Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  At Menabilly, however, things were on a downward trajectory. Tommy’s state of mind improved dramatically as soon as he was weaned from alcohol once more, but he slipped again in December 1963 when he was due at a local Civil Defence meeting where, as County Group Controller, he was the man in charge. He knocked back a couple of whiskies, climbed into his Alfa Romeo, and on the way caused an accident that meant two people ended up in hospital. He was found to have been driving under the influence of drink or drugs and fined by the magistrates’ court and banned for a year.

  To a man of Tommy’s sensibility, whose life had been circumscribed by rigorous even repressive discipline of himself and others, this public lapse of his own highest standards was humiliating in the extreme. The accident victims recovered but Tommy’s mortification haunted him. It was perhaps clearly indicative of his emotional fragility, combined with a character honed by a lifetime’s service, self-sacrifice and concern with the appearance of things. Not only had he always to do the right thing, but also to be seen to do the right thing. Shamed by his failure to live up to these ideals, he resigned from all his appointments and clubs. At first Daphne was sympathetic, but quite soon his misery and remorse began to irritate her. To Foy she complained that he was histrionically overreacting, behaving as if he had sinned in as flamboyant a manner as John Profumo, the scandal that had gripped the public imagination that year involving a minister of state, call-girls, frolics in a billionaire’s country palace and a Russian spy. Daphne felt a drink-driving offence, reprehensible as it was, did not quite equate with this kind of public betrayal and disgrace.

  In the middle of this upset, the legendary warmth of the Irish came to their aid. Kits and his Irish beauty Olive were married in Dublin in early 1964. Daphne and Tommy crossed the Irish Sea, expecting the worst, but found themselves completely swept up in the sheer enjoyment and generosity shown by all. Daphne was usually shy and retiring in social situations, but she declared she had never before had so much fun, thrilled by young Father Cleary breaking into song, while everyone joined with a spontaneous eruption of affection and exuberance of spirit. One of the best laughs was against herself when she realised that the bride’s family, working class and materially so much less well off than hers, considered that their beautiful daughter Olive, celebrated as a former Miss Ireland, could have done so much better for herself than marry the gilded du Maurier heir! Even Tommy, who was not well and had been dreading the whole affair, was utterly seduced by the beauty of the bride and the infectious joy of the occasion. ‘The only thing that was missing was Paddy McGinty’s goat,’27 he said to Daphne as they were driven back in the highest spirits to their hotel.

  There was something ineffably sad about Tommy, Oriel Malet felt when she next visited Menabilly. Daphne was writing the book based in Urbino that she was to call The Flight of the Falcon, but she struggled to find the atmosphere of the place and felt constrained that she could not hide herself away in her writing hut and truly immerse herself in the plot as she liked to do, knowing Tommy was at home at a loose end. His new boat was due to be launched in the early summer and there was great excitement in the town. Anne Treffry was asked to break the bottle of champagne on its prow and Tommy could barely sleep with anxiety and anticipation.

  The following month, Daphne escaped Menabilly to manage a short return to Urbino to check on places she had written about in her book. She was escorted there by Kits and Olive, prior to Kits’s departure to Jamaica as the second assistant director on the film A High Wind in Jamaica. It was a tribute to Daphne, and to Olive and Kits too, that she could cede her premier position as the main woman in her precious son’s life and be so accepting of Olive. With the du Maurier emphasis on the importance of good looks, it helped considerably that Olive was such a beauty, as well as being down-to-earth and unaffectedly friendly. Daphne’s occasional trips abroad with her son and daughter-in-law were always an enjoyable interlude in her increasingly limited existence.

  Tessa also managed to entice her away from Menabilly on two Swan Hellenic cruises, in 1966 and the following year, that lifted Daphne’s spirits for a while. They met Sir John Wolfenden and his wife Eileen and Daphne was entertained by this academic’s wide-ranging conversation and warmth of character. Sir John was obviously charmed by Daphne and both Wolfendens took Tessa under their wing. She was almost a contemporary of their brilliant only son Jeremy who had died suddenly the previous year, aged only thirty-one. Sir John was famous for being the chair of the committee that produced the groundbreaking Wolfenden Report, recommending the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consulting adults in private, nearly a decade before. Tessa believed that Lord Wolfenden was influential in recommending her mother for the DBE.

  The Flight of the Falcon was published in 1964, full of coincidences and melodrama and distinctive for the powerful nightmarish quality of its story. It would have made an exciting, atmospheric film, but this was the mid-sixties and the fashion had moved on to something more contemporary and edgy. Two Italian brothers, separated by the Second World War and both thinking the other dead, are reunited after the younger gives some money to a beggar woman, who turns out to be their old nurse, and is subsequently murdered. The colourful and complex plot deals with sibling love, power and rivalry and the thin veil that separates the present from the past. Daphne explored some of the ideas that so fascinated her about her feelings of close psychic connection with her grandfather George, and she made Aldo, the elder brother in her story, a kind of Svengali figure: ‘I am a puppeteer. I pull the strings, the puppets dance. It requires great skill.’28 This brother has much of the imaginative and charismatic power over his younger brother that Daphne had over her sisters when young, and she was intrigued by the way that the controlling figure himself became seduced into the fantasy world he conjured up. ‘There has to be an explanation of why the person directing the acting … begins to make it all become real to himself, and to the students etc,’29 she wrote to fellow writer Oriel Malet. In fiction, she had made Aldo’s suggestive power as an adult extend to the university students in his care, with sinister results as they re-enacted aspects of the town’s revolutionary history more than five hundred years before.

  Writing the book made her think again of the influence she had had over the games of the sisters’ youths. Even as Angela approached her sixtieth birthday, Daphne remembered how her sisters were roped in to enact the historical dramas that held such fascination for her then: ‘I always got them to play my games, in which I was the leader, so I suppose it gave me Power!’ Her past and the past of her ancestors were ever-present in her mind. Daphne felt that writing a book was just the same as those childhood games; pretence and dressing-up and being the grand puppet master of all your characters. Creating characters and plot in her own fiction was a way of reliving the excitement of make-believe that had coloured her girlhood and much of her life.

  Daphne could no longer keep the grim reality of life from her door. Tommy’s left leg was causing him excruciating pain. He had damaged it in a bobsleigh accident when a young man but now his circulation seemed to be seriously impaired and the subsequent nerve pain was almost unendurable. He was confined to bed and cared for by Esther Rowe and Daphne, who despaired of the situation. An operation to try and restore his circulation failed, and amputation of his foot to prevent gangrene was seen as the only possible solution. This was done in January 1965.

  For Tommy it seemed as if his life was over. He was deathly tired. Apart from his current health concerns he had already endured more high-level stress than ten average men. Facing life with a disability, his key pleasures of boating and driving were made more difficult, now that his new companions threatened to become the wheelchair and prosthetic limb. This all demanded hard adjustments for an active, proud and dapper man. His depression returned and with it his bronchitis.

  Careworn, Daphne had collapsed into bed too with jaundice that kept her from seeing her husband, but two nurses were engaged to care for him. Tomm
y’s last letter was to his dear sister Grace, ‘one sometimes wonders whether it is all worth it at my age and it really would be more dignified to fade gradually out’.30 The evening before he died he told Daphne that he dreaded the night and could not sleep, and she had kissed him and said, ‘You will, darling, you will’, and left the room. She later wrote that she deeply regretted her lack of foresight and the glibness of these last words, for Tommy was found dead in his bed at Menabilly the following morning, a blood clot having stopped his heart. He was only sixty-eight.

  Although she had long been concerned about her husband’s health, Daphne was quite unprepared for the shock of his death. To have him suddenly no longer part of her precious ‘routes’ in the house was deeply disturbing. Despite everything, she had loved him and now missed him so much. Guilt for her neglect of him during the previous years assailed her. She identified with Emily Brontë, whom she believed blamed herself and her sisters for Branwell’s death. ‘They had neglected him. Therefore, she argued, she must be neglected likewise. It was an unconscious form of suicide, not uncommon to the bereaved.’31 Her children arrived at Menabilly and touched her with their tenderness and maturity. But she did not want to leave the house.

  She decided on a private cremation and stated there would be no memorial service, not because the highly decorated Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning did not want one (he was not averse to ceremony having once said he would have liked a Viking funeral), but because she could not face one. It would have been an impressive and moving service, for her husband was much loved and highly regarded by many people from the Queen and Prince Philip outwards. The men who had served under his command and alongside him in the direst circumstances would have welcomed a chance to salute him one more time. His record in two world wars was remarkable and his honours told only a part of the story: mentioned twice in despatches, he was a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Companion of the Order of the Bath; he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order; France awarded him the Croix de Guerre; Poland the Polonia Restituta second class and the United States had honoured him by making him a Commander of the Legion of Merit. The heartfelt letters of condolence poured into Menabilly and Daphne carefully answered every one.

  Daphne’s tears distressed her. She was a woman who prided herself on seldom crying; she had not even cried much as a child. This had always been in stark contrast to her elder sister Angela who was always bursting into tears and was still capable of copious crying even in old age when a piece of music or a lovely view caught her offguard. Daphne was not conventionally religious, but she had a fascination with the idea of a possible afterlife from where those one had loved ‘beamed down’. In these difficult months of grief and loss, this idea consoled her.

  Ellen Doubleday flew over to stay and now, with all Daphne’s passion spent, the two could get on like the old friends they were. The only difficulty was that Ellen did not care to watch television in the evenings, as had become an integral part of Daphne and Tommy’s routine, and Daphne found herself having to talk to her, which was entertaining but tiring. She was, however, immensely helpful with her aesthetic and practical suggestions for how Daphne could make the best of Kilmarth, Menabilly’s handsome dower house that was being offered to her should the heir, Philip Rashleigh, reclaim his ancestral home.

  During the last months of Tommy’s life, Daphne had been full of anxiety over whether the lease for Menabilly would be renewed. All three sisters were children of the theatre; their houses were the stage on which they played out their lives. Make-believe and mutability characterised their parents, and the people who flocked to their childhood home were mostly in disguise, actors pretending to be something other than they were. This uncertain sense of self was particularly marked in Daphne, the most imaginative of them all, and she had long panicked at the thought of losing Menabilly. This was the one fixed and unchanging point in her world, the inspiration to her dreams, bulwark of her solitude and keeper of her soul. After years of bitter legal wrangling and resentment, when the dreaded news came that she would have to move, with characteristic practicality and courage Daphne accepted that this would have to be. She had three years to get the dower house ready and prepare her own mind for the next major loss. She was finally transplanted, reasonably happily, in the summer of 1969. Her transition to Kilmarth, a beautiful old house with medieval roots, was eased by the fact that its fascinating history began to stir her imagination into life.

  Along with her anxiety at losing Menabilly ran the fear that she was losing her most precious gift – the power to imagine herself into other characters and live their lives in other worlds. Historical research had increasingly provided the platform from which she could launch what she dreaded was a diminishing creative force. The result of her researches into Kilmarth’s past was The House on the Strand, a remarkable, if overlooked, novel that was biographically fascinating. Once again, Daphne identified with the male narrator Dick, an inadequate man in thrall to a more powerful mentor. On a trip to Menabilly to sort out some details of the book, her editor and friend Sheila Hodges was astounded by how clearly Daphne seemed to become Dick, as she walked the grounds and showed her the places that were significant in the novel.

  In the book Daphne explored the addictive pleasures of imaginatively inhabiting an earlier world where her narrator, and alter ego, could be present, although unable to participate in the vividly realised action. Daphne imagined the time-travelling propellant to be a prototype drug, an evil cousin to the mind-expanding drug LSD that, during the mid-1960s, when the book was written, dominated debate about the merits and dangers of hallucinogens. Daphne conjured skilfully the sense she had of the thrill and satisfaction of this other world, and the drabness and complexity of the real one that Dick increasingly longed to flee. She even began to suffer some of the symptoms she gave to Dick, as a result of the over-excitation of his nervous system with the ‘tripping’ back to the past. ‘I got so hooked on the story I actually woke up with nausea and dizziness.’32

  To be trapped in present-day reality, never to fly to alternative realms, was worse than death for Dick, and for Daphne too. Yet the risks of this dependency on the other world were very real. There was more than a passing resemblance to Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with the obsession, the secrecy, the dangerous addiction to the other self and its world. The House on the Strand closed with Dick, almost certainly paralysed and marooned in his own time, his obsessive desire to live in the world he preferred to the present having destroyed both worlds.

  Daphne wrote a poem twenty years earlier expressing this dilemma in her own life:

  Last night the other world came much too near,

  And with it fear.

  I heard their voices whisper me from sleep,

  And I could not keep

  My mind upon the dream, for still they came,

  Calling my name,

  The loathly keepers of the netherland

  I understand.

  …

  How fierce the flame! How beautiful and bright

  The inner light

  Of that great world which lives within our own,

  Remote, alone.

  …

  But if I must

  Go wandering in Time and seek the source

  Of my life force,

  Lend me your sable wings, that as I fall

  Beyond recall,

  The sober stars may tumble in my wake,

  For Jesus’s sake.33

  Daphne had an enquiring mind and had long been interested in Carl Jung’s writings on the collective unconscious. The idea fitted so well with her sense, since childhood, of the closeness of her ancestors, the inheritance of qualities, experiences even, passed on through the generations. She wondered if perhaps time could be ‘all dimensional – yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition’.34 This suspicion that the past and future were ever
-present seeped into one of her most haunting and successful short stories, ‘Don’t Look Now’.

  She had visited Venice again, this time with Jeanne, but the story had been growing at the back of her mind for some time. Then a conversation with the philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson about his ‘Great Intellectual Thoughts’35 suddenly spurred her on. Through force of will, she determined to get the story down on paper. It dealt with the alienating aspect of grief, the fearful power of the unconscious, the menace and mystery of Venice’s decaying canals and dripping back alleys, the tricks that longing plays on the mind. All those years of sitting in the darkened auditorium, as her father’s melodramatic productions unfurled in front of her suggestible child’s mind, paid off handsomely with her terrific sensitivity to the necessity of intricate plots and bold peripeteias. A psychic tale, the visual richness and rollercoaster action of ‘Don’t Look Now’, with its terrible denouement, was a gift to a film-maker; Nicolas Roeg was the director with a dark enough vision himself to create the unforgettable classic movie of the seventies.

  Daphne’s feeling for the past and increasing recoil from the present was the prevailing mood in a book she wrote called Vanishing Cornwall, with atmospheric photographs taken by Kits. Elegiac about the beauty of the landscape and the vivid history of its brave, independent-minded people, its very title suggested its glories were passing. This reflected her growing disenchantment with what tourism had brought to the county she had adopted so passionately as her own. All three sisters were intolerant of the ‘hoi polloi’ who cluttered the beaches, clogged up the roads and paraded their ugly sun-reddened bodies in Cornwall’s seaside towns. But this exclusivity was an emotional reaction that they, with their allowances and Daphne’s substantial income earned outside the area, could afford to have. The doughty modern-day Cornish needed emmets’ money in order to live, and their summer visitors became the main source of income for the county. There was real resentment too, however, at how little attention the London-centred government seemed to give to Cornwall and its needs for investment in manufacturing and business.