I
first visited Black Lake in the scorching summer of 1976, when I was writing
my script for the BBC Lost Boys. Since I fondly hoped we’d
be able to shoot the Boy Castaways sequence in the real place, I decided
to go and take a look to see if it still existed. Which indeed it does,
on the left-hand side of the road from Farnham to Tilford. Black Lake
Cottage is on the other side of the road, and was in those days owned
by a somewhat taciturn businessman who tried to sell me “Barrie’s
armchair”, stored in his tennis pavilion – Mary Ansell’s
gardens having been replaced by a large tennis court. But the house itself
looked much the same as in the photographs in her books about Black Lake,
and certainly the owner proved agreeable to letting the BBC shoot there
... for a sizeable consideration.
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I had better luck across the road, where the owners of the Black Lake itself were delighted to see a copy of the surviving Boy Castaways. Nor did gold light up in their eyes at the prospect of a BBC location. There was only one problem: the lake had virtually disappeared. But since 1976 was a freak summer and we wouldn’t be shooting till the following year at the earliest, it seemed reasonable to hope that by then the lake would be once again be restored to a South Seas lagoon. The owners had inherited a story to the effect that the punt used by George and Jack to explore the “island” (there isn’t one) lay somewhere at the bottom. I waded across the muddy sink, but all I found was a cricket bat ... |
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At
last I was left on my own to explore at will. The forest looked very similar
to the 1901 photographs, prosaically explained by the fact that the original
pine trees had been planted in 1860, felled during the Great War, replanted
and felled again in 1940 - thus the new trees planted during WW2 were
roughly the same age and size as the ones in The Boy Castaways.
But it was the spirit of the place that I remember best – the “haunted
groves of Waverley” as Barrie called them. I had the whole forest
to myself, and lying among the trees on that drowsy August day, with no
other sounds than the murmur of insects, it wasn’t hard to find
oneself back in that “strange and terrible summer” of 1901.
I had in my pocket a small copy of A E Housman’s The Shropshire
Lad, which George had taken with him in his kitbag when he set off
for the trenches in 1915:
On
the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far
and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth march by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die ...
George ... “the most gallant of you all”. “It's funny,” said Barrie in 1915, "that the real Peter Pan — I called him that — is off to the war now.” I remembered, lying among those pine trees, that Peter, in his Morgue, had recounted an episode that took place in the summer of 1908, when George was 14 and Peter, 10:
One afternoon George and I, making for home towards the end of a day's pursuit of White Admirals and Fritillaries, encountered a company of Highlanders of the march along one of the dusty forest roads [...] They halted and fell out for a few minutes, unbuckling their equipment and sprawling by the roadside in the relaxed attitudes of tired men, and George and I got into conversation with a sergeant and one or two of the privates at the rear of the little column. When they moved on again after their halt, we followed close behind them, enjoying the rhythm of the marching feet, and moved obscurely by a sense of unity with the sweating, swearing, back-chatting soldiers [...] Somehow this scene has always remained vividly in my mind: rather like a piece of a silent film, for I have long forgotten what we talked about. It was a queer little romantic presage of the real marchings of six years later, for which the Highlanders were more or less consciously preparing themselves, [though] nothing could then have seemed more remote from the destiny of two small boys.
I took out a pen and started scribbling a scene – Barrie photographing George, lying on “the idle hill of summer” during a picnic break in the Boy Castaways sequence. From Barrie’s POV, George is gazing dreamily at nothing. >What Barie doesn’t see - but we do - is that George is actually watching a platoon of soldiers marching along a forest track in the distance. Later, in Part 2, I’d find a way of working in Peter’s story, and reprise the moment later still in Part 3 on the eve of war ...
And so day slipped into dusk, and I too “set sail for England, home and Wilkinson’s”, with a solid three months of work ahead of me before my next expedition ... to find George’s grave. In the event, The Lost Boys was made in the late spring of 1978, and all the locations shot in Devon. I visited Black Lake again in 1984 with Bee and our son Anno, who was then 3. The lake had refilled, but the day was overcast, and the magic elsewhere. I briefly planned to revisit it on the 100th anniversary of The Boy Castaways at the end of August 2001, but it was Anno’s last day in London before leaving for Italy, so I spent it searching for Michael’s grave instead ...
I don't know who owns Black Lake today, but if you find yourself in the Farnham area on a hot summer’s afternoon, it’s well worth a visit if you can get permission (see map). Mary Ansell’s two books about Black Lake Cottage - The Happy Garden and Happy Houses (both published by Cassell’s in 1912), are both obtainable via www.abebooks.com.
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Finally, a short PS as to the origin of the “ill-fated brig, the Anna Pink”. Many years ago I received a letter from a retired sea-captain, enclosing an 18th sea chart dated 1741, showing the last known course of the real Anna Pink – a 300-ton 3-master that was lost off the coast of Chile after failing to sail round Cape Horn. If anyone can add further information, please let me know.
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 The Anna Pink ... |