Childhood
Davies was an infant when Barrie befriended his older brothers George and Jack during outings in Kensington Gardens, with their nurse Mary Hodgson and him in a pram. Barrie's original description of Peter Pan in The Little White Bird (1902) was as a new-born who had escaped to Kensington Gardens. However, according to family accounts, his brothers George and Michael served as the primary models for the character as he appeared in the famed stage play (1904) and later novel (1911), as a pre-adolescent boy.
In 1904, the year when Barrie's play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, debuted at London's Duke of York's Theatre, the Davies family moved out of London and went to live Egerton House, an Elizabethan mansion house in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Their time there lasted only three years; in 1907, Davies's father died of cancer and his mother took Davies and his brothers George, Jack, Michael, and Nico back to London. She too developed cancer and died in 1910, whereupon Barrie became the de facto guardian of Davies and his brothers. Hodgson continued to serve as nurse and surrogate mother for him and his brothers. Davies, like his brothers (apart from Jack), attended Eton College.
Read more about this topic: Peter Llewelyn Davies
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Having a child is the great divide between one’s own childhood and adulthood. All at once someone is totally dependent upon you. You are no longer the child of your mother but the mother of your child. Instead of being taken care of, you are responsible for taking care of someone else.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”
—Louise Bogan (1897–1970)