Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  If to be happy one must needs be chaste

  Dull and neglected, middle-class and kind,

  Surrounded by a garden and four walls

  Croquet and a tennis court behind,

  Surely one would choose then to be sad …35

  Her clever, scheming parents, however, had realised after the Ferdy and Paris experiences, and the battle over Molly Kerr, that they could not control their headstrong daughter with direct confrontation. They decided instead on the counter-seductions of the sea and countryside. The money from The Ringer allowed them to afford a holiday house and Muriel thought they should head for Cornwall. The parents said that it was necessary for Daphne’s health but, given their anxieties about her activities in Paris and London, and their express desire to have her somewhere, ‘where they could keep their eye on her’,36 it was just as likely to be her moral health that concerned them.

  In September 1926, the journey to Cornwall that would change all their lives began. The three sisters and their mother boarded the Great Western train at Paddington, heading for Looe. Disappointed with the town, they hired a car, piled their baggage into the boot and drove a few miles westwards, towards Fowey, arriving on the other side of the River Fowey at the Bodinnick Ferry. From here they could gaze across the harbour to the houses that rose from the opposite water’s edge. They were all overwhelmed with the beauty and fascination of the place and, almost as if fate took a hand they thought, there to the left of them, by the ferry landing, was a For Sale sign. It was attached to a ramshackle building that looked like a Swiss chalet and clung to the granite cliff just above the waves. When they enquired, they discovered it was certainly for sale, and was called Swiss Cottage. The ground floor had been an old boatyard with a sail loft above and the only living accommodation was on the third floor. Muriel was known for her intuitive feel for houses, and for her interior decorating skills. She showed her vision and strength in neither taking fright at the state of the property nor at the amount of work involved to make it habitable. Instead, she seemed to share her daughters’ excitement that here they would find paradise. Angela’s diary entry was breathless and prosaic:

  Motored to Fowey which we fell in love with directly. To Bodinnick first, adorable … Saw over perfect little place to be sold. Lunched at Fowey Hotel and have taken awfully nice rooms there. Motor-boated to Polperro for tea, very nearly sick. Quite heaven on earth, no words to describe it. Motored back, perfect scenery.37

  Daphne could not wait to explore and her sisters followed her lead in storming the property. Angela and Jeanne entered by the gate near the ferry that led to the boatyard while she climbed the cliffside to the terraced garden and stood beneath the jutting top floor, looking out on the activity of the harbour. Small boats were skiffing over the water, bigger yachts lay at anchor and then the thrill of a big ship approaching with its escort of tugs, to moor just beneath where she stood. Daphne’s own diary entry was just as enthusiastic as Angela’s, but abrupt and concise. In retrospect, writing many years later, she recognised the epiphany of this moment:

  Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone … I remembered a line from a forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one – ‘I for this, and this for me.’38

  She was, like Julius, the extraordinary eponymous character in one of her great early novels, stretching out her hands to the sky. And his question, that throughout her conscious life had been hers too, ‘Who am I? Where from? Where to?’39 was answered by the ancient spirits of the place.

  From this moment, the lives of each of the sisters would become entwined with Cornwall and the West Country. Angela was to live in the house almost until her death, content with a life and with loves very different from those she had expected when she first came to Fowey. Jeanne would become part of the artists’ colonies of St Ives and Newlyn and end up living for the rest of her days with her painting, her animals and her partner in an ancient house and remarkable symbolic garden in the heart of Dartmoor. And Daphne would prove that her parents’ ruse had worked. Her feelings for Ferdy cooled into lifelong friendship and her obsession became deflected to a place and a house with which no mere human could compete. With Cornwall as her focus, her restless, aimless life in London was swapped for independence, real contentment and hard purposeful work by the sea. Here in the solitude and beauty of the place, her imagination could take flight. Fowey would eventually bring her marriage too, and halt for a time her disruptive need to exercise her power of attraction over others.

  5

  In Pursuit of Happiness

  I do not blame my parents, they over-indulged us, that was all. There never were sisters who wished so ardently to eat cake and have it.

  ANGELA DU MAURIER, It’s Only the Sister

  BEFORE THE SISTERS could begin to explore their Cornish retreat, the ramshackle building their mother had bought in record time had to be renovated. Its name, Swiss Cottage, sounded too suburban to their sophisticated London ears so it was changed to the equally literal-minded Ferryside, for indeed it sat just above the ferry that plied between Bodinnick and Fowey. While the builders knocked down walls, reroofed, damp-proofed, partitioned, plastered and painted, the elder du Maurier girls continued the hedonistic life of a generation born with the right to play.

  After a jolly family Christmas at Sandwich in Kent, Angela and Daphne set off with Pat Wallace to join the Wallace parents and rest of their entourage at the Palace Hotel at Caux in Switzerland for a winter sports holiday. Edgar presided over a vast array of friends who met for lunch and dinner parties after spending the daylight hours skiing, skating and lugeing down the bobsleigh run. For Daphne it was a revelation that she could enjoy the company of people of her own age and of both sexes, although she still felt drawn towards the more grown-up members of the party. Her competitive spirit and need to be as courageous as the next man meant she launched herself flat out down the bob run; ‘people say it’s astonishing for my second day’.1 The après ski extended well into the night with games and dancing, and both sisters got carried away with flirtations.

  Angela’s affections alighted on a young Oxford undergraduate who seemed to return some at least of her enthusiasm and Daphne felt ‘menaced’ (the du Maurier word for attracted) by Edgar Wallace’s secretary, a woman called ‘James’; equally confusing was the fact that Edgar’s vivacious second wife was called Jim. The two elder du Maurier sisters confided fully in each other, Angela admitting, ‘I have always told everything to Daphne.’2 Years later, Angela told her friend Betty Williams that until Daphne’s marriage changed the dynamic of their sisterly relationship, Daphne loved her ‘passionately, from head to toe’,3 a closeness that would increasingly exclude Jeanne.

  They had an uninhibitedly good time in Caux, although the worst of their transgressions would have been no more than a daring kiss or two with the object of their crushes. Daphne shocked Ferdy when she mentioned in a letter that she stayed up late at the bar drinking brandy and soda. The older woman’s disapproval might have been as much for the company she kept as for the murder of a good cognac. Daphne, however, seemed unaware – or unconcerned – that Ferdy was suffering some jealousy as she felt her influence in Daphne’s life wane.

  In 1927, Jeanne was only sixteen and considered too young to be let loose on the wider world and its temptations. She was still at school but sometime in the following year or so she persuaded her parents that she did not want to follow her two elder sisters to Paris to be ‘finished’, but would rather go to art school. Whatever Gerald’s old-fashioned ideas about raising his daughters, he did recognise that his youngest daughter needed to express her considerable talents in painting and drawing. Viola Tree, always a dynamic and influential friend to him, would certainly have encouraged the idea as she had allowed her own daughter, Virginia, a school friend of Jeanne’s, to attend the Slade School when she was only sixteen.
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  Jeanne’s formal artistic education began at the Central School of Arts and Crafts – a monumental building on the corner of Southampton Row and Parton Street in London – where she was lucky enough to be taught life drawing by Bernard Meninsky. Twenty years her senior, he was a brilliant figurative painter and draughtsman who was skilled in all media, but sadly his experiences in the Great War had led to a nervous breakdown and to fragile mental health. At the school, Jeanne also learnt drypoint techniques and etching. Perhaps she had already decided what was to be her life’s work, for she followed this up with more study later at St John’s Wood School of Art. Here, P. F. Millard taught painting in the huge studios decorated with amusing murals by famous old students like Byam Shaw. Eventually, Jeanne would get her own studio in New End Square, opposite Ye Olde White Bear hostelry, just a five-minute walk down the road from Cannon Hall. It was the studio in which Mark Gertler, genius boy painter on the margins of the Bloomsbury Group, had painted some of his most famous paintings, including, in 1916, the pacifist Merry-Go-Round.

  Jeanne’s elder sisters also had begun their search for a way to bring meaning and purpose to their lives. In their parents’ circle, daughters did not consider middle-class careers as teachers or secretaries, although it was perfectly acceptable for a girl from the theatrical elite to become an actress. But Angela felt her lack of conventional beauty had disqualified her from the romantic lead and ingénue roles, although she allowed that if she had been more realistic and better advised then she might have made a career eventually as a character actress. However, the underlying problem was her chronic lack of confidence and the necessary ambition and tenacity to make her way in a tough profession. She would love the theatre all her life and liked nothing better than to read scripts for her father, picking out the good ones, and listening to him learning his lines. As long as she had her parents’ allowance that just about covered the essentials of life for a young woman-about-town, then she did not have to consider other less glamorous work. But later she could not help wondering, what if?

  If only one had been less flighty … I often think that in spite of the colossal hard work, I should have enjoyed musical comedy! I could have sung, I could have danced – but I couldn’t have looked!!! (And I should have hated to have been the Funny Woman, even if I had brought the house down!)4

  Most actors would be delighted to have the kind of power and attention that could ‘bring the house down’, but in this aside perhaps Angela was expressing her hurt pride at always being the butt of the joke in her own family, the plain woman who, like Micky Jacob, was not offered the romantic lead but the character part.

  Out of the blue, Angela and Daphne were asked to do screen tests. The play The Constant Nymph had been adapted by its author Margaret Kennedy from her bestselling book and in 1926 had been a great success on the stage. Central to this was a young actress Edna Best who broke the hearts of her audience every night with the poignancy of her portrayal of a teenage girl hopelessly in love with a man called Lewis Dodd (played on stage by Noël Coward) who eventually marries her cousin. Angela was rapt and declared no one could have given a more touching performance; Daphne wept profusely, imagining herself at the heart of the emotionally charged plot: ‘Cousin Geoffrey [as] Lewis Dodd to my fourteen-year-old Constant Nymph.’5 A film was mooted and the director, rather foolishly perhaps given Edna’s heart-wrenching performance, had suggested that a completely untried and untrained girl should be cast as the Constant Nymph. Whether it was this part that they had in mind when Angela was called in for her screen test was not clear, but she felt very underqualified for any role on film: ‘I was short, plump, not at all photogenic, certainly not pretty … and needless to say, nothing came from nothing.’6

  When Daphne was called in for her screen test, the role of the Constant Nymph was definitely in mind. Although she had the looks, she did not in any way have the temperament or desire to be an actress. In her diary she wrote, ‘Simply awful. I have to try and do a little scene. I was too frightful, I know, and felt such a fool.’7 Where her sister’s test had caused not even a ripple of notice, Daphne’s, despite her deep embarrassment and utter lack of interest, caught the eye of the film’s star, Ivor Novello. In the balance of sisterly justice, this was doubly unfair. Ivor was the epitome of male beauty and natural charm. Both sisters knew him as a family friend and thought him handsome and effortlessly glamorous, as indeed he was, and each determined as a schoolgirl that they would marry him, unaware then that he was unlikely to marry any woman. Not only was it Daphne who caught Ivor’s professional eye, but acting had been the career that Angela had attempted and flunked. Now her younger sister, with great reluctance and without even trying, was about to be offered the chance of a lifetime: the starring role opposite Novello in a film directed by Basil Dean.

  Despite pressure from her mother, father and Viola Tree, Daphne was having none of it. ‘A little money and a lot of gush, and tiring, tedious work. I’m not at all keen,’8 she wrote in her diary. The film was made in 1928 as a silent movie, with the experienced young actresses Mabel Poulton and Benita Hume cast as the young women in competition for the divine Ivor Novello.

  Approaching her mid-twenties, Angela was still set on marriage. But she was aware that while she waited for the future father of her children to come along, the parties and first nights, the high days and holidays should be leavened with some Good Works. She turned what energies remained towards the RSPCA, for whom she had become honorary regional secretary, responsible for the wider reaches of Hampstead. This involved entering the various cases of cruelty to animals in a ledger, probably splashed with tears, and then writing an annual report. Her main contribution, however, was collecting money door to door, which she did with dogged determination, pounding the streets with her Peke, Wendy, in valiant and panting support.

  She also was inducted into politics when she met Peter Macdonald, MP for the Isle of Wight, at the first night party for her father’s play SOS. He enrolled Angela as a Young Conservative under an equally young Conservative, the Hon. Everleigh Leith, who was to become a well-known balletomane and recreational alpinist. Angela was dispatched south of the Thames to darkest Southwark. For this sheltered Hampstead girl it was a shock to find how many other Londoners lived. She set to addressing envelopes and canvassing support for the Conservative candidate in the council elections, and for the upcoming general election of 1929 she canvassed again for the Conservatives. It was an uphill battle, and she would understand for the first time the attractions of socialism. So appalled was she by the poverty and squalor that greeted her as she knocked on doors (and had many slammed in her face) that when a man shouted that he voted Labour and always would, she sighed in sympathy and said, ‘Yes, so should I.’

  The need to work at something was becoming more urgent for Daphne too. The idea of living at home, entirely dependent on her parents was particular anathema to her. But it was only writing that captured her imagination and she was determined somehow to make it a paying career and her path to independence. Daphne was trying to rediscover her enthusiasm for writing short stories. She had been encouraged by her cousin Gerald Millar, elder brother of the raffish and unreliable Geoffrey, who worked for the publishers Heinemann. He had read her poems and a blank verse play she had worked on intermittently and, although he and his colleagues had not felt able to publish what she had shown them, he urged her to embark on some more short stories. Angela and Betty Hicks had also encouraged Daphne when they had surreptitiously read a story of hers entitled ‘Lundy’ and reported that they thought it really good and worth her perseverance. But sitting in the dull room above the garage at Cannon Hall, lit only by a skylight and recently appropriated as her ‘room of one’s own’, she struggled for inspiration.

  Viola Tree, deputed by Gerald to take his daughter in hand, set off with Daphne to Cambridge to show her undergraduate life. Daphne had a terrific time. With her sharp questioning intellect and love of research she would have benefited from
a university education and the life of the mind, but families like hers did not think of educating their daughters beyond the cultural skills necessary to enter society and make a supportive wife for some great man. The highlight of Daphne’s visit was tea at Jesus College with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, or ‘Q’ as he was universally known, famous Cornishman, Professor of English and writer of poems, novels and literary criticism. Daphne was twenty-one and ‘Q’ was well into his sixties, but she was charmed by him and particularly delighted to learn that he had a house in Fowey. He, no doubt, was charmed by her. Certainly she intended to get to know him further and left Cambridge clutching a copy of his Studies in Literature.

  The move to Fowey in early May 1927 was an exciting distraction for the du Mauriers, although it involved Angela and Muriel and the indomitable Tod, who had returned from Australia, in a great deal of organisational work and physical effort. They managed to get Ferryside shipshape in three days.

  Daphne, meanwhile, was in France, approaching the end of a three-week stay with Fernande in Paris, where she had managed to exert her influence over Mlle’s fierce wolf-like dog Schüller until it followed her meek as a lamb. She enjoyed the challenge of walking him in the Bois de Boulogne without the usual massacre of small furry innocents. This was another example of the comfort of power. Daphne read more French literature and sipped lemonade through a straw at various cafés in the Boulevard Montparnasse. But soon it was farewell Paris! Cornwall would be her new love and she set off on 9 May to join her family there, taking Daisy the maid with her.