by Jane Dunn
Daphne recognised it was time to move her family back to Cornwall. She rented a cottage at Readymoney Cove, and Christopher Puxley motored her down alone in his Bentley. The house was within a stone’s throw of the sea, and a brisk walk from her sisters and mother. It was good to be back in the part of the world that was most congenial to her spirit, where her imagination ran free. Her daughters, Flavia in particular, mourned the loss of Paddy Puxley’s company and affection, but Daphne dealt with the removal of Christopher Puxley by recreating her soul mate, and his family history, in her next novel, Hungry Hill.
During their romantic summer, Christopher had told her stories of the decline and fall of his Irish family that ended with the razing to the ground by the IRA of his ancestral home. She enthusiastically plunged into a world where the men were called John or Henry Broderick (her code for Puxley was John-Henry) and were relentlessly weak and incompetent, as they oversaw the rapid dissolution of the family’s status and fortune. Cursed by a rival family who had once owned Hungry Hill, ‘Copper John’ Broderick had been warned to respect nature and the hill before tearing into it with his mines. His arrogant dismissal of the past and the claims of the land set in progress the inevitability of the Broderick family’s downfall. Daphne could be ruthless in her dissection of even those she loved, and she was unsparing in her treatment of the Puxley/Brodericks. It did not really occur to her that the real family might recognise their ancestors in these wimps and wastrels and be unamused. Christopher Puxley’s mother particularly objected to the depiction of the women, and Christopher himself would have had to gaze at the portrait of himself as ‘Wild Johnnie’, a reckless alcoholic lost to hope and happiness. It had a certain justice.
In the summer of 1941, Frenchman’s Creek was not the only du Maurier novel to jostle for attention. After the retirement of Michael Joseph, Angela had decided to offer Peter Davies her first unloved manuscript as her third novel. The Little Less had carried all the emotional freight usual in a first novel but now, as an experienced woman of thirty-seven, she had looked at her youthful offering of more than ten years before and thought it needed some pruning. She had worked at it during the freezing winter months at Torosay. The woman whom her heroine had loved was based on Angela’s feelings at the time for Mary Newcomb. Now in thrall to Olive, she made her red-haired, as Olive had once been. At last it was published. If the critics considered Daphne had produced a satisfyingly escapist yarn, they were much less pleased with Angela’s clumsier, but bold and brave book.
The critics were either exercised by the ‘abnormal sex relations’,20 that Angela had placed at the centre of her story or the more sophisticated dismissed it as ‘lush mush’. In the Saturday Review of Literature, the reviewer was too worldly to overtly object to the subject matter, but found the writing uninvolving and the narrative ‘banal’. He or she then went on to characterise the heroine Vivian, who was in fact a portrait of the young Angela herself:
the author is eternally preoccupied with the beating of her heroine’s heart … motherless from birth, starved for affection, and doomed to a continual frustration. As a young girl, Vivian Osborne’s early sensibilities are outraged when an older man tries to make love to her. She is not altogether a usual girl to begin with, and her emotions are deflected away from men by this unfortunate experience.21
Angela’s heroine had then entered the path of continually thwarted love. The effect was to deny the possibility of any harmonious or lasting relationship between the sexes, a bleak view she appeared to share with Daphne.
The book was an eye-opener for Daphne too, who wrote one of her newsy and light-hearted letters while she was still in residence with the Puxleys. She had thought it unsuitable reading matter for Nanny, but all the other adults had been absorbed by it:
[Paddy Puxley] like all fundamentally ‘innocent and pure’ women, expressed disapproval but nevertheless lapped it up with gusto, while [Christopher Puxley] a cryptic smile on his face has been positively gloating … My newfound ‘discovery’ about you, as a writer, is that I believe you should write short stories … I do wish you would write a funny book, you so obviously can … I had a bit of fun out of the book and think some other people will have the same … I feel it’s only a matter of time before I’m asked, ‘Does Angela know a lot of queer people?!’22
Of course, the answer to that question, as Daphne well knew, was yes. Underneath its own humour, this is an interesting letter for it reveals something of the dynamic between the sisters. The Little Less was in no way meant to be a humorous novel. Serious, even lugubrious, in its emotionality, any laughs (and there could be many) would only be at its expense. Daphne did not say anything supportive about the novel, whereas Angela was often effusive in her praise for her sister’s books – with good reason, it was true. For instance, she had written to Daphne to say how much she had ‘adored’ Frenchman’s Creek, and had been so engrossed she had read it in one sitting. On the other hand, for Angela to have her efforts at writing a deeply felt and serious novel about a difficult subject greeted by an admired and much more successful sister with the suggestion that she should try short stories instead, or indeed a comic novel, sounded rather less encouraging. In fact, her emotive and rather baggy style did not lend itself either to the comic or the more tautly condensed.
Angela’s war work continued through the summer, helping Jeanne with the market garden at Pont. Jeanne complained to Daphne that Angela rather skimped her tasks and obviously had none of the dedication that drove her youngest sister on to such feats of endurance. After a hard day’s work in sun and rain and wind, the sisters would go across to Fowey, dusty and sweat-stained with heavy baskets on their arms, to offer vegetables and fruit to their regular customers, and anyone else they encountered. There was some ill-feeling towards privileged women who could escape the worst of war work in the factories and farms, and Angela particularly had to endure some sour comments and poisonous letters from the locals.
The prize, however, for most dangerous and demanding war work by a civilian in their circle, would have had to go to Angela’s redoubtable friend, Angela Halliday. Shaw worked in London throughout the Blitz as an ambulance driver in the Paddington area and was lucky to emerge from the war alive. She endured so much destruction and death, of friends, along with patients for whom she was caring, and strangers in the street, but her strong and optimistic personality saw her through. She sent wonderfully descriptive letters to her old friend, no doubt read out by Angela to the other members of the du Maurier family, and managed to transport the reader into the heart of the inferno. This one was written in May 1941:
By the grace of God I am still here. I suppose it was the most appalling night almost anyone ever spent. It started at eleven pm and J. and I were happily in bed. We tried to stick it out again but it was too hot and we went to the Mews shelter and played bridge until that became a farce and incendiaries were pouring all around us, so we seized bags of sand from various doorsteps and dealt with them. Fires were raging everywhere and H.E.s [High Explosives] screaming round us. As we got back to the shelter there was a God Almighty crash and tons of stuff and glass seemed to pour onto the roof. I went out to see what had gone and a crater about twenty feet deep and wide had appeared in the road by Albion Street P.O. where two minutes before J. and I had been …
There is no glass anywhere except on the pavements. The window of the room I was to have gone to on Wednesday has been blown in – but anyway my tenant won’t come here as there is no gas or water. Drucesfn9 is a crumpled mass of twisted iron and most of Baker Street is still burning … I think every [fire] engine and ambulance in London must have gone out. Some of ours went out four times each … Poor J. has gone on duty at eight this morning, and as we never closed our eyes at all all night, and she was violently sick before going, I can’t think she’ll be much good to-day … I don’t think one’s nerves could stand many raids like last night’s, and until I’m rung up for I shall try and get some sleep.23
While Shaw drove ambulances through a burning London, Angela was tramping to and from the market garden near Fowey. As she planted, weeded and watered she worked out in detail the idea for another book. Just as Jeanne had no time or energy for her real love, painting, while she laboured on the land, so Angela too could not put pen to paper while she was digging potatoes by day, and at night easing her aching muscles into an early bed. By the end of the summer, she was desperate to write the novel she had closely plotted while she tied onions in bunches and collected apples for storage. Once the harvest was in, she begged for permission from Jeanne to return to Mull. Her mother was strongly against the idea. Perhaps Muriel thought her eldest daughter would disappear for another nine months, as she had the previous year (and possibly did not approve of the reason) but, despite disapproval at home, Angela headed back at the end of September to Torosay and to Olive. She was only allowed two months and set herself the task of writing, in that time, the whole of her fourth novel that lay like a spring waiting to be released.
Angela ignored the critics and her family’s lukewarm interest in her writing and set to work with a will. She knew that soon her age group of women would be called up for compulsory war work, and when that happened she would not have another chance at writing anything longer than a letter. She worked eight hours a day, breaking only for meals provided by Olive’s cook, and the daily tramp to a derelict cottage on the estate, Achnacroish, that she had bought off Olive’s daughter ‘for a song’. She dreamed one day it would become her paradisiacal home where, ‘I could walk in unsurpassed beauty for ever.’24 With fuel and fires rationed, she and Olive huddled together at night in the castle dining room, wrapped in rugs to keep themselves warm. The penetrating cold at bedtime involved even more layers: ‘I remember quite well going to sleep under four blankets, an eiderdown, a fur rug, four hot-water bottles, wearing flannel pyjamas, a cardigan and a woollen rug!’25 And there was also the human warmth of Olive.
This novel was an interesting one. Treveryan was Angela’s attempt at a bestseller following the pattern of her sister’s Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek, and in fact was dedicated to Daphne ‘with much Love’. It had the du Maurier stamp of lethal sexual relationships, a family with a fearful secret, a once-great estate, wild landscape, thwarted desires. But Angela rather over-egged an already melodramatic tale by throwing in incest, ancestral madness and murder. She set her sights high by starting her first chapter with a quote from a rather more famous tale of family dysfunction, madness and murder, Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul …’ This time film rights were sold quickly as film producers found the chance to replicate a past success almost irresistible. Here was a du Maurier story full of sinister intent, set in Cornwall – surely it had the makings of Rebecca Mark II? Angela was thrilled at the prospect and probably had cast the whole personae dramatis in her mind before the ink on the contract was dry.
The Romanian-born British film producer Marcel Hellman bought the rights and then asked Rodney Ackland, a successful playwright and screenwriter, to write the screenplay. Ackland struggled valiantly with the superabundance of ‘strong’ scenes, as he called them. The plot remained vivid in his memory:
This novel I might say, begins with a devoted husband going stark mad and cutting his wife’s throat during a ball [in fact he only tried to strangle her] and ends with a semi-demented spinster shooting in cold blood the half-brother for whom she has an incestuous passion, and being sent to Broadmoor. In between these two lurid episodes in high life, Miss du Maurier describes deaths from cancer, Lady Chatterley-like couplings in barns, miscarriages, illegitimate children palmed off on unsuspecting husbands and shadows of incipient homicidal-mania brooding over all.
After months of work, he was surprised to see the verdict on Treveryan from one of the exalted executives in the film company as, ‘a fragrant little tale but rather thin’.26
The company had been determined to cast Lana Turner as the delicately nurtured Bethel Treveryan (her name was quickly changed to Eleanor Veryan). This casting did not fit very easily with Angela’s portrayal of the eldest daughter of an ancient but cursed dynasty, forced to renounce love through fear of the mania stalking the family’s genes. In the book, this conscientious eldest sibling grew increasingly bitter when she discovered the brother, whom she had always loved too well, had ignored the direst warnings, married against all family directives and, most heinous of all, begotten a potentially homicidal child.
If this film was to have any chance in America, however, Ackland was told that they could not have the heroine become a sour and murderous bitch, capable of killing her brother. Instead a screen heroine would have to become sweeter and ever more saintly, as she suffered the disappointments and renunciations of her bleak inheritance. Most crucially, if her brother died at her hand, his death would have to be accidental. In fact her brother must try and shoot her first, and she was to attempt to Save Him From Himself. A short trial and acquittal and then a happy ending with Lana Turner in the arms of her forsaken lover, would wrap the harrowing tale up with a bow. Oh, and the title would have to be changed from the apparently unpronounceable Treveryan, to Yours For Ever.
Angela had written a story full of drama, emotion and incident and considered this her favourite book. For once the critics seemed to agree with her and even Daphne was encouraging, writing to Tod, ‘It’s the best she’s yet written though somewhat gloomy in theme, and a trifle over-drawn.’27 In the Treveryans, Angela had recreated her own family, with some necessary exaggerations, but she had made the second of the three children a son called Veryan, as a present for Daphne who had always wanted to be that boy. Their mother was remote and vaguely hostile, particularly to Veryan, and the children were thrown on each other for love and entertainment.
Angela prided herself on her theatrical imagination and confessed she could always see her characters and their story as filmable, or at least on stage. After Ackland was sacked as screenwriter for being too highbrow (adding one word of Latin that the executives thought might as well be Greek to the average American), the second screenplay was also quietly shelved. The official reason given for this was that the powers-that-be thought, having invested in two full screenplays, that hereditary lunacy was not a fit subject for the screen after all.
Angela’s hopes had been riding on this book. A blockbuster film would have made up for so much disappointment in her writing career so far, elevating her profile, so she could stand almost shoulder to shoulder with her sister. However, she managed to be philosophical about the collapse of her hopes and even claimed she was relieved that nothing came of the film, once she had read the much-bowdlerised screenplay. She consoled herself with a tragic confession: ‘The greatest compliment I ever had paid to me was when someone said, “I like Treveryan the best of Daphne’s books”!’28
For a few months Ferryside was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a headquarters base for the officers and was not badly treated for the duration of its official use. When the du Mauriers were allowed back, in the early summer of 1942, Muriel soon restored it again to a gracious and comfortable home. Living there, rather than in Fowey, made the trip to the market garden at Pont much less time-consuming and tiring for Jeanne and Angela. But soon Angela was directed to work at a farm upstream from Bodinnick at Mixtow and leave Jeanne to garden alone.
This was a blow to both sisters: Jeanne because her health was suffering and she badly needed help, and Angela because she had to work from nine to five cleaning out the cowsheds (she was frightened of cows and the smell of farmyard slurry made her retch), digging a field of potatoes, hoeing turnips, carting gallons of water and clearing pasture of thistles by pulling them out of the ground one by one. Daphne thought that there was some official malice in this posting, that the local bureaucrat had thought ‘h’m – do that eldest du Maurier girl a bit of good to break her back. Been idling down here all this time.’29
Indeed the heaviness of
the work was exhausting and strained Angela’s back and body generally, and the loneliness of her solitary labour depressed her naturally companionable spirit. The best part of her time as a farm labourer was the twenty-minute row to work and back. All the du Maurier girls were competent at handling boats and even when she was in late middle age, Angela would row from her home at Ferryside to Fowey, always dressed in a sensible tweed skirt. After four months of miserable and not very efficient work on the farm (there was quite a lot of amusement locally at her ineffectual efforts and fear of farm animals), Angela’s stomach pains returned and she was given time off her work for rest. She took the opportunity to hare up once again to Torosay Castle and throw herself into Olive’s embrace to recuperate, restored by the familiar beauty of Mull in autumn.
While love and writing filled Angela and Daphne’s days, Jeanne was steadfastly gardening her difficult plot through the cycle of seasons, in fair weather and foul, drought and deluge, harrowing and harvest. Exhausted as she was each day, she was not without love and friendship. Her great friend Mary Fox was a stalwart fixture in her life, someone who loved farming and could share Jeanne’s dedication to horticulture and the land. Jeanne’s letters were as lively and full of detail as her sisters’, making light of her battle with rodents, whereby she rolled every pea she intended to plant in red lead and paraffin, and the backbreaking labour of laying hundredweights of new potatoes in the cold earth single-handed. The relentless struggle with nature, terrain and weather meant Jeanne occasionally lost heart. After surveying the damage done by some marauding bullocks that had burst through the top hedge, she found herself longing for her old freedoms to live as she chose, pursuing her life’s work: ‘God, what I’d give for m’warm studio, filled with the smell of paint, a kettle singing on the stove, and lights glaring through the uncurtained skylight.’30