by Jane Dunn
She and Mary Fox headed off to St Ives for a holiday together and rented a small flat. They had been discussing buying a farm at Mixtow together, close enough to Muriel at Ferryside, but in St Ives, Jeanne was reminded of her true calling, not to be a farmer but a painter, and here began her belief that she could be a serious artist and live among other artists. It would be here that Mary realised the close friendship they shared in Fowey could not last in its original intensity, once Jeanne entered the painters’ colony at St Ives.
While Angela was flirting with the Americans and Daphne was exultantly sorting out the house of her desire, Tommy was engaged in the most testing and tragic military operation of his career. He had been in charge of creating the British Army’s 1st Airborne Division and, in August 1944 as lieutenant general, was put in overall charge of the First Allied Airborne Army, consisting of British, American and Polish troops and their commanders. This job was immense, with the potential to alter the progress of the war. He had to provide the ‘Market’ part of ‘Operation Market Garden’ in support of Field Marshal Montgomery’s plan to encircle and control the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, from the north. The expectation was that if this operation was successful, the war could be ended by Christmas. Fundamental to the plan was the airborne troops who were to be parachuted and glided in to the field of conflict. The men then would seize the bridges over the River Meuse and the Lower Rhine, so that Allied troops, the ‘Garden’ part of the operation, could pour through in armoured units into northern Germany.
This was to be the largest airborne operation ever mounted with nearly 35,000 men silently delivered by glider and parachute, in daylight from 17 September 1944. Gliders and parachutes were also used to bring in military vehicles, guns and ammunition, but the men by necessity were more lightly armed than those due to follow by land in their tanks. It started well, but German resistance was far more powerful and well organised than the Allies had expected. This meant Tommy’s 1st Airborne Division were left without backup, trying valiantly for four days to defend one end of the road bridge at Arnhem, before being overrun by the Germans on the twenty-first. The rest of the company, trapped to the west of the bridge, had to be evacuated four days later. For the division created and trained by Tommy, this was a colossal tragedy. Only a quarter of his 10,000 or so airborne troops returned to Allied lines, the rest wounded, killed or captured.
The courage and resistance of the men fighting on the ground, often outnumbered four to one, was never in doubt. In fact, to have survived Arnhem became a badge of honour. But criticism of the high command began almost immediately. Analysis, supposition and blame circled them all and Tommy, as strategic planner of the ‘Market’ part of the assault, and commander of the airborne division, was most vulnerable. The controversy continues to this day, never to be categorically resolved. However much Tommy’s strategic judgements may or may not have been instrumental in the failure, Browning himself, a man with sensitivities and empathy hidden deep behind his rigid upper lip, was full of grief and a guilt that would never be assuaged. Ever proud of him and fiercely loyal in public, Daphne sprang to Tommy’s defence in a letter to the researcher for a forthcoming book, A Bridge Too Far, expressing something of the anguish with which her husband had to live for the rest of his life:
One thing I do know, although he did not talk about it, was that his grief at the loss of life at Arnhem was very deep indeed … this particular loss was something to which he could never become reconciled. He truly loved the men under his command, and the various regiments that combined to make up the Airborne Forces, his pride and his faith in them was tremendous, I would say – next to his family – the dearest thing in his life.42
Daphne and her sisters had been in Cornwall while the fateful hours of Operation Market Garden ticked tensely by. The news on the radio became desperate. Everyone knew Tommy was in the thick of it, having glided in along with his men. In his pack he carried three teddy bears and a framed print of Dürer’s The Praying Hands. Suddenly Daphne’s bubble of detachment at Menabilly was brutally breached by a phonecall from a newspaper reporter at six o’clock in the morning, demanding if it was true that Tommy had been taken prisoner. She knew nothing and for a while could find out nothing. Once she discovered there was no truth to the rumour, she wrote a sharp letter to The Times complaining about the cruel tactlessness of such a call.
Tommy wrote full of longing to come home to her and their familiar routines and was excited by plans for a new boat. Daphne, however, had grown used to being alone and liked it much better than having to accommodate another in her life. She had explored her forebodings in her play, The Years Between, in which a woman, deprived of her husband who is presumed dead, eventually thrives in his absence. She takes up his job and starts a new and more congenial relationship, only to renounce it all to return to her wifely role once more, when her husband turns up, very much alive. This gulf of experience was endured by tens of thousands of couples at the time, between the battle-scarred men and their wives whose independence and self-sufficiency had grown as they were freed from more conventional domestic roles by work and the need to cope resourcefully with the daily privations at home. It was difficult for them to share or even understand the full horror and deep camaraderie of war.
Daphne, too, seemed to be incapable or unwilling to imagine what her husband had been through, and, although unswervingly loyal when he was under attack, she found it hard to be sympathetic to the daily consequences in his own life and character, wrought by the extreme experiences he had endured in two world wars. As she contemplated with some misgivings the return of her soldier, Angela had waved goodbye to her American sailor, knowing this had been the last chance she had had of a conventional marriage. She was to immortalise him, however, by giving his name to the heroine and title of her fifth novel, Lawrence Vane. As war drew to its end, Jeanne managed at last to return to her love, painting, as she prepared for her first exhibition planned for the autumn of 1945 in St Ives.
10
A Mind in Flight
Do you remember me saying to you once at Oyster Bay that I had found, through life, that just as one had reached a moment in time when everything seemed static, and one knew all the answers, suddenly – Bang out of the Blue – a sledge-hammer came and knocked one out? I feel rather like that now. And the sledge-hammer was not Mr Rosenshein … Work that one out if you can! (Go and look in the glass, it will save you a lot of time.)
Letter from DAPHNE to Ellen Doubleday, 4 December 1947
AS THE WAR was drawing to its close in Europe, the news of victories, surrenders and retreats tumbled out of the radio, ‘faster and faster’, Angela recalled, ‘like Alice’1 sped up in an unreal momentum. Within just over a week there was Mussolini’s execution, Hitler’s suicide and then the once barely imaginable VE Day, declared on 8 May 1945. Muriel caused her daughters much amusement by insisting it should be VD Day – Victory Day – not for a moment understanding what was so funny. The streets were suddenly heaving with people celebrating with an ecstatic and bone-weary relief. Londoners, who had endured the worst of the bombing, thronged Whitehall and The Mall and pressed against the railings of Buckingham Palace chanting, ‘We want the King!’ and the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were allowed to mingle with the crowds, experiencing first-hand the euphoria of a nation that had prevailed against once apparently insurmountable forces.
A few days later, the du Maurier family en masse took over the front seats at Fowey’s small cinema to watch Frenchman’s Creek. Their pleasure was much enhanced by seeing old family friends Basil Rathbone, in a towering wig, as the dastardly Lord Rockingham and Nigel Bruce as Godolphin, a dimwitted aristocrat, in what was a sumptuous piece of overdressed derring-do. Joan Fontaine, who had made no secret of how unhappy she had been on set, shimmered as the beautiful Dona St Columb, the heroine who embodied something of Daphne’s own fantasy of temporarily abandoning husband and children for a life of adventure, dressed as a boy, with a da
shing lover who reflected herself.
In real life, dashing Lieutenant General Browning’s duties were not yet over. At the end of 1944, Tommy had been appointed Chief of Staff to Lord Louis Mountbatten at South East Asia Command, a job he was not particularly pleased to have, and was soon off to Ceylon. Daphne felt ambivalent at the news, telling Tod that one was bound to get out of touch with such long separations and dreading the difficulties of ‘beginning afresh’.2 She did not really miss her husband, however, as her solitary life, in a house she had made entirely to her liking, gave her creative and spiritual solace: ‘I do love my queer monastic existence. [Menabilly’s] cold, and austere, but I belong to it, and the house is in league with me against the outside world.’3 She particularly loved her bedroom, her space alone, and had asked Tommy if he minded having his own bedroom at Menabilly. He did mind, but did not complain when Daphne organised a room for him adjacent to hers. She was not yet forty when she closed the door on easy intimate relations with her husband.
This did not stop Daphne hoping for a romantic reunion when Tommy eventually came home from war. During their marriage they had been apart almost as much as they had been together and yet Tommy seemed to be sympathetic to the sacrifices made by all women left at home to await the return of those they loved. ‘[Daphne] and I seldom talk of those six years of practically complete separation,’ he wrote to Ellen Doubleday, ‘but my admiration for her in never giving a sign of how she must have felt is very deep.’4 In that one sentence there was all the poignancy of the unexpressed and unexplored, the gulf between.
On his return in the summer of 1946, Daphne’s hopeful expectations collided with Tommy’s exhaustion, inhibition and sense of anti-climax on finally arriving home, and both were left disappointed and ever more distant. Daphne found it a shock to find he had changed and was not as dependent on her as he had been: ‘So See Me [showy-off], rather boastful, and not a little boy any longer.’ And she had changed too, the five years’ separation had made her more independent again, she had become, ‘the pre-marriage person who went her own way … Kits got the tenderness I had given before to Tommy’.5 Moreover, Daphne’s natural jealousy and insecurity in herself as a woman was quickened by the sudden appearance behind her husband of his beautiful personal assistant, Maureen Luschwitz. The uneasiness she felt had no foundation in fact but nevertheless, combined with Tommy’s cool welcome, left Daphne feeling deflated and unattractive.
Her rather bleak play, The Years Between, dealing with this dilemma of ‘beginning afresh’ after a long separation, had been a quiet success during its run at Wyndham’s, her father’s old theatre. And she was writing another novel with great energy and enthusiasm, The King’s General, spurred on by her discovery of the impact the Civil War had had on Menabilly when the house had been besieged by Cromwellian forces. A skeleton wearing remnants of Cavalier clothing had been found during earlier restoration work on the house and this added an extra fascination to Daphne’s researches.
Daphne was imaginative but never fanciful and not prone to seeing ghosts, but Flavia remembered being told by her mother that before she even knew of this siege, Daphne had heard one night what seemed to be the galloping of horses and the jingling of their harnesses as they surged across the park towards the house. She even heard the scraping of metal and the stamping hooves of what sounded like hundreds of horses jostling beneath her bedroom window. When Daphne came to draw back the curtains and look out on the scene all she saw was the silent, empty drive starkly illuminated by moonlight.
The history of the house was inextricably bound up with the Rashleighs, the family to whom it had belonged since Elizabeth I’s reign, whose unassailable rights over it would always thwart Daphne’s dreams of complete possession. Dr Rashleigh had refused to let her borrow the family papers to research her story but, rather gleefully, she decided she could get copies of them through her friendship with the great Cornishman and historian A. L. Rowse. He did in fact help her with sources for her extensive research but did not care for the novel, feeling that non-historians could never authentically conjure up the period. Rowse, however, was a great fan of Daphne’s and understood very well her reclusive nature. He appreciated too that her fundamental loneliness and shyness was masked by an affable, kindly manner, but her real longing was to be left alone with her imagination in the house of her dreams.
The heroine of this stirring tale is one of Daphne’s rare strong women, Honor Harris, whose intellect and physical courage, despite being disabled by a riding accident, is the backbone of the story. Daphne’s skill in weaving real historical fact with the compelling skein of fiction meant the battle for Menabilly and the ruthless but irresistible Sir Richard Grenville burst into her readers’ imaginations. The confused and bloody events of the Civil War in the West Country were made all the more dramatic by Daphne’s unerring sense of place and visceral love of landscape.
Daphne dedicated the book to her own King’s General: ‘To my husband, also a general, but I trust a more discreet one’ – an act of appreciation that made Tommy slightly uneasy as it identified him with the charismatic but murderous and insubordinate commander who swaggered through his wife’s novel.
In the midst of the fun of writing The King’s General, Daphne was forced to take seriously the threat of having to defend herself against a suit of plagiarism involving Rebecca. This was brought against her in America by the estate of Edwina MacDonald, the author of a book, Blind Windows, published in 1927, and set in Louisiana. The two novels appeared to have a number of coincidental, or borrowed, factors in common, but it seemed there was some opportunism in the timing as the claim was only first made in 1942, after the phenomenal success of Hitchcock’s film. Although Daphne knew her idea for the book had arisen out of her own jealousy of Tommy’s previous love, she loathed the idea of being cross-examined about the entirely mysterious and secret elaborations of her mind, and she had no intention of revealing them to strangers. She felt the most private part of her self would be on trial. She was exasperated that neither Angela nor Muriel could understand this. They thought if she knew she was innocent why get so upset about the exposure: ‘They just missed the whole point. What I write is me. It’s inside myself. It’s deeply, bitterly, terribly personal. And to have to stand up and talk about it was to me absolutely degrading … It was, to me, my own private day of judgment.’6
The day of judgement did come. In 1947, Daphne was summoned to appear before a judge in New York and it threw her into a panic. Her American publisher Nelson Doubleday and his wife Ellen were immensely hospitable to their English authors and had previously offered to open up their home as a safe haven to the Browning children during the war. This time, Nelson encouraged Daphne to make the best of an event she could not evade and invited her to come with the whole family to stay at his lovely house on the ocean in Long Island’s Oyster Bay. This caused Daphne further anxiety for she felt singularly ill-equipped for the kind of gracious living practised by the well-connected and distinctly well-off Doubledays. Daphne hated to have to think about clothes and grooming and was always happiest wearing comfortable slacks and a shirt, tunic or fisherman’s jersey. She could look strikingly glamorous when coifed, made-up and smartly dressed but always felt something of an impostor, longing to return to her comfortable anonymous ‘jam-a-long’ clothes.
Daphne had persuaded the ever-devoted Tod to return as governess to her children in the autumn of 1945. Tod loathed the cold and discomfort of Menabilly but it was a measure of her love for Daphne that she agreed, despite being well into middle age, to come and live once more under a grand, if leaking, du Maurier roof. She had struggled to keep her hat-making business going during the war and had resorted to being a paid companion to a rich widow, where at least she lived in some luxury and was always warm. But she loved Daphne and liked her children, who returned her affection, although the young Kits had some reservations as she was unlikely to indulge him as much as his mother.
Daphne decided she would
take Tod and her two youngest children with her to America. Tessa was due to start boarding school and Tommy was involved in his new job as Military Secretary, living for the week in an austere flat in Whitelands House in Cheltenham Terrace in Chelsea. She hated being away from Menabilly, felt awkward anyway staying in the house of strangers and bitterly resented having to go to New York to answer such an obviously put-up case. She boarded the Queen Mary liner in November 1947, not in the most relaxed frame of mind. Flavia and Tod shared a cabin, and Kits was in with his mother. Greta Garbo was on board and was much amused by Flavia and Kits, galloping about the deck on all fours. Two days into the voyage there was a knock on her cabin door and it opened to reveal Ellen Doubleday.
Daphne’s first sight of Ellen took her completely by surprise. She was struck by a coup de foudre, or as she described it, a sledgehammer poleaxed her, ‘Bang out of the Blue’. Ellen walked in straight out of her dreams. For here was Rebecca, and Daphne, the faltering insecure second Mrs de Winter, felt immediately eclipsed by her sense of entitlement, competence and beauty. She had been expecting Nelson’s wife to be a cross between Mrs Simpson and Mrs Roosevelt, but instead she was faced by a beautiful, elegant and charming woman whom she conflated too with the Mary Stuart of her imagination. Daphne’s heroic boy-self wanted to be all the men who had loved her, ‘Lord Darnley, and Earl of Bothwell in exact sequence (I think Bothwell had the best of it). Even the Italian secretary Rizzio … who was murdered at Mary Stuart’s feet.’ She felt she was suddenly Eric Avon again, ‘a boy of eighteen … with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic, and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady’s feet’.7