granted in those days. It's certainly an unknown side to JMB! Yet Cardus wrote me shortly before he died last year saying how right I was that Barrie was a man of great wit and humour."

As to the unwashed/ancient shaving brushes, they may well have been Michael's, although prior to your post I'd always assumed they were Barrie's.  Of course we all know how people cling to the relics of their dead loved ones, often preserving them as they were left. My son Anno died a month short of his 21st, and for years I clung to his "last" ashtray, complete with the butt-ends he'd stubbed out before heading off to get himself killed ...
 

[mb0521]

Thanks for that Andrew. The more one reads about Barrie and the Davies family the more one wants to find out. It just seems that Barrie had such a dark, manipulative side to his character. Do you think that Michael committed suicide to escape from Barrie’s manipulative grasp or do you believe it was simply an accident?

[andrew]

In truth, an accident, although suicide makes for more dramatic copy. Thanks to Nicholas M's investigations (see elsewhere on this Forum) I think it's fairly clear that Barrie wholly endorsed Michael's friendship with Rupert, although he had been less enthusiastic about his relationship with Roger Senhouse ...