by Jane Dunn
She returned to London in March just in time to watch, from Carlton House Terrace, the spectacular state visit of President Lebrun of France with Herr Ribbentrop in attendance. The whirl continued as Angela dashed to Mull and Olive at Torosay and spent a month there before returning to London at the end of May for the Season. Looking back, she was surprised how unreal the looming cataclysm felt as the privileged classes reeled from Covent Garden to Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, cricket at Lord’s, and the Richmond Horse Trials. All the established social events of the summer continued as if the approaching hurricane was nothing but a refreshing continental breeze that barely ruffled their programme notes.
Even Olive, so worldly wise and politically sophisticated, seemed oblivious. Or perhaps the febrile activity of that summer was just a desperate desire to live life to the hilt before darkness descended. Olive travelled down to Bodinnick to stay with Angela and her family and then in July, as Jeanne accompanied Muriel to the annual Buckingham Palace Garden Party, Angela and Olive set off for a tour around Cornwall and the West Country. They were even then, as Angela recalled, unaware ‘that within two months the great fear would be a Fait Accompli’.26
Daphne’s vivid internal life had always detached her from the world, unlike her sisters who were more sociable and interested in events. As a fundamentally solitary individualist, she had never seen the need for religion. Neither had she been interested in politics. However, she was living with Tommy who, as Commanding Officer, was putting his elite unit of Grenadier Guards through a regime of strict discipline and training to prepare them for war. He was full of gloom about the unpreparedness of the British Army generally and explosive frustration at the complacency of so many of the top brass to the imminent conflagration. Daphne could not continue to live in her imagination, protected from the anxieties and privations of everyday life, while her husband, at the centre of the action, was full of fearful concern.
Awoken from her reverie, Daphne attempted to find some kind of philosophical framework to help her better understand herself and her place in the world. Although not formally educated, she had an intellectual cast of mind, was fascinated by ideas and, in seeking answers to the eternal metaphysical questions, picked eclectically from the Greek myths, bits of current psychoanalytical thinking, and even from the Bible. In this questing state, old family friends seemed to offer some solution. The tennis star Bunny Austin, and his actress wife Phyllis Konstam, were long-time friends of the du Maurier family and part of the Sunday lunch crowd at Cannon Hall. Considered by the press to be a celebrity couple, in 1938 Bunny was a finalist in the Gentleman’s Singles at Wimbledon (although soundly beaten by the tall American Don Budge) and Phyllis was an established actress who had acted in four of Hitchcock’s films. The spiritual solace they offered came wrapped in the controversial banner of ‘the Oxford Group’, the brainchild of a Swiss American Frank Buchman who, as war approached, renamed his movement, ‘Moral Re-Armament’.
For a while, Daphne was inspired by its followers’ message of personal responsibility, self-examination, confession and restitution (a message that became translated into the personal commitment that characterised Alcoholics Anonymous). There was reason to think that Angela, Jeanne and Muriel, all more conventionally religious than Daphne, might have been affected by their old friends’ zeal too. It was a branch of Protestantism that concerned itself with the individual, and his or her own perfectability and journey to redemption, rather than wider social justice and society at large. Understandably, it appealed to the educated and better off. Like all ‘cultish’ movements, it gave its adherents the comfortable sense of their own superiority as the enlightened in a benighted world.
Daphne came to feel embarrassed about her association with the Oxford Group, but for a while did her best to try and live less selfishly, with greater self-awareness, and offered to put her skills to the cause as part of her war effort. She was asked to write up stories of ordinary people whose lives had been enriched by following the Moral Re-Armament precepts of God-centred self-awareness. Furnished with the facts of these people’s lives by an MRA insider, Garth Lean, Daphne’s moral stories, with titles like: ‘The Admiralty Regrets’; ‘George and Jimmy’; ‘Over the Ration Books’; ‘A Miner’s Tale’; ‘Spitfire Megan’, and ‘A Nation’s Strength’, were meant to stiffen the resolve of the British as they entered yet another world war. The tales were placed by Garth Lean in various local newspapers and were eventually collected into a booklet entitled Come Wind, Come Weather. Published in the summer of 1940, it sold almost three quarters of a million copies during the fearful early years of the war.
Doubleday, Daphne’s publishers in America, decided to publish it too, where it was read as gentle propaganda, pointing out how the plucky little islanders would manage to repel the ravening wolves of Nazism through sheer goodness and bulldog grit. The subject matter and style, however, never sat very easily with Daphne’s interests or skills, and within a few years she was gently extricating herself from the MRA movement. Some seven years later she explained why:
One just is’nt selfless, one just cant give up life and all its possibilities for the Brave New World of Bunny Austin and his earnest friends. I don’t want to fight for Christianity, or save the souls of people, or even go round in the train of Princess Elizabeth being a good wife, which I ought to do. I want to dance alone in my monastery, and every three years or so write a book, just as one would give birth to a baby!27
The success of Rebecca had made her lazy, Daphne said, as her brain was not yet fizzing with another idea for a book. If Rebecca was her biggest baby so far, then this was the post-partum of recovery and reward. She had embarked on turning her bestseller into a play and by the summer of 1939 her script was completed. Daphne had found it hard going and did not hold out much hope of it being produced. Domestic concerns also reared their demanding heads. Margaret the nanny was near collapse with ill-health and exhaustion and Daphne had to look after her daughters without help, until she managed to employ a temporary nursemaid to release her from the drudgery of two lively and needy young girls.
Tessa was six, intelligent and perceptive, and Flavia was a sensitive pretty toddler of two. Both continued to be starved of their mother’s attention and sought reassurance with a clinginess Daphne found trying. She also had to organise moving house, as Tommy’s career in the run up to war had gone from strength to strength. He was now in charge of the Small Arms School at Netheravon, where the troops were instructed in how to use modern weaponry, and anything from mines and mortars to machine guns. He was expected to live in the commandant’s house at the headquarters in Hythe in Kent, at almost the closest point for an invading army, and so Daphne sent the children, for safety, to their grandmother Browning’s house in Oxfordshire, or to Nanny’s own cottage. Flavia recalled they did not see their mother for much of 1939.
Certainly the news from Europe that summer was terrifying. Fascism was rampant. Spain was bleeding to death under Franco’s fist, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and the Germans had militarised the Rhineland, overrun Austria, the Sudetenland and most of Czechoslovakia. Hitler signed a ‘pact of steel’ with Italy, and then a secret non-aggression pact with Stalin that implicitly exposed Poland to German and Russian megalomania. On 1 September, a million and a half German troops in six armoured and eight motorised divisions swept into Poland. Two weeks later, Russia invaded from the east. On 3 September, war was declared in London and Paris.
In Washington, President Roosevelt announced US neutrality and an embargo on shipping armaments to any of the countries at war (amended two months later to allow Britain and France to buy arms from the US after all). Tommy’s predictions all year, that war would be inevitable by the summer, were proved right. It was only just over twenty years since he, and hundreds of thousands of young men like him, had thought themselves lucky to survive the horror and slaughter of the Great War, or ‘the war to end all wars’ as they had been promised. Once again, they were facing another glob
al war, young enough to have to offer their lives for a second time, in a conflagration that threatened to be every bit as bloody and destructive of Western civilisation.
As thousands of troops of the British Expeditionary Force returned to France and the news from Europe became even grimmer, Angela returned to Torosay Castle, signed herself in as ‘Tommy’ and hopped into Olive’s bed for comfort. Her Pekinese Wendy had just died of meningitis and in tearing grief she had climbed into her car, and driven nearly eight hundred miles in two and a half days.
War was to etch very different experiences on the three du Maurier sisters. Angela evaded it as much as she could by living for large stretches of time with Olive at Torosay. She began her new book while she sat in the library there, a book dedicated to Olive, its plot a gift for the woman she loved and its setting her Hebridean isle. While Angela struggled with the unlikely story of a woman’s first and greatest love being restored to her, despite his death and the ensuing years, Jeanne shouldered the responsibility for Muriel, now living mainly at Ferryside. Very soon, she was working long backbreaking days growing vegetables in a steep and difficult site near Pont as her contribution to war work. Daphne was protected from such hard physical labour by being a wife and mother of small children. She did, however, volunteer to be a ‘gas decontaminator’ at the first-aid unit attached to the local school, but found it hard to take seriously. However, she was assailed on all sides by Tommy’s terrible reports from Europe and decided, in these first fearful months of the war, that she would try one last time for a son, ‘although I am quite prepared for another lumping daughter!’28
9
Fruits of War
I am rather sad that you will apparently weed for hours the Passing Glory of Torosay and don’t consider you can be of import in what may yet prove to be the Suttons of Cornwall. ‘You don’t – (sniff) – mind what you do for Olive’ … It’s been very wild weather again – my poor greens have all had to be staked and I’ve been like Lob practically kissing each sprout.
Letter from JEANNE in Fowey to Angela in Torosay, 1940
OF ALL THE sisters, Jeanne was the one who really committed herself to the war effort. Anything she did she embraced wholeheartedly with all her energy and spirit. For most of the war she cultivated, in very tough conditions, a two-acre field at Pont, steeply sloping and a good two-mile hike from Ferryside.
Jeanne took the new slogan ‘Dig For Victory’ and made it flesh, with all the aching muscles, strained hernias and dropped arches that ensued. The precipitous field had to be turned into a productive vegetable garden that meant every tool, bucket of manure and water, had to be lugged up by hand, and the produce brought down, again in buckets and baskets, to sell. She had very little help with the digging, manuring, planting, weeding, pest control, harvesting and even marketing of her crops. Certainly, there were no men to shoulder the heavier work. Jeanne’s good friend Mary Fox and her younger sister Pam toiled alongside her for a time, until both were drafted as Land Army girls onto local farms, Mary at Lawhyre and Pam at Trevedda. She was joined periodically by a very reluctant Angela. But it was Jeanne alone who planned, worked and managed the market garden, eventually compromising her health in the process.
The passions of her life, painting and music, were put to one side for the duration of the war as she had neither the time nor the energy to pursue them. Even while her elder sisters were still free to follow their interests, Jeanne complained little and got on with her onerous tasks. The responsibility for Muriel also hung heavily on her, a responsibility shared with Angela at times when she was not at Torosay with Olive. Pam Fox recalled Muriel in late middle age as a still extremely pretty woman, stylishly dressed and always with her hair done and make-up immaculate. Her real flair for interior decorating and home-making ensured that every house she inhabited was beautiful, comfortable and welcoming. She could not cook an egg, but she could charm extra rations during the war from local shopkeepers and managed to get her cook, or any available local woman, to rustle up delicious meals while everyone else was making do with the dullest rationed fare.
Pam was amazed how a woman who could produce three daughters with rollicking senses of humour was absolutely devoid of any herself, and in fact was quite bemused by humour in others. Muriel’s driving caused her daughters endless merriment as she never learnt how to reverse, and rarely shifted the car out of first gear. She also insisted on driving with a blanket over her knees, which inevitably would get tangled up in the foot pedals. It was a testament as to how few cars there were on the roads at the time that she did not cause herself or any others serious injury, mutilation or death. Muriel was remembered by many as being selfish and rather cold, but somehow her charming manners and beauty meant she largely got away with it.
When the war began, Muriel was ‘secretly terrified that she would be landed with evacuees’, and asked the Fox sisters to come and live with the family ‘indefinitely’1 at Ferryside. They complied for a short and stressful time, but then made other arrangements and decamped. The fear persisted, however, and Muriel, who had turned sixty in 1937, suffered from a series of ailments, some possibly as a result of anxiety and depression.
There was much to be anxious about. Both Cornwall and the far-flung Isle of Mull, sheltered on the extreme westerly margins of the kingdom, no longer seemed quite so protected from the advancing threat across the Channel. June 1940 seemed a moment of unremitting despair with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk. The news that the German army had reached Paris and marched triumphantly up the Champs Elysées was the final humiliation. But there were darker hours to come. Events in Europe were moving so fast that Britain was learning the true and terrible meaning of blitzkrieg, as London was nightly bombed by relentless flights of German bombers. Daphne, in the east of the country, justifiably felt more exposed to the threat of invasion and sent her daughters down to Cornwall for safety. They stayed with Nanny Margaret in a cottage in Fowey and came across to Ferryside for meals with Angela, Jeanne and Muriel. It was unsettling for the children, as every evacuation would be. Angela had an abiding memory of Flavia, aged three, lying in bed silent about her distress, except that a single tear welled from a cornflower blue eye and rolled down her cheek. Even this far west there was danger with Plymouth, a couple of headlands east, one of the most heavily bombed cities in the blitz and evacuees billeted on households in Fowey. A bomb fell in the of garden the cottage next door and another in the harbour, but Daphne did not want the children moved to a more remote spot unless she or one of her family were with them.
In the early summer of 1940, Angela once more hightailed it up to Mull and Olive, still signing herself in to the visitors’ book as ‘Tommy’. She intended to spend a month at Torosay but ended up staying for nine. This was the height of their love affair. She had already spent a month in the early spring, leaving three days after her thirty-sixth birthday on 1 March. On that visit she had written a poem on the castle’s headed notepaper, entitled ‘Hold on to Happiness’, that ended with the lines:
Hebridean sunsets – bitter-sweet –
Peace & free from yearning
A road that has no turning
Leading to an end where I shall meet
She who owns my heart-beats
Now & evermore
Friend & lover, husband, sister, wife
We shall stand together
Link’d by Muillach’sfn8 shore
Joy & sorrows shared in future life.
Hold on to happiness …
She later copied it into the leather-bound book, embossed with her and Olive’s initials and containing the fair copies of her love poetry to Olive, and gave this poem the explanatory title, ‘Lines written on Birthday, 1940 at Torosay’.
It had a sense of reckoning. Angela was halfway through the allotted lifespan of three score years and ten. Certainly, at that point she would not have expected to live to almost ninety-eight, the age she died, for the du Mauriers of
ten reminded themselves they were not a long-lived family. The future seemed to be in retreat. The war was not going well, and there was no certainty that the country could continue to withstand the German advance: it was more than a year and a half before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced America into the war alongside a weary, bombed-out Britain. Angela, like the rest of the population, grasped what happiness she could and lived for the day, never knowing whether there would even be a morrow.
She could rationalise her long absence from her family duties caring for Muriel and her neglect of Jeanne – so clearly in need of domestic and horticultural help – by pointing out she was gardening full time at Torosay, although admittedly tending to the delphiniums rather than the vegetables. She also undertook some knitting of scarves and balaclavas for freezing sailors as a contribution to Olive’s war work for the merchant seamen based at Oban. But most pressing of all was her desire to finish her third novel, her gift for Olive. She was determined to call this Weep No More, but to her chagrin had to defer to her English publishers who insisted on calling it The Spinning Wheel, a title she complained had no meaning for her whatsoever. Having been set on her path as a novelist, she had found a surge of creative energy and self-belief through her love affair and was working almost as concentratedly as Daphne.
Angela managed to publish four novels in four years. Sadly for her, Weep No More (her American publishers retained her original title) was met with little enthusiasm. Her weakness as a novelist, and one of her real differences from Daphne, was her propensity to pour all her highly charged romantic longings into the story. Her books were often a direct tribute to her current love and this hobbled her narrative drive with a too literal importation of her own or her lover’s emotional lives. Daphne had always insisted that her own strength lay not in emotion but in imagination. In each book she recreated herself and, through writing, inhabited that imaginary self and controlled the actions of others, ‘clothing some unfortunate human being with my own misguided fantasy’.2