Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters Jane Dunn The Du Mauriers – three beautiful, successful and rebellious sisters, whose lives were bound in a family drama that inspired Angela and Daphne’s best novels. Much has been written about Daphne but here the hidden lives of the sisters are revealed in a riveting group biography.The middle sister in a celebrated artistic dynasty, Daphne du Maurier is one of the master storytellers of our time, author of ‘Rebecca’, ‘Jamaica Inn’ and ‘My Cousin Rachel’. Her success and fame were enhanced by films of her novels and horrifying short stories, ‘Don’t Look Now’ and the unforgettable ‘The Birds’ among them. But this fame overshadowed her sisters Angela and Jeanne, a writer and an artist of talent, living quiet lives even more unconventional than Daphne’s own.In this group biography they are considered side by side, as they were in life, three sisters brought up in the hothouse of a theatrical family with a peculiar and powerful father. This family dynamic reveals the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird & Bing, full of social non-conformity, creative energy and compulsive make-believe, their lives as psychologically complex as a Daphne du Maurier plotline. DAPHNE DU MAURIER AND HER SISTERS The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing JANE DUNN Dedication In celebration of all sisters, and particularly mine: Kari, Izzy, B, Trish and Sue (and our outnumbered brothers Marko and Andy) CONTENTS TITLE PAGE (#u05d40d9c-e8d1-5f2c-9a59-1e29ea4f5faf) DEDICATION (#u4865493b-3545-5e15-8eaf-ea6f85f60a13) DU MAURIER FAMILY TREE (#u63f8ae32-afde-52ae-ba68-ef671d39b4b8) PREFACE (#u25ab24ea-b529-51f5-9f30-24b48a0bba4d) 1. The Curtain Rises (#ubd6b8e09-b7d6-57a0-b24f-b0dfab7725cc) 2. Lessons in Disguise (#u39f135da-37ab-57c9-9deb-59e9456e6d92) 3. The Dancing Years (#u093f090c-17bb-5e31-951d-f0a4c6c7e7ee) 4. Love and Losing (#u935a95f3-9ef5-5f9b-ad40-427ff271e8d0) 5. In Pursuit of Happiness (#litres_trial_promo) 6. Set on Adventure (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Stepping Out (#litres_trial_promo) 8. A Transfiguring Flame (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Fruits of War (#litres_trial_promo) 10. A Mind in Flight (#litres_trial_promo) 11. A Kind of Reckoning (#litres_trial_promo) 12. Heading for Home (#litres_trial_promo) AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo) PICTURE SECTION (#litres_trial_promo) FOOTNOTES (#litres_trial_promo) NOTES (#litres_trial_promo) ILLUSTRATIONS (#litres_trial_promo) SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo) BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo) COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo) DU MAURIER FAMILY TREE PREFACE But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies – about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are – all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp – and all sing – Or would sing if they were taught – or sing all the better for not being taught – or something like it. JANE AUSTEN, Mansfield Park JANE AUSTEN UNDERSTOOD about sisters. Mansfield Park and Persuasion seethe with them. Pride and Prejudice is as much about the affection, rivalry and vexation of sisters as it is about the complicated progress of true love for Jane and Elizabeth with Bingley and Darcy. Jane Austen shared a bedroom with her elder sister Cassandra all her life and they relied entirely on each other’s love and support. There is something infinitely touching about their relationship, and tragic too, for Cassandra lived on alone for twenty-eight years after her younger sister died. In biography, families are the soil out of which character grows, and one of the richest composts is the relationship of sisters. They are ever fascinating, cast from the same mould yet struggling for difference, brought up in the same family yet each with a childhood unique to herself. For good and ill, the sibling bond lasts a lifetime, longer than any other relationship with parents, partners or children, and it is sisters who weave the most complex webs of love and loyalty, resentment and hurt. Adults can turn sisters against each other by cruel comparisons and overt favouritism, as happened in the lifelong feud, continuing into their nineties, between the star of the film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Joan Fontaine, and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland, who landed the starring role in Daphne’s other great blockbuster, My Cousin Rachel. When sisters’ affections turn sour it can be deadly, for each knows the family’s secrets. More often, however, sisters are a foil and support to each other, a source of inspiration and close conspiracy; the safety net encouraging flight and breaking a fall. Daphne du Maurier was fascinated by the Bront? siblings and identified with them all, but she jokingly hoped she and her sisters might emulate Charlotte, Emily and Anne one day, if only she could get her artist sister to write too. A bevy of sisters is more than the sum of its parts and it is to this protean relationship that I, as a biographer, like to turn. The first pair I explored was Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell. This was an archetypal relationship of passionate dependence and rivalry, ultimately transfigured into self-sacrificing love, remarkably well delineated in the sisters’ own letters, Virginia’s novels and Vanessa’s portraits. I followed Virginia & Vanessa with other biographies that featured prominently sisters, daughters and female cousins. Then, with this book, another set of sisters drew my attention. For most of my life I had been unaware that Daphne du Maurier, author of so many stories that had gripped my young self, had any sisters at all. To find that she had two, her elder sister Angela a writer like herself, and her younger, Jeanne, a painter, piqued my interest. To have a sister’s fame so eclipse the others was psychologically interesting. Even more intriguing, however, was to find how different were the characters and lives of all three du Maurier sisters, yet how strongly imprinted with family values, bonded to each other in their desire to live in close proximity in Cornwall – with Jeanne eventually settling over the border in Dartmoor. In writing the story of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf I had set out to try and convey, as far as possible, their lives and thoughts in their own words. I hoped to do the same with the du Maurier sisters and was gratified to find how many of Daphne’s letters existed, and how candid and full of interest they were. She had also written a memoir of herself when young, based on the early diaries that she subsequently embargoed. Daphne’s letters are so rich, expressive and funny that they rival Nancy Mitford’s for wit and brio. All three du Maurier sisters wrote excellent letters: conversational, lively with news and comment and a great deal of humour, but Angela’s and Jeanne’s have been largely destroyed or withheld. Angela was a prolific writer of letters all her long life. She had many friends and acquaintances, but when she was old it seems that she wrote to her closest friends and asked them to destroy her letters. She had already burnt all her love letters, she explained to one of her past lovers, whose letters she had decided to keep. She also could not bring herself to burn her love poems to various important women in her life. For Angela, her deepest feelings and what made her happy in life, were in conflict with her desire to keep up appearances. She learnt early to dissemble to her parents. This conflict became more marked as she grew older, living within a close community in Fowey in Cornwall, where she was held in respect as ‘Miss Angela’, and attached to an Anglo-Catholic Church unsympathetic to any nonconformity in faith or life. Despite this attempt to obscure her true self, two extrovert autobiographies, if read carefully, are full of hints of a larger life, a more independent and courageous attitude to love, than one might ever suspect from the conventional face she chose to present to the world. She did not want to be known for her guise as maiden aunt who had missed out on love. There had been much more to her than her Pekinese dogs and the roles of dutiful daughter, dependable friend and stalwart of Church and community. I hope this exploration of her life is in keeping with at least one aspect of her family’s ethos, for the sisters were much influenced by their own father’s view that a biography is only worth doing if it attempts to tell the truth without evasion or pretence. Daphne boldly followed this precept with her own memoir of her father, soon after his death, shocking some of his old friends with her temerity. Whereas following Angela’s clues have led me on an intriguing journey of dead-ends and surprising revelations, the search for Jeanne has been blocked from the beginning of my researches. Her lifelong partner, the intellectual and prize-winning poet No?l Welch, still lives in their exquisite house on Dartmoor with the best collection of Jeanne’s paintings, all her papers and her memories. Now in her nineties, she has been adamantly set against any biography of the sisters, despite writing her own insightful piece on them for The Cornish Review nearly forty years ago. There are vivid glimpses of Jeanne in other people’s letters and memoirs. In the few letters that have surfaced, an expressive, amusing, highly creative voice rings out through the years as freshly as when they were written. The du Maurier girls could not have been more closely brought up. They were consciously sheltered from the contamination of school; for them there was no escape where, freed from controlling adults, they might speak of taboo subjects like sex and God and money. Largely lacking outside friends, the sisters were thrown on each other’s company and their own imaginations in a way that seems peculiarly intense compared to modern childhoods, with the ready distractions of the wider world. Moreover, they never quite managed to cast off the bonds of their family: the tentacles of the past spread into every part of their adult lives. Their influence on each other as children was potent and undiluted and it both held them back and spurred them on. For this reason I have dwelt at some length on their shared early life at Cannon Hall in London’s Hampstead. In this, the last generation to be named du Maurier, as daughter after daughter was born, it was hoped that at least one of them would have been a son, to ensure the continuation of the family genius and name. As mere girls, however, they would have to do as best they could. It was good indeed, but could it ever be good enough? The superlatives that surrounded their parents and forebears entered the romance of their family inheritance. ‘These things added to our arrogance as children,’ was how Daphne described the effect in her scintillating recreation of a theatrical childhood in her novel The Parasites: ‘as babies we heard the thunder of applause. We went about, from country to country, like little pages in the train of royalty; flattery hummed about us in the air, before us and within us was the continual excitement of success.’ Edwardian parental influence and du Maurier expectation was paramount. But given the distinctiveness of their upbringing, the sisters relied on each other for education and entertainment, with little change of view contributed by outside friends or adults who were not in the theatre. This hot house amplified their importance in each other’s lives; family dynamics are seldom more complex and long-lived than in the love and rivalry of sisters. ‘You have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me,’ Virginia Woolf famously wrote to her elder sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, expressing an age-old sense of natural sisterly justice. But this fragile balancing act was overthrown in the du Maurier family. For as it transpired, Daphne, the middle sister, not only had the fame but also the children, the beauty, the money, the dashing war-hero husband; she won all life’s prizes, her fame so bright that it eclipsed, in the eyes of the world, her two sisters and their creative efforts as writer and painter. However, Daphne did not value these prizes. Nothing mattered as much to her as the flight of her extraordinary imagination that animated some of the most haunting stories of the twentieth century. Her elder sister Angela, more extrovert and expressive, had the emotional energy for children and wrote of her longing to have been a mother. Certainly fame too promised to bring her more pleasure than it ever did to Daphne, who recoiled from publicity and the importuning of fans. Angela, eclipsed as she was, nevertheless came so close to claiming a share of the limelight; when she turned to singing she did not even get to first base as an opera singer, although her love of opera was to last a lifetime and she tried yet failed to join her parents’ profession and become an actor. Insecure and easily discouraged, she quickly abandoned her youthful dreams of a life of performance as enjoyed by her parents. Instead, her emotional nature found an outlet in fiction, a highly regarded aspect of the family business thanks to the success of their grandfather the artist George du Maurier, whose late career as a novelist brought him transatlantic fame. Soon after the publication in 1928 of Radclyffe Hall’s notorious novel, The Well of Loneliness, a plea for understanding ‘sexual inversion’ in women, Angela began writing her own first novel, The Little Less. Given the damning prejudices of the time, together with her father’s powerful influence and horror of homosexuality, Angela showed surprising courage – even revolutionary zeal – in exploring the bold theme of a woman’s love for another. Like The Well of Loneliness, Angela’s novel was not a great literary work, but it was a brave one and would have brought her a great deal of notice and some riches. Publication and attention would have established her as a novelist to watch and encouraged her to continue, and grow. Instead, she was met by rejection from publishers scared of another scandal. Her tentative flame of independence was snuffed out and she was left demoralised, perhaps even ashamed, for she had thrown light on a taboo subject and been silenced. She put the manuscript away, returned to the distraction of a busy social life and did not write again for almost a decade. Meanwhile, Daphne had been writing a few startling short stories since she was a girl and then, sometime later in 1929, had begun her first novel. The Loving Spirit, a rather more conventional adventure story, was spiced with what was to become the characteristic du Maurier sense of menace. This too was not a particularly good book but it was a much safer subject and easily found a publisher in 1931. Daphne was launched as a writer on a spectacular career that powered her through four books in five years to the darkly atmospheric Jamaica Inn and then, two years later in 1938, her creative prodigy Rebecca stormed to bestseller status. The momentum was now entirely with her. Daphne’s writing career, financial security and reputation were all made by the phenomenal success of Rebecca, and the haunting Hitchcock film that followed. The eclipse of her sisters was complete. Jeanne, seven years younger than Angela, had also made a bold move that went against the powerful family ethos. She had tried her hand at music and was a fine pianist all her life, but her real love was painting. Hers was a family brought up to decry anything modern in the arts. The French Impressionists, the English Post-Impressionists, whose exhibition in London in 1910 had caused uproar among polite society, all horrified their father Gerald du Maurier. He was vocal in his derision of any art after the mid-nineteenth century and his opinions were held in Mosaic regard by his adoring family. ‘Daddy loathed practically everything that was modern. He hated modern music, modern painting, modern architecture and the modern way of living … Gauguin horrified him I do remember,’ Angela wrote, adding, ‘I’m not at all sure it’s a good thing to be as impressed by one’s parents’ ideas and opinions as I was by Daddy’s.’ Angela was not alone. All the sisters were in awe of their father’s opinion on most things and Angela and Daphne never came to appreciate twentieth-century art. This made it all the more remarkable, but also painful for her, that Jeanne made her career as a painter, not of conventional, narrative, realistic pictures that her family might have appreciated, but of quiet, contemplative, modernist works. Her family did not value her art enough to hang it with pleasure on their walls, although her paintings were considered good enough by the art establishment to be bought by at least one public gallery. Jeanne seemed not to long for children, neither did she court fame, but her painting was the mainspring of her life and her immediate family’s lack of appreciation of her work was a kind of denial too. The intriguing threads of inheritance, character, family mythology and circumstance combine with early experience to create the pattern of a life. It is in childhood that these elements make their deepest impression. Here can be found possible reasons for Angela’s lack of perseverance that became a lasting regret: ‘I have always been an easily discouraged person … I had not the “guts” to start again writing’. Inheritance and familial experiences gave Daphne the contrary commitment; imagination and writing were the things most worthwhile in life. It helped that her talent was encouraged by her doting Daddy who saw so much in his favourite tomboy daughter to remind him of his own father. ‘[He] told me how he had always hoped that one day I should write, not poems, necessarily, but novels … “You remind me so of Papa,” he said. “Always have done. Same forehead, same eyes. If only you had known him.”’ In childhood Jeanne found the seeds of her later independence. Her mother’s favourite and perhaps the most honest and down-to-earth of them all, she was the youngest sister who chose a discredited style of painting as her life’s work and managed to live openly until her death with a woman poet as her partner, despite the oft-expressed antipathy of her father towards people like her. The sense the family had of being glamorous, exceptional and blessed with French blood was reinforced by the private language they shared. This was a highly visual and entertaining creation that bound them together as a tribe and kept out pretenders. Daphne’s fascination with the Bront?s and Gondal, their imaginary world, brought the verb ‘to Gondal’ into the sisters’ lexicon, meaning to make-believe or elaborate upon. Nicknames too were a du Maurier habit. Angela became various forms of ‘Puff’, ‘Piff’ and ‘Piffy’; Daphne was ‘Tray’, ‘Track’ or ‘Bing’; and Jeanne was ‘Queenie’ or ‘Bird’. Exploring Daphne’s character and work in the context of her sisters, means she appears in a quite different light from the one that shines on her as the solitary subject of a life. She was shyly awkward and intransigent, a girl who escaped into her own imaginary world, where she was supreme. Intent on wresting control over her destiny she thereby influenced the lives of others, not least her sisters’. In introducing her two much less famous sisters, I hope this book draws them from the shadows. I like to think that Angela, who longed for more notice during her lifetime and dreamed of having a film made from at least one of her stories (Daphne had ten – the unforgettable Rebecca, The Birds and Don’t Look Now among them), would have been delighted to be rediscovered, her books read, possibly even inspiring a belated dramatisation. Where Daphne controlled her universe, Angela, at the mercy of her emotions, seemed to be buffeted by hers. Unfocused when young, and wilting under pressure, her youth was marked by humiliations and missed opportunities, while she was intent on the pursuit of love. Later she discovered a remarkable courage to tackle in her novels and her life injustice in matters of the heart, and to live as unconventionally as she pleased. As she aged, however, the constraining bonds of her Edwardian upbringing tightened around her once more. A little light shed on Jeanne might also lead to a wider audience for her art, with paintings taken out of storage in small galleries and hung on the walls, for new generations to appreciate. The largest public collection is at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, where the quiet atmospheric beauty of her works rewards the eye with a spare, unsentimental vision. She was perhaps the most solid and least flighty of them all. Jeanne was always the honest, boy-like sister and did not apparently struggle with questions of identity or her role in life. When she decided what she wanted to do, all her energy was committed to it, unlikely to be deflected by emotion or propriety. Much has been written on every aspect of Daphne du Maurier’s work and life. Margaret Forster’s impressive biography published nearly twenty years ago remains the authority on her life, but there are other essential contributions from Judith Cook’s Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier and Oriel Malet’s Letters from Menabilly. Her daughter Flavia Leng’s poignant memoir adds another layer of understanding. Daphne’s writing attracted penetrating analysis in Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik’s Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination, and in Nina Auerbach’s personal take on the themes of Daphne’s fiction in Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress. The rewarding mix of The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor, and Ella Westland’s Reading Daphne, add their own layers of meaning. There is also a highly successful yearly literary festival at Fowey, established to honour Daphne’s close connection and imaginative contribution to that part of south-east Cornwall. In this book I do not set out to write a full biography of each sister; nor have I the space to analyse their individual works in any depth, although I have discussed them when they offer extra biographical or psychological insights to the story. I have considered the du Maurier sisters side by side, as they lived in life. This adds a new perspective to the characters of each, as they evolve through the tensions and connections of ideas and feelings that flow within any close relationship. Most marked is how much the opinions and experiences of one sister find their way into the work of another. In their fiction particularly, Angela and Daphne each used aspects of their sisters’ lives to animate her own work. But all the du Maurier sisters drew on their unique childhood, a past that was always present, bringing light and dark to their lives and work. 1 The Curtain Rises Coats off, the music stops, the lights lower, there is a hush. Then up goes the curtain; the play has begun. That is why I’m going to begin this story ‘Once upon a time …’ ANGELA DU MAURIER, First Nights TO BE BORN a du Maurier was to be born with a silver tongue and to become part of a family of storytellers. To be born the last of the du Mauriers, as the three sisters would be, was to be born in a theatre with the sound of applause, the smell of greasepaint, and the heart attuned to drama, tension and a quickening of the pulse. The du Mauriers were in thrall to myths of their ancestors. Even the romantic name that meant so much to them was an embellishment on something more mundane. As soon as they were old enough to understand, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne du Maurier realised they were special and had inherited a precious thread of creative genius that connected them to their celebrated forebears. Although Daphne did marry, all three sisters evaded the conventional roles of wife and mother and rose instead to the challenge of living up to their name, a name they never relinquished. Two sisters expressed themselves through writing and the third through paint. The du Maurier character was volatile and charming, inflated with fantasy and pretence; characteristically they hung their lives on a dream and found little solace in real life once the romance had gone. These three girls inherited a name famous on both sides of the Atlantic: their grandfather George du Maurier was a celebrated illustrator, Punch cartoonist and bestselling novelist. His most famous creation was Trilby and this sensational novel enhanced his fame and made him rich: it gave the world the ‘trilby’ hat and made his anti-hero, the mesmerist Svengali, part of the English language as a byword for a sinister, controlling presence. It was his first novel, Peter Ibbetson, however, that impressed his granddaughters most, insinuating into their own lives and imagination its haunting theme that by ‘dreaming true’ one could realise the thing one most desired. The sisters attempted in their different ways to practise this art in life and incorporate the idea in aspects of their work. George’s grandfather, Robert, had expressed his love for fantasy by inventing aristocratic connections for his descendants and adding ‘du Maurier’ to the humble family name of Busson. His own mother Ellen, great-grandmother to the sisters, was filled also with the sense she was not a duckling but a swan. As the daughter of the sharp-witted adventuress Mary Anne Clarke, she was brought up with the tantalising thought that her father might not be the undistinguished Mr Clarke, but the Duke of York, the fat spoiled son of George III. Such stories, lovingly polished through generations, contributed to the family’s sense of pride and place. Only Ellen’s great-granddaughter Daphne, with her cold detached eye, was not seduced. She recognised the destructive power of this pretension: ‘She will wander through life believing she has royal blood in her veins, and it will poison her existence. The germ will linger until the third or fourth generation. Pride is the besetting sin of mankind!’ Yet the du Maurier story ensnared her too. The family myths centred on these three tellers of tall tales: Mary Anne, Robert and the sisters’ grandfather George du Maurier. If imagination and creativity ran like a silver thread through the du Mauriers, so did emotional volatility and lurking depression. In some this darkened into madness, with George’s uncle confined to an asylum and his father so subject to bi-polar delusions (he believed he could build a machine to take his family to the moon) that he lived a life of impossible ambition and frustrated dreams. Some of these soaring flights of fancy would find alternative modes of expression in subsequent generations. George’s elder son, Guy, like George himself with Trilby, was overtaken in 1909 by an extraordinary flaring fame with An Englishman’s Home, a patriotic play he casually wrote before going to serve as a soldier in Africa. This was five years before the start of the Great War and he satirised his country’s unpreparedness. Sudden international celebrity was followed too soon by Guy’s heroic death in the world war he had foretold. George’s youngest child, Gerald, became an actor whose naturalistic lightness of touch changed the face of acting, where life and art seemed to combine in an effortless brilliance. Gerald made memorable the character of Raffles, the gentleman thief, and was the first actor to play J. M. Barrie’s Mr Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan. His portrayal of this unpredictable cavalier pirate set the template for that character’s appearance and behaviour in subsequent productions. This was the father of the du Maurier sisters, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne. As with all sisters, the du Mauriers’ relationship with each other was an indissoluble link to their childhood: for them that meant above all a link with their father and with Peter Pan. The play’s creator, J. M. Barrie – Uncle Jim to the girls – was a prolific and successful Scottish author and playwright who, nearly a generation older than their father, had been influential in Gerald’s early career and become a friend. Ever since they could first walk, the girls were taken on the annual pilgrimage to see the play performed at their father’s theatre, Wyndham’s. There, as the pampered children of the proprietor, they sat dressed in Edwardian satin and lace in their special box, saluted by the theatre staff and stars. They were celebrity children. Throughout their childhood the sisters would re-enact the play in their nursery, the words and ideas becoming engraved deep into their psyches. Daphne was always Peter; Angela was more than happy to play Wendy, while Jeanne filled in with whatever part Daphne assigned her. Peter Pan excited their imaginations and intruded on every aspect of their lives. Their father was closely identified with the double personae of Mr Darling and Captain Hook, and Peter himself, brought to life the same year Angela was born, remained the seductive ageless boy. While the du Maurier sisters reluctantly accepted that they had to grow up, Peter Pan lived on in an unchanging loop of militant childishness, mockingly reminding them of what they had lost. The excitement and wonder of the theatre, however, was something they never lost. It informed their lives, finding expression in their work, in the dramatic character of their houses and their attraction to those with a touch of stardust in their blood. Angela claimed Peter Pan as the biggest influence in her childhood: she saw it first performed when she was two and then finally played the role of Wendy in the theatre when she was nineteen. Her steadfast belief in fairies and prolonged childhood was encouraged by the play’s compelling messages. But the influence on Daphne was profound, for her own imagination and longings so nearly matched the ethos of the story: the thrill of fantasy worlds without parents; the recoil from growing into adulthood and the fear of loss of the imaginative power of the child. The tragic spirit of the Eternal Boy plucked at the du Mauriers, just as he did the Darling children who left him to enter the real world stripped of magic. The place between waking and dreaming would be very real to Daphne all her life and her phenomenally fertile imagination propelled her into her own Neverland, whose inhabitants were completely under her control. Neverland was never far away. Daphne still referred to Peter Pan as a metaphor when she was old, considering her children’s empty beds and imagining the Darling children having flown to adventures that she could not share. Her powerful identification with this world of make-believe fuelled her spectacular fame and riches and an intense life of the mind, but held her back in her growth to full maturity as a woman. Her sisters, excited by the same theatricality in their childhoods, responded very differently. Angela, never quite taking flight, was shadowed by her sense of earthbound failure, yet she had the courage to grow up and risk her heart in surprising ways. Jeanne largely cast it off to go her independent way and turned to the down-to-earth pleasures of gardening, and the sensuous realities of paint. These evocative childhood experiences brought the sisters not only the comfort of familiarity – ‘routes’ in du Maurier code – but nostalgia too for the past they had so variously shared. Just a word could transport them back to the thrill of the darkened theatre of their youth, full of anticipation of the big adventure about to begin. ‘On these magic shores [of Neverland] children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.’ These du Maurier girls were born as Edwardians in the brilliant shaft of light between the death in 1901 of the old Queen Victoria and the beginning of the First World War. It was a time when new ways of being seemed possible: pent-up feelings erupted into exuberant hope in the dawn of the twentieth century. Under a new and jovial king, the longing for pleasure and freedom replaced Victorian propriety and constraint, and this energy infected the nation. Such optimism extended to a young theatrical couple who married in 1903. Gerald du Maurier, as an actor and then theatrical manager, was already on a trajectory that would bring him fame, riches and a knighthood. His wife was the young actress Muriel Beaumont, cast with him in a comic play, The Admirable Crichton, a great hit in the West End. She was very young when responsibility and care for him was passed ceremonially to her from his mother (for whom he would remain always her precious pet ‘ewe lamb’) together with a list of his likes and dislikes. Muriel was a pretty actress who eventually gave up her career to be the wife of a great man and the mother of his children. Her two elder children would recall her impatience and irritability when they were young, her lack of humour, and her beauty, always her beauty. On cue, just over a year after their marriage, on 1 March 1904 a plump baby girl was born in No. 5 Chester Place, a terraced Regency house close to London’s Regent’s Park. While Muriel laboured in childbirth with their first child, Gerald managed to upstage her. Suffering a serious bout of diphtheria, a potentially fatal respiratory disease, for which the cat was blamed, he lay in isolation on the floor above and, it seemed, at death’s door. When Gerald had recovered and could at last see his firstborn he was delighted to have a daughter. Girls were a rarity in this generation of du Mauriers. His sister Trixie had three boys, Sylvia five, and his brother Guy and wife Gwen were childless. Most importantly, his adored father George du Maurier had longed for at least one granddaughter. ‘That endless tale of boys was a great disappointment. If only he was here to see Angela.’ For Angela is what this jolly baby was called. In the du Maurier family it was not enough to be a girl, however rare. Aside from ancestor worship, this was a family who adored beauty, demanded beauty, particularly in its women. This aesthetic sensibility was very marked in George whose drawings of gorgeous Victorian wasp-waisted females graced his witty cartoons. Despite his father’s good looks, Gerald’s attractiveness owed more to his charm and animation than the rather ungainly proportions of his face. He may have thought himself lacking in romantic good looks, but he was lightly built and elegantly made and expected grace and beauty in others, especially his womenfolk. Gerald’s wife Muriel was exceptionally attractive and stylish all her life, but their first daughter, by her own admission, was not: ‘I was a plain little girl, and I got plainer. Luckily, when I was small I was, apparently, amusing, but no one could deny I was plain.’ Muriel was still pursuing her acting career and baby Angela was handed over to ‘Nanny’ when she was eight months old, heralding Angela’s first great love affair in a life in which there would be many. This kind, inventive, affectionate young woman was the central loving presence in Angela’s universe and when she was dismissed, as surplus to requirements eight years later, the little girl’s bewilderment, grief and loneliness seemed to her ‘like a child’s first meeting with Death’. Angela’s earliest memories, before her sisters joined her in the nursery, were fragments of life. Between the ages of two and three she could remember her canary dying and being replaced, seamlessly, by another. This sleight of hand was enacted a few times more during her childhood. She remembered dancing as her mother played on the piano the hymn, Do No Sinful Action, and being sharply reprimanded for this serious but inexplicable sin. But her very first memory was of wetting her pants in Regent’s Park when dressed in her Sunday best of bright pink overcoat with matching poke bonnet, trimmed with beaver fur. To complete the vision of prosperous Edwardian childhood, white suede boots clothed small feet that were not expected to stamp in puddles or run in wet grass. This memory of her immaculate outward appearance, contrasting with the shameful evidence under her coat, remained with her for life. When Angela was three the family moved to 24 Cumberland Terrace, a larger house in a grander terrace a few hundred yards away, just as close to Regent’s Park. Muriel was expecting another baby and this time it was hoped she would produce the son and heir. Gerald’s obsession with his father made him long for a boy who might embody some of the lost qualities of artistry, imagination and charm that so distinguished George du Maurier: he wanted continuance of the du Maurier name and his father’s genius somehow reincarnated in a son. The baby was born late in the afternoon of 13 May 1907. After a week of heat the weather had finally broken and rain pelted down from a thunderous sky, and into the world came not the expected son but another daughter, although this time she was pretty, which was some consolation. Angela did not remember her sister’s arrival but she recalled her mother insisting ‘she was the loveliest tiny baby she has ever seen’. Gerald was playing that night to packed houses in a light comedy called Brewster’s Millions. The eponymous hero, who had to run through a million-dollar legacy before he could inherit another seven million, mirrored something of Gerald’s own cavalier attitude to money: his characteristic off-hand style and sense of fun endeared him to the audience. He returned from the theatre to find Nanny in charge of this second daughter. Gerald decided to call her Daphne, after the mesmerising actress Ethel Barrymore, who had much preferred the name Daphne to her own, and had jilted him before he had met Muriel. One wonders if Muriel knew after whom her second daughter was named – perhaps thinking the impetus was the nymph Daphne who ran from Apollo and his erotic intentions (as a last resort transforming herself into a laurel tree), rather than the American beauty from a great acting dynasty who ran from Gerald and his ravenous need for uncritical adoration. Daphne fitted into a nursery routine long practised by Nanny and Angela. Angela was almost four and for nearly all that time had been the focus of Nanny’s love. She may not have remembered her sister’s birth but recalled she had to relinquish sole command of the nursery and share her beloved with a demanding interloper. Apart from a couple of terms, Angela did not go to school and was not able to establish a new kingdom for herself outside the confines of the nursery. Life continued in its soothing routines but now everything had fundamentally changed. The highlight of the day was the walk to the park with the enormous coach-built pram, enamelled white to match their front door. There Nanny met other nannies and their charges were allowed some sedate play while the women chatted. The sisters were always impeccably dressed, and dressed alike, something that frustrated them as they grew older and struggled for their own identities. Their days were spent away from their parents, everything done for them by Nanny who never, it seemed to Angela, had a day off. In her eight years’ employment with the family there were only two holidays, but looking back this was such an unjust state of affairs that Angela wondered if she had misremembered it. The children were brought to their parents at the end of the day, washed, brushed and on their best behaviour. Good manners and above all quietness were instilled into them from an early age; Gerald was extremely sensitive to sound: even the singing of a blackbird could be too plangent for his peace of mind. As he and Muriel slept late and had a rest in the afternoon when they were working, Angela and Daphne, whose nursery was on the floor above their room, learnt to creep around and talk in whispers. When he was available to them, however, he was unusually interested in their young selves, endlessly inventive, funny and full of jokes and games. He was iconoclastic and mocking of others behind their backs and drew his daughters into the joke, though insisting at all times they maintain high standards of politeness and deference to adults, to their faces. Muriel finally gave up the stage when she was pregnant with her third baby – surely this time a boy. Angela had been praying for years for a baby brother, perhaps giving voice to the whole family’s hopes. She was just seven years old when Gerald and the doctor came into the nursery at lunchtime to tell them that they had a new baby sister. Angela, ever one to enjoy the dramatic in life and art, got down from the table (she had been eating cold beef and beetroot) and walked to an armchair where she knelt and gave thanks. Jeanne was born on 27 March 1911, the day after Gerald’s thirty-eighth birthday. Perhaps by now he was resigned to the lack of a son, for Muriel, at thirty, seemed unwilling, or unable, to add to their family. Luckily, Jeanne too was a pretty baby who managed to keep her crowd-pleasing charms; according to Angela, between the ages of two and six, Jeanne was the loveliest child she had ever seen. This verdict was not just a big sister’s pride, for the infant won a baby beauty contest. Having given up work during her pregnancy, it was not perhaps surprising that with more energy and time for her children Muriel’s youngest became her favourite. Gerald’s energies too had shifted. His career had been given greater propulsion when in 1910 he became an actor-manager by joining with partner Frank Curzon to manage Wyndham’s Theatre, in London’s West End. Although the current play there, Mr Jarvis, was a flop he was to have many more successes than failures and the family’s income and consequent standard of living rose dramatically. The girls’ childhoods were lastingly vivid to them, revisited often in memory and in the atmospheric energy of Angela’s and Daphne’s fiction. Their experiences, however, were very different. Angela was romantic and theatrical and easily gulled. Daphne was critical, detached and distrustful, even from young, of some of the stories told by the adults who cared for them. Angela was convinced that Father Christmas was real and, overcome with excitement, had swept the lowest curtsey possible when, aged seven, she came across an actor friend of her father’s in full fig of snowy beard, buckled red tunic and a throaty Yo ho ho. She was twelve when a friend’s insistence that the philanthropic old gent did not exist sent her to her mother in panic, certain she would be reassured: ‘When poor Mummie apologised and said, “I’m sorry darling, I’m afraid there isn’t,” [it] knocked the bottom out of childhood. With that bit of news went a bit of one’s trust.’ It was remarkable that she had maintained her belief almost into adolescence, testament to their isolation from other children, but also to Angela’s resolute romanticism and childlike sense of wonder. The maintaining of childish innocence, even ignorance, was positively encouraged by their father who loved having his family around him and dreaded his children growing up. Through his profession he conjured the theatrical template for Captain Hook, but in life he was a true Peter Pan, ever youthful, full of tricks; ‘gay, innocent and heartless’ as the boy who was afraid to grow up. Nowhere was this enforced innocence more pernicious in its effects than in the area of sex. Angela was told some fantastical story of where babies come from involving angels descending from the sky bearing fluffy bundles; a common enough deception at the time, but one that the highly emotional Angela would take to heart. When she was enlightened with the real truth in graphic detail by a ‘Miss Know All’, she was disgusted. ‘My father would never do such a thing,’ Angela declared in alarm. But worse than the crude explanation was the realisation that she had been lied to by the people she trusted most. The twelve-year-old worked out that the reason for these lies was ‘because the truth was so HORRIBLE that they couldn’t bear to tell it to me’. Inevitably, the parents got to hear of the schoolgirl chatter and Angela, somehow singled out as the source of this taboo revelation, and overcome with fear and shame, faced her appalled mother. Muriel ‘harangued [her] like the devil for having learned the truth’, and histrionically declared she could never trust her daughter again. Angela’s anger and dismay were still alive three and a half decades later when she wrote in her memoir how it was inevitable that she concluded, ‘“all that” [sexual intercourse] was horrible, unnatural, repulsive, disgusting and ugly’. It came close to blighting her emotional future, she explained; her youth, her whole life even, ‘came near to ruin’, through this particular piece of evasion and the shame-filled aftermath. Daphne was never so blindly trusting of those closest to her. Nor was she ever as na?ve. When she was six, and Angela nine, she saw through Nanny’s pretence that there were fairies on the lawn who made the fairy-ring of flowers and wrote little notes addressed to both girls by name in tiny fairy writing: Angela, eyes wide open in wonder, smiled delightedly. I stared at the circle. I must pretend to be pleased too, but the trouble was I did not believe in them … ‘They [the adults] wrote it themselves,’ I said after we got back. ‘They wouldn’t! Of course it was real.’ Angela was indignant. I shook my head. ‘It’s the sort of thing grown-ups do.’ All three du Maurier sisters were taken to the theatre from babyhood, to proper adult plays in which their father starred. They were treated by the cast and the theatre staff as special mascots: the glamour of the performance and the excitement when the lights went down deeply impressed these little girls and the memory stayed with them for life. Only once did Angela go as a small child to a pantomime, but she was so horrified by the harlequinade at the end – ‘something about a sausage shocked me at four’ – that she would not subject herself to another until she was nearly grown up. The girls regularly saw their father and mother dress up, put on make-up and become other people. It was the most natural thing to do. They visited Gerald in his dressing room after performances to find him high with adrenaline, charismatic, laughing and talking animatedly to the hordes of friends and acquaintances that always surrounded him, wiping the greasepaint off his face to return in stages to a heightened version of himself. It was thrilling and confusing and somehow conspiratorial, this almost magical transformation. Most of the family friends were also actors and actresses and they too practised this occult art. They seemed to live more intensely, their lives shiny with colour and light but speeded up, and soon over. The excitement fuelled childish imaginations and the glamour and theatricality of their existence blurred the boundaries between truth and fantasy. But if childhood certainties were proved no longer safe, what other truths would disappear as the lights went up? For Daphne, the fantasy world she inhabited was created by her own imagination, a refuge from a world in which she felt alien and adrift. She remembered that at only five years old, after being bullied in nearby Park Square Gardens by a seven-year-old called John Poynton, she came to the cheerless realisation that everyone was ultimately alone. From very young, feelings of powerlessness and being misunderstood made her long to be a boy and therefore stronger, braver, and more important – not this outer, more vulnerable, female self. She discovered that she, like her parents, could dress up and pretend to be someone else, but for her it was a private thing, a protection from a real world in which she was a stranger. Assuming the persona of another made it less painful when surrounded by unknown adults and their expectations. It ‘stopped the feeling of panic when visitors came’. Although Angela recalled her first eight years as being blissfully happy in the secure love and care of Nanny, ‘all my very happy early childhood can be laid at [her] door’, this was brought to a traumatic halt when, completely without warning or explanation, Angela saw this precious mother figure leave the house never to return. ‘I can see Nanny now,’ she wrote at nearly fifty, ‘going down the top flight of stairs and carefully shutting the gate behind her, tears pouring down her face, and only then myself being told she was going for ever.’ Eight-year-old Angela’s cheerful spirits were replaced with ‘a horrible sense of loneliness’. Daphne remembered this unhappy incident too but with much greater detachment: she was puzzled to see Nanny in tears because surely grown-ups don’t cry. Already, at five, she was aware that adults should never lose their dignity and she herself would very rarely cry, even as a child. Sadly grown-ups did cry. Tragedies befell the du Maurier family during the earliest years of the girls’ childhoods and it shadowed their father’s careless gaiety. First, Uncle Arthur Llewelyn Davies, married to their beautiful and gentle Aunt Sylvia, died after a long battle with a painful and disfiguring cancer of the jaw. He was only forty-four and his death in 1907, the year Daphne was born, left his wife with five young sons to bring up and educate. The Llewelyn Davies boys had been the inspiration for Peter Pan and J. M. Barrie, this lonely, childless man who shrank from the harsher elements of adult life, now stepped in to help Sylvia financially and practically with the education of her boys. However, the family’s ills were not over and Sylvia herself had not long to live. Not even the needs of her young family could anchor her to life and three years later she slipped away, aged forty-four, the same age as her dear Arthur. She was Gerald’s favourite sister and he and his family were broken-hearted for she was much loved by all who knew her. Yet this was not the end of their suffering for only three years later their eldest aunt, Trixie, died unexpectedly aged fifty leaving three mostly grown-up children of her own. She was the most energetic and forthright of them all. It seemed unbelievable that her vibrant spirit had been snuffed out so easily. Only their Aunt May, their father Gerald and the hero-uncle Guy remained of George’s five distinctive children. The Great War was further to devastate this diminishing band of du Mauriers. In 1914, Lieutenant Colonel Guy du Maurier was waved off by his family at Waterloo Station and headed to war. His mother, Big Granny to the three sisters, was overcome with emotion and collapsed in a dead faint on the platform. Angela and Daphne watched transfixed by the sight of their formal grandmother stretched out, her long black dress decorously pulled round her ankles and her white hair escaping from her bonnet. Within months she too had fallen ill, with heart failure, endured an operation urged on her by her children, and never recovered. According to Daphne, she died in the arms of both her sons. Her death undid the family, and Gerald, her spoiled youngest, particularly felt the loss of her devotion. She had been such a central controlling presence. Her children had deferred to her, written every day while away, sought to please her and been offered all-encompassing love in return. Only nine weeks later, while everyone was still rapt with grief, Uncle Guy, loved by his troops and his family alike and rumoured to be due promotion to brigadier general the following day, was killed as he evacuated his battalion from the front line. He was not quite fifty. Both Angela and Daphne were possessive of his love and attention for, although he was Angela’s godfather, Daphne shared his birthday. Unhappiness overwhelmed the family once more. Angela was mortified that she had not written to him while he was at the front, despite being his godchild. She was put out that Daphne had sent him letters and felt that somehow this made their hero-uncle, her godfather, belong more to her sister than to her. The most anguished though was Gerald. He had received the telegram while he was in the middle of his evening performance of the play Raffles and had to go the moment the curtain fell to tell Guy’s widow, Gwen, the awful news. Guy had been the epitome of the heroic elder son. Attractive to everyone for his breezy good humour, he had engaged in the manly things that mattered, and given his life for King and Country. He had also created An Englishman’s Home, the play that seemed to grasp the spirit of the age and for an extraordinary moment take by storm the theatre-going world on both sides of the Atlantic. His success as a writer had somehow proved to Gerald that their father’s genius had not died with him but lived on in Guy, until extinguished tragically too soon. Guy had added his own robust heroism to his father’s creative flame. All Gerald had done so far was pretend to be other people and provide a few hours’ distraction while momentous events happened elsewhere. He was overcome with regret at having taken his big brother for granted, for not writing often enough; he despaired at the apparent futility of his own life. The devoted family who had loved Gerald as their baby, protected and spoilt him, had been lost to him within a period of only five years. ‘Poor darling D[addy],’ Daphne wrote, ‘had none of his family left but Aunt May.’ Gerald and May, whose health had never been good, had been considered the weaklings and now they were all who remained from the close-knit and glamorous du Maurier clan. The next tragedy, just a few days later, was made no less painful by the knowledge that personal catastrophe had become commonplace: young men with all their promise before them were dying in their thousands in filthy trenches in a foreign land. The sisters’ cousin, George Llewelyn Davies, one of the orphaned boys, had excelled at Eton and just gone up to Trinity College Cambridge when he joined the Army on the outbreak of war. Less than a week after his Uncle Guy’s death, George, a second lieutenant with the Rifle Brigade, was killed at the front, aged just twenty-one. Everywhere were families overborne by grief. The sisters could not turn to the comforts of religion and the belief that the beloved dead would be reunited at last, for Gerald had no faith and was an emphatic atheist. Although their mother Muriel and her family were conventionally religious, Gerald’s lack of belief set the tone for the du Maurier children: ‘the Church was a World Apart to us’. Angela, however, remembered the occasional treat of attending a very high Anglican Mass with her Aunt Billy (her mother’s sister Sybil) where, she admitted, the scent of incense and the ritual ringing of little bells appealed to her emotionalism and theatricality. The rituals of the Anglo-Catholic Church would become a solace to last a lifetime, long after the appeal of Peter Pan had faded. As for most children, however, the full impact of these family tragedies did not strike as hard, for the routines of daily life continued, offering comfort and entertaining distractions. London was milling with soldiers and their songs penetrated the genteel portals of Cumberland Terrace. Angela, Daphne and Jeanne marched and sang, as the troops did, memorable ditties like Who-Who-Who’s Your Lady Friend? Angela had overheard someone tell their nurse that in wartime everyone made eyes at the soldiers. She interpreted this to mean that it was a patriotic duty and so the girls would practise ‘making eyes’. Daphne thought that the soldiers in Regent’s Park, rewarded with an encouraging smirk and sidelong squint, luckily did not notice. Their father Gerald, however, was not as emotionally resilient as his children. His mercurial character had found easy expression in his early years through acting. His capricious and light-hearted delivery had pioneered a new informal, conversational style, refreshing after the more self-conscious theatricality of the older generation of actors like Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree. Easily bored, Gerald needed constant diversion and had already been tiring of his stage work. However, even the greater challenges in becoming an increasingly successful actor-manager, sharing the responsibilities of selecting plays and cast, directing the acting and reaping the not inconsiderable rewards when a show was a hit, did not banish entirely the sense of ennui that sometimes overcame him. With the approach of middle age and the harsh realities of death all around, Gerald’s facile emotions as readily flipped into existential gloom. This volatile seesaw of elation and depression ran in the family; his father had sought comfort in his wife and children and a wide circle of artistic friends, and Gerald did the same. To evade the abyss he filled his leisure hours with an endless round of social activity, handled with aplomb by Muriel, whose only desire apparently was to make him happy. Family holidays often involved a small party of friends and hangers-on, largely funded by Gerald whose capacity to earn money increased dramatically along with his readiness to spend it. He was a demanding and devoted father and, given his emotional nature and love of fun and practical jokes, became the shining sun in his young daughters’ universe. He was a regular in their nursery, ready to play games with them, read stories and preside over mock trials when squabbles broke out between his daughters. More than once he brought J. M. Barrie up to the nursery where the du Maurier girls, without any self-consciousness, acted out for him the whole of Peter Pan: Daphne as Peter, Angela as Wendy and Mrs Darling, and when necessary a pirate or two, while Jeanne was Michael and any other part as necessary. Gerald slipped into his old blood-curdling role of Hook. The girls would slither as mermaids on the floor and fly from chair to chair, thrillingly immersed in their own fantasy of Neverland. In fact for years Angela liked to believe that the lights in Regent’s Park were fairy lights, ‘like those in the last scene of Peter Pan’. All three sisters pretended to be characters other than themselves throughout their childhood. It seemed that everyone they knew did the same. Histrionics were a way of life. It was not just Angela who screamed she was being murdered if the nurse got soap in her eyes when washing her hair. With Gerald, emotions were magnified; from the anchoritic groans of a man in despair he could become the clown in the nursery or a capriciously domineering Hook. Amongst the children, Daphne was already in thrall to her imagination and became the main mover in the sisters’ dramatic reconstructions of history (executions and torture were popular) or action scenes from books of adventure and derring-do. Daphne insisted on playing the hero, only deigning to be a girl if the character was warlike and heroic, like Joan of Arc. Angela was happy enough for a while to play the female roles, even though they often ended in tears or death. She remembered the lure of The Three Musketeers, with herself as the responsible, elder Athos. Daphne of course was the upstart outsider d’Artagnan, their natural leader, and ‘poor Jeanne becoming Aramis’. The older girls didn’t rate the amorous, ambitious Aramis so left him to their little sister who would not complain. No one wanted to be Porthos, whose good-natured gullibility made him too dull to be heroic. Although Angela recalled being blissfully happy up to the age of eight, in Daphne’s memory her childhood lacked even a few years of uncontaminated happiness. From early on she stood out in the family as the beauty but also as the difficult one. Angela was gregarious and outgoing and in her own estimation was a highly nervous child, but never shy. Manners were everything. The correct appearance of things mattered to the family, and shyness was considered by their parents to be extremely bad manners. Angela could converse with the adults and sweep impressive curtseys when required, but Daphne was not sociable and charming in the way that privileged Edwardian children were expected to be. Already brave and individual, in society Daphne was introverted and shy. When introduced to grown-ups, she was more likely to scowl than simper, and escape to the nursery and her own private world as soon as she could. Being singled out in the family by her father as his favourite was a perilous honour Daphne was ill-equipped to receive. It was perhaps a major reason for the lack of sympathy between herself and her mother, ‘someone who looked at me with a sort of disapproving irritation, a queer unexplained hostility’. Daphne insisted that from the age of two, when memories began, she had never once been held by her mother or sat on her lap and that this sense of thwarted longing and alienation turned her inwards. ‘I became tongue-tied with shyness, and absolutely shut in myself, a dreamer of dreams.’ It changed the way she viewed the world. She grew watchful and wary, aware always of an uneasy exile. ‘You could never be quite sure of any of them, even relations.’ She recognised Gerald behind his many dramatic personae, but she was disconcerted by Muriel, fearful that her role as mother was just a fa?ade and that she was really the Snow Queen in disguise. If those closest to you appear unpredictable and powerful, as beings possessed of knives, where as a child can you feel safe? This sense of domestic menace fuelled her extraordinarily fertile imagination, expressed all her life in macabre stories and dreams. Where Angela was wide-eyed and believed anything, Daphne took nothing on trust. Extreme wariness and diffidence followed her into adult life, perhaps magnified by her sensitive apprehension as a child that beneath her mother’s lovely exterior existed something deadly to her emerging self. Even in middle age, when she was no longer afraid of a mother who had grown frail and grateful, Daphne’s anxieties found outlet in cinematic nightmares about her, ‘in which my anger against her is so fearful that I nearly kill her!’ There was a cool steely quality behind Muriel’s delicate beauty and this contrast was confusing. She seemed so compliant with Gerald’s extravagances, so ready to act the perfect wife and mother, but even Angela, her responsible eldest and ever eager to please, did not elicit much sympathy from an impatient Muriel who took it upon herself to teach her eldest to read when small and reduced her to tears every time. Despite the apparent self-sacrifice of herself and her career, Muriel was considered by some of her daughters’ friends to be charming, but selfish. Like many of her generation born towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign she was a snob and very keen that her daughters mixed in the right circles. The girls understood the code of the du Mauriers, as Angela recalled: blatantly the upper classes and lower classes were alluded to, but the middle class, to which lots of us belonged and we belong, was never mentioned by us! We probably kidded ourselves that we were of the first category, and I squirm when I remember how my darling mother would talk with a sniff about ‘that class’ when speaking of some servant or other. The highlight of the year for the young du Maurier sisters was the summer retreat to the country. Every May they were dispatched to a rented house with maids and a nurse and there they stayed until August, often without their parents who remained for some of the time in London, acting or dealing with the business of the theatre. Although their behaviour was still constrained by adults’ demands, their country surroundings offered a whole range of new experiences and freedoms denied them in town, where routines and lack of space stifled the spirit of childish adventure and freedom. One significant freedom was to be able to make a noise, to walk and talk without constraint, instead of creeping in silence around their London house in the mornings while their parents slept. Everything became slightly looser. The servants seemed more cheerful, the sisters squabbled less and Mummy did not wear a hat at lunch. In the summer of 1913, when Angela was nine, Daphne six and Jeanne still only a toddler, the girls arrived at Slyfield Manor in Great Bookham in Surrey. Rented by their parents for the summer, this house impressed the elder sisters with its ancient mystery and the beauty of its surroundings. It was dark and creaky inside, a manor dating back to the Domesday Book, but the current building was largely Elizabethan: the great Queen was meant to have stayed a night here. Perhaps they learnt too of stories of the ghostly blue donkey that leapt the high gates at the bottom of the stairs (installed in an earlier age to keep fierce guard dogs at bay) to disappear into the gloom. Daphne was scared of walking these dark-panelled stairs alone, but the atmosphere of the place and the conjured presence of Elizabeth I stirred her imagination: ‘Where had they all gone, the people who lived at Slyfield once? And where was I then? Who was I now?’ To Angela it was much less complicated. Slyfield was ‘the loveliest house I have ever lived in’. It was there that this city girl discovered the beauty of bluebells and the intoxicating smell of lilac from a bush beneath her bedroom window. Her happiness that summer was made complete by her infatuation with a farmhand called Arthur who sat her on his great horse. For the first time Daphne felt she ‘had come off second-best’, for Angela ‘smiled down at me, proud as a queen’. Daphne preferred the farm animals, the great shire horses and the luscious countryside with the River Mole flowing through the manor’s grounds. But mostly the country meant the precious freedom to go off on one’s own, on some adventure, only to return to the adults’ dominion with reluctance and impatience at their intrusion into her world. Already very unalike in character, both girls seemed to inhabit parallel universes, Angela’s emotional, connected to others and Daphne’s bounded only by her imagination and peopled with her own creations. With a macabre detachment she could dispassionately watch the gardener at Slyfield nail a live adder to a tree, declaring it would take all day to die, and return at intervals to watch it writhing in its desperate attempts to break free. Aunt Billy had given Daphne two doves in a cage and she found it tiresome to have to feed and care for them when she would rather be out doing interesting things. She was struck how Angela loved administering to her pair of canaries and sang while she cleared out their droppings and sprinkled fresh sand on the base of their cage. Daphne’s solution was to set her doves free and accept without complaint the scolding that would be forthcoming, for this was the price of her freedom from care. Jeanne, so much younger, amenably slipped into whatever game or role her elder sisters required. She was pretty and jolly and loved by her mother and nurse, and her life had not yet deepened into its later complexities. While the children spent the summer at Slyfield, Gerald enjoyed one of his great theatrical successes up in town. He had produced Diplomacy, a melodrama by the nineteenth-century French dramatist Victorien Sardou who was known for the complex constructions of his plots and the shallowness of his characterisation. This play sprang the young actress Gladys Cooper to fame, playing Dora the beautiful spy at the centre of the action. All her life, Gladys was to remain a close friend of the whole family, loved and admired by the du Maurier daughters as much as by Gerald. Angela and Daphne were both taken to see the play in which their father, as producer, had given himself a minor role that he played with characteristic nonchalance. Angela never forgot the dramatic impact at the end of Act Two as the exquisite Dora banged the door hysterically crying, ‘Julian, Julian, Julian!’ When Sardou was asked what tips he would give an aspiring playwright he famously advised: ‘Torture the women!’ It certainly made the play memorable for an impressionable girl of eight and in their nursery productions, Angela would reprise with gusto Dora’s tortured door-banging and weeping. This dramatic scene and the part of Wendy from Peter Pan were her two favourite acting roles, repeated many times with her sisters. Angela also never forgot her first meeting with Gladys, not just for her luminous beauty at barely twenty-two, but for one of her father’s characteristic roles as the unpredictable joker. On a summer Sunday morning in 1911, when Angela was seven, she and Gerald drew up in the family car at Rickmansworth station to meet the London train. Angela was sent off alone to pick up ‘the prettiest lady’ she could find amongst the throng on the platform. Luckily, Gladys stood out with her fine fair hair and dazzling blue eyes and this small child in her sun bonnet emerged from the crowd and solemnly took the prettiest lady by the hand and without a word led her back to the car where Gerald waited, highly amused. ‘How like my father, Gerald du Maurier!’ recalled Angela decades later, with a mixture of exasperation and affectionate pride. The year after this great success, Britain was at war. The assassination on 28 June 1914 of the Archduke of Austria in a little known part of the Balkans was the start of what became known as the Great War. Initially, however, there was no great concern at home as eager boys were waved off as part of an expeditionary force; most people thought they would all be home by Christmas. And although everything had changed, in some respects life for the du Maurier children went on in much the same routine. They still spent the summer months in the country, each year gaining greater freedoms. In 1915 they were in Chorley Wood in Surrey and Angela, by now eleven years old, had lessons every day with a family across the common. Daphne was left on her own with their first family dog, Jock, a much-loved bottlebrush of a West Highland Terrier that became her loyal companion on solitary adventures in the gardens and countryside beyond. Jeanne was growing up and at four had become more use to Daphne in her dramatic recreations of adventure stories. This year it was Treasure Island that captivated her: Angela was roped in to playing the supporting parts, and Jeanne filled in as Blind Pew to Daphne’s Jim Hawkins or Long John Silver. Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific and highly successful historical nineteenth-century novelist, became for a while Angela and Daphne’s favourite author, his stories providing Daphne with plenty of dramatic incident to re-enact with her sisters. The Tower of London provided ample opportunity for torture and death. Angela was happy enough to play Bloody Mary (for whom she admitted some affection) but was proving less tractable to joining in with Daphne’s imaginative games, keener on pursuing her own more grown-up interests. Jeanne, however, was happy to be Daphne’s sidekick and was beheaded many times by her elder sister without complaint. ‘Jeanne, strutting past, certainly made a moving figure, her curls pinned on the top of her head, while I, the axeman, waited …’ Unsurprisingly, Daphne could not recall in these childhood games ever being felled herself by the executioner’s axe, although she would submit occasionally to the torturer’s rack or to energetic writhing in simulating a victim of a rat attack. Catholics and Huguenots provided another thrilling enactment with all kinds of grisly tortures and deaths, but on her terms. More memorable and exciting even than Slyfield Manor was the family’s visit in 1917 to Milton, a stately colonnaded country mansion near Peterborough, owned by a friend of their mother’s, Lady Fitzwilliam. Daphne recalled with some puzzlement that her usual shyness and diffidence as a child, when confronted with new people and experiences, was here swept aside as she stood in the grandeur of the great hall. Instead she was overwhelmed by an instantaneous feeling of happiness, recognition, even love. This sense of familiarity and affection for the house never left her and much later became conflated with her mysterious Cornish mansion, Menabilly, to create her most famous fictional house, Rebecca’s Manderley. The girls were only at Milton for ten days, Angela and Daphne sharing one spacious bedroom and their mother and Jeanne another. The sisters entertained and played cards with the convalescing soldiers who were nursed by the Red Cross in the centre of the great house, but there was so much laughter and good humour among the men that the terrors of war did not impinge on the young girls’ thoughts at all. There was too much fun to be had, hiding and seeking in the unused wing, visiting the pack of Fitzwilliam hounds, rabbiting with the soldiers, hanging over the huge jigsaw puzzle that Lady Fitzwilliam worked on most of the time. She nicknamed the du Maurier girls Wendy, Peter and Jim, much to their delight, particularly Daphne’s for she was awarded Peter, that most promising of boy personas. Despite the war, plays continued to be performed in the West End and Gerald’s successes added to his reputation and his growing fortune. He was becoming more interested in producing than acting but nevertheless, in The Ware Case by George Bancroft, his triumphant production in 1915, took the lead in what his daughter Angela considered one of the finest parts of his career. He played a financier who murdered his brother-in-law, found dead in his garden pond. After a tense trial he was declared not guilty. The trial scene itself was a dramatic novelty for the time and all the more nerve-racking for that. Daphne was gripped by it and recognised Gerald’s acting skills in making the audience believe in Hubert Ware’s innocence, despite so much evidence to the contrary. Angela found it impossible to forget the final scene and the look on her father’s face ‘of hopeless hatred and bitterness’ as he cried: ‘You bloody fools, I did it!’ before taking poison and dramatically collapsing to the stage. She insisted, perhaps a bit defensively, that there was nothing hammy in this at all. Daphne herself appeared in a charity production at Wyndham’s of a musical version of a play by J. M. Barrie, The Origin of Harlequin, performed in August 1917. The star of the show was a boy, the Honourable Stephen Tennant, at eleven only one year older than Daphne herself, who was struck by how grown up he looked and how well he danced. Stephen was a pretty, clever child who was to grow into an exquisite and talented young man whose life and body became his greatest work of art. The dancing boy had also noticed the young Daphne, but then it was hard to miss her as she was dressed as a Red Indian. Reminded of this fact fifty-five years later, Daphne recalled that the costume was probably a birthday present and she had refused to appear in the show, ‘unless I could be disguised, self-protection I suppose’. It was inevitable that highly imaginative children, living with this everyday theatricality, would wonder what life was really about. Murderers and fairies crowded the stage, but did the dream end when one awoke? When the lights went up and the crowds left the foyer streaming into the bright night, what was real of whatever remained? Young men were dying in a bloody war just a few hundred miles away; their young cousin, their uncle, were already dead in the slaughter. Confusingly, at home the show went on, with actors pretending to die and children executing each other with imaginary axes, and Daphne dancing on stage as a fully-feathered Indian brave. Two years earlier Gerald had viewed a Georgian mansion for sale in the leafy village of Hampstead. Cannon Hall had once been a courthouse and it stood in proud command of its demesne of large gardens and various outhouses including a lock-up – much to the sisters’ pleasure – a real jail at last. Gerald was immediately struck by the Hall’s theatrical staircase and decided then and there that he would have it. To return in some style to the area of London where his father had lived and he had grown up seemed to add a nice symmetry to his restless life and would perhaps help to recapture some of the happiness and contentment that had gone. As Gerald attempted to reconnect with his past, he was unconsciously setting a new scene for his daughters’ future. 2 Lessons in Disguise Sisters? They should have been brothers. They would have made splendid boys. NO?L WELCH, The Cornish Review CANNON HALL WAS the du Mauriers’ last London home. The family moved there in 1917 in the darkest days of the war, and life for the girls aged thirteen, ten and six changed for ever. The house was much larger than their town house at Cumberland Terrace, and Hampstead Heath was a vast wild territory on the borders of urban civilisation, so much more alive with possibility than genteel Regent’s Park. The Hall’s gardens were enormous and beckoned the sisters into a private world of make-believe and adventure, a place where they did not have to wear coats and hats when they went out, while the wider horizons of the heath were just a hop and a skip away. Gerald was earning a great deal of money from his continued successes at Wyndham’s and, proud of his elegant new house, he imported furniture and objets d’art to match its early-Georgian splendour. The historical paintings he bought to grace the theatrical staircase impressed Daphne most: a mournful portrait of Charles II, a vast battle scene, food for many re-enactments, and a portrait of Elizabeth I, majestic on the stairs, made every trip to bed full of fascination and not a little menace. The most dramatic change for the du Maurier sisters was school. For the first time in their lives, Angela and Daphne were to mix with a group of children and adults who did not belong to the glamorous circle of their parents’ acquaintances. It was an alien experience that ten-year-old Daphne, self-sufficient and already armoured against the world, thoroughly enjoyed and Angela, three years older, nervous, conscientious and over-emotional, loathed. The school was a small private establishment in a large house in Oak Hill Park, a road in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. It was owned and run by an elderly, strict Scot called Miss Tulloch. Elizabeth Tulloch, like many schoolmistresses at the time, was an unmarried woman whose energies and talents had few outlets apart from teaching. She had established her school in 1884 and at sixty-seven was at the end of her career when the two, largely unschooled, du Maurier girls turned up on her doorstep. Angela and Daphne walked to school every day with satchels on their backs to enter very different worlds. Daphne had a sympathetic teacher who thought her stories were the best in the class, but her spelling and handwriting were atrocious. Daphne was not particularly troubled by this criticism, although she was miffed that another girl won the short story competition with an inferior tale but better presentation. She quickly became leader of a gang of girls who intimidated any classmate who displeased them by threatening to burn her at the stake. The punishment was straight out of Daphne’s historical re-enactments. She enjoyed being able to exercise her imagination and power on a bigger stage, and with a larger cast than just two sisters. Angela admitted that she was terrified of the teachers from the start and was unprepared for the classwork, particularly arithmetic – an arcane mystery she would never fathom. Unfortunately her teacher was a fearsome Miss Webb who attacked her fumbled sums with a forbidding blue pencil and little sympathy. Maths homework was a torture and so many tears were shed that Gerald, unable to make sense of any of it himself, would ring up his business partner for help. What appeared to upset Angela as much was the chaos and noise of nearly two hundred girls going about their school day, banging desks, their feet thumping carelessly on wooden boards, their voices raised; she had been brought up to creep noiselessly from room to room while parents slept, not to chatter and laugh in corridors and stairwells. Her only companions previously had been her well-behaved younger sisters and polite adults. The cacophony of girls en masse alarmed her, until she discovered a few nice quiet girls like herself. But it was these quiet girls who revealed the real truth of how babies are made and thereby destroyed, by Angela’s own admission, her trust in her parents and stunted her social development in adolescence and young womanhood. The school got to know of these clandestine conversations and Muriel was summoned. The shame of her mother’s wrath and her own horror at the grotesqueness of sexual intercourse meant Angela’s reaction to the next incursion of her safe world was even more extreme. Every day on their way to and from school, the sisters would walk along a lane so secluded it seemed almost to be deep country. Just another morning turned into a day that Angela would not be able to recall without shuddering. She noticed a wounded soldier in the lane. The sisters had been taught to think of all soldiers as heroes. Their soldier-uncle Guy had died defending his country, and their young cousins were still fighting the Germans, one already killed before he had grown to be a man. This young soldier before her was not only wounded, and therefore even more heroic in Angela’s na?ve imagination, but was wearing a uniform of the most beautiful celestial blue. The colour so attracted her that she gazed at the man full of sympathetic feeling. Then, this embodiment of courage and virtue, exposed himself to the schoolgirls. Angela was shocked and bewildered at the betrayal of his noble appearance and the sight of this terrible dark hidden thing. She was naturally highly strung and quite ignorant of the naked male body and had certainly never seen a man’s genitals before. The shock was compounded many times by the fact she had already been sworn to silence over the previous schoolgirl debacle. She had been forbidden by her mother to mention anything about sex to Daphne, who was walking beside her and, lost in her own thoughts, completely oblivious to the situation. Angela could not turn to her, in fact felt a sense of responsibility for her – slightly misplaced in this case as Daphne, more intellectually curious and emotionally detached, would not have been so disturbed by the situation. In fact, Daphne was to be shielded from the facts of life until she was eighteen when, enlightened by a school friend, was astounded: ‘What an extraordinary thing for people to want to do!’ But twelve-year-old Angela, more confused and distressed, could not even confide in the girls at school as, after the earlier showdown with her mother and Miss Tulloch, the small group of sexual know-alls there had been dispersed and warned not to talk of such things again. So Angela’s shock of discovery combined with disgust and fear was internalised. Years later she insisted there was no exaggeration in her description of the devastating effect these two incidents of sexual revelation and the accompanying secrecy, silence and shame had on her development. She became self-conscious, she said, felt an uneasy burden of taint and alienation, her mind straying to ghastly imaginings when confronted by any recently married woman. Hers was an elephant’s memory, she declared, and her scared younger self lived on within her well into adulthood. ‘Not for many years did I tell anyone, and for what it’s worth not for more years than anyone would believe possible could I bear to think about a man, much less look at one.’ Instead, she retreated to the safer alternative of idolising her male cousin Gerald Millar, nine years her senior and already fighting in the Great War (in which he would be awarded the Military Cross). A girl given to serial crushes and longing for affection, Angela inevitably fell in love with the head girl at school but gained emotional satisfaction by imagining marrying her off to Gerald, with nothing more than a chaste kiss between them: ‘Love to me meant romantic young soldiers in khaki, Keeping the Home Fires Burning, the Prince of Wales, Handsome Actors, Beautiful Actresses, and falling in love, and no sex in any of it.’ Not surprisingly perhaps, Angela and Daphne’s schooling at Miss Tulloch’s was soon over. They attended for four terms, punctuated by most of the childhood diseases they had so far evaded. Angela thought they were withdrawn from school once a uniform of neat blue gym tunics was mooted; their parents would rather their girls gave up their education than their pretty print dresses. But a more serious reason occurred to Angela in middle age: their parents, particularly Gerald, were militant about maintaining their daughters’ innocence when it came to sex and they feared what the girls might learn ‘in giggled whispers from our contemporaries’ about ‘the wicked World’. Silence and ignorance were not bliss, as Angela painfully discovered when she and Daphne returned to the routines of nursery life to continue to learn what they could with a nursery maid as teacher. The du Maurier parents did not value academic education for their girls. The maid was already engaged in trying to teach six-year-old Jeanne to read, but luckily both older girls were already keen readers and they absorbed much about history, writing style and romance from the adventures of Alexandre Dumas and Harrison Ainsworth. Angela and Daphne became well informed on the most arcane and melodramatic elements of Louis XIII’s France, Guy Fawkes, witches, London’s Great Fire and Great Plague, and executions through the ages, but they were not learning much about life in their own rapidly changing century. German Zeppelins overhead occasionally broke the Hampstead calm, sending the family and their servants running for the cellar, shattering Angela’s already over-sensitive nerves, but no one really discussed the drama that engulfed them all. Beyond the graceful fa?ade of Cannon Hall, beyond the garden parties and glittering first nights at Wyndham’s with Daddy and Mummy, their supporters and friends, the world of 1917 was convulsed by total war. In England, the movement for female equality and emancipation was gaining support, with women from all walks of life campaigning with ingenuity, determination, violence and occasional hilarity. For the du Maurier girls, growing up surrounded by beautiful actresses and make-believe, it was hard to comprehend that women would rebel against the status quo. More distant still was the thought that women’s work could be dirty, gruelling and dangerous – and essential to the nation’s efforts, not just in the factories but also at the front line as nurses and ambulance drivers. Mrs Pankhurst had even suggested that women could be trained up as a fighting force, as they were in Russia. She saw women taking their full part in all aspects of war as strengthening her call for women’s vote. Most privileged middle-class girls of the time were shielded from the worst horrors of the war, but for the du Maurier sisters their retreat from school not only limited their contact with the wider world, it also meant their narrow view of what it was to be a woman remained unchallenged. Beauty, fine manners and charm were prerequisites, as demanded by their father and embodied in their mother, regardless of what darkness or mutiny went on beneath the surface. The lack of an independent school life with friends and exposure to different perspectives meant the overwhelming influence on the sisters’ thinking and opinions came from their reading, their imaginations and their parents – and the du Maurier parents were more influential and odder than most. As an Edwardian father, Gerald set the family’s ethos and was opinionated and melodramatic in the expression of his views. Fascinating and contradictory, he was terrified of boredom yet easily bored, seeking distraction in other people and gossip. Extravagant in most things and a natural show-off, he was ever fearful of stillness and introspection. He was a physically elegant man, not tall, but slightly built with a large head and raw-boned features in a highly expressive face. Witty, light-hearted and terrific company, Gerald so often played the joker in the pack. Roger Eckersley, the genial Director of Programmes at the BBC, was struck by his subversive energy: ‘I have seldom met anyone more bubbling over with the absurdist nonsense than [him].’ But Gerald would as easily swing into depression and self-pity when nothing seemed to be right, and he could be as petulant as a spoilt child. Greatly fond and easy-going with his children, Gerald alternated between laxity and ridiculous strictness. Angela thought him ‘a strange father because in a lot of ways he was much more like a brother, but he could be very difficult’. What she found problematic was how, on occasions, he became an emotional bully: possessive and intrusive in their lives, unaware of the pernicious effects of his blundering comments and flippant ridicule. She recalled a story of how her father had often had flaming rows round the dining table with one of his sisters, probably Aunt May, and on one occasion, when she burst into tears, he had shouted after her as she left the room ‘that she was “a barren bitch”’. He appeared to get away with this kind of cruelty. Aunt May had indeed wanted children but not managed to have them. Their father George had only gently remonstrated with Gerald over his comment, and then rewarded him with a wink. Evidently, Gerald was still the indulged youngest child. The kindly husband of his humiliated sister could only manage a startled clearing of the throat. His daughters liked to remember their father more as a Peter Pan than a Captain Hook. He entered their games with gusto, playing cricket on the lawn and teaching Daphne and Jeanne to box by tapping each other on the nose. As an atheist he gave his daughters no formal religious education, but he was however sentimental and superstitious. He did not rate modern art or music, even though Millais and Whistler had been some of his father’s closest friends. He hated and feared homosexuality, despite many in his profession and among his friends being quite clearly sexually unconventional. All these strongly held opinions were absorbed by the sisters. One of the contradictions most difficult for them to integrate into their own social behaviour was exhibited daily by Gerald. He was courteous and charming to a fault to everyone he met, from strangers to his closest associates, but mocked and mimicked them when their backs were turned. One of the most important lessons inculcated into the sisters was the necessity of social grace and politeness at all times. The contradiction of being expected by their father to curtsey sweetly to his friends was hard to reconcile with the encouragement to ridicule them once they had gone. Such double standards were confusing. It was hard for a child to fathom what was real in love and friendship if it all appeared to be a sham. The mockery was often fond, aimed at his closest friends, and bonded him with his audience of admiring daughters. But it also encouraged a sense of superiority, setting them apart from the mocked, making it difficult to empathise or be intimate with someone reduced to a caricature. The du Maurier family language, wonderfully visual and effective with distinctive words and phrases practised by Gerald and expanded by his children, entertained and strengthened the sense of tribal feeling. It also excluded outsiders and reinforced the family’s separateness. The writer Oriel Malet, who became a great friend of Daphne’s in her middle age and then of Daphne’s daughter Flavia, recalled how the coded language, colourful and intriguing as it was, could make one feel a foreigner among friends. Daphne in her 1949 novel, The Parasites, evoked brilliantly the theatricality of the sisters’ childhood that set them apart, describing how disconcerting the fictional Delaney (and du Maurier) children could be: [Maria] had the uncanny knack of exaggerating some little fault or idiosyncrasy … and her unfortunate victim would be aware of this, aware of Maria’s large blue eyes that looked so innocent, so full of dreams, and which were in reality pondering diabolical mischief … [Niall]’s silence was full of meaning. The grown-up individual meeting him for the first time would feel summed-up and judged, and definitely discarded. Glances would pass between Niall and Maria to show that this was so, and later, not even out of earshot, would come the sounds of ridicule and laughter. Unusual for his generation, Gerald enjoyed his daughters’ company and this intimacy meant his influence on their growing minds was all the more powerful and potentially malign. Unusually for any generation, Gerald confided his romantic entanglements with young actresses to Angela and Daphne and made an entertainment of it, inviting them to scoff at the young women’s naivety and misplaced hopes, and compromising the sisters’ natural loyalty to their mother, who was not included in these confidences. These young actresses were nicknamed ‘the stable’ by his daughters, who were encouraged to think of them as fillies in a race for the prize of their father’s attentions. His daughters ‘would jeer, “And what’s the form this week? I’m not going to back [Miss X] much longer”,’ and they laughed as their father brilliantly mimicked the voices and mannerisms of the poor deluded girls. These conversations made them feel uneasy though. Their father was positively Victorian in his attitudes to his own daughters’ morals: he was pathologically suspicious of any male with whom they socialised, implying that something dreadful lurked behind the friendly wave or kiss on the cheek, and did not want them to grow up. Angela found his intrusiveness hard to bear. As a young woman returning from a party, she would see him peering from the landing window: ‘“Who brought you home?” he would say, if the chauffeur had not collected us. “Did he kiss you?” he would ask. Absolutely frightful. He was easily shocked.’ He darkly threatened that they would ‘lose their bloom’, which suggested to them that a young man’s kiss somehow tarnished their looks, that the rot would set in, making their corruption visible to all. Angela concluded her father would have been happiest if his daughters had been nuns, with Cannon Hall as the nunnery. Yet Gerald’s own behaviour belonged more to the Restoration age where self-indulgence and the desperate desire for distraction cast constraint to the winds. Angela was confused and scared by her father’s sexual hypocrisy. Daphne, wary of adults and suspicious of their motives, perhaps grew even less inclined to look to conventional love and marriage as the path to happiness, with the example of her own adored father before her. In her teenage diary she wrote, ‘I suddenly thought how awful just being married would be. I should be so afraid, so terribly afraid, but of what? I don’t know.’ Jeanne was still young and protected by her mother’s love and less susceptible to her father’s charm. She spent much more time with Muriel and was a sweet-natured child who was musical and good at drawing and looked most like her mother. But all the sisters, such close companions in their games and make-believe yet temperamentally so unalike, were bound with family pride and affection. They shared too a taboo on discussing with adults the things that really mattered. Their father had been spoilt and adored by women all his life, first his mother and elder sisters, now his wife and daughters, and the actresses who depended on him for their careers. A young John Gielgud was struck by Gerald’s gift for getting what he needed from others: ‘He was a very great director, particularly of women. He was a great fancier of pretty women, and he taught them brilliantly, but very often they were never heard of again.’ Taken up and dropped, these young women never ruffled the surface calm of his wife who had become, in effect, a second mother to him. Even Muriel’s unmarried sister Billy devoted herself to Gerald in the role of personal secretary and made her life’s work his every ease and comfort. Nobody challenged him or called his bluff. He was the grand panjandrum of his universe, but fundamentally weak and dependent on a constant flow of feminine admiration and solicitude. In order to maintain this life-giving stream, he had become adept at making himself as irresistibly charming and seductive as he could. And his daughters were as much ensnared as anyone. If their mother Muriel had been more of a presence in the older daughters’ lives, she might have added a creative counterbalance to Gerald’s powerful influence. Strikingly attractive all her life, with fine manners and surface charm, her absorption in Gerald’s life and career meant her true character was somehow effaced, leaving just a sense of chilly detachment and inner steel. Only Jeanne received the unconditional love that was left after Gerald’s needs and demands had been answered. ‘He was her whole life,’ Daphne recalled, ‘and next to D[addy] came Jeanne, petted and adored though never spoilt, while Angela and I … came off second-best.’ In fact, Angela came off worst of all, as, after Nanny left, she was special to nobody and was hungry for approval and affection. Very early she recognised that in her family she was considered plain and had therefore failed the most important test of womanhood. Her need for notice and love found expression in hero-worshipping men and women alike, so much so that her father teased her mercilessly for her swooning expression. ‘Puffin with her swollen look,’ he would say in a not entirely affectionate way. It was partly his manner, his need to be funny and make people laugh, but there was also an element in that phrase of exasperation that his eldest daughter was slightly plump, too earnest to be cute, and not the refined beauty she ought to have been. Daphne was clear-eyed about Gerald’s lack of sensitivity to his family, describing how at the theatre he was careful not to hurt anyone’s feelings but was ‘constantly tactless and continually thoughtless in private life’. From this jest about Angela’s looks, reiterated many times, came the family nickname that would accompany her through life, Puffin, Puff, Piffy. She tried to be a good sport and see her father’s comment as a trifle, something amusing, but years later was moved to write: ‘DON’T always tease your children when they fall in love, it can be dangerous’. Eventually Angela grew resigned to her family’s insensitivity, admitting bleakly that by the age of sixteen she knew, ‘if one couldn’t be the beauty one might as well be the butt’. For good and ill, Daphne was the daughter most affected by Gerald’s peculiarly narcissistic character. She had been chosen as his favourite at a young age perhaps because she was the most beautiful, perhaps the one most closely resembling his longed-for son, perhaps because she reminded him of his father. She alone saw through his charming gay exterior to the uncertain, dark and flawed human being within, and yet still loved him; that might have been the most compelling reason of all. The historian A. L. Rowse, who became a good friend in Daphne’s middle age, suspected that her relationship with her father haunted her adult emotional life. What was problematic was not Daphne’s love for Gerald so much as his cloying yet controlling need of her. Her remarkable third novel, The Progress of Julius, written when she was only twenty-four, explores a pathological obsession of a father for his daughter. Julius has some of the overbearing yet mercurial qualities that made Gerald irresistible to his daughter. His intensity and high emotionalism (she feared he was always acting and so could never be sure what he really felt) made her own inchoate emotions oscillate between ecstasy and despair. In an extraordinary passage in the novel she conjures up something of this oppressive power that borders on psychological abuse: [She was] aware of Papa who watched her, Papa who smiled at her, Papa who played her on a thousand strings, she danced to his tune like a doll on wires – Papa who harped at her and would not let her be. He was cruel, he was relentless, he was like some oppressive, suffocating power that stifled her and could not be warded off … she was like a child stuffed with sweets cloying and rich; they were rammed down her throat and into her belly, filling her, exhausting her, making her a drum of excitement and anguish and emotion that was gripping in its savage intensity. It was too much for her, too strong. Gerald’s adult neediness extended to her was far too weighty for her childlike, uncomprehending heart. Overarching it all was his manipulative favouritism that tainted all other relationships within the family. The close emotional connection that grew between them disturbed Daphne and inevitably unsettled her mother. Musing on why there was such a mutual wariness between her and Muriel, Daphne wondered, ‘could it be that, totally unconscious of the fact, she resented the ever-growing bond and affection between D and myself?’ Again in Julius, she explores this tragic transference to melodramatic effect. Not only did the intense Electral bond between Daphne and her father distress her mother, it inevitably unbalanced the family dynamic between the sisters. It was Angela who felt most acutely the lack of admiration: the spotlight that might have fallen on her for a while, as the eldest, always seemed to swerve off towards Daphne. It was not her younger sister’s fault, Daphne did not seek it and in fact the limelight made her uneasy, but her beauty and detachment seemed to draw people’s attention in a way that Angela’s expressive eagerness to please did not. The huge painting of the three sisters, executed in 1918 by the society artist Frederic Whiting, and exhibited to acclaim, epitomised the shift in power between the sisters. Angela was fourteen and feeling her way tentatively towards a sense of herself in the world. Much as she had feared growing up, she was beginning to see there were some advantages. This painting captured her on the cusp of womanhood but reduced to a rather big child. She hated the pose she was expected to hold, unflatteringly dressed in baggy clothes, sitting uncomfortably with her rump to the viewer and all her weight on one hand. She resented how she was encumbered for all time with a shiny red nose, quite possibly the result of the crying fit when she had been told that she would have to spend the whole Sunday posing in Whiting’s studio. The unfairness of this representation of her she felt was made more stark by the way Daphne was portrayed. Placed apart from the undistinguished bundle of Jeanne and Angela and Brutus the dog, she stood as straight and noble as an arrow with a visionary spark in her eyes. Every time she saw the painting Angela was reminded of this memorial to her eclipse. ‘I realised I should be handed down to posterity with a flaming shining nose, and Daphne looking rather like a flaming shining Jeanne d’Arc.’ At about the time this group portrait was painted, Angela was ‘suicidally inclined for Love’ and her gaze fell on a young soldier who put up with her devotion, mailing her a box of chocolates from Paris that filled her with excitement. To Angela’s overactive imagination he was, ‘Apollo, Mars, God, Romance, IT’. On the one occasion she got to accompany him, Muriel insisted Daphne should go too. Their destination was the Military Tournament at Olympia in West London. In a fever of anticipation Angela carefully chose something grown-up to wear a pretty pink dress with a lowish neckline, but her mother immediately ordered her upstairs to change into a frock that matched the one Daphne was wearing. Her sister was still as slim as a sapling, and Angela felt humiliated, stuffed into the childish mauve dress that did not suit her, the linen too tight across the bust. Tears of frustration and disappointment welled in her eyes. ‘Daphne looked a dream as always, and by the time my swain had called to take us to Olympia I was red-nosed with heat, discomfort, mortification and a fit of the sulks.’ This god-like being was a young cadet who was training alongside her father. In what appeared to be an odd caprice, with more than an element of despair to it, Gerald had decided in the last year of the Great War to enlist in the Irish Guards. His restlessness and growing sense of futility, together with the long shadow of his hero-brother Guy, made him long to prove he was more than just the ephemeral entertainer. He was forty-five and had lived the last two decades of his life as a successful, pampered thespian, chauffeured around, clad in the most luxurious clothes and fed on the best foods and wine. Daphne understood his despair. ‘He was nothing but a mummer, a trickster, playing antics in some disguise before a crowd. All he had won was a cheap popularity, and what good was that to him or the world?’ He had just pulled off one of his greatest theatrical successes, a new production of J. M. Barrie’s play Dear Brutus, where night after night he received the audience’s ovations. The play’s conceit – whether, if we could return to something deeply regretted in our past and choose a different path, it would change anything – suffused his thinking, for he always lived his character for the duration of a play. Would life have been more satisfactory if he had taken the more difficult road? There was a kind of bathetic heroism in Gerald’s turning his back on his glittering London life to go to training barracks in Bushey, where even the officers bawling at him were young enough to be his sons. Never the most physically or mentally robust of men, he had to submit to the gruelling training and spartan conditions alongside boys who were straight out of school. Removed from home comforts and denied the reassuring balm of his wife’s and friends’ concern, he had only the rough camaraderie of men to sustain him. Muriel moved the whole household to Bushey to be close to him. Angela explained her mother’s blinkered focus on Gerald: My mother, for whom wars only meant parting her from her family (me at my school in Wimbledon, and now my father) one day met the famous actress and beauty Lily Elsie in Piccadilly and burst into tears with the remark, ‘Poor Gerald has gone to Bushey.’ Elsie’s husband was in the thick of the fighting but she was sympathetically full of horror for poor Gerald’s plight. Although Muriel had done her best to remain close to him, Gerald could only escape infrequently to eat big teas surrounded once again by his womenfolk. Angela remembered how his face had ‘an abject hungry misery’. It was a nightmare from which he was luckily awoken by the Armistice. He could return home having not encountered any of the fighting, but perhaps feeling some kind of personal honour had been satisfied. The play he had left behind centred on two unhappy people, mired in misery, being given a second chance of a life different from the one each had chosen, but realising it was better to just get on and live. Perhaps Gerald returned to his life in the theatre relieved at the choices he had made, and ready for the next project. 1918 was also the year when the girls’ patchy education was taken in hand by a dynamic new force. Miss Maud Waddell came into their lives to tutor them in every subject, although history was the universal favourite. Miss Waddell was quickly nicknamed Tod, as a partial rhyme on her surname, or a nod to Beatrix Potter’s Mr Tod, a wily, tweed-jacketed fox. Born in 1887, she was ten years younger than their mother and a completely different kind of woman. Miss Waddell was well educated, adventurous and independent minded, with a wealth of exotic stories of her past to tell. Before she ended up in Hampstead she had already tutored the grandson of Belgium’s Minister for Finance. She had enjoyed living with the family in the beautiful Ch?teau de la Fraineuse at Spa, inspired by Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles. The Kaiser then had appropriated it and had a bedroom for himself redecorated in pink silk. Tod became important to all the du Maurier girls, but particularly to eleven-year-old Daphne. She quickly recognised her as someone in whom she could trust and confide, a woman who filled part of the vacuum left by her mother’s emotional absence, but also a woman who responded to her intellectual curiosity and creative mind. Daphne liked to think of Tod as one of her heroines, Queen Elizabeth I. In an early letter she wrote to her: Divine Gloriana, Why look so coldly on your slave who adores you? Have you no commpasion on the billets written with the blood of my heart (jolly good). Tod responded to this clever, imaginative child (so ill-schooled that her spelling and wayward punctuation kept Tod awake at night) and understood the yearning in Daphne for something beyond the ordinary: ‘That something that is somewhere, you know; you feel it and you miss it, and it beckons to you and you cant reach it. It is’nt Love I’m sure … I don’t think anyone can find it on this earth.’ This longing for the unattainable owed something perhaps to Barrie’s Neverland that entranced the sisters’ childhoods. Daphne told Tod she was the only person to whom she could express her confused feelings, having been silenced on the things that mattered most to her by her family’s mockery and lack of understanding. Although Angela, and occasionally Jeanne, wrote to Tod also, the only letters the governess kept were those written by Daphne, in what became a lifelong correspondence full of frankness and humour. Tod later told a reporter on the Australian Argus that Daphne was ‘the most beautiful human being I have ever seen’. An intelligent, feeling woman who never married, Tod was to love her all her life. Angela had endured one last experiment with formal schooling that had failed dismally. Gerald had accompanied his nephew Michael Llewelyn Davies to visit a friend of his, Eiluned Lewis, at Levana School in Wimbledon. Eiluned was a clever girl, four years older than Angela, who became a successful journalist, novelist and poet. Whether Gerald was impressed by her or the school, he determined to send Angela to the school as a boarder. Angela was fourteen and although she made some friends she was so desperately homesick she only lasted half a term, and was soon back at Cannon Hall. Tod then became responsible for educating all three girls. Although she would remain committed to the du Mauriers, Miss Waddell for a while had other adventures to pursue. Soon after her stint tutoring the sisters she headed off in 1923 to Constantinople to teach the Sultan’s son English. This was a fascinating time for an Englishwoman in Turkey, just after the last of the Allied troops had left Constantinople, having been in occupation since the end of the First World War. Tod lived in the magnificent Dolmabah?e Palace in great splendour but did not think much of the Turks themselves. ‘What an unprogressive, aggravating people they are,’ she told the same Australian reporter. She thought them a nation lost in passive contemplation and her no-nonsense Cumbrian self wanted to pinch them awake from their reveries. Maud Waddell then sailed for Australia in 1926, where her brilliant mathematician sister Winnie had emigrated, eventually rewarded with an MBE for her pioneering work establishing wild flower sanctuaries. For a while Maud thought she might stay, teaching in the Outback, but finding it ‘too rough and windy’ returned to England. There, after more, but less exciting, adventures, she eventually ended up tutoring Daphne’s children in Cornwall at Menabilly. The du Maurier family’s move to Hampstead had been an emotional return for Gerald to the place of his childhood where he had been happiest. Restless and increasingly dissatisfied with his working life, and missing the close bond with parents and sisters, for all except May were now dead, he began to revisit the past, recalling his youth with fond nostalgia. He had always idealised his father George and the bohemian life he lived with family and artist friends, but now that he had returned to his father’s old stamping grounds the obsession with him grew. He shared his romantic reminiscences with his daughters, taking them to gaze at the old family home, New Grove House, where he had hoped to live with his own family but had had to settle for Cannon Hall instead. He would point out the studio window at which his father had once worked and then walk them up to Hampstead Heath to a twisted branch where he sat as a boy, imagining it was his armchair. The girls would climb in too, and think of their father as a boy. Then up the hill to Whitestone Pond where George du Maurier, weak-sighted and kind-hearted, had noticed a dog splashing about and plunged in, intent on rescue. But the dog was swimming not drowning. The girls then learnt how the great man, dripping wet and slightly foolish, was tipped by the dog’s owner for his trouble. As Gerald walked them through his romance of boyhood, his daughters grew more interested in the grandfather they had never known and who, in dying before Angela was born, had been ignorant even of their existence. They had seen the leather-bound copies of Punch, with George’s elegant witty drawings, and had not thought much about the artist who had made them; but through their father’s memories they began to discover a man who was important in their own stories, whose life belonged with theirs. His novels exerted the greatest imaginative pull, most importantly Peter Ibbetson, with its compelling central theme that people can exist in a world they had purposefully dreamed. They could meet others there, possessed also of the gift for ‘dreaming true’ that joined them in this extra dimension, brought into being through will and emotion. The love story between Peter and his childhood sweetheart, the Duchess of Towers, conducted in this dreamscape, freed from conventional restraints of time and space, fuelled the imaginations of his two elder granddaughters. It was a powerful idea that offered whatever the dreamer most desired: escape and adventure for Daphne; love and romance for Angela. At about the age of thirteen Daphne’s desire for escape from impending womanhood, and all the attendant embarrassments and constraints, caused her to dream up a boyish alter ego: Eric Avon. In real life she had been taken aside by Muriel and warned of the advent of menstruation, a rubicon that would unite her to her mother and the female half of experience and separate her, it seemed, from everything she valued and held dear. Nothing was explained to the horrified and bemused girl, only that she would bleed, and with it came confusing intimations of illness, incapacity, secrecy and shame. Just as Angela had been forbidden to mention the facts of life to her friends or younger sisters, so Daphne too was told not to discuss with anyone this looming threat to her freedom and integrity. Eric Avon sprang to her aid. He was the imaginary personification of the boy she should have been, the embodiment of uncomplicated male energy, the son for whom her father had longed. He was sporty and brave, captain of cricket at Rugby School, and his day of glory came each year at the imaginary cricket match between Rugby and Marlborough School, played out in the garden at Cannon Hall. Jeanne and her friend Nan were drawn into this fantasy. Renamed David and Dick, the Dampier brothers, they bowled and batted for Marlborough, the opposing team, and invariably lost to the one-man sporting hero, Daphne in her role as Eric Avon. Angela and Tod were roped in as spectators to clap politely from the sidelines. Daphne inhabited the persona of Eric Avon for more than two years. Only once she had turned fifteen (and Eric turned eighteen) did she have him play his last triumphant cricket match, for he would have to leave Rugby for Cambridge University the following autumn. Daphne walked into the lower part of the garden at Cannon Hall, scene of so many of Eric’s triumphs. ‘He wept. The moment of sadness was intolerable. Then someone from the house called “Daphne!” and it was all over. Eric Avon had left Rugby School for ever.’ This had so much of the emotional force of Peter Pan, where Peter angrily repels any suggestion he might grow up and become human, the whole play suffused with sadness at what is lost when childhood is left behind. Years later, Daphne recognised that Eric Avon became submerged in her subconscious and never really left her, emerging in various guises as her inadequate male protagonists in I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, and The House on the Strand. Although they were weak while Eric, like Daphne herself and many of her fictional heroines, were resolute and self-sufficient, these men relied on strong male mentors, perhaps echoing something of her father’s relationship with Tom Vaughan, his supremely capable and efficient business partner, or with his competent and heroic elder brother. Tom Vaughan was a remarkably successful man and central to the functioning of the du Maurier household. He managed Wyndham’s Theatre with great creative and professional acumen, and fixed all the family’s financial and practical problems too. Angela appreciated how crucial he was to everything. ‘That the du Mauriers could get on without Tom Vaughan seemed an impossibility. Alas, when he died it became all too evident that life without him was a sadly complicated affair.’ The intolerable sadness felt by Daphne/Eric in the garden the day of the last cricket match was the realisation that she could not remain this boyish child for ever. At fifteen she was aware of Angela on the verge of ‘coming out’ and having to enter the dreaded social whirl. The expectations of family and society would hedge Daphne in too. Perhaps the prospect of her growing up caused her father unease as well for, about the time that puberty and Eric Avon arrived in her life, he wrote Daphne a remarkable poem, celebrating her as the Eternal Girl, yet recognising her own, and his, disappointment that she was not that longed-for boy: My very slender one So brave of heart, but delicate of will, So careful not to wound, never kill, My tender one – Who seems to live in Kingdoms all her own In realms of joy Where heroes young and old In climates hot and cold Do deeds of daring and much fame And she knows she could do the same If only she’d been born a boy. And sometimes in the silence of the night I wake and think perhaps my darling’s right And that she should have been, And, if I’d had my way, She would have been, a boy. My very slender one So feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet, So full of fun and womanly deceit. My tender one Who seems to dream her life away alone. A dainty girl But always well attired And loves to be admired Where ever she may be, and wants To be the being who enchants Because she has been born a girl. And sometimes in the turmoil of the day I pause, and think my darling may Be one of those who will For good or ill Remain a girl for ever and be still A Girl. This was a poem full of complex meaning when written by an adored and influential father for his favourite daughter. Daphne stood on the threshold of adulthood, confused by her identity and struggling to find a sense of herself in the world. Gerald’s elegiac words could only compound that confusion. He regretted the son that might have been, and celebrated the lovely daughter whose gender made her second best. But she was lovely only as long as she remained a girl and managed somehow not to grow to womanhood. Becoming a woman meant losing so much of value: joy in action, beauty of form, simplicity, freedom, integrity of the self. At a time when women had been risking their lives in wars abroad, and at home taken on the Establishment and won the first concessions in their battle for the vote, Gerald’s view of the roles of men and women was old-fashioned and stultifying. In the poem Daphne as a boy is full of action, a hero figure, ‘brave of heart’ and spurred to ‘deeds of daring and much fame’. On the other hand, her place in the world as a girl is passive, her looks and the effects she has on others paramount – ‘so fresh and sweet’, prone to ‘womanly deceit’, ‘dainty’ and ‘well attired’. Muriel was the role model for this kind of woman, and Daphne did not want to be like her at all. Daphne and Jeanne were happiest in boy’s shorts, thick socks and stout shoes. They did not care about their hair or the grime on their faces. Daphne hated her white knees after a winter of being covered up and would rub dirt into them each spring to reclaim her tomboy self. Their prettiness belied the masculine characters that swaggered in their imaginations and peopled their games. The stereotypical sporting hero Eric Avon was not based on the kind of men who loomed largest in their lives like their father and the romanticised view of their grandfather. These immensely successful men were artists and darlings of the drawing room, not men made on the sports field or battleground. In fact, George in later life had lost much of his sight and was in thrall to his womenfolk, and Gerald’s love of gossip about friends’ private lives, tireless practical joking, and enjoyment of the company of women made him an exceptional entertainer with an effete and dandified air, rather than an all-conquering hero. His propensity to go to pieces if separated for too long from Muriel also disqualified him from the square-jawed masculine ideal. In the du Maurier household, where the women were capable and robust and the men were pampered and indulged, sexual stereotypes were not the norm. Unlike her sisters, Angela did not want to be a boy. She was happy enough to be a girl even though she bitterly regretted she was not beautiful and therefore felt handicapped in the great marriage game that her family considered a woman’s natural destiny. She too was afraid of growing up, but it was her emotionalism that bothered her, the embarrassment of her crushes and the torrent of feeling that they unleashed. The young Angela was sensitive and serious and hated being teased, the default position in her family. She was also ignorant and afraid of the sexual male, that scary other that had grown sinister in her imagination as a result of early shocks and her inadequate education: The business of growing older, into ‘double figures’, I disliked. I was unhappy when I was told I was too old to wear my nice white socks in the summertime, and made to wear horrible brown stockings … one was a fish out of water, too young to listen to sophisticated conversation, at the same time not wishing to play cricket on the lawn with younger sisters and their friends … pulled both ways, misunderstood at times by young and old alike, and not always understanding oneself. Angela’s literalness of mind and the inadvertent hurt caused by adults who did not understand was illustrated by an unhappy infatuation she never forgot. At weekends, Cannon Hall was filled with various stage people: one Sunday, even Rudolph Valentino came to lunch, to general excitement, as too did Gary Cooper, the embodiment of Hollywood star power. There were the long-established acting friends like Gladys Cooper, Viola Tree and John Barrymore, and any number of glamorous others who passed through their lives. But in 1919, when Angela was fifteen, she was taken by her parents to see a magnificent production of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Robert Loraine – ‘Bobby’ to them all – was playing the title role. From then on Angela was smitten. Only three years younger than Gerald du Maurier, he was an actor-manager like him and the theatre he successfully managed was the Criterion. A fine actor, he was usually cast as the romantic lead, and even went on to tackle Shakespeare. But he was much more than this, a true heroic figure. A pioneering aviator, he had only just survived as a flying ace in the Great War and been decorated for his bravery with an MC and DSO. Angela had a photograph of him in his Royal Flying Corps uniform and she kissed it every night, along with her picture of the Prince of Wales. Bobby had a mellifluous voice and it amused him to spout the most rousing bits of Shakespeare under Angela’s bedroom window at night. Inevitably, Angela, by now sixteen, began to dream of marrying him. The age gap seemed no barrier: perhaps the fact that he was her father’s generation was a reassurance to her. Then with the thoughtlessness of adulthood, Bobby hijacked her fantasy by casually saying to Gerald at one of their family Sunday lunches at Cannon Hall, ‘the day will come I expect when I shall ask you for Angela’s hand’. Given her youth, innocence and supercharged romantic nature, it was not unreasonable of her to imagine the deed was done and she would be the next Mrs Robert Loraine, with accompanying beautiful house, enchanting children, dogs, the whole caboodle. (She admitted she daydreamed about weddings and babies’ names, without sex coming into any of this at all.) But Angela had misunderstood Bobby’s manly banter with her father, and he had misunderstood how serious she was and how tender her heart. ‘The day never came, and he suddenly appeared with an exquisite wife very little older than me (which made one’s frustrated misery more acute).’ It may have been on this occasion that Angela, in the depths of despair and with pure melodrama running in her veins, had jumped up onto a wall running along the Embankment, declaring she would cast herself into the Thames. Luckily she was with the imperturbable Tod who replied, ‘Not now, dear, it’s teatime.’ The sisters, unable to confide in their parents, turned to each other. Daphne, struggling with deeper existential questions, turned to Tod. Their exasperated mother would complain that she could never get one sister to side with her against another as they always stood up for each other. Angela was incapable of keeping her tumultuous emotions to herself and so Daphne, already a confidante, was party to all her upset and disappointment. Daphne at thirteen had just sought refuge from the adult world in the creation of her boy-self Eric; no wonder that she retreated further when she observed the incomprehensible behaviour towards women of even the nicest men. Her body may have betrayed her by beginning to turn her into a woman, but her diary for that year was still childlike, full of cricket matches and the birthday party she gave for her teddy bear. Jeanne at nine, the favoured companion of their mother, was very much the baby and sheltered from even this incursion of the adult world. The following summer Angela would see her longing for love thwarted at every turn while her younger sister, without seeking it, once again became effortlessly the centre of admiration and, this time, of male desire. In the middle of the family seaside holiday, fourteen-year-old Daphne glanced up from paddling and shrimping to find her much older cousin, Geoffrey, looking at her with a strange smile. Something about the smile caught the girl’s attention and made her heart beat faster. She had never felt this way before. She smiled back. She knew nothing of the facts of life and was completely uninterested in the mechanics of sex and would remain so, she recalled, until she was eighteen. But in that one moment, Daphne’s innocent world of cricket and reading and making up stories was intruded on by a grown-up male old enough to be her father. It was 1921 and the du Mauriers had rented a house in Thurlestone in south Devon, and as usual other guests had been asked to join them. Cousin Geoffrey, the elder brother of Gerald Millar, who had so appealed to Angela when she was younger, was divorced from his first wife. This had caused a scandal amongst the aunts and uncles who considered divorce something that should never happen in a family like theirs; ‘one might have thought a national calamity was about to occur’. This raffishly good-looking thirty-six-year-old actor had subsequently remarried and had brought his second wife with him on this visit to his cousins. But his roving eye had been caught by the attractive sight of his young cousin paddling in the sea, still so obviously just a pretty child but on the threshold of sexual awakening, and he smiled. Daphne never forgot the peculiar excitement caused by that secret smile. She could not understand it but liked the physical sensation and the sense that she was special and there was a precious understanding between them. When all the children were sunbathing on the lawn, with rugs over their knees, Geoffrey came and lay beside her and under the blanket reached for her hand. The effect on her was electrifying and unsettling; something dormant was awoken in her. ‘No kisses. No hint of the sexual impulse he undoubtedly felt and indeed admitted … but instead, on my part at least, a reaching out for a relationship that was curiously akin to what I felt for D[addy].’ Daphne found this frisson with Geoffrey even more exciting because it was wrong and especially because it was secret, hidden from her pathologically possessive and suspicious father and right under the nose of Geoffrey’s unsuspecting wife. ‘Nothing, in a life of seventy years, has ever surpassed that first awakening of an instinct within myself. The touch of that hand on mine. And the instinctive knowledge that nobody must know.’ Geoffrey’s behaviour could be seen as a subtle seduction by a much older, worldly-wise man of a vulnerable cousin, still a child who should have been safe in his company. In a classic ploy of the seducer, he told her he had already grown disenchanted with his new wife and now, because of his feelings for Daphne, no longer wished to go on tour to America at the end of the year. There was little doubt that the whole flirtation that summer was a deliberate manipulation of a young girl’s emotions to gratify his egotistical needs. The loading of responsibility for his dubious behaviour on her child’s shoulders was cowardly, and distorted her sense of power and integrity. The intrusion of a confusing adult world into her child’s one, lived largely in the imagination, certainly unsettled Daphne and absorbed much of her thoughts for the rest of the year, uniting her to him in an indissoluble bond of rebellious conspiracy that was to last a lifetime. Daphne loved to think of herself as daring and she also enjoyed a growing sense of the power she had over others. Neither was she averse to causing her father anxiety and jealousy – it all reinforced her central importance in his life. Her recognition of the similarity of the feelings she felt for Geoffrey and those for her own father informs one of the enduring themes of her fiction: that of incest and taboo. But for Daphne, always living more vividly in the mind than the body, the idea of incest would come to exert an intellectual fascination that grew, she explained, from her realisation that we are attracted to people who are familiar to us, that family provide the real romance of life. Years after the encounter in south Devon, when she was twenty-one and her obsession with Geoffrey had cooled to an amused flirtatious affection – although he remained as smitten with her as ever – she had fun teasing him by meeting him in the drawing room at Cannon Hall to say goodnight, dressed only in her pyjamas. With her parents in bed on the floor above, she allowed him passionately to kiss her for the first – and last – time. Having not been kissed by a man before, apart from her father, she found it ‘nice and pleasant’, but, with a startling lack of understanding of human sexuality and empathy for the feelings of another, wished Geoffrey could be more light-hearted. He had finally managed some intimacy after years of secretive smiling, furtive knee-stroking and hand-holding, with the object of his forbidden desire prancing about in her pyjamas, at night, and she complained he was rather overexcited. ‘Men are so odd,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘it would be awful if he got properly keyed-up.’ Daphne added another peculiarly detached statement: ‘He is very sweet and lovable. The strange thing is [kissing Geoffrey] is so like kissing D[addy],’ and went on to surmise that perhaps their family was like the incestuous Borgias, with her as the fatally attractive Lucretia. But then this was a girl who liked to shock and given how underwhelmed she was by Geoffrey’s kisses, likening them to Daddy’s did not suggest unbridled fatherly or daughterly passion. Any incestuous impulse between father and daughter was more likely to reside in his overbearing emotional demands on her and her answering fascination with him, united with resentment and excitement at how important she was to him. The growing realisation of her power over others through her attractiveness and detachment was thrilling. While Daphne, only just into her teens, was quickening their cousin’s pulse simply by being there, Angela recalled yet another example of her own lack of beauty and physical presence. She was seventeen when she accompanied her ten-year-old sister Jeanne to a children’s party in a grand house in London. Dressed in a sober blue coat and skirt, and feeling rather overweight and shy, she was mistaken by the butler for a children’s nurse and shepherded in with the other visiting servants. But ‘the nurses were far too high and mighty to bother with me’, and, although short and appearing younger than her age, Angela was not about to become one of the children for the afternoon, so she sat in lonely exile for hours until the party was over and she could escort Jeanne home. She made a joke of it, but these humiliations and unflattering comparisons undermined the self-esteem of a young woman who already felt inadequate and in some fundamental way unworthy of love. The summer of 1921 was clouded for the family by another tragedy that befell their ill-fated Llewelyn Davies cousins. The eldest of them, George, taken into the care of Uncle Jim Barrie after he was orphaned, had been killed in the war. Michael, the fourth brother, and the main inspiration for Barrie’s Peter Pan, was now twenty-one and a sensitive poetic young man, a troubled undergraduate at Oxford University. On a perfectly fine and warm afternoon in May, he and his best friend Rupert Buxton drowned together in a still bathing pool in the countryside just outside Oxford. They appeared to have died in each other’s arms, in what may have been a double suicide, but no one could be sure. Saving the families’ feelings was paramount, and the coroner declared a verdict of accidental death. But this did not soften the blow of two immensely promising young men dying in mysterious and harrowing circumstances. There is no mention as to how the du Maurier sisters took the news except for Daphne who recorded it in her diary (‘how dreadful’) along with the information that their youngest Llewelyn Davies cousin Nico came to stay before the funeral. Contrary to some suggestions that J. M. Barrie not only ruined the boys’ lives but also had some malign hold over Daphne’s, it was noticeable that in her early diaries, when his influence was meant to have been intense, his name did not once appear. In fact the du Maurier sisters seem not to have seen very much of him or the Llewelyn Davies cousins either, once the boys’ mother had died. When Peter, the third eldest brother, came to lunch at Cannon Hall in 1925, Daphne wrote in her diary that she had not seen him for years. Barrie’s creation, Peter Pan, however, continued to hold a magnetic attraction for them all. Holidays apart, life continued at Cannon Hall with lessons during the week, wild games for Daphne and Jeanne in the garden, and paperchases on the heath – with Daphne as the paper-scattering hare. The glamorous friends of their parents filled the house at weekends, when the du Maurier girls were expected to practise their social skills and be attendant maidens and entertainers. Both Angela and Jeanne were musical, a gift that could be traced back to the du Maurier ancestors where grandfather George and his father were known for their beautiful tenor voices which would bring an audience to tears. All three girls learned to play the piano – as well-brought-up girls did – but only Angela and Jeanne persevered into adulthood. Jeanne was particularly talented and continued to play all her life. In the du Maurier household, playing the piano was not allowed to be a private pleasure. Muriel insisted the girls play for her friends after lunch, and she refused to let them use sheet music, it all had to be from memory. This became a misery particularly for Angela who had to stumble through some standby like the Moonlight Sonata in front of a long-suffering audience, accompanied by her mother’s audible intakes of breath at every wrong note, of which there were many. She much preferred practising with their enthusiastic music mistress, who would come to the house and inspire Angela and Jeanne to play exciting duets, the Ride of the Valkyries being one memorable favourite. In fact her visits sparked both girls’ love of music. Angela’s love of opera and of Wagner began with these lessons. At sixteen, Angela had a good singing voice and dreamed of being an operatic diva. She had no ambitions to be an actress but longed to sing, and as nothing but the most romantic roles attracted her, she wanted to be a soprano. This proved to be difficult as she was naturally a good contralto, but Daddy was paying, so a succession of well-regarded singing teachers attempted to turn her into a less good mezzo-soprano and finally into a reedy excuse for a soprano. ‘My future at Covent Garden was soon doomed to a still-birth.’ This frustration of a musical career was a lasting regret to her but her love of music was to last a lifetime. Ballet too was a lasting pleasure, introduced to her when she was fifteen by one of the most beautiful women in England, Lady Diana Cooper, or Lady Diana Manners as she was then, who whisked her off to the Diaghilev season at the Alhambra, a spectacular Moorish-inspired theatre dominating the east side of Leicester Square. ‘I was her slave for life,’ was Angela’s characteristically effusive reaction to this thrilling experience. By 1921, Jeanne was becoming more than just her mother’s pet and Daphne’s willing sidekick in her make-believe worlds. She was not only developing into a talented artist and pianist, she was also growing surprisingly good at tennis, and would soon be entering tournaments. Photographs showed this pretty girl growing into a sturdy, strong-limbed youngster whom Daphne nicknamed ‘The Madam’. She wrote to Tod that Jeanne had grown upwards and outwards: ‘her legs resemble what a stout Glaxo baby may eventually grow into, and she will probably be ten feet each way! Her taste in literature takes after Angela, she has just finished “The Great Husband Hunt”! which she gloated over.’ Jeanne retained for many years the alternative identity of David Dampier, schoolboy sports star, given to her by Daphne. Many years later her partner in life, No?l Welch, who knew all three grown-up sisters very well, commented that Jeanne, ‘the youngest, would have made the best boy … She has never got over not being able to lower a telescope from her eye with a suitably dramatic or casual remark, her feet apart, her square shoulders, so elegant on a horse, braced against the wind.’ In another letter, Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as her youngest sister and was disconcerted that she felt bored with life before it had even begun. She was already writing a book about a boy called Maurice who suffered from her own sense of dislocation from humanity and who identifies with the freedom of the natural world, for trees and water and sky. The whole story is imbued with a Peter Pan-like longing for something unattainable. Even the father figure whom Maurice finds to console his widowed mother is an amalgamation of her own father and Barrie, a man who had never grown up. After four years of tutoring the du Maurier sisters, Tod had left for Constantinople at the end of 1922. In her reluctant progress to adulthood, Daphne especially missed her sympathetic and practical approach to life. Miss Vigo had replaced her and although she lacked Tod’s personality she was a good teacher, encouraging Angela and Daphne’s writing efforts and Jeanne’s drawing. Ever inventive, Daphne, as a Christmas present for Angela, created a magazine where all the stories, news, gossip, poems and articles were as if written by ‘Dogs of Our Acquaintance’. Angela remembered it all her life as a brilliant piece of work that anyone who loved dogs, and was prone to give them individual characters and voices, would appreciate. The girls were not educated in science and barely any mathematics, but their French was passable. They were keen readers, could play the piano, and knew how to behave in polite society; like well-bred girls of their time and class they were being schooled to become good wives to well-bred men who were wealthy enough to keep them in style. Their lives would be determined and their horizons described by the men whom they married. But little did their parents know that an inchoate rebellion was already stirring in their breasts for there was not much about a woman’s life in the first decades of the twentieth century to commend itself to them. Each sister would take her destiny in her own hands: none would become the exemplary wife that their mother had so gracefully embodied. 3 The Dancing Years I suppose we all led pretty empty lives of enjoyment, with snatches of good works to salve our consciences … I was amazed and fascinated by the days I’d led, hardly even a meal at home or an evening in, parties, parties, parties – always falling in love with this or that Tom, Dick and Harry. ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember THE DU MAURIER sisters grew up with the century. They were in their teens and early twenties during the 1920s when much of the nation entered a delayed adolescence. It was an era that became known as the Jazz Age, when this new music provided the soundtrack, its syncopated beat the tempo that sped the young from party to party on a febrile flight to nowhere in particular. Dancing became all the rage; dancefloors were rapidly laid in smart restaurants – the du Maurier family’s favourite, the Savoy, being the first to lead the way. The waltz and the foxtrot were replaced by the highly energetic Charleston and Black Bottom, an import from African-American culture and based on an earlier pimp’s dance, all of which brought to its English adherents a sense of their own exotic naughtiness. All this was a stark reaction to the general mood of the country. Having emerged from the Great War, Britain was stunned by grief, exhausted, broken-hearted and spiritually crushed by the scale and brutality of the slaughter of its young. More than three quarters of a million men, many straight from working the fields or not long out of school, had died. The sense of loss seemed almost insurmountable. Even the inspired idea of honouring all these dead by interring, with the greatest ceremony, the body of an unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in November 1920, could not staunch the mourning for what became known as the Lost Generation. The ramifications were far-reaching: emotional, economic, political and personal. In the 1921 census it was revealed that there were nearly two million more women than men. Few families escaped unscathed. Society was changed for ever, most notably perhaps the place of women, now that married women over thirty (and those on the Local Government Register) had gained the vote at the end of the war and Nancy Astor took her seat in Parliament in 1919 as the first woman MP. As the nation slowly began to rebuild, the wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George famously declared in a postwar electioneering speech that he wanted a land fit for heroes: some kind of hope for a new future began to bubble through the daily drabness. A group of well-off, aristocratic or otherwise well-connected young people reacted against the general mood of deprivation and worthy social responsibility and decided to throw a non-stop party. It was largely a privileged and metropolitan phenomenon. Young men and women came together for extravagant fancy dress balls, ‘stunt parties’, elaborate practical jokes and outrageous treasure hunts with flashy cars driven at breakneck speed through the midnight streets of London, their exquisite occupants seeking nonsensical clues and odd objects of desire. Everything was screamingly funny or pointlessly naughty. The heroes of the hour were not Lloyd George’s magnificent young servicemen, who had given their lives for their country’s freedoms, but epicene youths, posing as maharajas or fairies, drawling their witticisms to a beautifully dressed crowd of braying young. Closely shingled girls in diaphanous, jewelled dresses joined in the fun, pursuing policemen’s helmets or some other trophy, before speeding away to breakfast on quails’ eggs and caviar, champagne and cake. This was a highly visible group that intersected with the du Mauriers’ theatrical milieu, with Angela on the verge of being carefully launched on a world that seemed half-crazy. One of the revellers, and barely a year older than Angela, was Evelyn Waugh. He famously satirised this period of relentless futility and emotional dead-ends in his novel Vile Bodies: Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies … The popular press was also hungry for distraction and avidly followed the antics of this gilded youth, reporting in middle-class papers such as the Daily Mail and Evening Standard activities that made Bertie Wooster and the Drones look positively intellectual and patrician. Journalists coined a term for this group of gorgeous wastrels: they were the Bright Young Things, and by breathlessly recording every move in their newspapers, from the scandalous to the banal, they initiated modern celebrity culture. The Bright Young Things were delighted with this newfound fame based on nothing more than being fabulous. They courted the publicity, dashing for the papers each morning and counting how many photographs or news flashes they could find in the accommodating press. Among this group exaggeratedly camp behaviour became the norm, and male homosexuality, at the time illegal and socially suicidal, was accepted, its mores copied and celebrated. Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Stephen Tennant, Brian Howard and Beverley Nichols were amongst the more flamboyant and it was only their influential connections that protected them from the dangers of prosecution and ostracism by mainstream society. Lesbians too were suddenly fashionable and famous comedy revue acts like Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney were extremely popular and welcomed into the boisterous parties thrown by these giddy young. Norah played the piano and sang in a sweet girlish voice while Gwen, with circular horn-rimmed glasses and a cello between her knees, played the fool with her comedy basso profundo voice. The bisexual American actress/phenomenon Tallulah Bankhead and Radclyffe Hall, known as John, were part of these artistic social sets. Severely cropped hair, masculine attire, male nicknames and a swaggering culture of smoking, drinking and drug-taking became daringly chic. The blurring of gender and flaunting of an exaggeratedly theatrical style caused great unease as social norms appeared to break down. A popular song of the 1920s sung by, amongst others, Gwen Farrar, was called Masculine Women, Feminine Men: Hey, Hey women are going mad today Hey, Hey fellers are just as bad I’ll say, Masculine Women, Feminine Men Which is the rooster, which is the hen, It’s hard to tell ’em apart today? And SAY Auntie is smoking, rolling her own Uncle is always buying cologne … You go and give your girl a kiss in the hall But instead you find you’re kissing her brother, Paul And so it continued, with the suggestive frisson of what was still considered by the law, and society at large, to be aberrant behaviour. The richer or more famous you were the easier it was to express such freedoms. Amongst this social group, largely centred on London, the 1920s became notorious for its subversive energy and flair, for freedom from the social constraints of the previous generations and for a feverish pursuit of pleasure that loosened rigid hierarchies of class and behaviour. The anarchic spirit of Peter Pan presided over the age in the irrepressible energy and rejection of responsibility, unlike the elder brothers who had marched so tragically to war. The newspapers built a picture of celebrity idlers dancing their lives away, when not otherwise engaged in various amoral pursuits. The gossip of drug-taking and heterosexual promiscuity, however, was much exaggerated. Given that many of these young men were only just out of all-male public schools and universities with drinking clubs like the Oxford Hypocrites Club that lived by the unwritten law that ‘gentlemen may prance but not dance’, and that young women were mindful of their marriage prospects, it was not surprising that both were still sexually shy in each other’s company. Nevertheless, the gossip appalled the mothers of well-brought-up girls – and none more than the du Maurier parents who watched as their two elder daughters entered the dubious social fray. Before Angela was let loose, but in a very controlled way, she had to ‘finish’ her education in Paris. When she was nearly eighteen she and Betty Hicks, the daughter of the actor Seymour Hicks and his actress wife Ellaline Terriss, were sent to the smartest and most famous finishing school, situated close to the Eiffel Tower and run by the three unmarried Ozanne sisters, daughters of a Protestant minister. Angela had known Betty since she was fourteen and would come to consider her ‘my extra sister’; they would remain close friends for life. They shared similar upbringings: both were daughters of actress mothers, celebrated for their beauty, and ambitious actor-manager fathers, and both girls were made to feel they were plain and failed to live up to their parents’ high aesthetic expectations. After a bout of flu, Angela arrived a little late in January 1922 full of excitement at the idea of being in Paris, but once again poleaxed by homesickness. Betty had been a boarder at Roedean School and was used to being away and consequently found the regime free and easy in comparison. Angela, horrified by the rules and regulations, thought it more like a prison. A wide range of rich and glamorous young women passed through the doors of what was a strictly run establishment more concerned with culture than education. Angela and Bet were slightly disconcerted to overhear themselves described in hushed tones by one of the Mesdemoiselles Ozanne as filles d’artistes and rather patronisingly commended for being surprisingly well brought up. Angela felt she learned little; in fact her French, which under Tod’s tuition had progressed quite well, actually deteriorated. Nancy Cunard, who had attended the Ozanne school a few years before, bitterly complained that the lessons were almost infantile and she loathed the dull, heavily chaperoned outings to churches and museums. But her visits to the Op?ra and the discovery of C?sar Franck’s music saved her sanity. Angela’s love of music was nurtured by the richness of Parisian culture but her singing and piano teachers crushed the life out of her dreams of performance. Her voice training was put in the fiercely competent hands of Gabrielle Ritter-Ciampi, a famous lyric soprano who, in her mid-thirties, was still in her prime with many performances before her. She declared herself initially quite impressed with Angela’s voice but her rigorous demands and tempestuous response to any slackness or stumble – she once flung across the room a small bunch of violets Angela had brought her – destroyed her pupil’s fragile confidence. The eldest du Maurier daughter was not a fighter. Her sheltered and genteel education had not taught her resilience. ‘I have to be encouraged; whether over a short story, a song, a love affair or the receipt of a bunch of flowers.’ If Angela’s voice wobbled over the middle C, Madame ‘behaved as though the Huns were at the gates of Paris, and oneself just the most imbecile of an entirely imbecile race’. This was too much for a student who had offered her heart in her singing and now quivering, tearfully excused herself from any further training. Her natural exuberance and pleasure in playing the piano was similarly extinguished by an unimaginative and overambitious piano teacher, who declared that her knuckles were out of joint, her hands lacked the right tension and poise, and she was forced to spend the next term doing remedial finger exercises on the lid of a closed piano. She felt both these teachers in their heavy-handed ways had silenced her natural expression and joy through music. ‘I would liken it to a stoppage of all private enterprise of the soul.’ Angela’s sentimental nature found outlet, however, in crushes on other girls. The highly attractive Ozanne sisters, vivacious and beautifully dressed, and with the added frisson of authority, were also a natural focus for girls seeking favour, attention and love. This experience of attraction between girls and the need for affection from charismatic women may well have set her thinking about the radical theme of the first novel she was to write. After rereading her diaries from this time, she went to great trouble in a memoir to defend the dawning erotic feelings of young women in institutions: it’s such an entirely natural thing, this ‘falling’ for older girls and mistresses, that I cannot think why there is always such a song and dance made when novels deal with the subject. Victorian adults put their heads together and mutter ‘Unhealthy’; what is there unhealthy in putting someone on a pedestal and giving them violets? Or hoping – in a burst of homesickness – to be kissed goodnight? Although Angela would always appreciate the beauty and fascination of Paris, her unhappiness during two terms at school there clouded her feelings for the city. She never recaptured the rapture that Daphne, for instance, never lost. But then Daphne enjoyed a seminal experience and successfully established herself as the centre of attention when it came to her ‘finishing’, three years later. Angela’s confused emotions and homesickness were slightly relieved, however, by the arrival in March 1922 of her family, who whisked her off on holiday with them to Algiers, and then on to the South of France. Daphne was almost fifteen and fell for Paris in a big way. She wrote to Tod, ‘I adored [all the sights] and loved Paris. You don’t know how I long to have a good talk with you and pour out everything. I never tell anyone anything and there is no one to turn to.’ Gerald had been knighted in the New Year’s Honours and this was their first holiday as Sir Gerald and Lady du Maurier. They travelled in style, or as Angela remarked, ‘en prince’. They were due to be away from England for seven weeks and in their party was not just the family of five but Aunt Billy, Gerald’s secretary, as well as two of his theatrical pals, the actor Ronald Squire and playwright E. V. Esmond, invited as the entertainment. They travelled by rail and Billy had booked a fleet of cabins for their use. All Gerald’s needs were accommodated, his clothes and brushes and potions all set in place, every eventuality catered for. When it came to holidays he was difficult to please as he complained he would rather be at Cannon Hall or in his favourite club, the Garrick, where he would always find his friends offering admiration and bonhomie. If anything did not meet his approval he would cast a stricken look at Billy, ‘and soon some wretched manager bowed to the knees with grief would emerge and some Rajah would be turned from comfort and ourselves installed, and – “Send the chap a case of cigars, Billy darling,” Daddy would remark.’ His mercurial emotions and lurking dissatisfaction made everyone rather tense and edgy, and keen to keep him happy if they wanted the holiday to continue, as he seemed to be always on the verge of flight. Algiers was the most exotic place yet for a du Maurier family holiday. Settled into the Hotel Mustapha St George, the girls were excited by this assault on the senses. Daphne wrote to Tod, displaying her cavalier approach to spelling, ‘lovely hotel, beautiful gardens. Full of luxerious flowers and orange trees.’ She was fascinated by the Arab quarter, the Moorish buildings, the carpet stalls and the noisy bartering over every transaction. Jeanne, not yet eleven, was still in her tomboy stage but perhaps her painterly eye was stimulated by the patterns of crimson madder, yellow ochre and soft turquoise that made the street and its inhabitants so vivid. Angela was more in the mood for love. She had just read The Garden of Allah, an atmospheric and intense romance by Robert Smythe Hichens where an unconventional Englishwoman (Domini) and an inscrutable stranger (Boris) meet and fall in love at an oasis in the desert. Angela thought it the greatest book ever written. Desert erotica was becoming all the rage since Valentino’s smouldering portrayal of The Sheik in the silent movie sensation of the previous year, and young women were full of romance about the Orient. Angela described herself at the time as, ‘eighteen, rather plump, hair just up (and in consequence always falling down), desperately serious and very much under the influence of [the novel]. I was ready to find a Boris under any palm tree.’ Soon after their arrival their paths crossed with the talented Mr Pertwee. Roland Pertwee was a thirty-six-year-old actor, artist, playwright and producer. He had booked into the hotel seeking distraction from the shock of being dumped by his wife, and mother of their two young sons, for a wild Russo-French soldier, whom he had befriended and was half in love with himself. His pain had been slightly mollified by the payment of a remarkable ?2,000 for his first serial to be published by The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most widely circulated weekly, famous for its Norman Rockwell covers. Angela immediately recognised her Boris. He, however, was not inhabiting the same novel and failed to recognise the femme fatale she hoped to be. ‘Very different [the sisters] were from each other,’ Roland noted in his memoir. ‘Angela was admittedly romantic. Daphne practical, observant and a shade cynical. Jeanne was sturdy, and behaved like the boy she was supposed to have been … Angela spent most of her time writing infatuated letters in reply to infatuated letters from girlfriends from her finishing school.’ Roland was amused to find that she was not just in love with these nameless girls but her infatuation extended to him too. In a mad moment he wished she was ‘not so dreadfully young, for no one was ever sweeter. Her grave, thoughtful eyes, fixed on me were very disturbing.’ Looking back at her diaries in middle age, Angela was highly embarrassed by her behaviour. She thought Roland deserved a knighthood for gallantry for not taking advantage of her na?ve eighteen-year-old self: ‘If anyone threw themselves – unconsciously – at someone’s head, I did.’ In Roland’s memoir of these two weeks of intimacy with the du Mauriers, he teasingly reproduced part of a letter Angela had shown him from one of her Parisian school friends: I never actually saw what [Angela] wrote of me, but I saw a letter replying to one of hers, in which was the phrase: ‘If he is all you say he is, how could his wife ever have left him.’ There was another passage that struck a warning note. ‘Darling, do be careful!!!!! I know, but you have yet to learn, how deceiving men can be!!!!! I would not have your heart broken for all the world.’ Roland found her admiration and affection rather gratifying. She wrote in her diary how she had smoked her first cigarette and rather liked it and, in another attempt at grown-up cool, had her hair washed and waved, much to her parents’ dismay: ‘Looked topping, row over it, however, but Roland liked it.’ He then had apparently kissed her hand. Such bliss! Her father, however, ruined it all for his eldest daughter with his desire to amuse, even at the expense of another, however vulnerable. ‘Gerald, who never missed a trick, used to call me “Puffin’s latest crush”,’ Roland wrote, ‘then Angela would go a kind of black red, for whatever her feelings may have been, nobody was supposed to know anything about them.’ Gerald amused himself with his men friends, talking shop, fooling around, changing subjects as rapidly as shadows passing over water and Roland thought there could be no one in the world who was a better companion, investing ordinary events with a spirit of gay adventure. Meanwhile, his daughters went about their very different interests. Angela’s emotionalism affected everyone; Daphne found her crushes oppressive and told Tod her sister was quite hopeless. Daphne was filled with an irritable ennui, perhaps affected by her father’s innate restlessness but also isolated and alarmed by Angela’s obsessional mooning over one love object after another. Is this what it was to grow up? To Tod, she confided: I must be an awful rotter as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is … Everyone thinks I’m moody and tiresome and I suppose I am; and I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I’m acid and bitter, perhaps I am on the outside but I’m not really. Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as Jeanne. She was grieving for the childhood she was being forced to leave behind, while her sister, four years her junior, was still in that uncomplicated place, sturdy and boy-like, safe in the pretence that she was one of the Dampier brothers. Only a couple of days after Roland Pertwee first met Jeanne, he was disconcerted by her arrival in his bedroom where she wordlessly folded his trousers and underwear before putting a strip of Kolynos toothpaste on his toothbrush. ‘When I asked her what it was all about she replied: “I’m Dampier, your fag. Shout if you want anything else”,’ and gravely left the room. Before the end of their time in Algeria, an expedition into the desert and the Atlas Mountains was planned by the men, and the sisters and Muriel were driven to meet them at Bou-saada, a small trading town surrounded by date palms in a true oasis on the edge of the Sahara. Having had all kinds of desert adventures, the men eventually met up with the women for dinner. Afterwards, Roland linked arms with Daphne and Angela and walked them into the night to watch the moon rise over the desert. To Angela it must have seemed as if The Garden of Allah had come to life. But before they had got very far, the romantic and mysterious atmosphere was suddenly riven with a ghastly cackling laugh, dwindling to a moan. The girls clutched his arm. The shrieking laugh came again. Roland enquired of a passing young Arab who was it laughing so devilishly. ‘A hyena in the cemetery,’ he replied. ‘He is eating the dead.’ Then when a shot rang out in the still air, and the young man explained it was the armed guard in the gardens firing at desert robbers, Angela and Daphne decided they had had enough of moonlight and romance and would rather go home. Cannes and Monte Carlo were their next destinations. Gerald liked to live life with a flourish: he carried gold sovereigns, using them to tip extravagantly and after paying for a purchase with gold would not bother with the change. Occasionally he was a spectacularly lucky gambler on the horses, no doubt encouraged by his partner at Wyndham’s, Frank Curzon, who became as famous and successful as a racehorse breeder as he was a theatrical manager. Gerald chose horses purely on their names reminding him of something significant in his life: he naturally backed Frank Curzon’s horse Call Boy, which went on to win the 1927 Derby. Then he bagged the 1928 Derby winner Felstead (the name was an amalgamation of Hampstead and his sister’s house Felden) a 40–1 outsider on which he won the considerable sum of ?500. He probably made an even bigger return on the 1929 Grand National when his pick Elton, at even more remarkable odds of 100–1, romped home. During the good times, when Frank was running the show, the money kept on rolling in and Gerald was extremely generous and adept at spending it, with little thought of the morrow. During the euphoric 1920s, the Casino in Monte Carlo was filled with rich and well-connected Englishmen and women intent on diversion. Daphne found it energising: ‘It had a great atmosphere of a sort of suppressed excitement all the time.’ Here was another natural stage for Gerald’s flamboyant insouciance. His friends and daughters observed him in his familiar role: There was something about a casino which inspired Gerald to put on an act. He was conscious of the interest he excited, and moved briskly through admiring crowds – alert and on his toes. He had a dashing air as he roved among the tables, saying, ‘Banco’; greeting a friend: ‘Hello Portarlington!’; picking up cards and tossing them down: ‘Neuf! Too bad!’; ignoring the money he had won, and having to be reminded of it. A casino offered the opportunity to display his casual, throw-away methods. Not only was he a great showman, Gerald also relished confounding people’s expectations. On their escapade to the Atlas Mountains, the four men had stopped at the oasis at Laghouat, having drunk a good deal of Cointreau. Here they were entertained by the famously beautiful belly-dancing prostitutes of the Ouled Nail. These Englishmen, however worldly wise, were nevertheless born Victorians and hardly immune to the earthy sensuality of the girls, dancing in magnificent costumes and then naked, except for their elaborate jewellery and headdresses, their exotic looks made more dramatic with make-up and kohl-rimmed eyes. Gerald took one young beauty aside and began to tell her the plot of his forthcoming production of The Dancers and determined, against his friends’ advice, to act out every scene. Ronnie Squire lost his temper and told him to pay the poor girl some money and let her go, but Gerald took offence. ‘This intelligent girl is highly interested,’ he said in clipped actorly tones, and insisted on keeping her into the night while she sat perplexed, uncertain what was required of her and whether her traditional services might be called upon, and if so, when. Significantly, perhaps, Gerald was not as keen on practical jokes if he was the victim. One of the actresses who sprang to fame in Gerald’s successful production of The Dancers – alongside Tallulah Bankhead – was Audrey Carten. She became a great friend of the family, a romantic interest of Gerald’s, and was as much a practical joker as was he. She went too far one night, however, when she filled the fountain outside the eminently respectable Cannon Hall with empty champagne bottles, suggesting some great Bacchanalian orgy had taken place behind its genteel walls. Gerald was not amused. After Monte Carlo, Roland Pertwee and Ronnie Squire were deputed to take Angela with them to Paris where she was to return to finishing school. The train was packed and they could not get any sleeping berths, so huddled together and eventually slept, Angela’s head on Roland’s knee. When she awoke she was green with motion-sickness and dashed for the lavatory. Roland noticed as they approached the school that Angela shed her newly acquired veil of sophistication – ‘she had the smiling gravity of a small Mona Lisa’ – and became a schoolgirl again as they deposited her at the Ozannes’ front door. Angela’s diary recorded her feeling like a dog being left at the vet’s. While Jeanne perfected her tennis and took up golf, Daphne’s mind turned questioningly to religion. She was confirmed at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London in the early summer of 1922, in spite of Gerald’s atheism – as this was just the done thing – but within the year lost any zest she may have felt for organised religion when the priest she liked became interested in spiritualism. In a letter to Tod she attempted to work out what she believed: I suppose some people would say that I’m an atheist, but I’m not exactly that. I sincerely believe that the world is in a state of evolution, and so is everybody in it. Also I think the idea of re-incarnation has a lot in it. As for Heaven & Hell & all that rot, its absurd. Everyone, sooner or later, gets punished for their sins, in their own lives, but not by the way priests tell one. Daphne compared herself with Angela, who was much less critical and tough-minded. She was ill at ease with the extremes of emotion that characterised her elder sister and was proud of her own rational self-sufficiency: I know she secretly wants to become [a Roman Catholic]. Of course some people do need an emotional sort of religion like that! You know how emotional and rather sentimental she is. It wouldn’t do for you & me I’m afraid! Not that I’m matter-of-fact but I do hate sloppiness, & I think R.C. is rather bent that way. This thoughtful, mistrustful adolescent was painted by Harrington Mann during this time. His portrait captured Daphne’s wariness, her shoulders hunched, her body in an S-shaped slouch, her world-weary eyes slipping away from the gaze of the spectator. She was persevering with her short stories, exploring with a thoroughly unsentimental eye relationships and ideas that concerned her. She showed some to her father who found them quite good, and this encouragement spurred her on. Years later she explained the creative spring of her fiction: the child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows … the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him … But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. The fact Daphne was becoming rather an accomplished writer of stories had come to the attention of a young dandy photographer out to make his name, Cecil Beaton. The elder du Maurier sisters had become friendly with him, possibly at the Peter Pan party where he had taken many photographs of famous people, including the du Mauriers, and sold them to the papers. He had begun to get his strikingly posed portraits accepted by Tatler and the daily newspapers. ‘We’d worked & plotted for our success & we’d got out in every paper except the Mirror and the Evening Standard!’ Beaton declared in triumph at the beginning of the new year of 1923. It was during this time, when Beaton was making a name for himself in society, that Angela began to meet him at parties and dances. When Angela returned to Cannon Hall she was officially ‘out’. A ball was given for her at Claridge’s and she became part of the generation of Bright Young Things who went to each other’s parties, not always in the company of parents. This important event in Angela’s young life caused great anxiety and grief to her, and a temporary rift in the family. Angela was so afraid of being upstaged by her prettier younger sisters that she declared she did not want either Jeanne or Daphne at her coming-out party. Muriel gave her an ultimatum: your sisters or your dance, and Angela gave in. She nevertheless could not but think that they inadvertently stole her show: They wore pale blue velvet frocks and both looked dreams, dancing every dance; I was at my fattest and wore a white satin frock that stuck out like a crinoline and must have made me look even fatter. I wore my hair in a low knot or bun at the back of my neck, and I would imagine a tear-stained face. During the celebration that should have been one of the more triumphant moments of her entry into adulthood, she was given an unkind letter from her latest crush telling her he did not want to have the all-important supper dance with her. Despite the advent of the Jazz Age and the general casting off of stays, the social life for young women of the du Mauriers’ social class was still very formal. Anyone going to the theatre and sitting in a box or the stalls or first rows of the dress circle was expected to wear full evening dress. No woman or girl would dream of lunching out without an immaculate frock, and a hat on her head. If you were a well-brought-up young woman you could not be seen in nightclubs, although it was considered safe for Angela and her friends to flock to the Embassy Club or Ciro’s, the glamorous dance club and restaurant that had been favourite family venues and where birthday parties were often held after an evening at the theatre. In January 1923, Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss gave a party for their daughter Betty’s coming out. Like Angela’s, it was at Claridge’s. About one hundred people were invited to dinner with dancing afterwards. One of the guests was their new friend Cecil Beaton, whose remarkably detailed diaries recorded the merry social scene. This party he considered terrific good fun, with ‘such a riot of interesting people’, whom he then proceeded to criticise. ‘The du Mauriers were all there,’ he wrote, ‘they are charming except Sir Gerald whom I simply loathe. He is so conceited and so ridiculously affected. He gets completely on my nerves.’ This from an equally self-conscious dandy. Beaton seemed to be amused by Angela’s grave and innocent demeanour and enjoyed dancing with her and teasing her mercilessly: ‘I ragged [her] as looking [rather] Shaftesbury Avenue in a dress from Idare [the famous theatrical costumier]. It was dreadfully chorus girly & when she swished around the skirt swished up revealing knickers to match.’ But his attention must have helped restore some of Angela’s fragile confidence. Beaton himself did not so obviously lack self-confidence, but nevertheless was immensely gratified when Seymour Hicks sought him out to tell him he had a reputation as the wittiest young man in London. He was even happier to find himself seated at dinner in a more favourable place than the precocious novelist and journalist Beverley Nichols. They were natural rivals as talented, exquisite young men on the make. The family’s annual summer escape from London took the sisters to Frinton on the Essex coast and then to Dieppe in August, where Jeanne’s sporting prowess continued to grow. She was entered for tennis tournaments but Daphne’s diaries do not mention how well she did. Angela sought out another crush, this time a girl named Phil, and Daphne joked to Tod that her sister’s emotional nature would lead her into ‘more and more compromising [situations] and I fear she is on the road to ruin!’ The elder sisters went to stuffy afternoon dances and complained about the body odour hanging in the air. Daphne pretended to fancy a handsome French officer purely to irritate her father, who of course rose to the bait and raged that the man looked ‘an awful bounder’. Their glamorous life continued with the whole family, including their Aunt Billy, spending Christmas in Monte Carlo, again visiting the Casino regularly, and Daphne and Jeanne playing tennis and golf with each other and their father. Female fashion had changed radically and young women at parties abandoned their restrictive undergarments and appeared in slim columns of beaded and sequinned silk. Angela, still dressed by her parents’ favourite theatrical costumier, remained in the waisted dirndls of her youth. While she was dancing in old-fashioned flouncy dresses, laughing at the inoffensive jokes of effete young men, Jeanne was focusing on her art and sport. Daphne, always more introspective and intellectual than her sisters, meanwhile wrote disconsolate letters to Tod about the impossibility of conventional happiness and her fear of growing up: ‘It seems a morbid and stupid thought but I can’t see myself living very long,’ wrote Daphne, ‘but the future is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly, marriage doesn’t thrill me – nothing – nothing remains. If only I was a man! That is the one slogan to me … I like women much better than men.’ She then described how dance music made her long to dance with someone she had a crush on, but these barely understood emotions disturbed her: ‘It annoys me though to feel like that! I should love to be free from all that sort of thing.’ Full of anxiety and dread of the future, this was the girl who had once bitten her nails so savagely that her parents had sought medical help; theatrically she recalled what she considered a symbolic act – that of being offered bitter aloes as a cure rather than an attempt at understanding and the unconditional love she craved. Another great theatrical family who were very much part of the sisters’ youth was the Trees. Viola, the eldest daughter of the legendary Edwardian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was larger than life and greatly loved. To call her an actress hardly did justice to her many talents; she was co-writer with Gerald on The Dancers, had an eccentric newspaper column in the Daily Dispatch and was a natural and unselfconscious comedienne. Viola was also blessed with a wonderful singing voice and would touch the heart, or the funny bone, with anything from German lieder to the rudest vaudeville ditty. Angela remembered her as ‘the most brilliant, most witty, most amusing – and at times most maddening – woman it has been my pleasure to have known’. Viola was married to the drama critic Alan Parsons, and their daughter Virginia was a contemporary of Jeanne’s. Jeanne was being tutored at home with her friend Nan Greenwood but at fourteen she went to school in Hampstead and made closer acquaintance with Virginia. Unsurprisingly, this younger Tree was much shyer than her mother but had her own generous helping of the family’s therapeutic charm. She was beautiful and lacking in cynicism or side. She loved most humans and all animals but, most importantly for Jeanne perhaps, she was highly artistic. Her enlightened parents allowed her to have private lessons with the Bloomsbury Post-Impressionist Duncan Grant, and then with the realist painter William Coldstream. When Virginia was only sixteen she became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, the prestigious college that Coldstream would eventually direct as Professor of Fine Art. This was liberated, even libertine, company for a young woman of the privileged yet sheltered classes. There was no evidence as to whether Jeanne was included in her friend’s art tutoring. Considering Gerald’s antipathy to anything modern in art or in the education of daughters, it seems unlikely, but as Virginia’s contemporary, and given the closeness of the du Maurier and Tree families, there was little doubt that Jeanne was influenced by the fact that a young woman’s artistic talents could be taken so seriously. Virginia Parsons did not go on to make painting her life, but she did end up as the wife of the 6th Marquess of Bath and chatelaine to the glorious Elizabethan confection of Longleat (and its lions) in Wiltshire. Here she started Pets Corner and exercised her concern for all living creatures, charming friends, animals and visitors alike. Angela’s debutante days of gadding-about from social lunches to shopping, to attending every new film and play, all punctuated by gay conversations with other debutantes, were followed by nights of wittily themed parties, treasure hunts and extravagant balls, before the dash home by chauffeured car. They were privileged times indeed. The du Maurier girls took it for granted that Hollywood royalty like Rudolph Valentino (so incredibly handsome and charming, they thought), Gary Cooper and Jack Barrymore (ditto) would dine with them at home at Cannon Hall. It was unremarkable that Arthur Rubinstein and Ivor Novello, also incredibly handsome and charming – and bagged by Daphne as a future husband, despite Angela’s first claim on him – would play the piano to entertain them and their guests in the drawing room. It did not seem remarkable that actors of the calibre of Gladys Cooper and Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier should be family friends, and that exotic acquaintances like Nelly Melba, Tallulah Bankhead, Cecil Beaton and Lady Diana Cooper would enliven the show. Unremarkable too, that the Savoy Hotel was the du Mauriers’ home from home, the place to which they decamped when cook was ill or the maids had flu. This grand hotel was their regular haunt for Christmas Day lunch with friends, their own table specially kept for them by the vast windows overlooking the river. Enforced sexual ignorance and unwelcome parental control took their toll on these apparently carefree days. When Angela was eighteen she spent a happy September week in a country house in Gloucestershire under the aegis of Lady Cynthia Asquith. Staying in the house was a collection of young people, among them her cousin Nico Llewelyn Davies and the rest of the Eton cricket XI, which included Lord Dunglass – the future Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After a great deal of innocent games and dancing into the night, Angela allowed one of these young gods chastely to kiss her in her bedroom. When she felt vaguely sick the next morning (probably from too much gaiety the night before) she was panic-stricken by the thought that the kiss, so riskily proffered in such a taboo place as a bedroom, might somehow have made her pregnant. She could not confide in Daphne, who was even more ignorant in the facts of life than she was. She could never confess such a thing to her mother, and her father’s reaction was too terrible even to imagine. So she wrote to her Aunt Billy, who luckily kept her secret and reassured her with a sanitised version of the truth. Angela never let on whether the young god with the prepotent kiss was the nineteen-year-old Lord Dunglass. She suggested in a later memoir that it was. This young aristocrat was already a boy hero, captain of the Eton cricket team, Keeper of the Field (captain of football, in the college’s own form of the game) and President of the Prefects’ Society, called Pop. He was a gallant, golden, effortlessly accomplished youth who may well have attracted the over-romantic girl. Certainly Lord Dunglass trumped Daphne’s creation, Eric Avon. Eric merely went to Harrow (Gerald’s school): Milord went to Eton. Eric excelled at sports and acts of simple bravery; Alec did all this and was also rather good at the intellectual and social stuff too. To the eldest daughter of a family enamoured of its own breeding, Lord Dunglass held the ace, the inheritance of the earldom of Home. This dated from the beginning of James I’s reign and included several thousand acres of the Scottish borderlands. Angela, whose memoirs are full of veiled clues (at least for those of a forensic mind), rather gave the game away in her second volume, where she was musing on education and recalling her ecstatic teenage self: ‘I’m eighteen and last week I met an absolutely wonderful boy who’s just left Eton. Actually he’s a viscount – I wonder …’ Her readers, perhaps, did not need to wonder. This young viscount who caught Angela’s eye and was to become an earl and then renounce his title in order to sit in the House of Commons as an MP was described by his contemporary at Eton, Cyril Connolly, with remarkable prescience as, ‘a votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part’. Connolly thought had Douglas-Home lived in the eighteenth century, to which he so obviously belonged, this kind of effortless brilliance would have made him Prime Minister before he was thirty (he managed it by sixty). As it was, ‘he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life’. Sundays at Cannon Hall provided another stage for fun, flirtation and amusing conversation, and had become an institution amongst the theatrical circles in which Gerald moved. He was always the centre of attention, and Muriel the gracious and well-organised hostess. There were liveried maids (in grey and white alpaca uniforms) who acted as waitresses, serving champagne and delicacies to a large and varied mix of beautiful people. Angela enjoyed the relentless socialising. Daphne did not. While Angela was beginning to grow up and learn about love, in rather limited circumstances, Daphne was reading voraciously (Oscar Wilde for a while was her favourite), still writing stories and thinking a lot. At the suggestion of Tod, she had discovered Katherine Mansfield. Daphne declared her short stories the best she had ever read, although they left her feeling melancholy, with ‘a kind of helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s lives’. She identified with the author as a sensitive outsider, but the expectations and hypocrisy of the adult world alarmed and dismayed her, and sex seemed to be fraught with menace. To Tod, she wrote: have you ever noticed, (I think its vile) that if one marries its considered awful if one does’nt do it thoroughly (you know what I mean) and yet if one does certain things without being married, its considered awful too. Surely that’s narrow-minded, and disgusting. Either the Act of – er-well, you know, is right or wrong. A wedding-ring cant change facts. An illegitimate child is looked on as a sort of ‘freak’ or ‘unnatural specimen’, whereas a child whose parents are married is wholesome and decent … Oh is’nt it all unwholesome? She and Jeanne were exposed to another unwholesome aspect of adult life when, at the beginning of 1924, their father took them to Pentonville Prison. He was rehearsing Not in Our Stars, a play about a man involved in the murder of his romantic rival, and wished to investigate the experiences a convicted murderer would endure. It was just a year after a sensational trial and double execution of Edith Thompson and her young lover Frederick Bywaters for murdering Edith’s husband. Angela’s new friend Beverley Nichols was a young journalist on the case and he wrote about the awful tragedy that was played out to a packed house at the Old Bailey, and the heartbreak of the lovers’ letters read aloud in court. All of London was talking about it. The double executions were synchronised for 9 a.m. on 9 January 1923, Thompson’s in Holloway and Bywaters’s in Pentonville, the prisons just half a mile apart. Rumours of Edith’s grotesque last minutes on earth filled the newspapers. With the horror still raw, somehow Gerald thought it a good idea to take his young impressionable daughters with him to Pentonville. The girls were shown over the whole prison by the governor Major Blake; they saw the locked cells with their miserable inhabitants, the patients in their beds in the hospital wing, the condemned cell and the hanging shed, and even had the drop gruesomely demonstrated. The unmarked graves of the hanged added their own grim melancholy. Amongst them was wife-murderer Dr Crippen, the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and, perhaps most poignantly, the twenty-year-old Bywaters, whose unfailing loyalty to his lover was remarked on by all in the press. Daphne could not get the images out of her mind and sketched the cell and the hanged man’s drop in her diary. This episode showed how peculiarly contrary Gerald could be. He was almost hysterically protective of his daughters and wished to keep them as children for ever, but then he was capable of taking Jeanne, just thirteen, and Daphne, seventeen, to see people at their most degraded and dangerous. He had even exposed them to the horror of the process and apparatus for judicial murder by hanging. Had Angela been there too it might well have elicited a fit of uncontrolled crying, but Daphne just digested the images and added them to her already jaundiced view of human nature and the harm people do each other. She wrote a poem in her diary and wondered later if it was inspired by the visit: Sorrow for the men that mourn Sorrow for the days that dawn, Sorrow for all things born Into this world of sorrow. And all my life, as far as I can see, All that I hope, or ever hope to be, Is merely driftwood on a lonely sea. Emboldened by her first kiss with a member of the Eton cricket XI, Angela next attempted to break out from the social straitjacket of home. Aged twenty, she developed a crush on a woman notorious for her lesbian proclivities. It showed a certain courage and boldness of character that this conscientious and obedient young woman should make a stand over this friendship. Her father was particularly hard to withstand. He was emotionally extreme and a practised actor and could work himself into a fit of temper that seemed close to insanity. Beverley Nichols had watched this amazing facility in action in rehearsal: ‘He can precipitate himself into a state of hysteria with the speed of a sporting Bugatti, and the moment afterwards is playing a love scene with admirable timing and sentiment.’ When Angela persisted with her desire to see this forbidden woman, both parents raged and threatened. Angela resorted to asking the Almighty to intervene. ‘Oh God,’ she wrote in her diary that autumn, ‘help something to happen to get them to change their minds.’ Their minds remained made up and Angela later reflected that this intensive control of her behaviour pushed her, from this time on, into subterfuge, secrecy and barefaced lies. She did not name the focus of her desire in her memoir, but she was almost certainly an actress and most likely Gwen Farrar – the sensation of the highly successful revue at the Duke of York’s Theatre, The Punch Bowl, that ran through 1924 and the following year. She was witty and lively, a natural boyish clown who attracted men and women alike. She was partnered in the revue by her partner in life, the more conventionally pretty Norah Blaney, a friend of Angela Halliday, who was to become a close and lifelong friend of Angela du Maurier’s. Daphne’s eye had also been caught by the unconventional attractions of the crop-haired Gwen when she saw the revue and wrote a fan letter to the actress. She admitted this to Tod and begged her discretion: I adored Gwen Farrar! I wrote to her last night (not a word of this) saying ‘Dear Gwen, I think you are quite perfect, Daphne.’ Shall I be drawn into the net too? I wonder. I hope she won’t show the letter to anyone, or I shall be tarred with the same brush! Being ‘drawn into the net too’ implied that someone else was in that net, and perhaps this was a reference to her elder sister, whose stormy rows with their parents over her unsuitable friendship could not have gone unnoticed. Daphne then added a significant coda: ‘Life’s no fun, unless theres’ a spark of danger in it.’ Angela did not relish the fights with her parents and, although she held out for a couple of months, in the end the force ranged against her was too much to withstand. She regretted her parents’ slur on the reputation of this intriguing woman and the thwarting of her own longing for friendship with her: ‘in all the weeks and months I knew her I never met anyone kinder, more generous, more amusing and so utterly uncontaminating in influencing the impressionable girl I was’. Angela’s diary at the end of October 1924 relayed the rollercoaster of her life, the italics are hers: Dreadful scene with Daddy over X and Z (another friend) [possibly Gwen and Norah]. He stormed like a madman. Went to the dentist, awful time as he injected me with cocaine and jabbed a colossal needle into my jaw. Extraordinary feeling. Lilian and Joyce to lunch (Lilian Braithwaite and [daughter] Joyce Carey). Spent rest of day making frock. Polling Day – exciting results on wireless. What Angela, and no doubt her family, considered ‘exciting results’ was an increased majority for the Conservatives and a rout of the Liberals under Asquith. Gerald perhaps decided it was time to divert his eldest daughter’s energies away from unsuitable love affairs and into some kind of suitable career. Out of the blue he suggested that she play Wendy in the annual Christmas and New Year performance of Peter Pan at the Adelphi. This was a daunting role for someone who had never been trained as an actress. Peter Pan, however, was so well known to the du Maurier sisters, and loved by them all that each was word perfect in every character. Daphne did not envy her one bit. To appear before an audience, even in such a special play, she said, ‘would be agony’. Angela, more extrovert, trusting and na?ve, did not hesitate. She could have ‘jumped over the moon with glee’. This was always her part in the family shows and she had not missed one of the professional productions since she was first taken at the age of two. Highly professional and famous actors were hired to co-star with her. The lovely Gladys Cooper was Peter Pan, Mrs Patrick Campbell was Mrs Darling, and Hook and Mr Darling were played by a young South African actor, Ian Hunter, for whom Angela had already conceived a crush. There were rehearsals all day and Angela was still socialising at night. She had always found attending rehearsals generally fascinating and enjoyed nothing more than sitting in the darkened stalls watching her father tease performances out of his company as they brought a play to life. This time, Angela struggled with the director’s vision of Peter Pan, which contradicted her own childhood memories of how it should be played. She also struggled with the acting. After weeks of work, her diary for late October 1924 lamented: rehearsal all day 3rd act morning. Daddy came down and I was very bad. Lisped worse than ever, spoke quickly and forgot my words. Lunched Jill [Esmond, who was playing Nibs]. Last act afternoon. Ian so sweet, I had to prompt him and he said, ‘Bless you.’ I am a fool. The middle-aged Angela wrote of her youthful sense of folly: ‘How true, how true!’ In retrospect she realised also that she had been parachuted in ahead of all the other young actresses who would have hoped for the part. Jill Esmond for instance, although younger, was fully RADA-trained and merely had a minor part. The nepotism involved in her selection and Angela’s lack of training, together with her na?ve belief that she could just reprise her nursery performances, all set her up for a fall. Unfortunately it was a literal and almighty one. Each actor who was required to fly had to don an uncomfortable harness and then be lifted into the air and manipulated by a man pulling wires in the wings. In the last act Wendy, John and Michael all flew through the window back to their nursery, alighting in the middle of the stage. But Angela was flown too vigorously and crash-landed on the footlights. She was catapulted into the orchestra pit, taking the double bassist and his instrument with her. There was an appalled hush from the audience: no one knew if she would emerge alive. She was dazed and in pain but recovered enough to creep under the stage and reappear as Wendy in her bed in the nursery. ‘The ovation which greeted me was almost frightening. The audience stood and clapped and yelled, and with tears running down my face by then (from emotion not pain) I blew them all a kiss and then the play went on.’ Angela dined out on the story of her flying debacle so many times that the family and her closest friends coined the phrase ‘an orchestra’ to mean a long tale of melodramatic disaster. After this mishap she realised she hadn’t the mettle to be a proper actress because she did not believe that the show had to go on regardless. She was much more inclined to take to her bed if she felt under the weather. But although she was battered and bruised, her nerve shattered, Gerald insisted she return to the theatre the next day, conquer her fear of flying, and perform in the afternoon show. Angela’s careering flight was one of the few outside incidents to merit a mention in Daphne’s continuing angst-ridden correspondence with Tod, who was living in some splendour at Burrough Court in Leicestershire, tutoring Averill the daughter of a rich, recently widowed businessman, the 1st Viscount Furness. Daphne teased Tod by suggesting that her much-loved governess should become the next Lady Furness. In fact, the Viscount’s taste unhappily ran on rather more exotic lines as he was already engaged to one beautiful American socialite, and would end up married to another, who promptly became the mistress of Edward, the Prince of Wales. Daphne’s adolescent introspection and sense of the pointlessness of life was about to be challenged. At eighteen it was her turn to go to finishing school in Paris, the city of her imagination. She was not bound for the Ozannes’, where Angela’s experiences had been mixed, but to a school run by Miss Wicksteed at Camposena, some five and a half miles south-west of the city. Miss Wicksteed, or ‘Wick’ as she was known by the girls, was a reassuringly solid middle-aged Englishwoman with white hair and a no-nonsense manner. On 16 January 1925, after a blast of Christmas parties and dances, Daphne headed off to Paris for what would be the defining experience of her life. Jeanne was now nearly fourteen and life for her was changing too. She was enrolled in Francis Holland School at Clarence Gate near Regent’s Park to start in the autumn term a more formal education with art and sports on the curriculum. Having had generous notices for her Wendy the first time round, Angela contracted to do one more season of Peter Pan, but the critics this time sharpened their quills. Already ambivalent about her future as an actress, exhaustion, demoralisation and a stage fight with real swords, in which her nose was almost severed, put paid to her faltering ambition. Her famous theatrical name was both a boon and a liability. If she was to be an actress as a du Maurier she would have to be particularly dedicated and particularly good, and she feared she was neither. During her run as Wendy, Angela had been conned by a well-known elderly photographer into posing for him in the nude, and been appalled and embarrassed by the results. A happier experience was provided by their young friend Cecil Beaton when he asked Angela and Daphne to be models in two of his earliest photographic experiments. They were shown into his old nursery where he had set up his props and various cameras and tripods and, with the help of his elderly nanny, and a great deal of laughter (and ineffectual fiddling around it seemed to the girls), produced his inventive portraits of the sisters: ‘Daph’s and my heads appearing magically under wineglasses.’ Stilted and ludicrously artificial to the modern eye, the photographs were considered by Angela later in life to be the most flattering portraits of them both ever created. Hers hung in pride of place in the Italian house of her great friend Naomi Jacob, until the Germans arrived in the Second World War and either purloined or trashed it. Angela could never confide her hopes or fears to her parents and without prospects of a career she drifted rudderless and ill-equipped for independent life. Years later she mused on how celebrity affected those closest to it: I wanted to be a good actress, and with a name like du Maurier I could not afford to be a bad one … Possibly too much is expected of the children of the great; I would definitely say, in fact, that both as an actress – admittedly of only one part – and as a writer, I have found my name as big a handicap as ever it was a help. As Wendy I was Gerald du Maurier’s daughter – and it had been an amusing ‘stunt’ to try me out in a star part straight off … Her lack of training and the chance to work her way up from the bottom had also robbed her of the opportunity to graduate to being a producer, which was where her true talents possibly lay, though as a young woman gazing into the unknown she could not have been aware of this at the time. Girls of her background and education did not aspire to have serious careers apart from becoming actresses and the wives of famous men. While Angela waited for the man she would marry, the parties continued. In a private room at the Garrick, Gerald occasionally invited an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to lunch. One memorable gathering on 23 October was recorded by Angela in her diary, and also by her old crush, Roland Pertwee. The party was organised to wave off in style on an Australian tour their friends and colleagues, the actor-director Dion Boucicault Jnr and his actress wife Irene Vanbrugh. Apart from Muriel, Gerald, Angela, Roland and the Boucicaults, there was also (with Angela’s comments in italics) ‘Dame Nellie Melba (most excited about [her] for whom I had (rightly) boundless admiration), H. G. Wells (too sweet), Augustus John (overawed by him and sat far away), Sir Squire Bancroft,’ and the sisters’ lifelong heroes, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. Roland continued the tale: half-way through lunch Irene said to Melba: ‘Tip us a stave, Nellie.’ And Nellie Melba, over a loaded fork, for she was a hearty trencherman, opened her throat and sang like a lark. That lunch, which started at one fifteen went on until seven thirty, when John Barrymore rushed off to appear as Hamlet at the Haymarket, and gave one of the most sensational performances of his career. This was the kind of glamorous world that the du Maurier sisters inhabited, some of them more happily than others. Angela, still childlike at twenty, was standing tentatively on the edge of this world she was reared to join, while Jeanne was allowed to remain a girl for a few years more. Daphne, who had been so reluctant to grow up and did not care for her parents’ kind of high society or attitudes to love, was back in Paris in the heat of her first real love affair. This time she would give her father real reason for outrage. Luckily, he never knew. 4 Love and Losing I for this and this for me. DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Growing Pains DAPHNE HAD NEVER before been away from home and everyone expected her to be homesick – after all, Angela’s time in Paris had been spoiled by a heart-clutching nostalgie. But Daphne suffered not one twinge. Why would she? She already adored Paris, not for its shopping and its shows, but for its possibilities, the ancient alleyways, the hidden squares, the imaginative connection with her ancestors, and the dark stories embedded in its stones. Daphne had found life at home limiting, her parents’ suspicions claustrophobic, and she had never been happy with the relentless socialising expected of her in London. She had grown up with a sense of her own exceptionalism, something her father’s attention had encouraged, and always felt separate and alien, and quite unlike other people. Desperate to escape the envelope of make-believe and good manners that had maintained her in a suspended state of childhood, Daphne could not have chosen a better springboard for her flight. Paris between the wars was the most exciting city in the world, a City of Light that cast her home town distinctly in its shade. Intellectuals and artists were attracted to its vibrant energy, where the revolutionary movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism evolved from the studios of painters like Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti and Chagall. American jazz was the thrilling accompaniment to the modernist experimentations that energised intellectual debate and transformations in design. Excitement spilled from the caf?s and bars of the Left Bank – a favourite haunt of Daphne’s all her life. Her pulse could not have failed to quicken to its beat. Daphne’s only concern was that she had to go to school and her fellow pupils would be a dull lot, as she wrote to Tod, adding revealingly, ‘I know so few girls that I will probably think them all fools at first.’ She was accompanied by Doodie Millar, the daughter of another Hampstead family. Doodie, a lively, good-looking girl she had known from childhood, had already been to boarding school and so was sanguine about the whole experience. The house at Camposena was cold and far less comfortable than Cannon Hall but was situated in fine parkland close to the small town of Meudon, and a short train trip from Paris itself, which more than made up for its lack of luxury. The bedroom she and Doodie shared was barely furnished and bitter even in October, and Daphne thought the girls looked as dull and boring as she had expected. However, she liked the mistresses, and one in particular. She wrote to Tod, her faithful confidante, ‘the head kind of mistress, Mlle Yvon, is obviously “Venice” [her code for lesbian], many of the girls, & one mistress, are mad about her. She has a sort of fatal attraction about her, I feel I shall fall for her before too long!!’ During her flirtatious skirmishes with Cousin Geoffrey, Daphne had learnt of her singular power to attract: having been the sister who had always drawn the most attention, she was not used to having to compete with others for favour. She was stung by the school’s assessment of her as being merely middling in her abilities, placing her in the B stream. The elite A girls, who clustered around Mlle Yvon, were privileged to choose where they sat at dinner and – the height of excitement – could follow her afterwards to a special room, the salon du fond. Here they played an uncomfortable game called ‘Truths’ that would reduce a few of them each night to tears. The atmosphere was febrile with girlish intrigues and emotion, encouraged by the green-eyed, soign?e Fernande Yvon. Daphne was determined that she would somehow penetrate this inner sanctum and claim her rightful place as favourite at its centre. Despite remaining in stream B and therefore outside the charmed circle, she showed her father’s chutzpah when one night she picked up her book (a French classic by Edmond de Goncourt whose acad?mie had founded the most prestigious literary prize Prix Goncourt) and strolled nonchalantly into the lionesses’ den. The girls greeted this uninvited interloper with surprised hostility, but Mlle Yvon appeared to be amused by her presumption and motioned her to sit at her feet by the fire. ‘My triumph was complete,’ Daphne wrote, recalling her heroic boy-self, ‘even Eric Avon, bowing to the crowd from his balcony above Lord’s cricket ground, had never achieved such a victory.’ But this kind of power was heady and dangerous and, as with Cousin Geoffrey, the thrill of a clandestine and forbidden connection exerted its own power to enslave. Fernande Yvon, in her thirties, unmarried and with limited prospects, inevitably enjoyed the influence that her position as directrice of an exclusive finishing school gave her, and the devotion of well-connected girls brought its own rewards both socially and emotionally. There was little doubt that the teacher set out to seduce her new pupil, but also that the pupil was ready to be seduced, or certainly desired the power that being favourite bestowed. Daphne wrote to Tod: I’ve quite fallen for the woman I’ve told you about – Mlle Yvon … She’s absolutely kind of lured me on, and now I’m coiled in the net! She pops up to the bedroom at odd moments (Venice – what!!) and is generally divine. She’s most seductive when coming back from the Opera. I get on the back seat with her, & she puts her arm round me and makes me put my head on her shoulder. Then sort of presses me! Ugh! It all sounds too sordid and low, but I don’t know – it gives one a sort of extra-ordinary thrill! Having her own feelings for Daphne, perhaps Tod found these letters rather hard to take. Daphne wrote extensively in her diary and letters of the romantic crush that became an obsessional affair, lasting almost two years, while their subsequent affectionate friendship lasted until Fernande’s death. For this girl, who had always felt herself unloved by her mother, her need for Mlle’s approval was ‘as insidious as a drug’. Her sensible friend Doodie tried to reassure her by saying everyone had crushes, and promptly decided to attach herself devotedly to a little red-headed teacher. Daphne thought she knew all there was to know about crushes, having seen enough of Angela’s fleeting and, to her mind, vaguely ridiculous passions, but this, she insisted, was different. She added a further paragraph in her letter to Tod, revealing how cool, detached and watchful she remained, even while in thrall to her first grand passion: I hope I haven’t got ‘Venetian’ tendencies! Already some of the girls are jealous which makes life somewhat uncomfortable … Life is queer, I can’t make it out … It will be fun, when I get back from the hols, imitating everyone here and laughing at it all. Even when I’m feeling most ‘?pris’ of Mlle Yvon, there is always something inside me laughing somewhere. Daphne’s idea of courtship was theatrical and gleaned from the way her father behaved towards women: exaggerated chivalry alternated with studied indifference. When, for instance, Mlle Yvon dropped a handkerchief, Daphne swooped on it and hid it away; later, in Paris, she bought a bottle of scent, sprinkled it on the linen and then in front of her rivals in the salon du fond Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jane-dunn/daphne-du-maurier-and-her-sisters/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.