Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Daphne and Foy visited Clara Vyvyan, a woman closer to Muriel’s generation but who could not have been more different, and she caught Daphne’s imagination. A most intrepid traveller and successful writer, Clara had married late in life the elderly 10th Baronet, Sir Courtenay Vyvyan, owner of the magnificent Trelowarren Estate, situated on the Helford River in a protected microclimate so mild that tropical plants could be grown in its renowned gardens.

  But Cornwall could not contain Angela. She was planning a romantic adventure with her new best friend Shaw and Wendy, her Pekinese, to the west coast of Scotland and the Isles of Mull and Skye. In mid-July they set off in the MG Midget. Bowling merrily along the Great North Road, they had reached as far as Yorkshire when they were hit broadside, and without warning, by a much larger car that shot out of a crossroads at speed. The tiny MG was shunted off the road and upended, tossing Angela over a hedge while her friend Shaw and dog Wendy ended up in a ditch. The car was so badly damaged it is possible the two Angelas and Wendy only survived because it was open-topped and they were thrown clear.

  Angela was badly concussed and unconscious and the rescuers at first thought she was dead. Her first slurred words were to ask about her dog. Shaw, conscious throughout and in agony, having badly smashed her collarbone, never let Angela forget how revealing this was of her heart’s priorities. They were taken to Ripon Cottage Hospital, where they stayed for a week in the empty children’s ward, with Wendy in a child’s cot by Angela’s bed. Apart from the concussion Angela’s back was damaged and she and Wendy ‘vomited constantly’, while Shaw, in extreme pain and for some reason refused morphia, cried out through the night: ‘I’ve come to the end of my tether.’23

  Shaw’s family were quickly roaring up the Great North Road in their motors, but Angela, anxious not to disturb her father’s holiday at Ferryside, made light of the incident. Not even Daphne knew how close they had all come to death, for she wrote in her diary at the time, ‘Angela & Shaw have car accident on way to Scotland, neither injured.’24 It was probably Angela’s and Muriel’s joint decision not to tell the family and upset Daddy’s holiday for it was generally accepted that Gerald’s interests came first in everything. It did not stop Angela, however, from feeling bereft as she languished alone and in pain, while her friend in the next bed was surrounded by concerned relations.

  By the time Angela and Shaw had made their battered way back to Ferryside, the handsome Guards officer, and fan of The Loving Spirit, had eventually arrived in Fowey in his motor cruiser and booked himself into a local hostelry. It was Angela who first spotted this good-looking stranger in the town’s post office and excitedly reported her sighting back to Ferryside. Daphne was busy finishing Julius, working on the shocking murder scene, and did not at this point take much notice. It was mainly Angela who hung out of the window of the house with Gerald’s bird-watching binoculars. She plotted the progress of this romantically solitary figure as he daily cruised up and down the estuary on some unknown quest, and pointed him out to her sisters: ‘There’s a most attractive man going up and down the harbour in a white motor-boat … Do come and look!’ They took turns watching him and speculating on what he was up to. Local gossip relayed his name as Browning and that he was the youngest major in the British Army.

  Ferryside was shut up and everyone headed back to London for Christmas in varying degrees of expectation. Angela was panicking about how once again she had overspent her allowance and was overdrawn with barely sixpence to last her to the end of the year. Her extravagance was on a par with Gerald’s and a source of some friction with the parents, so had to be kept deadly secret. Daphne had spent almost the whole year in Cornwall, had finished her book and was expected to join in with ‘the usual festivities … worse luck!’25 Once again Carol Reed was much in evidence. He had shown his devotion a few months earlier by driving down from London to Bodinnick overnight just to see her fleetingly before driving back again the next day – a round trip before motorways of well over five hundred miles. But such seeming devotion did nothing to heighten Daphne’s romantic interest in Carol, rated still in her mind at the level of a son.

  Daphne was interested in the imbalance of affection and need in all human relationships; her earliest experiences of longing for affection from her mother were as damaging to her as the excessive and demanding love of her father. His intense attention had shifted to Jeanne, still living at home, still studying at the Central School of Arts, and a more discreet character than her spirited elder sister. Gerald was delighted by Jeanne’s artistic ability, another connection he made with his father. Though Daphne found her father’s needy love oppressive, discovering the beam of his affection now turned on her younger sister was unsettling. Yet, unapologetic about what she considered to be her selfishness, Daphne was happiest when she could live unfettered from the ties that bind one to another. Above all, she recognised how much she needed freedom and the solitude that allowed her to inhabit her imagination, and make real the people and worlds she created, through the alchemy of words. She was aware that both her father and Ferdy and Carol Reed wanted so much more from her than she was willing to give.

  Angela was the sister to whom Daphne most naturally turned in their adulthood and it was she who accompanied her to Brighton in the early spring of 1932, as part of her younger sister’s recuperation after an operation to remove her appendix in January. Daphne then headed off to Paris to be further cosseted by Ferdy, but this time Carol followed her there and pursued his romantic interests in the cafés of the Left Bank. An English girl who was at Mlle Yvon’s finishing school remembered Daphne at this time as highly self-possessed and rather awesome to the younger women there, struck by, ‘her manly stride and unusual clothes – her boyishness, but great fun’.26

  But nothing could keep Daphne from Cornwall for long and by April she was back in Ferryside. Her second novel I’ll Never Be Young Again was published to distaste and alarm amongst her family and closest associates. ‘Prepare for a bit of a shock,’ she wrote to Tod, ‘the family are all a trifle staggered. What is known as outspoken …!’ In fact her hero Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was more than staggered: he was appalled by the worldliness and cynicism and banned this book, and her next, Julius, from his library, considering the human relationships she described and the attitudes towards sex to be corrupting of young minds. Angela, alone of those closest to her, thought I’ll Never Be Young Again a triumph and years later declared it to be her favourite.

  After the success of her first novel, Daphne was paid £125 for her second, significantly more than for The Loving Spirit, although her publishers did not expect it to sell as well. She was fulfilling her life’s desire to live independently by her own pen. However, within a week of arriving in Fowey she was told by the boatbuilder’s wife that Major Browning was back. His boat was on the water again and he wished to meet Daphne. She was flattered. A letter from the dashing major arrived the following day, pointing out that their fathers had met and in fact shared the same club, the Garrick. As Angela made clear, this meant it was perfectly proper for him to call on Daphne, despite the fact she was unchaperoned and living alone at Ferryside.

  On 8 April they met for the first time, on his boat, and set off into a brisk breeze. Both were in their element and charmed to have found someone who felt the same way about boating and the sea. Major Browning explained that to his company he was ‘Boy’ Browning, that his family called him ‘Tommy’ and he would like Daphne to call him that too. He was fascinated by Norse mythology and hence had named his boat Ygdrasil, after the great Norse Tree of Life. So together they battled through the choppy sea, drenched with spray and exhilarated by each other’s company. Daphne asked him back to Ferryside, lit the fire and they talked on into the night.

  Both admitted to each other that ‘it was a case of mutual “love at first sight”’. ‘How’s that for romance?’ Daphne triumphantly wrote to Tod, describing the focus of this instant love as ‘the best-looking thing I have ever seen, 35, liv
es for boats and all the things I live for … The sort of person who has always liked being alone, up to the moment, like me, and hates a crowd.’27

  Love at first sight is an interesting phenomenon that always implies an element of narcissism. Daphne and Tommy were gazing at intriguing versions of themselves: lean, handsome, heroic, happiest in boats, away from society. He was even a sporting hero and had competed in the bobsleigh at the 1928 Winter Olympics, a sport Daphne had tried in Switzerland and had, by her own description, been ‘astonishingly good at’. Here was the personification of Daphne’s masculine alter ego, her boy-in-the-box, Eric Avon – with knobs on. No wonder he seemed so familiar. ‘He’s the most amazing person … and I feel I’ve known him for years,’28 she wrote in her diary, having just met him. Even his nickname in the Army, that was to follow him all his professional life, was ‘Boy’, with all the delightful resonance of a youthful, carefree personality, a true match for Daphne’s identification with Peter Pan.

  It was easy to fall for this charming Guards officer, in his old boating clothes with the wind in his hair and sunburn on his cheeks. But alike as they were on the surface, their characters and the experiences of their lives were dramatically different. Daphne could not know the real Tommy, the Tommy who was gregarious and good fun in company but nervous and prone to depression, with an iron discipline that kept him from the abyss. Unbuttoned, carefree and tousled by the sea breeze, this Tommy was a far cry from his professional persona as a ferocious stickler for discipline and the most immaculately dapper man in the Army. He was an old Etonian, an intelligent and sensitive man who had had the misfortune to be part of the generation that went off as teenagers to face the horrors of the Great War, and fought as a young officer of eighteen on the Western Front.

  He had been instrumental in the battle for Cambrai in 1917 – his brigade ordered to take the strategically important Gauche Wood – and it was here that ‘Boy’ Browning found himself dodging sniper bullets and fighting hand to hand with bayonets drawn. All the officers apart from three were killed or wounded in this operation and, in this hell of dead and dying men, Browning found himself the last remaining officer in the wood, charged with leading what men remained. Under continuous shelling they battled equally youthful Germans, face to face in deadly combat, with men falling to left and right of them. The unexpected responsibility for so many living and wounded men, and the prolonged stress and horror of the situation, changed his life for ever.

  It was for this action that Tommy received his Distinguished Service Order, an award hard-won and rarely given to a lieutenant, proudly worn alongside all the other distinguished medals he was to receive throughout his active service. But he was only twenty when this experience took possession of his life, and for the rest of his days he suffered nightmares that would jolt him awake with a scream. The tension in his perfectionist, highly strung nature was wound so tight it could never return to resilient normality. None of this was evident to Daphne as she thrilled to the handsome windswept sailor beside her in the boat on the Cornish seas.

  While twenty-year-old Tommy was being strained beyond endurance in the cauldron of war, Daphne, the pampered daughter of one of the most glamorous theatrical families, had found herself ecstatically exploring Cornwall and visiting Paris for creative inspiration and the loving care of Fernande Yvon. All her life Daphne had been the special one who had never had to accommodate anyone else’s needs and always got what she wanted in life. She had at an early age been singled out by Gerald from her sisters; their governess Tod adored her always, as did Cousin Geoffrey. Everyone she met offered admiration, loyalty, even love. Only Muriel did not fall under Daphne’s spell and this, although a lasting grief, was managed by ignoring her as much as possible, and seeking sympathetic mother substitutes elsewhere.

  In those first exciting weeks when Daphne only saw the heroic figure, a masculine clone of herself, Tommy too had fallen for the image of a robust and beautiful young woman, as much fun as a male companion but with the added frisson of her strikingly attractive femininity. It did not occur to him that the elusive spirit to which he had responded in her novel and saw in its element in Fowey, was just that. Daphne was not someone who could be contained, made to nurture, and sacrifice her own interests for the needs or comfort of others.

  The fact Daphne had fallen in love with this handsome, interesting, distinguished man was not at all surprising. She had had passionate and obsessional relationships before and of all of them he was the most deserving of her interest. That she had asked him to marry her, within ten weeks, much of them spent apart, knowing little about him and less about marriage: this was the interesting conundrum.

  In her letter to Muriel, even Daphne sounded puzzled by her own decision: ‘Don’t know quite what I’m doing myself, it all seems so extraordinary, and I never thought I was the sort of person who would get married …’29 She had been adamant to her sisters and to Foy that she would never marry. Her sisters were kept in the dark until after the event and Daphne obviously felt some embarrassment at telling Foy:

  I have burnt my boats and thrown my cap over the hills, and have followed the drum. Tommy and I are going to be married … I never thought or intended this should happen to me, or if it did would have lived carelessly in Walmsley fashion [the writer and war hero Leo Walmsley, who lived nearby at Pont, was a great friend] but he is trying to teach me that these ways of living are messy and stupid and very very young.30

  Daphne’s decision to propose to Tommy, a fundamentally conventional man, was an extraordinarily unconventional act at the time; her power of imagination had brought this hero into her sphere of influence, her beauty and strength had kept him there. By taking the initiative Daphne retained the power and control that had been hers so far. Years later, Tommy admitted he had never regretted accepting her proposal, ‘though I was a bit scared at the time and was too much of a gentleman to refuse you!!’31

  Daphne agreed that she would try and live in a different way, ‘to have a shot at living “unselfishly” for the first time in my life’.32 She must have wobbled over her decision soon afterwards, for when she went to Pirbright, the Army camp where Tommy was stationed, and saw him for the first time resplendent in his uniform and medals, she realised a little more of what Army life entailed. She was reminded by Tommy’s friends, the Dorman Smiths, however, that his career would be compromised if they lived together without marriage. Having boldly taken the initiative and proposed, Daphne suddenly was uncertain about what she had willed into being and the kind of life that would now be hers.

  She was not a quitter and her response was to insist on having as little ceremony as possible. She told Foy she was a reluctant bride who could only manage the wedding if no one was looking. She was terrified of having her essential self changed by the experience, by appearing different: a married woman. It had to be as close to an impromptu event as could be, no engagement, no announcement, no sisters, neither of Tommy’s parents – despite his being their only son – none of the aunts, no Quiller-Couches or any other close friends. Only Gerald, Muriel and, peculiarly perhaps, Cousin Geoffrey, would be there, and for best man George Hunkin, the boatbuilder.

  The marriage itself was as romantic and secretive as an elopement. Daphne was dressed in an old blue coat and skirt, carefully ironed by her mother the night before. According to Aunt Billy, Muriel had dreamed of her daughters marrying in grand society weddings. But on 19 July 1932 at 8.15 in the morning, ‘so nobody was about’, she and her mother and father with Geoffrey climbed into her boat, the Cora Ann, and proceeded up the creek to Lanteglos and the remote small Norman church that awaited them. Tommy and George Hunkin followed in Ygdrasil. Once the service was over and breakfast quickly eaten, Daphne and Tommy changed into their old sailing clothes, climbed into his boat and set off for the open sea. The newly married couple pointed the prow towards the Helford River and Frenchman’s Creek. Daphne’s diary ended with this romantic view of a new beginning: ‘We couldn’t have chosen
anything more beautiful.’33

  Daphne hoped that by marrying she would create a ‘fuller life’. Was this need for a new adventure encouraged by a romantic scandal that hit the headlines both sides of the Atlantic involving Averill Furness? Daphne had told Tod that the dynamic in the Furness family provided part of the inspiration for her psychologically bleak novel, The Progress of Julius. She had always been fascinated by Tod’s charge, who was only a year younger than she, and the stories her old governess told of the shenanigans (some of them royal) in the multi-million-pound Furness menagerie. Averill had been the girl to whom Daphne had proffered advice over her hopeless passion for her cousin. She was also perhaps a girl who, like Daphne herself, suffered from an unhealthily close relationship with a possessive and powerful father. In this way she had found her way into Daphne’s imagination and into the book. But from poor little rich girl, Averill had sprung to independence and celebrity as the heroine of a high romance of sex, class and dangerous wild animals. Just a few weeks before Daphne fell in love ‘at first sight’ with Tommy, news of Averill’s elopement had the world, Tod and the du Mauriers, agog.

  At the age of twenty-three, while on safari with her father in Kenya, Averill had secretly married his white hunter and zebra trainer, Andrew Rattray. One year older than her father, Rattray was a handsome, romantic figure, completely at home with wild animals and big game in Africa, and irresistible to well-brought-up English women who longed to escape their destiny. He could not have been less like the scion of an aristocratic family that her social-climbing father and stepmother would have hoped for her as a husband. ‘Fiery’ Furness had been in the bush, shooting lions, when he was told of his daughter’s elopement and his roar of fury and disapproval could be heard across the Maasai Mara.