Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  At the end of November 1957, Muriel was very close to death when Daphne went to see her, for what was to be the last time. The following day she was due to catch the Riviera Express to London to be with Tommy, who was still recuperating from his nervous breakdown and could not be left alone for more than a day or so. Long retreated from the world and on the threshold of death, her mother slowly moved her head, and Daphne, bending her face towards her, was unexpectedly kissed twice on the cheek. She then left Cornwall to do her wifely duty, absolved by what she felt was ‘an amazing spiritual thing’ of being kissed freely, and at last, by the mother who had caused her so much grief. ‘I feel all the queer strains between us right through childhood and adolescent days were somehow wiped out with that brink-of-death kiss.’6 Along with the relief that her mother’s suffering was over, Daphne also felt a pang of regret that all connections with the ‘happy laughing past of theatre and youth’,7 embodied so brilliantly by her parents, and then fleetingly by Gertie, were now gone.

  Daphne’s relationship with her mother may have been resolved at the last but her marriage to Tommy was making its own unwelcome demands. The desperate condition to which he was reduced was having a marked impact on Daphne’s own life and she felt she was slowly being asphyxiated. Living in London during the week, in what she considered to be a rat-trap of a flat, exile from her beloved house and Cornwall, all contributed to the feeling ‘it is killing me’.8 The difficulty of writing when away from Menabilly and the loss of the solitude she craved was her main grief.

  Perhaps it was significant that Daphne, who confessed everything to Ellen, did not mention a word about her husband’s affair with ‘Convent Garden’. Ellen had been the first to be told the most important secret in her life, her struggle with the ‘boy-in-the-box’, and Daphne had felt no embarrassment in relating frankly how she had gone ‘potty’ and paranoid during the stress of Tommy’s breakdown. Yet the revelation of Tommy’s unfaithfulness had rocked her sense of self and belief in the stability of her marriage, and she could not expose this to Ellen. Perhaps Daphne’s pride would not allow her to confide in someone who had thought her a negligent wife and had many times urged her to be less self-centred and more supportive of Tommy’s career. The more conventionally minded Ellen, to Daphne the embodiment of a good woman, would have seen the challenge to her unassailable place in Tommy’s life as an inevitable result of wifely neglect.

  As Tommy’s recuperation dragged on, Daphne’s first heroic impulse to hang on to her marriage and make her husband well again, through force of will and self-sacrificing care, started to wear a little thin. She best understood real people and events through the medium of myths and stories that had some resonance for her. To Oriel Malet she wrote that she saw ‘Moper’ as Kay, the small boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s great fairy story The Snow Queen, who fell under the influence of the ice queen when he got a splinter of the troll’s mirror lodged in his eye, distorting his character and understanding. It helped Daphne to theorise that the Snow Queen was Tommy’s lover, and she herself was perhaps Gerda, the heroine of the story. Only Gerda could release Kay from the Queen’s spell through the power of simple, enduring love. This sense of temporarily disturbed vision may well have been a main impetus to her brilliantly creepy short story ‘The Blue Lenses’.

  As the months wore on, with Daphne doing her duty, living in London more than Cornwall, her resentment and boredom combined with despair. Menabilly was abandoned while she whiled away her time in the unprepossessing flat, cooped up and unable to work. Instead by day, Daphne turned to paint and daubed her ‘out of proportion and very crude’ paintings as a relief for her feelings, although she thought they had a certain kind of power, ‘like paintings done by “madmen” (Perhaps I am!)’. By night she cooked Tommy’s steak and asked him about his day. Tommy had returned to work for Prince Philip but he was now more silent and subdued, she felt as a result of the electric shock treatment for his breakdown. It became obvious that his unrelieved depression and general poor health meant it was too much for him to continue with his duties and, by mid-May 1959, Tommy finally retired at the age of sixty-two. Daphne was at last free to return full time to Menabilly. But this time she would no longer be alone.

  Religion was an area of life where the sisters were unalike in surprising ways. Jeanne had become her own kind of Catholic, almost, Noël suggested, as an extension of her deeply embedded good manners. Daphne, more individualist, leant towards a version of animism, though she would create her own chapel when she moved to the dower house of Kilmarth and found comfort in the belief in a kind of afterlife where loved ones were united. Most conventional of all was Angela, whose romantic childhood pleasure in accompanying her aunt to High Church services (she loved the vestments, the bells and smells – another kind of theatrical experience she admitted), against the traditions of her agnostic father, had matured into a traditional belief system that did not brook much rational debate on the matter. Writing in the mid-1960s, when Angela was just into her sixties, her irritation with the naysayers was palpable:

  I have never for one moment doubted the existence of God … I am astonished at the conceit of people who dare voice their unbelief, for not only do they argue with savants throughout the ages but against – presumably – the great teachers of all religions throughout the world, throughout the entire Universe.

  She had no time for scientists who argued that the world ‘had been going on for several million years’, and articulated what she felt would be the killer question: ‘How do they think worlds began?’9

  There was no doubt that Angela’s religion, shared with Anne Treffry, brought her a great deal of deep consolation and some affirmation of her place in the community, but it also contributed to the internal conflict between her nature and the private life she had lived and the respectable public face she so carefully maintained. It made her afraid of exposure. She had managed for a while after Gerald’s death to throw off the heavy disapproving hand of her father and explore a different way of living and loving with the carefree Hampstead set that revolved around Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Marda Vanne. With Olive at Torosay she had learnt a devil-may-care insouciance. Yet she had never quite broken free and when middle age beckoned and small-town life in Fowey became her stage, the thundering homophobia of her father came back to haunt her in the form of the prescriptions of an Anglo-Catholic Church, where expressions of such love were a sin.

  There was a real change in tone on this subject between her first autobiography, written when she was still in her forties and tolerant, even celebratory, of women’s love for each other, and the defensive stance she took in Old Maids Remember, penned when she was into her sixties and more deeply ensconced in the Church.

  There was little doubt that her relationship with Anne Treffry was of central importance in the last stage of her life, in fact in the same memoir she wrote of ‘Anne without whom one’s life would be incomplete, and so very much the poorer’.10 However, given Angela’s reluctance épater les bourgeoisie it would have been impossible for them to live together, even though they saw each other virtually every day. Their only freedom from the goldfish bowl of local life was to escape on holiday as much as possible, and these holidays, many involving touring by car, were the high points of their later lives. It was known in the family that Angela slept with a weighty railway time-table by her bed so she could consult the times of all the trains across the world, from Asia to the Americas. Her romantic enthusiasms were always as readily expressed for places as for people.

  Italy had been a favourite destination since she had first visited her old friend Micky Jacob at her house at Sirmione on the southern shores of Lake Garda. Angela was known among her sisters as being the one most like Gerald in her love of luxury, much preferring suites in grand hotels and travelling in style. One of the most spectacular of hotels was on the shore of Lago di Braie in the Dolomites in the north-east corner of Italy. She and Anne drove there in Angela’s trusty Mini in late June and w
ere temporarily lost for words as they gazed on the view from their grand hotel bedroom. The mountains appeared to fall sheer into the deepest turquoise blue, lapping almost to the hotel’s terrace; they spent many a happy hour on the capacious balcony just revelling in the beauty of the setting, ‘we could not tear ourselves away’.11

  Another year, the doughty pair set off to drive to Madrid to see the paintings in the Prado. While there, they decided to book into the Ritz, after Angela had read that a stay at this grandest of hotels was one of the defining moments in life. She and Anne certainly never forgot the experience, but Angela looked back with some amazement that they had managed such a long stay there and wondered how they could afford it. Jeanne and Noël Welch shared her amazement as they wandered through the same airy portals, admired the fountains in the courtyards but decided reluctantly that they could not even afford lunch of a simple paella.

  A more modest trip to Ireland in 1962, again in the company of Anne, not only inspired Angela to write another novel after a creative drought of ten years but also marked her last love affair with a country. The attraction of foreign places for Angela lay not in getting to know the people and their culture but in being close to her companion and sharing their own private appreciation of landscape and place. ‘I much prefer to go to a hotel, and with Anne, where we’re probably considered very “sidey” and stand-offish by the other guests, but which allows us to find out for ourselves the places to avoid and the views to fall in love with,’12 she wrote in her later memoir.

  Angela’s ecstatic response to the countryside in counties Kerry and Connemara spurred her to write what became one of her favourite novels – a late child she called it – The Road to Leenane. And in fact the real road to Leenane, as she and Anne drove across the valley with not a soul in sight on their way to the beautiful Killary Harbour, filled Angela with a sense of heightened spirituality. ‘Something I have never met or known before. There was a peace about that road and the stark hills which guard it that I believe one might know at death; for me it was as if one suddenly came face to face with a vision of Himself and all He has to give.’13

  Like all Angela’s novels this one was deeply felt, and tackled the large subject of faith and duty, but in a highly romantic and already dated way (it was published in 1963). She drew on all her experience in writing about the women who loved the artist Micky Renvyle, and her own emotion and religious feeling infused the story. Set in the part of Ireland she and Anne had so memorably discovered, with a powerful background of the Catholic faith that had always exerted its fascination, Angela made her hero’s childhood sweetheart become a celebrity actress, partially based on Vivien Leigh. Through the character of the sensitive bespectacled Joan, who suffers in loving Micky, a married man and therefore forbidden to her, she recalls her own agony over her married love, for whom she herself was prepared to face family hostility and public ignominy. Convenient deaths of spouses and misunderstandings abound and it ends with the saintly Joan deciding to become a nun. This was the result of her, mistakenly, concluding she could never consummate her love for Micky and remain true to her faith. Thus the human heart and its desires are sacrificed to a higher purpose, and the story ends in tearing grief, then resignation. Angela’s gratitude to Ireland, and to Anne, who shared the revelation with her, is clear in her dedication: ‘To Anne – who showed me Killary Harbour and the road to Leenane – in love.’

  The lack of reviews depressed her and Daphne wrote to Ellen asking if there was an outside chance that Doubleday might publish Angela’s novel in the States. She did not rate it highly herself – ‘frankly, it’s a bit old-fashioned and women’s magazine in the writing, but completely readable’. Both sisters, however, shared a laugh at the fact that Angela was mistaken once for Iris Murdoch, the critics’ darling with her new novel The Unicorn, and even occasionally confused with Victoria Holt, ‘who writes Cornish romances quite unlike Cornwall’.14

  For Angela, as she grew older and the consolations of religion increased, her growing commitment was encouraged by her friendship with her parish priest Ivan Clutterbuck. Always susceptible to crushes on men and women alike, Angela found him rather dashing. An ex-Army and then naval chaplain, he was thirteen years younger than her and gratifyingly Anglo-Catholic, and therefore sympathetic to her delight in ritual and tradition. Based at the beautifully situated church of Polruan-by-Fowey, Father Clutterbuck encouraged Angela to unite her enjoyment of travel with her active love for her faith. He had been involved with a couple of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and this had caught Angela’s interest, despite her loathing for mass travel and embarrassment at being part of a group of English tourists. ‘You’re never quite the same person after having been to Jerusalem,’15 Ivan Clutterbuck explained to her as he showed her his photographs from previous trips.

  Despite her friends’ less than encouraging remarks, Angela decided in early 1966 to join the next expedition without her usual companion and see what transpired. It was not what she usually enjoyed but she felt pushed into it by an unseen presence, she wrote, and decided she would embrace it as a jaunt, an adventure, and hopefully a book, or even two, might be the result. Suddenly shy and rather snobbish, she looked askance at the 300 fellow travellers amassed at Victoria Station on a chilly April day and quickly allied herself to Ivan who strode out of the throng. The itinerary of what was billed as a three-week ‘Voyage of a Lifetime’ included Venice, Damascus, Jerusalem, Rhodes, Ephesus, Athens, Istanbul and Dubrovnik, at a cost of £110 and counting, depending on the quality of the accommodation (Angela’s was the best she could afford).

  After three weeks that might have been three centuries, so disorientated was she by the richness of all she had experienced, Angela returned to her old life at Ferryside. She found her reflections in tranquillity even more memorable and affecting. The thought of Jerusalem elicited a particularly emotional response; for days afterwards tears would fill her eyes when she talked of or even wrote the word. Angela began to write a book describing her personal view of the journey and what she had seen and felt, her customary enthusiasm, readily accessed emotions and chatty perceptions enlivening the text from start to finish. Cheerful commentary on vomit sloshing the deck on a rough ferry crossing and ‘gippy tummy’ (Nazareth seemed to have a particularly lethal strain) sat happily alongside her ecstatic relation of the night-time pilgrimage from Mount Zion to Gethsemane. She felt she did return a different person as Ivan Clutterbuck had promised she would.

  The previous year Angela had published her second volume of reminiscences, Old Maids Remember, in homage to Micky Jacob and the alphabet system of subject headings that she had used so effectively in her reminiscences. This book was as well received as her first memoir had been. The critics recognised how opinionated she was, but also her touching affection and enthusiasm. The Scotsman encapsulated its charm: ‘this is an unpretentious book by a warm-hearted woman and it holds enjoyment in every page’. This description would have done as well for her subsequent Pilgrims by the Way, and after the paucity of attention for her later novels, Angela must have been delighted to be reviewed by The Sunday Times who found the book ‘an intriguing, and in the end enchanting, mixture of deep feeling and personal chatter’.

  Warmth and humour percolated into all her non-fiction and her letters were full of funny and discursive chattiness, but face to face on home territory she could seem guarded and rather stern. Ellen Doubleday was delighted to find Angela so much more fun when she visited her in America than she had ever been at Ferryside, where ‘those tea and cocktail visits [with Daphne] were slightly on the formal side’. Her younger sister’s fame even followed Angela to the States where the customs officer on seeing her name enquired if she was the famous author, and Angela replied to the familiar question with a sweet smile, ‘Oh no, I am her sister.’16

  Buoyed on the ripple of interest in her last two books and full still of heightened emotion and religious feeling after her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she embarked on what would
be her last book, The Frailty of Nature. Again, Angela tackled large but now outmoded concerns, like the bitter antipathy between Low and High Church in the Anglican fold, and the struggle of a man to be both a good priest and a loving husband to a racist wife, full of disdain for his parishioners. As with all her novels, the exaggerated drama of the theatre of her youth seeped into her highly coloured plot: an unfaithful spouse dies immediately in a car crash; the most unlikely marriages are made between young women and very elderly men; a baby is born dead after a labour akin to medieval torture; and divorce is the ultimate sin. At the centre, she places a visit to the Holy Land, and her priest-hero’s attempt at murdering the man who has cuckolded him, prevented only by an apparition of Jesus Christ on the road before his speeding car. Her plots were always so much more heavy-handed than Daphne’s. Angela’s characters, however, had a humanity that was often lacking in Daphne’s best stories, and each book she wrote was suffused with feeling, if at times slightly overwrought.

  Angela accepted the end of her writing career with resignation and little grief. She had admitted that her life was characterised by enthusiasms and lack of perseverance on any one thing. Friendships, love affairs, holidays; these were the central strands around which she fitted her writing, when the impulse arrived. Writing had been something she enjoyed, she would have loved to have written a bestseller or had a novel made into a film. How gratifying it would have been to be able to say, ‘Yes, one of them’, to that eternal question about whether she was the famous du Maurier. But writing did not define how Angela thought of herself. She consoled herself that even the critics’ favourites must one day fall from grace, ‘so perhaps on thinking things over, my position as “Only the Sister”, and an old maid remembering, is the best road to take’.17