by Jane Dunn
The house was pronounced perfect. Daphne and Jeanne once more shared a bedroom but, in Daphne’s eyes, they had the best – the room she had first discovered that led into the garden and had the fine view down to the harbour. The wooded cliffs were full of bluebells; the water was endlessly fascinating with its lapping tides and boats that plied back and forth, the big ships silently heaving into view. And the town of Fowey awaited. It could not have been more laden with promise and the sisters knew that in this place began the better part of their lives.
But the pleasure of discovery for Daphne was crowned by the rest of her family plus the maid returning to London five days later, leaving her alone (except for the cook, a local woman named Mrs Coombs): ‘Oh, the happiness of those weeks!’9 She learnt how to sail with Adams the boatman, she fished, she explored Fowey and climbed the steep cliff paths and rowed to the coves that unfolded around the coast. She dug and weeded the garden – and ideas for stories crowded into her mind: ‘Another quite different story, about a smart vicar in London [‘And Now to God the Father’], which would be fun to do and would make D[addy] laugh, if he ever read it. Yes, to work, to work … The time flashing by.’10
Adams the boatman was to prove a significant companion for Daphne in all her seafaring adventures. He was a brave survivor of the calamitous Battle of Jutland, fought against the German fleet in the early summer of 1916, when more than six thousand British seamen had perished in the North Sea. He was full of stories of this and his time as a spirited lad in Fowey, brimful of local knowledge of the land and coastline that was his home. Many weeks were spent in each other’s company and, with his guidance, Daphne was transformed from dissatisfied city girl into a happy sailor, beachcomber and highly competent boating hand. Most importantly, it was Adams who gave Daphne the seeds for her first novel, The Loving Spirit, by telling her the story of the Jane Slade. This was an abandoned schooner with a magnificent figurehead that lay beached up Pont Creek and belonged to his own wife’s family, the Slades, from the neighbouring village of Polruan.
While Daphne was messing about in boats, Angela was once more on the London stage in a Forbes Robinson production of Twelfth Night, but only in a walk-on part and only fleetingly as she cut her hand on a tin during the dress rehearsal and fainted dead away. Before she could even get to first night, she suffered a far worse accident at home at Cannon Hall when she slipped on the polished drawing-room floor and the corner of a wireless she was carrying smashed into her side, rupturing a kidney. In agony, she was pumped with morphine and sent to bed for two weeks. These two experiences, combined with her dive into the orchestra pit while impersonating a flying Wendy in Peter Pan, together with nearly getting her nose sliced off in a sword fight in the same part, she took as a warning that her health and happiness lay not on the stage but elsewhere.
The gay London Season continued with her attendance at every opera, ballet and major sporting event. At Wimbledon she saw the US tennis champion Helen Wills dominate in the finals and at the Derby witnessed Call Boy, owned and trained by Gerald’s partner Frank Curzon, win against huge odds (earning a fortune for Gerald and no doubt much more for Frank). Then down to Ferryside with Wendy to spend a week with Daphne and accompany her reluctantly back to London. By the end of July, Daphne was back at Ferryside but this time with Jeanne as her companion sister, to greet Bingo, her new puppy, half-spaniel, half-collie, a dog blessed with boundless energy and good humour.
Angela’s accident-prone stage experiences were matched by the poor survival rate of Daphne’s dogs. All of them thus far had died prematurely, but most traumatically perhaps was the drowning of her West Highland Terrier, Jock, in a water butt at Cannon Hall into which he had slipped while in pursuit of a cat. The running down by a laundry van of his successor, a golden retriever called Phoebus, came a close second. Phoebus was in Angela’s charge and, distressingly, bled to death in her lap. Understandably, Angela was even more distraught than Daphne for Angela empathically suffered with the dog and felt herself responsible, while her sister, although saddened by the news, thought it had a more universal significance: ‘Another sacrifice. But why? For what reason? Must this always happen to animals I loved?’11
The rest of the family descended on Ferryside for the summer, everyone very nervous about Gerald’s reaction, for this was the first time he would see the house and the area. As he generally hated being away from London, his home and his club and was hypercritical of anything that did not please him, he was quite capable of cancelling the holiday if the mood so took him. Luckily, Viola Tree was with him when he arrived. She had such natural exuberance and a clownish capacity for slapstick and jokes that no one could be glum for long in her company. Angela recalled the introduction of Gerald and Viola to Fowey as being one of her funniest memories of the time.
Viola arrived by motorboat and fell straight into the harbour, fully clothed and with a very smart hat on her head. Completely unfazed by her unceremonious dunking, and watched by a crowd of people including Gerald, she turned tail with bravado and set off, swimming out towards the sea, her hat becoming more and more rakish as the water lapped at its brim. She made it seem the most natural way to go for a swim. Sadly she did not have the last laugh this time as she caught a terrific chill and within a week was desperately ill with pleurisy.
In France, Fernande Yvon was feeling neglected, sensing that her place in Daphne’s affections was slipping: ‘Now your letters are so full of Fowey you won’t want to come and stay in Paris again.’12 Daphne felt the claustrophobic pull of others wanting something from her, when all she wanted was freedom. ‘I’m Prometheus Unbound!’ she declared in triumph in her diary. She dashed over to Ferdy’s new house in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine in November, intent on spending a month before returning to Ferryside for Christmas with the family. It thrilled her to feel at home in Paris and she claimed her French blood with pride. But the month was slightly spoiled by the presence of Joan, an older ex-pupil of Fernande’s, who was in constant attendance and appeared to dislike Daphne. Both the young Daphne, who wrote her diary at the time, and the seventy-year-old who reread the entries in preparing her memoir, seemed puzzled by this dislike. A possible reason for this antipathy was that Joan was another of Ferdy’s lovers and felt some rivalry and resentment at the arrival of Daphne, a more recent former pupil and intimate who took her ascendancy in the household, over both Fernande and the dog, for granted.
Angela and Muriel went ahead of the family to Ferryside to get ready for their first Christmas there. Daphne was left in Hampstead in charge of Gerald, which she found quite a chore. It was significant how much her newly won independence had relieved some of the intensity of her relationship with her father. She and Angela had both written about how his emotional intrusiveness and extravagant suspicions, his possessiveness and dependence, made them reluctant to confide in him, as he so wished they might. This time he drank too much at Gladys Cooper’s birthday party on 18 December and was left an emotional wreck. Breaking down and hysterically weeping, he behaved so irrationally that Daphne felt incapable of getting him to Bodinnick alone. Even with the help of Cousin Geoffrey and Uncle Coly, Aunt May’s widower, she described the journey as still ‘something of a nightmare’,13 suggesting Gerald may have been suffering some kind of psychosis. He only recovered under Muriel’s motherly ministrations, combined with bed rest. Daphne showed scant sympathy for him in her diaries, and very little curiosity as to why he appeared to be going through some sort of collapse. Instead she was left thinking ‘what a tie married life must be – I hoped it would never be my lot’.14
1928 stands as the midpoint between the end of the Great War and the looming shadow of the Second World War. Alongside the curses of unemployment, poverty and inequality, this was a period of real improvement in standards of living for the employed and in education and general health. Above all the interwar years saw an increase in leisure and a flowering of entertainment of all kinds. 1928 was the year in which Mickey Mouse st
rutted into film and Professor Alexander Fleming had his chance encounter with penicillium mould. The genie of female power had well and truly escaped from the lamp, and in this year British women over the age of twenty-one won the right to vote, at last. Angela would be one of these new women and it helped propel her into volunteer political work. One of the most significant events for her, however, amongst all the first nights and general jollity, was the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s sensational novel, The Well of Loneliness.
The book shocked the male establishment which launched a concerted, at times hysterical, attack on the book. The clarion call came from the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, who in the middle of August’s ‘Silly Season’ for newspapers with substantial stories thin on the ground, wrote an overheated leader article declaring the book should be banned. In the midst of a great deal of grandstanding rhetoric, he thundered: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’15
The novel was so discreet about love between the two women that the only explicit lesbian action was a kiss on the lips and the only sexually suggestive text was the phrase, ‘and that night they were not divided’.16 Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge were glamorous friends of Micky Jacob, and Angela, who spent time with them later in Italy while visiting Micky, might well have met them during the turmoil of the campaign against The Well. Hall was already a well-known and successful author and had written her book with the express purpose of bringing her kind of love into the open in the hopes for greater tolerance.
As a devout Roman Catholic, she made her female protagonist, Stephen Gordon, melodramatically petition God and the rest of mainstream society: ‘Acknowledge us, O God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our own existence!’17 Without the campaign against it and the subsequent high-profile obscenity trial, few people would have read the book, and the general populace would have remained largely ignorant about the subject matter. The Express, and the trial, made sure the subject was a matter of discussion over most of the nation’s breakfast tables – or behind the backs of disapproving parents.
Certainly the operatic emotion in the novel was entirely to Angela’s taste. The subject of love and sex was excitingly taboo but, no doubt, had been discussed to some extent with Micky Jacob at their weekly teas. Daphne too would have been part of the chatter, for she sought with her sister some insight into her early exploratory relationships with Cousin Geoffrey, Mlle Yvon and Molly Kerr. After all, this was the book Angela admitted had had more impact on her than any other work by a woman writer, and it had disturbed her. It was this, perhaps, which would give her the courage to embark on her first novel whose subject matter was equally subversive and brave.
1928 was also for Daphne a highly significant year for, at the age of twenty-one, she had encountered the love of her life: Menabilly. This was the house of her imagination, the captor of her soul, but it would take fifteen years until she could possess it for herself. She managed to live in Menabilly for a precious twenty-five years as if it was her own, before it was extracted from her grasp, reclaimed by the family who had owned it for more than three and a half centuries.
All three sisters had enjoyed a glorious summer of freedom and exploration at Ferryside while their parents were mostly busy with a new play in London. At the end of the holidays, Jeanne and Muriel returned to Hampstead and Angela and Daphne had just two weeks more before they too had to drag themselves away.
One afternoon in late October, Angela and Daphne, accompanied by the dogs Wendy and Bingo, set out at last to find the mysterious great mansion hidden in the rhododendron woods on the cliffs about two miles west of Fowey. It was already a house with a dark glamour. Stories about it abounded: it was ancient, abandoned and unloved by the Rashleigh family, protected by an almost impenetrable jungle of trees, bushes and undergrowth gone wild. Still furnished, it was suspended in time by some enchantment, like a sleeping beauty.
Daphne had met the Quiller-Couch family in Fowey that summer and had been delighted by Q’s eccentric daughter Foy. Their stories of Menabilly’s history in its heyday were the most compelling of all. Built at the end of the Elizabethan era, completed by a Stuart royalist, the house was battered and broken in the English Civil War, its past rich with ghosts and the skeleton of a cavalier. It had an atmosphere so powerful that it changed those who strayed into its domain.
With their heads full of these romances, the two sisters started to walk up the three-mile drive. Hours seemed to pass and the path became fainter and more overgrown. The trees grew taller and to Daphne’s eye more menacing, the undergrowth encroached more and more and they eventually lost their way. Angela grew increasingly nervous: ‘an eerie and most ghost-like atmosphere pervaded these uninhabited acres, and we threshed backwards and forwards, this way and that, falling into holes and over submerged tree-trunks, realising only too well that we knew neither the way to the great house nor yet the way back to Fowey’.18 The light was beginning to fail and the unseen owls were hooting and screeching in the trees overhead. The stink of fox drifted on the air and the dogs, much subdued, their tails no longer gaily waving, clung to their heels, starting back occasionally and staring into the gloom. ‘“I don’t like it,” said Angela firmly. “Let’s go back.”
“But the house,” I said with longing, “we haven’t seen the house.”’19
Daphne dragged her sister onwards but then even she was daunted by the dark vegetation that loomed above, encircling them in the gloom as twilight turned to night. They beat their way out of the woods and emerged at a distant cove that they recognised with relief. The great house was nowhere to be seen. Daphne was sure it was guarding its secrets from them and did not want to be disturbed.
Angela was less starry-eyed about the expedition. She had been scared and exhausted and was much more willing to believe the local stories of a haunted house that had lost its soul. However, after a good night’s sleep, she was prepared to be persuaded by her determined younger sister, who would not now give up her quest. They set out early and tried a different approach. Driving their mother’s little car to the entrance gates at West Lodge, they parked before heading into the forbidding woods. This time they emerged unexpectedly in a clearing, and there Menabilly stood, grey, silent, almost suffocated by the dense creeper that covered its face, the probing tendrils invading the stonework and even the great sash windows. It was an early autumn day and the sisters stared at their prize in the cool morning light. Angela was both disappointed and frightened by what she saw. The grimy windows were shuttered, making the house appear sightless and closed off from the present. She thought it lonely, gloomy and filled with ghosts. In some trepidation they approached and pressed their faces to the dirty glass. The fact it was still furnished, with pictures on the walls, heavy Victorian furniture and a dusty rocking horse in suspended animation, added to the sense of pathos, of other times, of other worlds.
Daphne’s emotions were entirely different. Here was her own enchanted princess whom she alone was destined to wake. In her memoir it was striking how she referred throughout to the house, a great, austere mansion built of granite, as ‘she’. Daphne noticed the ugly later wing, the altered windows, ‘but with all her faults she had a grace and charm that made me hers upon an instant’. Angela realised that from this moment an obsession formed in Daphne’s mind: she would somehow, someday, make Menabilly her home. ‘This house which had taken complete possession of her heart and soul should one day be hers.’20
They returned to London for the usual rounds of parties and first nights. Daphne was more determined than ever to earn money from writing so she could escape her bondage to parents and the city, but Angela and Jeanne seemed happy enough with the life they led there. Angela, however, like Daphne, was beginning to think of writing as a career. With her grandfather’s example before her, she thought that a sensational novel might do the trick. Her interest had be
en caught by The Well of Loneliness and its scandalous subject matter. Here she had the theme, but could not have alighted on a more attention-seeking debut as a novelist.
While this idea brewed, she continued with more mundane matters – collecting RSPCA subscriptions, helping her mother with the traditional Sunday parties at Cannon Hall, serving on the Actor’s Orphanage Committee, and enduring the rudeness of one of their regular guests for Christmas dinner. Bunny Bruce, the actress wife of the actor Nigel Bruce, declared over the turkey and stuffing that Angela was fat and ‘a disgrace’. Angela had never thought of herself this way, although she did realise that at five foot two inches and weighing over ten stone she would not be mistaken for a sylph. She had always felt lumpish compared to Daphne’s finer beauty and boyish figure, but being dubbed a disgrace was rather a blinder. The awful thought began to lurk that the reason for her lack of romantic success with young men might be her disgraceful fat. It did little to bolster her confidence. She might have forgiven Bunny – ‘obviously she believed in the method of being cruel to be kind’21 – but she did not forget.
As Angela and Jeanne entered once more into the fray of London society, Daphne could hardly bear the contrast with her life at Fowey. Her sisters, and her diary, bore the brunt of her dissatisfaction:
I think I’ve been born into the wrong atmosphere. Take Sunday, so typical of all the Sundays I have ever known. People to lunch, to tea, to dinner, and endless discussions of plays, of actors, and criticism of everything. I have to become an unnatural Sunday person and be part of it all … I’m selfish and I admit it, but I know that no person will ever get into my blood as a place can, as Fowey does. People and things pass away, but not places.22
Daphne’s answer to being exiled from her new love was to immerse herself in books, including many on seamanship and practical boating skills such as navigation. Amongst these handbooks, however, she made particular mention in her diary of an oddity, De L’Amour Physique, by a prolific French poet, novelist and critic, Camille Mauclair. The book’s thesis was radical, even shocking, for the times. It had been first published in 1912 and had been a great success in France. Mauclair argued that men and women should be treated equally in matters of their sexual needs and consequent behaviour, suggesting that just as men could visit prostitutes without shame so women too should be allowed to pay for sex with men, instead of being ‘condemned to a comedy that overlays with sentimentality the purely physical satisfaction that she desires’.23 This unorthodox thought may well have contributed to Daphne’s idea of the chillingly mechanical relationship her female protagonist had with a male sex doll in her striking early short story, ‘The Doll’, written in its first draft the year before. The idea that women should be free to live like men would also have had a huge attraction to a young adventurous girl like Daphne, who resisted the narrowness and passivity of the female life she was expected to follow.