Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Perhaps more relevant to all the du Maurier sisters, who had so resented the artificial sexual innocence their parents had tried to enforce in their childhoods, was Mauclair’s chapter ‘L’Ignorance Sexuelle’. He agreed with them that ignorance was highly destructive but, where Angela had thought it made them scared of men and sexuality and Daphne had felt utterly unprepared for life, he argued something more complex – that ignorance fuelled the imagination, enforced dishonesty and corrupted and distorted natural desires. Curiosity in children was natural, he declared, but then they had to learn hypocrisy in order to cover up their inevitable investigations and experimentations. He believed that imagination became necessary to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and this combination of curiosity, hypocrisy and an overheated imagination (all the results of being kept in the dark) led to eroticism, ‘avec sa consequence directe et terrible chez les enfants: l’onanisme [with the direct and terrible consequence to children of masturbation]’.24 Perhaps it was a peculiarly French perversity to deplore masturbation yet to argue for unsentimental sex between prostitutes and their clients, of either sex.

  In a letter to Tod, Daphne gave sexual ignorance as the reason for the mess men and women made of their emotional lives, a thought that perhaps resulted from her recent reading alongside her collected works on boating for beginners. ‘If only they were brought up to know about sex like they know the rain falling from the sky, half the battle would be over. It’s all the mystery and giggle-behind-the-hand that causes the trouble.’25

  However, as Mauclair developed his argument further, there was a psychological truth that may have found further resonance with Daphne. In her first erotic stirrings with Cousin Geoffrey she had recognised that it was the hidden, secret aspect of her relationship, rather than the man himself and his hand-holding, that was arousing. The excitement of the secret and forbidden, Mauclair believed, would end up so distorting one’s taste that the natural act of sexual intercourse could only be disappointing. Instead, the thrill of taboo, together with the power of the imagination, made a young woman return continually to her first sexual experiences, for ‘in the mind of the child keeping secret something so disapproved of gives the act an immense and fatal importance’.26 Daphne agreed with Mauclair, and D. H. Lawrence, when she said, ‘that one is brought up to believe sex is “Nature’s dirty little secret”.’27 This book’s message explained that secret’s erotic charge.

  In January 1929, Daphne set off once more with Pat Wallace to Switzerland, to join Edgar and the rest of the Wallace family and friends at the Caux Palace Hotel for a New Year’s winter sports and partying. It suggested that her reading of De L’Amour Physique might have released some inhibitions, for she enjoyed herself even more than two years previously when she and Angela had surprised themselves with how much fun their contemporaries could be. This time Daphne had greater skills at the sporting activities by day, and discovered how successful she could be with the young men at night. The most daring it got was dancing cheek to cheek, light-hearted kisses and late nights at the bar, but she felt compelled to boast to Ferdy: ‘I was kissed by two young men at the same time … and another man, married, kissed me outside in the snow.’28

  Daphne drew men like moths to her flame, but their amorous attentions did not mean much to her, except for the excitement of the power it bestowed. The person she most fancied, she confided in her diary, remained Edgar’s female secretary, James, who had caught her eye during their last holiday with the Wallaces. But the most attractive of the young men who fluttered about her was not going to be put off. He was Carol Reed, an illegitimate son of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and thereby a half-brother of their much-loved friend Viola Tree. Only six months older than Daphne, his persistence would make him the first important man in her life, after her father and Geoffrey. Reed was charming and talented, an actor turned producer/director, who would be responsible for the masterpieces The Third Man and Odd Man Out, eventually winning an Oscar for Oliver! and a knighthood for his services to film. He could not have been a more suitable suitor.

  Ferdy was not amused by Daphne’s light-hearted, confessional letter, and wrote to Aunt Billy relaying her niece’s licentious behaviour in Switzerland. Like wildfire the news spread to her parents and the Wallaces. Edgar, feeling his relaxed hospitality had been taken advantage of and that it reflected badly on him, did not welcome Daphne back into the family fold for many months to come. When she eventually returned to Cannon Hall, via Ferdy and Paris, her reception was cold. It grew colder as Carol Reed followed her to London and they pursued a youthful love affair, under Gerald’s increasingly paranoid glare.

  But more importantly to Daphne, she was writing short stories again with the excitement and intensity of old. The thrill of hurtling down the icy slopes of a Swiss mountain was translated into the swift adrenaline-filled dash of a story about an actress. She also copied out another story, ‘East Wind’, which she had written when she was nineteen – a strange brutal story of murder, madness and sexual awakening conjured up in a remote and peaceful fishing community by the relentless blowing of the easterly wind. The sexuality in the story was no more overt than the mention of moist lips and the pressing of warm flesh, and this may have been all that happened between herself and Carol Reed, both young and inexperienced as they were. They were inevitably wary of pregnancy and outraging social mores. He had wished he had played the hero and clambered up to her window one night and Daphne seemed half-relieved he had not: ‘It would have been awful, I suppose, if he’d been seen.’29

  Gerald’s jealousy and suspicions had him cross-examining Daphne at breakfast, making her squirm with the intrusiveness and inappropriateness of his questions. He was back on his midnight vigil at the landing window, waiting, watching, twitching the curtain as he strained to catch his daughters kissing their beaux goodnight. Daphne was to use these humiliating memories to sinister effect in her third novel, The Progress of Julius, written three years later, about a father’s murderously possessive desire for his daughter:

  ‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘I saw you from the window. Out in the square with some fellow. You were in that car eight whole minutes [in her diary she mentioned kissing Carol in the car for five minutes], and then you got out and I saw him kiss you. You bitch!’30

  In the novel, the daughter enjoyed taunting her father, patronising him as a fool, as someone getting old and losing his virility, while she remained masterful with the magnetism of youth and sexual attraction. For Daphne, there was a similar excitement at discovering the power inherent in her beauty and desirability and in the exercise of it: ‘Knowing you can attract people … really is more heady than champagne.’31 This realisation had begun covertly, with her own father’s dependence and favouritism towards her somehow entwined with Cousin Geoffrey’s suppressed desire. Her growing sense of power was greatly boosted by her success in overthrowing all competition for Mlle Yvon’s attention and affection, and now, with Carol Reed, a young man of her own generation and background, she once more held the upper hand. It was an exhilarating feeling, this sense of conquest and control.

  But she did not herself become enslaved to love or desire. While in the throes of this new romantic relationship with the besotted Carol, Daphne was capable of fantasising about the actor Leslie Howard, who embodied some kind of creative peg for a story, or fulfilled some need in her for a doe-eyed man. But she did not want to be tied down at all. Recalling the primitive male energy she captured so well in her story, ‘East Wind’, Daphne wrote in her diary: ‘What a pity I’m not a vagrant on the face of the earth. Wandering in strange cities, foreign lands, open spaces, fighting, drinking, loving physically. And here I am, only a silly sheltered girl in a dress, knowing nothing at all – but Nothing.’32 In her imagination and fiction, however, she could become whatever she chose to be, that vagabond boy, that free spirit, untrammelled by the limitations and expectations of family and the rest of the world.

  For Daphne there was panic too that her parent
s, in their very different ways, sought to contain and control her. It exasperated her that when she at last turned up with a young man of her own age, and from the right background, they still made as much fuss as they had about her relationship with Ferdy, and her passing attraction to the actress Molly Kerr. Something of this frustration went into her portrayal of the mother in Julius, set by her husband in deadly competition for his love with her own threateningly seductive daughter whose power, she fears, can only be defused through marriage:

  … hoping with bitter, grim tenacity that the girl of eighteen would wake up suddenly and throw away her crude, unbroken, dangerous charm and fall in love and lose her individuality. Then only would she be harmless and natural; the wife of some man – or even his mistress … possessed and held at last.33

  As Muriel’s main concern was Gerald’s peace of mind and happiness, and he was far from happy with his daughters’ slipping the surly bonds of family, she could not rejoice that Daphne, now in her early twenties, was interested at last in such a nice, eligible young man, with impeccable theatrical provenance. This jealousy of the carelessly beautiful daughter who came between her and her husband, transmuted into an unexpressed hostility. All her life Daphne remembered with a shudder, her mother’s ‘cold awful suspicious look at me, after I had come in rather late, having been out in Carol’s Lagonda’.34

  Gerald’s paranoia about his daughters’ behaviour was stoked once again by his elder daughter Angela, who had always seemed more conformist, but also appeared to be hellbent on steering a romantically dangerous course. In 1929 she met the man who came closest to marrying her. ‘I had at last found what novelettes are pleased to call Mr Right.’35 She did not name him, but mentioned he was almost as famous as her father, was married to another and almost certainly a good deal older than she was. They met while she was involved with canvassing for the general election: a socialist, he was at that time in the opposing camp to herself, a cradle Tory.

  Love brought Angela into the exciting turmoil of politics, and this election was a critical and interesting one. She and her generation of women under thirty were added to the electoral roll and for the first time they would be able to make their interests known via the ballot box. For this reason it became known in some quarters as the Flapper Election. The Conservatives were in power under Stanley Baldwin and had presided rather ignominiously over the General Strike three years before. Millions were out of work, poverty was rife; there was widespread disillusionment with a ruling party that seemed old and tired.

  Angela’s job was a difficult one. She had to persuade the poor and disadvantaged people of Southwark that voting Conservative would improve their lot, as they shouldered the brunt of high unemployment and low wages. She attended a huge rally, where Baldwin gave his electioneering speech, and was greatly impressed by the excitement and theatricality of the whole event. She was delighted he was an Old Harrovian ‘like Daddy!’36 He was, however, up against the charismatic new Liberal leader David Lloyd George, and Ramsay MacDonald who pledged that a Labour government would tackle as its first priority the rising tide of unemployment and the cost of living, where there were still taxes levied on staple foodstuffs.

  Angela and the new ‘love of her life’ argued their opposing politics during surreptitious visits to the zoo or out-of-the-way restaurants, and planned how they could somehow make their lives together. When Angela eventually confided her feelings to her parents they were horrified and deeply disapproving, and attempted to freeze the relationship out by refusing to talk to or entertain Angela and her man friend. She never forgot how bitter and miserable she was made by their lack of sympathy or understanding. Most unforgivable, she felt, was her father’s outburst of anger. ‘How little cause my father had when he called me a whore – virgin as I was – when I told him I was in love with X, and that X loved me.’37 This was a shocking accusation towards any daughter, but particularly one as conscientious and highly emotional as Angela. She was all the more shattered by his reaction as her love for this man had not been consummated. This violent and unjust response was no doubt relayed to Daphne and added by her sister to her memorable portrayal of paternal cruelty in The Progress of Julius, where the father was quite capable of spitting, ‘You bitch! … You bitch!’38 at his daughter, when she showed interest in another man.

  The general election was not only the first time that Angela, as a woman, was allowed to vote but it was to prove the watershed of her romantic life. Her first and last real love affair with a man had unfolded during the hard work that preceded it, but with the election of a Labour government at the end of May came the end of any hope she had of marriage. ‘We had a superstitious gamble on the issue [of the election]: if the Conservatives won all would be well with us; if Labour, then all would be over. It was the first time I’d had a vote, and a great deal of my heart went into the ballot box.’39

  Angela was not, however, as dutiful a daughter as she appeared. Rebellion was growing in her heart. Despite her ‘Mr Right’ being married, she declared she would have been prepared to run away and live with him, and face the opprobrium this would have called down on their heads: ‘In those days it would have needed untold courage on both our parts, as he was nearly as well known as my father and we would have courted censure from the world we knew.’40 She also decided this was the last time she would be honest with her parents about where she went at night, what she got up to and what her feelings were about anything that mattered.

  Angela’s fictions were pretty closely tied to her own and her friends’ experiences and preoccupations. Her doomed love for this man was perhaps immortalised ten years later in her first published novel, The Perplexed Heart, where her heroine, Verona, falls in love with a champagne socialist, Maxwell Harris, who has a ‘genuine Christ-like attitude towards the poor’.41 For an intelligent and serious politician he also has a callow and theatrical way of speaking: ‘I couldn’t bear you to look old. Awful old frights you conjure us up as! We must both die young, gallantly, and very thrillingly. In an air-smash I think.’42 It could almost have been her father speaking in one of the light, drawing-room melodramas he produced at Wyndham’s. In a much later novel, Reveille, published in 1950, Angela re-entered the socialist versus Conservative debate. Her socialist anti-hero, who is in love with a heroine who, had she married well and pursued her political ambitions would have borne a striking resemblance to Angela, owes something to this forbidden love. ‘He had a slow cynical way of talking, was inclined to a biting and sarcastic wit, and embarrassed the wrong type of person by suddenly quoting poetry, which he spoke beautifully.’43 Needless to say, Angela’s fictional self did not marry the man, but he loved her until his bitter, self-inflicted death.

  In real life, Angela was stricken with grief at the loss of her dreams of happiness. In the middle of all this, she ended up having an emergency operation to remove her appendix. Thereupon the wronged wife of ‘Mr Right’ became convinced that the procedure was really an abortion, an accusation that was doubly distressing to a heartbroken Angela. This was the painful and ignominious end to what was to be her last attempt at living a conventional life with a husband and children. She was not yet twenty-five years old. The lack of children was to prove a lasting regret for her but she was to fill her life with friends and dogs, and to find happiness in the love of women.

  Two people who became good friends to her at the time were Rita Jolivet, the beautiful Anglo-French actress, and Stafford Bourne. Rita had made world news by being a brave survivor of the Lusitania, torpedoed by the Germans in 1915 (she had stood at the bridge as the liner went down). In the summer of 1928 she had married, as her third husband, the immensely popular Jimmy Bryce Allan, a rich and well-connected Scottish landowner and socialite. They invited Angela up to their grand gothic castle, The Cliff, at Wemyss Bay in Renfrewshire, and there began an emotional connection with Scotland that was to last most of her life.

  In between her two visits to the smart nursing home where first she had
her tonsils out and then that controversial appendix, Angela was introduced to a young man not much older than herself who was recuperating from his tonsillectomy. Stafford Bourne was the son of the Bourne half of the great West End store Bourne & Hollingsworth, and there began a chummy friendship with lunches at The Ivy, weekly visits to the theatre and country house weekends at his mother’s grand house, Garston Manor in Hertfordshire. When he married and had children of his own and took on more responsibility at the store, their lives inevitably diverged, but the friendship remained, in a more diluted form, with the whole family.

  The Wall Street Crash that autumn reverberated round the world. The sense of doom and approaching economic depression affected Gerald in his working and personal life. He owed money he did not have to the Inland Revenue, his daughters were growing away from him, and in the theatre he was thrown back on tired old favourites like Barrie’s Dear Brutus that he had made so triumphantly his own twelve years before. That Christmas he also returned for the first time to Peter Pan and to the roles as Mr Darling and Captain Hook that he had fashioned so successfully for himself it became a template for the actors who followed him.