Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  She was not a person who had filled my whole life … but a Peg, and a lovely illusion. The Peg had become so vital, and so mixed up with writing, that I felt for the time being, there was nothing left in life at all. The writing had gone too. Rock bottom.42

  This creative dependence on people as ‘pegs’ for her imaginary characters, fascinated her and in a sense the loss of inspiration, the death of a muse was more devastating than the loss of any real person: ‘I was quite bouleversée by [Gertie’s] death; not because how sad a friend had died, but how bottomless – a Peg had vanished! A fabric that one had built disintegrated!’43 Perhaps Daphne’s overwhelming grief was made all the sharper as, with Gertie gone, she mourned her father in a much deeper way than she had managed to do at his death. By her own reckoning it was four years of despondency and creative dearth before she really began to be able to escape into her imagination again.

  During the end of the war in Fowey, Angela had met the last love in her life, one that was to last for the next four decades. She turned forty on 1 March 1944 and had been dreading the coming decade with its sense of love lost and a life half-lived. ‘Forty,’ she thought, ‘has an ugly sound.’ But in the month of that birthday she began the love affair with Anne Treffry that would sustain them both almost to death. Life suddenly seemed full of promise again. ‘Lots of strange things can happen in wartime,’ she wrote cheerfully in her memoir, ‘forty wasn’t so dusty, as my father would have said.’44

  Like Olive Guthrie, Anne Treffry was a remarkable woman who had been widowed young. She was the mother of four children and the matriarch of the family who owned half of Fowey, many local farms and the harbour at Par, along with Place House, their stately home in the centre of Fowey itself. Anne was thirteen years older than Angela and had great presence and elegance. Even as the family’s fortunes declined in the postwar period, she was surrounded by beautiful things and lived her life with style. Her house was full of flowers, her clothes were of the finest quality and her leather gloves were sent for cleaning all the way to Scotland, to Perth, the only place that could be trusted to do the job properly.

  All her life, Angela was drawn to mother figures, declaring: ‘I have never thought that age should be taken into account where friendship is concerned. I have always had friends far older than myself.’ She certainly felt privileged by Anne’s friendship, telling a friend: ‘I am in love with a very grand lady.’45 To Marda Vanne she wrote with some exuberance: ‘My new & greatest & – (pray God) – for-all-time Love … is 13 years older than me & complete & utter heaven, & it’s the biggest thing that’s ever been.’46 Anne Treffry may have been grand, but she was also kind and immensely capable. The two women would set off in the car for holidays abroad, driving great distances across Europe with hardly a care. When quite elderly, they once drove to Madrid simply to visit the art galleries there.

  This friendship enlivened what Angela considered her ‘Aunt Jessie years’. She and Anne saw each other every day, Angela more often than not rowing herself across the river from Ferryside to Fowey, often for lunch. When they did not meet then they would telephone. Angela told Marda she was not writing novels but instead was as lovesick as a teenager, ‘I wait for the telephone. And the ferry. And “all that & heaven too”.’ Angela felt that instead of waiting on tenterhooks for her new friend to call she really ought to get on with writing another book, but her old health problems were troubling her: ‘my inside is misbehaving v. badly [it would turn out to be fibroids]’. She decided to make a bonfire of ‘every love letter I’ve ever had, & all the letters everyone has ever written me, but there was one person’s I couldn’t do away with; yours’.47 These were the letters Marda sent to Angela once she and Gwen had gone to South Africa at the start of the war to try and set up a national theatre there.

  In 1945, Anne Treffry’s daughter, Pamela, probably prompted by her mother, asked Angela to be godmother to her daughter Fiona. As an unmarried woman without children of her own, Angela was godmother to a number of children and was conscientious in keeping up with them, collecting their photographs for her album, and remembering their birthdays. She told a friend, Betty Williams, that not having children herself was a lifelong regret, although as she grew older the young people she knew did not feel she was a naturally maternal type. She could be alternatively scary and stern, or full of fun, and rather like her father it was never quite clear which Angela would be to the fore.

  The happy routine of Angela and Anne’s relationship was rocked some nine years in by another redoubtable Cornish grandee, Lady Clara Vyvyan, the great plantswoman, explorer and travel writer. She had introduced Daphne to Frenchman’s Creek, a part of the coast on her estate at Trelowarren, and had also accompanied her on a most enjoyable rambling holiday in Switzerland. Eccentric looking (‘like an old gypsy’ Daphne thought) and much loved, Lady Vyvyan upset Angela by staying with Anne Treffry at Place House and conceiving ‘a fearful passion for her’. Angela was distraught and sought Daphne’s shoulder to cry on. Anne was light-hearted and amused, ‘behaving in an irritating rather laughing way’, as Daphne reported to Ellen. In distress, Angela accused Anne of encouraging Lady Vyvyan, something Anne denied and casually tossed aside.

  Daphne seems to have been the confidante for both sides of the jealous triangle, for not only did Angela ask her advice but Lady Vyvyan unburdened herself to her on a long walk on the cliffs. Lady Vyvyan, who was well into her sixties by then, felt she had ‘treasures of riches’ to offer Anne, whom she thought had ‘un-plumbed depths’. Daphne was highly amused and attempted to dampen Lady Vyvyan’s enthusiasm, for, as she commented to Ellen, ‘if [Lady V] tries to plumb them there’ll be murder from Angela’. Daphne recognised that although she took her own emotional struggles extremely seriously, she was highly entertained by the travails of others. Her sense of humour, like her father’s, could be casually barbed. ‘Have you got unplumbed depths, darling?’ she extended the joke to express her frustrations with Ellen: ‘somehow I don’t think you have. I guess I know what there is in you to plumb, and that’s a crumb [something small that is magnified by the recipient], if ever there was one!’48

  Angela survived that scare and her friendship with Anne continued, with excursions to London, where theatre, concerts and ballet filled their afternoons and evenings, and trips together abroad. Angela and Muriel had decided to make their home permanently at Ferryside in Cornwall. This meant selling their London house, Providence Corner, in what was an emotional wrench as they cut physical and spiritual ties with Hampstead, their home for so long and the place that had meant so much to Gerald and his father.

  Postwar London depressed Angela. She found it bomb-shattered, dirty and swarming with people who did not speak English. Distressing too was the relaxing of standards that for her made life civilised. She and Anne had booked seats in the stalls at Covent Garden to see Sleeping Beauty with Margot Fonteyn. The Queen was there and Angela and Anne were in full evening dress. To her dismay they were practically the only couple in expensive seats to have bothered to dress up; everyone else was in day clothes and some women even had shopping bags under their seats. The democratisation of the arts had begun and this self-confessed old-fashioned du Maurier, who remembered with nostalgia the grand occasions of her father’s day, was not impressed.

  Music and theatre in London flourished in the postwar years and Angela, always the most expressive and theatrical of the three sisters, was often brought to tears by the magnificent performances of family friends such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who with Marda Vanne had been away most of the war helping establish the National Theatre of South Africa, returned to the London stage as the Queen Mother of Persia in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story. It was thought by the critics to be rather an overambitious play but it launched Paul Scofield, as a terrific Alexander the Great, and Gwen gave her usual exquisite performance. Angela was so moved that she could not stop crying in the dressing room afterwards and even burst into tears
again at the Caprice Restaurant where she and Gwen went for a late drink and chat.

  The end of the war was also the end of another great love, for Olive Guthrie died unexpectedly in July 1945. Angela’s grief was compounded by the guilt of having abandoned her in the last year or so of her life while she pursued her affair with Anne. She had travelled up to Torosay to stay for the last time in October 1944 in order to tell her about Anne, and Olive was devastated by the news. ‘I went up for a disastrous holiday in Mull 2 months ago,’ she confided to Marda, ‘& have never been so miserable in my life. This new [love affair] started last March. I’d hoped O. would take it philosophically but I had a ghastly time,’49 as no doubt did Olive too.

  Olive lived less than nine months after this painful rift with Angela. Her daughters, who had found Angela’s relationship with their mother hard to accept, generously kept her up-to-date on Olive’s progress and then her sudden shocking death after only two days’ illness. Angela for the last time boarded the sleeper that had in the past promised so much happiness. This time she hurried north to Torosay with a stricken heart. After a full day and a night’s travelling she arrived in pouring rain to hear the lament of the bagpipes keening through the sodden air. Out of the rain and mist came many hundreds of mourners, weaving their way up to the great granite cross that marked Olive’s husband’s grave. Crying uncontrollably, Angela watched as the ashes of ‘the most remarkable woman I ever knew’ were interred alongside Murray Guthrie’s on Torosay’s most easterly shore, ‘looking forever to Loch Linnhe, Ben Nevis and the rising sun’.50

  Olive’s flamboyant nephew, the diplomat, author and supporter of Irish Home Rule, Sir Shane Leslie, wrote Angela a letter of heartfelt condolence, honouring her relationship with his much-loved aunt. Angela’s reply was emotional and candid. She felt she had treated Olive badly in that last year and was filled with bitter remorse:

  I miss her terribly … I miss our more or less daily letters to each other so much. Certainly the years we gave each other were the happiest of my life, & I only pray that from 1938 to 1944 made up to her in happiness the disappointment I caused her from then until she died. I tell you this because I loved her v. much, & because I did I could not let you think me better than I was.51

  The end of the war also brought Angela work that she enjoyed. For about three years she was employed in the Women’s Land Army as a welfare worker. She said that the only reason she agreed to do it was for the coupons she would then be entitled to use for car tyres and petrol; the freedom her small car afforded her was worth any privation. Nevertheless she found the work interesting: getting to know something of the everyday lives of ordinary young women, whom she visited every month, listening to their troubles and trying to mediate between them and the farmers for whom they worked. She was confronted with how people working full time on the land really lived; sometimes it was not comfortable, but she enjoyed doing what she could to help.

  Angela’s fifth novel, Lawrence Vane, was finally published in 1946. She had so hoped that Olive might have been able to read the proofs as she had been encouraging of her writing all along and was enthusiastic about the idea, ‘but then she always was where I was concerned’.52 Angela thrived on appreciation and she did not really expect it from her own family, where Daphne was so much more successful and could be critical, and Muriel refused to read her daughters’ books. Michael Joseph, her nurturing publisher, had now retired and it was a disappointment when his successor, Robert Lusty, turned down the manuscript. Luckily her cousin, Peter Davies, who had his own publishing house, generously agreed to take it on.

  Again its theme was controversial for the times, and Angela had high hopes that it too could be filmed. She felt, however, that as it dealt with a white woman in an erotic relationship with a dark-skinned man (he was half-Indian) it might be hindered by prejudice, ‘people were a great deal more squeamish over the subject than they are today [1966]’.53 Her heroine, Lawrence Vane, with the oddly masculine name, is an ambitious concert pianist of world renown who has sacrificed her personal life for her art. After a car crash deprives her of sight and the use of her right hand, her life appears to be over. However, she has a persistent penpal, Paul Carron, who professes to love her and lives as the lord of all he surveys on an exotic Indian island. The book’s drama turns on a rather heavy-handed exposition of racial prejudice in the English towards anyone of mixed race. Racism is also expressed by Paul Carron himself, the child of an Indian mother and a white father, towards anyone who is darker-skinned than himself.

  At the time Angela was writing, English high society was perfectly happy to tolerate black entertainers, but it punished anyone, as happened with the renowned cabaret singer Leslie Hutchinson, who had the temerity to fraternise with their aristocratic women. Racial prejudice was most marked in fear of the sexual black male, as one of Angela’s characters put it: ‘There’s something so much worse in a white woman marrying a coloured man, than a white man marrying a coloured woman’; such a relationship was ‘perfectly foul’.54

  The du Maurier sisters probably shared their class’s uneasiness with mixed marriages. In a blustery note to Ellen about unorthodox love, Daphne, far from being a retrogressive conservative herself, wrote, ‘People can fall in love with goats, if it makes them happy. But I think to be promiscuous is unattractive, and I draw the line at colour.’55 It was likely that Angela felt the same way, for in her novel her heroine can overcome her initial recoil from intimacy with black people by being, literally, blind. Rather bizarrely, the only way she can continue to love her dark-skinned husband is to deliberately spoil the operation that would have restored her sight. Lawrence’s willed blindness is a result of racial prejudice, for only in this way can she continue to make love to him without facing the problem of his colour. From a modern perspective, there is little sense to this central theme unless to be black-skinned is an equal disadvantage to being blind and Lawrence Vane, in seeking to save her marriage, redresses the balance of her ‘superiority’ of skin colour by blinding herself for the second time.

  Although her device of wilful blindness allowed Angela to muffle the full impact of interracial marriage in her novel, once again she had displayed her boldness in handling a subject that was still considered generally distasteful, if not criminal. Certainly in America at the time the majority of the states had anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised marriage, even sexual activity, between whites and blacks, with the threat of imprisonment hanging over aberrant lovers. It took until 1967 before the United States Supreme Court ruled that all anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. In England there was no similar law, however suspicion of mixed marriages and ‘half-caste’ children, as they were called, was ingrained in much of the populace. Fear and prejudice usually went unchallenged. Not even the shocking evidence at the end of the war as to the extremes that the Nazis went in their pursuit of racial purity prevented the average man and woman in the street from recoiling at marriages between white English women and black men.

  Doubleday stood by Angela and published the book in America, to lukewarm reviews. Kirkus thought it an overwritten melodrama with ‘plush’ prose, but it went to a second edition in England and Angela was proud enough of it and, like all her books, could imagine it brought to life on the screen, if only … It was, however, the last book of hers to find an American publisher and this added to her sense of being underappreciated. Thanks to her natural optimism, she took Daphne’s past criticism seriously and started to compile a collection of short stories, that would be published in 1948 as Birkinshaw and Other Stories. In these Angela tried to reproduce her sister’s distinctive, disenchanted view of the world and human relations, but she lacked her imaginative power, stylistic touch and feel for atmosphere, and they too often ended up leaden and uninvolving. However, ‘The Nun’ was written from the heart and, lacking the synthetic cynicism of the others, worked as a poignant study in love lost when two women are torn apart by a bargain made with God.

  Whe
n Marda arrived back from South Africa in 1948, more than ten years had elapsed since the height of her love affair with Angela. No longer Marda’s ‘young lady’, Angela was now a long-standing friend. When they met again one September evening on the platform at Lostwithiel station, they fell into each other’s arms and realised that ‘no years can destroy true friendship’.56 Marda stayed at Ferryside and before she had left had arranged for Jeanne to spend the winter in Basutoland and South Africa’s Cape Province to try and recover from the virus that had attacked her and weakened her voice during her last winter in Tenerife.

  Marda also caused quite a stir in the hearts and minds of the du Maurier sisters. Jeanne was struck by her openness and the ease of conversation with her about both women’s difficult emotional relationships at the time. She wrote to her with some amazement that she could confide so easily in her, but ‘it does seem quite reasonable to want to write or Talk with you, after so few meetings, quite so frankly’.57 Daphne too was affected by Marda and used her unusual name in her remarkable short story ‘The Blue Lenses’, about a woman who could see people as they really were – an acknowledgement perhaps of Marda’s clear-eyed truth-telling that cut through the artifice of so much of English polite society.

  By the middle of 1946, when Jeanne was thirty-five, she finally escaped her horticultural duties and left Ferryside to take up her artist’s life with a studio in St Ives. During her years of hard labour and care of a demanding mother, she had longed for the time and energy to paint and now at last could revel in the freedom to be an artist among other artists, in one of the most exciting creative colonies in England.