Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Angela was a good companion when she was around, sharing a laugh, talking of their childhood and snatching the odd cigarette together to punctuate their labours. But Mary Fox was a more practical friend to Jeanne, for she truly loved working on the land and was capable and uncomplaining. When the war was over and Jeanne returned to her painterly and musical pursuits, however, Mary felt somewhat out of her depth; as Jeanne made new friends with painters and poets, the intimacy between the two old friends diminished.

  The du Maurier sisters enjoyed each other’s letters and Daphne, after reading an operatic account from Jeanne about work on the market garden and her elder sister’s less than impressive efforts, wrote to Angela: ‘Thank Bird for her priceless letter. I wish she’d take to the pen and make the third [of the ‘Sisters Brontë’]. It seems you are not entirely thorough with your hoe! How about her making me a birthday cake? … I must rouse, it’s nearly twelve and I’m still in bed. Sordid!’31

  The war continued with its hardships, fears and deprivations at home. Every family knew someone who had been killed or injured and worried for those who were fighting abroad, or living in large English cities being bombed and burned in concerted German raids. No one could predict when it would end and what if anything of the old world order would remain. Because of Tommy’s close involvement, Daphne shared the fear, with millions of other wives of fighting men, that she would receive the fateful communication that changed everything.

  Tommy had risen fast up the chain of command and was now in charge of forming and commanding the Army’s Airborne Division, responsible for training glider pilots and parachutists in their thousands. It involved superhuman efforts of organisation, persuasion and strategic planning and for years he had been living on adrenaline, his nerves taut with stress. The news on the radio alternated triumphs with disaster. The Americans and Japanese were now in the war, and the conflict was truly global with British troops fighting the Japanese in Burma, General Montgomery and his Eighth Army turning the tide in Africa against Rommel and his Afrika Korps, and the desperate battle for Stalingrad in inhuman conditions of cold and starvation.

  Angela had been allowed to leave for good the farm at Mixtow and return to less onerous work as Jeanne’s assistant at the market garden. She nevertheless managed to escape for a week’s recreation in London with Olive Guthrie in March 1943, where they went to theatres and concerts every day. The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had just died in exile in California and they sat enraptured through his Piano Concerto No. 3, played by an incandescently fine young Cornish-born pianist Moura Lympany. ‘It was the first time I had heard her,’ Angela recalled, ‘and both Olive and I were pulp by the end. That anyone – any girl so young too [she was twenty-six] – should have quite such power staggered both of us … she is a superb artist.’32

  The social highlight of her week was meeting Olive’s old friend, the exiled King George II of Greece. They had a few meals together, one evening in a restaurant (probably Greek) during a bombing raid, but the clatter of plates, the clamour, and rowdy dancing inside the building drowned out the war outside. The King was fifty-two and yet would live less than five more years, before dying in Athens, the monarchy having just been restored, in April 1947. Olive had another week in London and King George wanted Angela to join them at Claridge’s, her favourite haunt when she was young. She had promised Jeanne she would only be gone a week and would return to help plant hundreds of onions, so instead she reluctantly left behind London’s remnants of glamour to dig the claggy ground of Cornwall.

  This time with Olive had been very much overshadowed by the news that Lieutenant David James, Olive’s much-loved twenty-three-year-old grandson, was missing in action, presumed drowned. His motor gun-boat, operating out of Felixstowe, had been sunk in freezing waters off the Hook of Holland. In fact, against all odds, he did survive. He became a prisoner of war and wrote a gripping book about his experiences and eventual escape. David James went on to live a life of adventure, to marry and father six children, inherit Torosay and become a Conservative Member of Parliament.

  Angela hurried back to Fowey and her onions. Her summer was spent weeding, watering and harvesting, often dressed just in shorts and a sleeveless vest and tanned by the sun and wind. Daphne was rather disconsolately settled at Readymoney with her children, Margaret and a new cook whom Nanny did not take to. Christopher Puxley still came down to see her for romantic trysts, staying in the annexe to the Fowey Hotel, but it was not satisfactory for either of them. Daphne was once again living in close proximity with her sisters and spent some time with them, even contracting to help Jeanne once a week at the garden, ‘she puts me to weeding carrots with great sternness, or picking up onions, or some other equally backbreaking task’, she wrote to Tod, ‘the Madam [Jeanne] is a great task master these days’.33 Although she was exempt from the war work that her sisters, especially Angela, found so gruelling, Daphne was aware that being seen ‘lounging about in my corduroy pants’, risked her receiving abusive anonymous letters about privileged women not doing their bit for the war. She certainly knew that Angela felt life was rather unfair on her, compared to her middle sister, and Daphne joked to Tod that the anonymous letters would be ‘from the Puffin herself who will be sore with secret resentment!’34

  Daphne was looking forward to the publication of Hungry Hill that summer. She hoped it would be a kind of watershed that established her as a serious writer, freed from the hated tag of ‘romantic’ novelist. Sadly, it did not live up to this expectation. It did become a bestseller, largely through the tireless efforts of her publisher Victor Gollancz, and a film was eventually made of it after the war. It was, however, an unwieldy novel with a confusing storyline and cast of characters – whose names alternated through the generations as John or Henry Broderick – and no unifying thread to which the reader could cling. The critics were disappointed and disappointing. They thought it would sell on her name alone, but showed none of the staying power of Rebecca, or even the popular romantic pull of Frenchman’s Creek. Daphne was to be as haunted by the phenomenon of Rebecca, the novel, just as surely as her second Mrs de Winter never cast off the shadow of Rebecca herself.

  In this lowish mood, Daphne was suddenly given the chance of something she had wanted more than anything in the world. Dr Rashleigh, the owner of her beloved Menabilly, appeared to be willing to let her lease the house and grounds for twenty years. Her work may suffer under the spell of Rebecca, but she would now have Rebecca’s house and it would be hers alone. Menabilly was Daphne’s Manderley and her love for it was more powerful than her love for any man. The thought it could be hers was exhilarating, and no amount of judicious advice or family opposition would put her off.

  There was a lot that was off-putting. The house was so long uninhabited it needed restoration, certainly a whole wing was already derelict and dangerous to unwary visitors and children. You could open a door upstairs and teeter on the abyss where a floor once was, giving a whole new dimension to passage wandering at night. The lease she would be required to sign was a fully repairing one. Her own money would have to be used to restore the mansion to a habitable state and keep it maintained, without any ultimate advantage to her for the huge sums invested, other than the chance to live there for twenty years. ‘I so much want to go there I’d rather be rooked than not go,’35 she admitted to Tod, knowing this weakened her negotiating hand. There was no way she’d walk away, whatever was asked of her, and she knew that Dr Rashleigh knew that too. To solicitors and accountants this seemed a crazy scheme. To Tommy and family, who knew how many staff would be needed to run such a big house comfortably, it seemed far too ambitious: to Daphne who relished forbidden and heroic love affairs, it was absolutely irresistible.

  She and Angela were with the children having a picnic in the grounds of Menabilly when Daphne decided to confide her plans to her sister. The children heard their aunt’s distinctive hoot of laughter, and then a shout of amazement, ‘“You’re mad, you can’t,�
��’ Flavia recalled, ‘and we wondered what she meant and why they suddenly seemed so heated in their conversation.’36 The house at this stage was so completely covered with ivy you could barely see the windows. Its dark presence, stillness and quiet was eerie. The overgrown gardens and woods were magical, but there was nothing to attract Angela, or Daphne’s children, to the house as a potential home. Flavia remembered seeing her mother lean against the ivy-clad walls and kiss the stone and, when she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.

  Once the lease was signed then Daphne was determined to move her family into the house for Christmas, but to keep it as a surprise for the children. Builders arrived to patch the roof and provide some functional running water in the place. Windows were cleared of ivy and rotten frames replaced. The nineteenth-century wing, riddled with sinister fingers of dry rot, was barred and bolted and left in peace to further decay. Daphne and Margaret disappeared each day to clear and clean two decades of dust, animal droppings, cobwebs and debris from the rooms the family was to inhabit. Walls were decorated and rooms minimally furnished. Light and life, if not warmth, began to seep into the unloved spaces, and the force of Daphne’s determination and passion breathed life into the house again. Her enduring love affair with Menabilly was now consummated as she awoke it slowly from its long sleep.

  Everyone was amazed at the transformation. The children were delighted with the adventure of its vast spaces and the fascination of the woods that surrounded it like a protecting reef. Tommy was home for a week over Christmas, shattered with fatigue but appreciative of the house and its miraculous metamorphosis, masterminded by his wife. Draughty and freezing cold when out of the narrow reach of an open fire, understaffed, haunted, infested with rats beneath the floorboards and flying battalions of bats at dusk (both families of creatures Daphne admirably insisted had as much right to live in the house as they did): this was a house that aroused strong feelings in every sentient being within its orbit. Flavia and Christian (known always as Kits) grew to love it in different ways and for different things; but Tessa, lonely and out of place, was frightened by the powerful atmosphere and the night-time skirmishing of an army of tiny rodent feet.

  Angela managed her customary autumn visit to Mull, this time for only two weeks at the beginning of October. The war arrived at Oban when a squadron of German bombers discharged their cargo on ships at anchor. Some valuable thoroughbred horses were killed in the raid and Angela and Olive lay awake listening to the crump! of exploding bombs that shattered the deep silence of the Hebridean night. Returning to Fowey she found that the American navy had arrived and the town was seething with excitement and rumour. Her more than five-year romantic obsession with Olive and Torosay was about to be deflected by a new, very different, romantic interest.

  There were many in Fowey who initially resented this American invasion. They did not like their houses being commandeered and US personnel billeted on them, and were outraged that their familiar town was overrun with a swaggering group of young, tall, well-fed and confident men. For the majority, however, these exotic creatures, so well-off compared to their British counterparts, so charming with their drawls and American courtesies, brought sex and glamour and the thrill of film star sophistication. Angela was part of the latter group.

  The American invasion could not have got off to a better start, as far as the du Mauriers were concerned, for Gertrude Lawrence’s husband Richard Aldrich turned up with his commanding officer, Lawrence Woodsworth Snell. The whole family liked Richard and, having just landed with their troops, it was natural that their first port of call was Ferryside. Angela, particularly, was charmed by Richard’s boss, Commander Snell. Larry, as he quickly became known to them, had a great deal to commend him. He was the commanding officer of the US Naval Advanced Amphibious Training Sub-base at Fowey and his brief was to get his men ready and the landing ships and craft seaworthy for the coming invasion of Normandy. He was obviously efficient at his job and was awarded the Bronze Star medal for this coming D-Day operation. He also looked impressive in his naval uniform, complete with medals. Daphne had her distinguished war hero husband, away doing important and dangerous work for the safety of the realm; Angela now had the most distinguished American in uniform in Fowey paying her court. No wonder it went to Angela’s head.

  Larry had a way with the ladies. By the time Angela met him he had been married twice, with two sons from his first marriage. He was a graduate of the University of Michigan and was well known on the New York Social Register; his social ease and awareness of his status (his third wife complained that he treated her as inferior for not being like him, a ‘blueblooded social registerite’37) would have charmed Angela, who had long given up hope of being charmed by a man again. Her nieces noticed how she giggled a lot in his company and eventually had a large signed photograph of his chubby shining face by her bed. Even Tod got to hear of her infatuation when Daphne wrote in some amusement: ‘Puff having the time of her life with the US Naval officers, who are stationed in Fowey.’38

  The war had lost its dreariness and suddenly become a lot more exciting. Angela wrote to Gertrude Lawrence to thank her for two packets of silk stockings that had just arrived and would now allow her to fit in better with Larry’s idea of female glamour: ‘No woman wears trousers … at home!’ In this excited letter of thanks, Angela described how ‘a comet from the sky, L[arry] appeared & blitzkreiged us out of our trousers into frocks & skirts & God knows what else!’39 Gertie was still in America having triumphantly starred in the musical, Lady in the Dark, a great hit on Broadway and then toured for years. She had not forgotten, however, the hard-pressed women at home and, along with Angela’s stockings, she had also sent nail varnish to Muriel, who was just as delighted with this unexpected luxury.

  Angela joined the local Home Guard in an ‘intelligence role’, a fact that caused a great deal of chauvinistic ribbing from her fellow male Local Defence Volunteers. She enjoyed herself immensely, although she was still meant to be working on the market garden by day. On evenings off, instead of the drabness of a book, some cocoa and early bed, now she was helping forge, ‘a kind of Atlantic Charter in a real but minor way’,40 in other words socialising and flirting with American naval officers in various private houses and drinking places round Fowey.

  Given Angela’s romantic and emotional nature, there was little doubt that, facing forty, a small part of her hoped it was not too late for her to love a man and be loved in return. Why should she not dream of marrying her Commander, to enter at last the life for which she had been bred, to be the supportive wife of an important and well-off man? Larry may well have let her think she had a hope. Certainly, they were extra friendly and affectionate together, and their friendship continued once Larry had returned to America.

  The fact that he married for a third time, very soon after returning to America in 1945, would not have escaped Angela’s notice. Larry Snell had fallen quickly in love with a glamorous Washington businesswoman, ten years Angela’s junior, who went by the Chandleresque name of Marshall Adams. She was a radio talkshow host and a ‘fashion arbiter’, who organised fashion shows at foreign embassies. Larry was so bowled over by her that he proposed on their second date. Less than two years of marriage and a baby son later, Marshall was suing Larry for divorce, declaring ‘he does not want to work … and prefers to loaf, have a good time, drink, gamble and cavort around the city’,41 and philander with other women.

  In fact, Larry could not be entirely averse to work, as he went on to found an investment company in Wall Street, and sail close to the wind in his dealings in securities. Angela kept a sizeable photograph of Commander Larry Snell, in his naval uniform with tramlines of decorations – long after he had left the navy – with sad eyes and thinning hair, signed with love and dated Christmas 1951. Perhaps he was ruing the day he had married the tall blue-eyed, down-market blonde, having left behind his small, dark and unglamorous, but well-bred, English admirer.

  I
n the days leading up to June 1944 there was an atmosphere of expectation in Fowey as the day of departure of their American visitors approached, although the actual date was kept a secret. Daphne at Menabilly was asked to give a party for the US war correspondents who were in the town incognito. No one was to know, even Daphne’s servants were sent away on a picnic and Angela noted that ‘negro naval staff’ were bussed in, in unmarked vans, to replace them. Angela and Muriel were asked to be present as hostesses to the war correspondents, on what was meant to be the eve of D-Day (it was postponed at the last minute because of adverse weather). The party was a huge success and Angela, always more extrovert than either of her sisters, enjoyed herself immensely, even though it marked the beginning of the US Navy’s mission to Normandy, and therefore the end of the American invasion of Fowey.

  It was here that she saw close up African-Americans and appreciated their attractiveness, and that fear of their difference and the prejudice against them was purely due to the colour of their skin. Like most people of her generation, Angela was aware of Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, a half-Grenadian pianist and singer, one of the most famous cabaret performers in London at the time. Daphne loved the way he sang Sand in My Shoes, and recommended it to Tod, and high society generally had taken him up enthusiastically. But scandal accompanied him everywhere. His attractiveness to men and women alike meant there were all kinds of rumours as to the celebrity of his lovers, among them the du Mauriers’ great friend Ivor Novello and Edwina, the wife of Tommy’s colleague, Lord Louis Mountbatten. The rumours were made all the more salacious because of Hutch’s colour and his legendary sexual prowess. Love between a white woman and a black man was as controversial an idea as love between women. Angela’s next novel began to take root in her mind.

  Jeanne’s dogged determination to make her market garden as productive as possible finally took its toll on her health. While Angela was forging the Atlantic Charter in Fowey, Jeanne was off sick and ordered to rest with an umbilical hernia, caused by all the heavy lifting and carrying she had been engaged in on her unforgiving plot. Never had the idea of a studio and the smell of paint been more attractive as she lay in bed, hoping that Angela, whose horticultural work had hardly been as dedicated as Jeanne would have liked, would be left in charge. Luckily, she did not need an operation, but was told she must take three months off work.