by Jane Dunn
Did this unconventional match make Daphne realise that romantic love and adventure could co-exist in a marriage? That she too could marry a hero and live an expanded life with an eye to the distant horizon, rather than shrink into conventional bondage like all the other wives she knew? It would explain her triumphant comment to Tod when she told her of her instantaneous attraction to Tommy, ‘How’s that for romance!’, for she had a hero every bit as handsome and remarkable as Averill’s, and she intended to live just as unconventional a life.
The fathers’ reactions were slightly different, however. Marmaduke Furness roared in possessive outrage and curtailed all further association with Rattray; while Gerald, on hearing Daphne was to marry, burst into tears and cried, ‘It isn’t fair!’34 And so the Alpha Male rampaged and Peter Pan wept – and then gave the young lovers one of the cottages at Cannon Hall to live in as a wedding present, thereby keeping his precious daughter within the family compound. Most grand passions have a tragic coda and the same was true for poor Averill’s. Rattray died just a year and a half later from some tropical disease. After nursing him devotedly, Averill, heartbroken, soon followed him to the grave, apparently having drunk herself to death. She was just twenty-seven. Daphne’s reality was more a prolonged disillusionment, as she and Tommy returned, with mixed feelings, to their solitary lives.
Their marriage would prove a great mismatch of expectation and experience. Daphne thought she was marrying someone strong and self-sufficient like herself, a natural nonconformist in most things. Their carefree courtship in Cornwall, largely conducted in a boat, was not an accurate precursor of what was to come. Daphne was completely unprepared for any kind of conventional wifely role, let alone to become the supportive spouse of an exacting military man destined for glory. She was horrified and shocked by the night terrors Tommy suffered and recoiled from his naked need of her reassurance and comfort. The last thing she wanted was any vestige of a clingy, weeping man like her father, or a marriage like her parents’, where Muriel’s every waking thought was directed towards making Gerald’s life easy and less stressful.
Tommy later told Daphne he always looked for something of his devoted mother or sister in women. Although she was a terrific companion in any adventure and a fascinating and generous friend, womanly nurture was not Daphne’s strong suit and Tommy, lonely and disconsolate, would ultimately seek comfort in alcohol and the affection of other women.
Daphne had written a poem ‘The Writer’ when she was nineteen, before she started her writing career. Yet it was uncannily prescient about her destiny:
…
Mine is the silence
And the quiet gloom
Of a clock ticking
In an empty room,
The scratch of a pen,
Ink-pot and paper,
And the patter of the rain
Nothing but this as long as I am able,
Firelight – and a chair, and a table.
Not for me the whisper in the ear,
Nor the touch of a hand,
And that hand on my heart,
Nor the quick pattering of feet
Upon the stair, nor laughter in the street,
Nor the swift glance, intangible and dear.
Not for me the hunger in the night,
And the strength of the lover
Tired of his loving.
Seeking after passion the broken rest,
Bearing his body’s weight upon my breast.
Mine is the silence
Of the still day,
When the shouting on the hills
Sounds far away,
The song of the thrush,
In the quiet woods,
And the scent of trees …35
Nothing could deflect Daphne for long from the irresistible need to write, the longing for solitude and freedom to explore her characters and inhabit her imaginary worlds. This was to prove difficult to combine with wifeliness, and motherhood. As Dick, the male narrator in I’ll Never Be Young Again, declared ‘this power of writing [is] more dangerous than adventure, more satisfying than love’.36 This was Daphne’s own voice speaking of the central impulse of her life.
7
Stepping Out
A lot of people say I have suffered because of Daphne’s fame and success, in the same way as I had to stand for greater and stronger criticism on the stage, being Gerald du Maurier’s daughter. I am still – and know I always shall be – asked ‘Are you the writer?’, and I still – and always shall I suppose – reply, ‘I’m the Sister’.
ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember
THE SISTER WHO had been most vocal about not marrying had now deserted the sisterhood and done just that, and kept her marriage secret from both sisters. Daphne was a little sheepish, and perhaps did not enjoy relinquishing her place as the most individual and nonconformist du Maurier. ‘How Puff [Angela] and Queenie [Jeanne] will jeer,’1 she wrote in a letter to her mother. In fact, she told her sisters nothing and the first that either heard of it was through a letter from Muriel to Angela in Italy. The news took both sisters by surprise.
Jeanne had never entertained any thoughts at all of marriage. From girlhood it was obvious to her Hampstead schoolfriend Elizabeth that she had quite quickly left girlish friendships behind and ‘moved on to various lady friends’.2 As the ‘most boy-like of them all’, and despite her sweet and docile manner as a child, she had from a young age ‘quickly become startlingly independent in thought and action’.3 At twenty-one she was already on her path to becoming an artist. In this, she continued to be encouraged by Gerald, the full light of his expectation now falling on her. Her talents in music and sport created other bonds with Gerald: she played the piano and for a time the violin too; she was a powerful tennis player, ‘able to hold her own as a girl playing with three good men’,4 and a passably good golfer, a game her father enjoyed and could also play with her as his partner. Angela thought Jeanne initially suffered from having too many talents, but it was painting that finally claimed all her creative energies.
The college she had attended, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, had been set up in the late nineteenth century with the specific aim of encouraging the traditional handicrafts and industries. But it was also very forward looking, embracing new developments in design and manufacture and blending tradition with the excitement of the new. Students and teachers flourished in the lively and enlightened atmosphere of innovation, experimentation and debate. When Virginia and Leonard Woolf visited in the late 1930s, Virginia wrote in her diary how she liked the cheerful, free-and-easy atmosphere and compared it favourably to the stuffiness and formality in Oxford and Cambridge colleges at the time.
The life-drawing classes that Jeanne attended were run by an eclectic collection of practising artists, most notably the Vorticist painter William Roberts and Bernard Meninsky, a painter who responded most to the warmth and light of the Mediterranean. Roberts’s art was powerfully felt and compellingly modern. A war artist during the Great War, he had depicted its hell in his searing The First German Gas Attack at Ypres. But it was the more expansive Meninsky who made the strongest impression on Jeanne. His charisma as a teacher inspired generations of students at the Central, where he taught on and off from his youth, on the eve of the First World War, until his suicide in 1950. Morris Kestelman was a scholarship student, not much older than Jeanne, and he too became a renowned artist and teacher at the Central. Recalling his time as a student, shortly before Jeanne herself was attending Meninsky’s classes, Kestelman evoked the thrill of his teaching:
[Meninsky] was gifted with brilliant powers of demonstration accompanied by lucid exposition of what he was about. What held me was the intensity of his concentration in the act of drawing, remarkable feats of improvisation from the model. It was a fascinating exercise to watch, and it related to you as a student … He talked very well, constructively and clearly, and would establish a strong personal relationship, watching your reaction. Then he wou
ld produce a stub of a pencil … and with extraordinary directness proceed to produce, on a corner of your sheet, one of those remarkable drawings which students would later cut out and mount. As he drew, he talked.5
Unsurprisingly given the quality of the teaching, the drawing classes at the Central were increasingly highly regarded and well attended. Drawing was considered the skill that underpinned all the other crafts taught at the school, from textiles and costume, silversmithing, stained glass and book production, through to furniture-making and architecture. Before Jeanne could enrol in the life classes, she had to go through the general drawing classes, where students were expected to spend many hours drawing from the vast collection of plaster casts of everything from classical statues to bits of English cathedrals. After this apprenticeship, she could move to the life classes at the college and spend a day a week in the studio drawing the human form from the life models employed to pose for them. When drawing naked models the classes were segregated. Men and women were not allowed to work alongside each other while contemplating the curve of a buttock or a breast. If the model was ‘draped’, however, either in ordinary clothes or some wonderful theatrical confection loaned from the costume department, then the classes were once again mixed.
The models were paid half a crown an hour and posed from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon, with three fifteen-minute breaks and an hour for lunch, before everyone went home at four. For this course, with teaching one day a week with inspirational teachers, Jeanne was charged £3 a term.
The landscape and light of the Mediterranean proved irresistible to the artists who taught Jeanne and her fellow students and she, like many artists before and since, would be drawn south for inspiration. Europe, and particularly France, was still the powerhouse of art and design and Paris was the flame at the centre that attracted artists from all over the world. The scintillating concentration of talent there between the two world wars was characterised by the creative independence and brilliance of artists such as Modigliani, Chagall, Marie Laurencin and Picasso. Most were still working in Paris when Jeanne began her life as an artist; some embodied the romantic vision of a creative bohemian, indulging in an excess of life and love, yet always in obsessive thrall to their art. This creative vitality streamed across the Channel to fizz in the corridors of the Central School. Even the students who had never been abroad were enthused by their teachers with artistic innovation and fervour.
The stimulus of the teaching was more than equalled by the liveliness of student life. The annual Chelsea Arts Ball was held in the Albert Hall and students were encouraged to attend in fancy dress by being offered tickets at half price. Bizarre costumes were often inspired by famous paintings. These, especially the classical references, were used as an excuse for extravagance, hilarity and, sometimes, near nudity. Given a theme each year, for decades the ball was one of the social highlights of artistic London. General exuberance, however, got increasingly out of hand until, in the 1950s, a smoke bomb was set off causing some of the revellers to require medical treatment, and the ball was eventually banned.
It was in this febrile, unfettered atmosphere that Jeanne pursued her art, while maintaining her image as the youngest, most placid sister. Her surprisingly independent spirit was beginning to strain at the carapace of conventional family life.
Angela too was baulking at the narrow role assigned unmarried women of her generation and class. She was twenty-eight and, as the hope of a husband and children of her own receded, the marriage of her younger sister confirmed her in her spinsterhood. She would refer to herself with some poignancy when she was middle-aged as an Aunt Jessie, but she was an Aunt Jessie with a wilder and more bohemian private life than any of her sisters. Beneath the tweeds and sensible shoes beat a passionate and unconventional heart. Part of the problem for Angela’s generation of women was the very real lack of marriageable men after the catastrophe of the Great War. Angela was fourteen at the outbreak of hostilities, and the young men she would have expected to marry were the eighteen-year-olds plucked from their schools and universities and sent across the Channel to fight, be wounded and die.
It is probable that Angela would have been most happy in a theatrical marriage, much like her parents’ own. Facing the increasingly likely fact of her spinsterhood, however, she had to find some kind of genteel voluntary work to make use of her time, while turning to relationships elsewhere to satisfy her highly emotional and romantic nature. During her canvassing in the poorer parts of South London, Angela had begun to question her family’s lack of political engagement and their acceptance of the status quo that made them natural Tories. With direct experience of how most of her fellow Londoners lived, she could not remain unmoved: ‘The conditions of the poor filled me with unspeakable pity … turning me into a rabid socialist for quite a long time.’ ‘Mr Right’, the unnamed married man she had once longed to wed, had also been a socialist and it was to the left that she leaned until after the Second World War when, wishing to reward Winston Churchill for his wartime leadership she said, she returned to the Conservative fold. She became more strongly Tory as she aged and, looking back on her youthful idealism, wrote, ‘I was foolish enough to imagine that only a Labour government could put these conditions [of widespread poverty and inequality] right.’6
Her great friend from her debutante days, Betty Hicks, had joined the Red Cross and proved herself an instinctive nurse, which Angela did not. Bedpans, dirty linen and unsightly diseases that needed hands-on treatment were all beyond her. However, she did love the scruffy little urchins who came to the children’s clinic and she would burst into tears in sympathy with them. So, turning her back on the nursing side of the work, Angela was encouraged by Shaw, ever the robust and adventurous spirit, to become a VAD with her.
Voluntary Aid Detachments had been founded in the Great War by the Red Cross to provide supplementary aid to the Territorial Forces Medical Service, working in convalescent hospitals and helping with clerical and kitchen duties. They were a volunteer force mostly of women drawn from the middle and upper classes. In the interwar years their duties were much less onerous and Angela, largely employed with distributing cups of coffee to spectators at Society events like the royal wedding of Princess Marina to the Duke of Kent, enjoyed the brushes with royalty and high society this entailed. Unfortunately, the Red Cross enforced a strict no make-up rule and more than once a virago bore down on her wielding methylated spirits and stripped the lipstick from her face: ‘good gracious, du Maurier, who do you think you are? In the chorus? …’7
The women VADs even had their own club, in a palatial house in Cavendish Square that used to be Marshall Thompson’s Hotel, used by Thackeray in Vanity Fair as inspiration for the grand hotel where Captain George Osborne takes his new bride, Amelia. Conveniently close to the draper John Lewis, it was an extremely popular club for ladies, run on much the same lines as the gentlemen’s clubs but more economical. Lunch was one shilling and threepence and a six-course club dinner was only the equivalent of twenty-six new pence. It was managed by a series of resilient and resourceful women and, during the extreme food shortages just after the Second World War, the main source of protein offered up at club mealtimes would be the ever-adaptable London pigeon.
Angela and Jeanne were still living with their parents at Cannon Hall and Daphne and Tommy had moved into a cottage on Well Road adjoining the main house’s garden, so sisterly friendships and support continued uninterrupted, although Angela was aware of an inevitable shift in allegiance. She still felt she could tell Daphne everything, but she accepted that since her marriage, Daphne could not be as completely confiding in her. Another intimate family relationship was altered too. Muriel, uneasy with Gerald’s obsessive relationship with Daphne throughout her girlhood, recognised that this difficult and beautiful daughter created less disturbance now she was wed and Gerald had been forced to finally let go. The unspoken maternal hostility that Daphne feared from childhood dissolved a little and the two wome
n tentatively began to share an occasional solidarity over how best to deal with emotionally needy husbands. Where Muriel seemed to accept her wifely role as mother, cheerleader and nurse, Daphne resisted any demands for nurture. Despite her remarkable imagination and ability to inhabit the personae of her fictional creations, she only had occasional flashes of empathy for the feelings of the living and was largely uncomprehending about their suffering. She could not attempt to enter sympathetically the experiences of the young men and officers, like Tommy, whose terrible experiences of war were far from imaginary.
Daphne was forced to adjust to life with another person whose needs and expectations encroached on her free-wheeling independence, demanding that she live in a world not entirely fashioned to her own designs. Although she loved Tommy and thought him ‘the most charming person in the world’, she found his night terrors, moodiness and irritability trying. Overall she declared to Tod that life was ‘very pleasant all round’,8 and more full and interesting than her single life had been. After all, it was all still a new adventure.
Part of this idea of an expanded life involved children and Daphne wanted lots, as many as six – but only sons. Within three months of marriage she was pregnant and was certain she would have a boy. It did not occur to her that she was just as likely to be carrying a daughter. The nursery at the cottage was painted blue and the name ‘Christian’ inscribed on the cupboard doors. This was another occasion when she would exercise her power to ‘dream true’. Through force of will and desire, she could imagine anything she wanted into being; throughout her pregnancy she was certain she would manage what her mother had failed three times to do, to produce the longed-for son.