Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  This disenchantment with the despoiling of Cornwall led Daphne to join the Cornish Nationalist party Mebyon Kernow and contributed to the atmosphere of mad anarchy in her last novel, Rule Britannia. This book, a satire on the invasion of Cornwall by an American force, addressed all the author’s own bugbears of the tourist assault on her precious adopted land. It was not a success. However, it was for Daphne emotionally a homecoming. She claimed that the eccentric elderly woman at the centre of the action, Mad, was based on the family’s great friend Gladys Cooper, and indeed she dedicated the book to her. It was, however, as much a portrait of herself as an aged Peter Pan figure, surrounded by her adopted tribe of unruly boys, the six sons she had imagined into being.

  In this, her last imaginative effort, Daphne returned to her childhood world of story-telling, leading the great adventure from the front, with her elder sister Angela as the sensible Wendy in their nursery productions of Peter Pan. Here in Rule Britannia, Angela was celebrated as the delightfully literal-minded, kind-hearted Emma, one of the few truly sympathetic characters Daphne ever created. Daphne wrote to Gladys Cooper’s son-in-law, actor Robert Morley, and explained how she had based Emma on Angela and the book reads like a love letter to her sister. In her recoil from the erotic fumbling of men, she made Emma like Angela. She made her much more responsible for the happiness and wellbeing of the boys than Mad could ever be, in the grip of her obsession, leading the Cornish resistance movement against the might of the United States. Daphne also captured Emma’s, and her elder sister’s, extreme emotionality:

  ‘Old people and young children,’ thought Emma, ‘they don’t feel things as we do. One begins to feel at eight or nine … and everything goes on hurting until one’s almost fifty, when it eases off, the person goes numb.’36

  Perhaps Daphne also appreciated how Angela, living all her life in her sister’s shadow, might dream, as Emma dreamed, of standing alongside her as an equal:

  As a child [Emma] had looked up to Mad in the dream, as her protectress, and there was a feeling of reassurance in the echoing smile, in the squeeze of the hand, as though Mad were saying, ‘It’s all right, they can’t hurt you, I’m here now and forever.’ Then through schooldays and adolescence the protectress figure had shrunk, or rather it was that Emma grew, and now they were equal in power, she and Mad, they were identical faces on either side of a coin, and the applause was for them both …37

  The inspiration for Mad’s wild boys was not just Peter Pan’s Lost Boys of make-believe, but Daphne’s grandchildren too. From her surprised delight when her first grandchild, Tessa’s daughter Poonie, had leapt into her arms saying ‘Tay, Tay’ as her version of ‘Tray’ (another of her grandmother’s nicknames), Daphne had embraced her role as grandmother, although love did not soften her critical eye. Her grandchildren remembered summer holidays and Christmases as times of adventure and magic. Menabilly, and then Kilmarth, became the enticing spaces in which the next generation of children acted out their own escapades and stories.

  Rule Britannia was Daphne’s farewell to the world of imagination that had served her so well all her life. She had managed to retreat from the dull limitations of the everyday into universes spun from her own extraordinarily creative mind. She knew the dangers of this obsession and protected herself from its addictive power by writing about these conjured worlds and the people who inhabited them, and thereby freed herself from possession. Her novels gripped the imaginations of millions of readers grateful for the exhilaration of escape. This ability to inhabit a place other than her own, thrilled and at times frightened her, but for her it was essential to happiness. With the loss of this power of invention, Daphne’s life and mind began to contract.

  All the sisters carried their theatricality with them throughout life and all three brought down the final curtain prematurely, when they still had years to live. They were in thrall to the myths of their ancestors and everyone knew du Mauriers were youthful spirits and did not flourish in old age. They died young, and those that did not nevertheless tended to withdraw from the full enjoyment of old age, the company of friends, the love of family, the pleasures of travel and discovery. ‘I’m sixty, I’ve had my life,’38 Daphne wrote to Oriel Malet.

  Their houses all stood apart from the bustle of the world. Angela at Ferryside lived in an extraordinary organic building clinging to the cliff like an eagle’s eyrie with a dazzling cinematic view of the harbour, Fowey estuary, and out to sea. Daphne, first at Menabilly was protected in the centre of a dark and tangled wood and then, at Kilmarth, forced more into the open but still in retreat, down a drive enfolded by shielding layers of trees, cliffs and garden. Jeanne was deeply imbedded in the mysterious heart of Dartmoor, where the scale of rock and sky and moorland diminished the mortals in its reach. Into these refuges they themselves retreated, always courteous but also impenetrable and hard to truly know.

  Daphne had discussed in her own mind, and possibly with her sisters too, whether as they aged and became infirm they should come and live with her. But she realised, perhaps with relief, that each sister would not want to leave the house that had become an integral part of themselves. Jeanne anyway had her partner Noël, nearly ten years younger and more robust, who would care for her until she died. So the sisters came together at Kilmarth at Christmas and on Daphne’s birthday and struggled on into old age in their own domains.

  Angela had always been the most extrovert of the sisters but, after Anne Treffry’s stroke when Angela was just into her seventies, the happy routines of her life, seeing Anne every day, came to an abrupt end. It was a huge shock, especially as Anne’s family at first would not allow Angela to visit her. They eventually relented but from that point Anne and Angela’s travelling days and the close sharing of a life was over. The Church still provided her with a purpose and solace, and the good-hearted people from the village and from Fowey who cooked and cleaned and eventually cared for her provided affection and interest. But her insistence on routine became almost as rigid as Daphne’s. Two carers, who became very fond of Angela, Jayne and Kevin Giles, moved into Ferryside to look after her as she became less able to get about and care for herself. They recalled how tea had to be served in her room at four o’clock precisely. If Jayne brought it up a couple of minutes early she would be sent out to wait until the prescribed hour. But along with her pedantry over routine and the inherent sadness of her solitary state, she was funny and affectionate and for entertainment would ask for her youthful diaries and read parts of them out loud. Every morning, at nine, Daphne would ring and in their later years the conversations were almost exclusively about their bowels.

  Daphne also visited Angela at Ferryside once a week without fail, but would only stay the duration of two ferry crossings and as the ferry, just below Angela’s window, readied itself to return to Fowey for the third time, she would leave and board, to return to Kilmarth and her solitary routine. Although she made the best of Kilmarth, and to most visitors it was a more appealing house, smaller and elegant, filled with light and wonderful views over the sea, Daphne still mourned Menabilly. But most of all she mourned the loss of her creative powers, her escape through imagination into a world of her own making. For all three sisters a deep attachment to Barrie’s play Peter Pan and the thrill of the drama, fantasy and the dream of child rebellion against the grown-up world, ritualistically enacted on stage and in their nursery, set the template for their lives. Daphne’s last novel may have brought her creative life full circle but, unlike Angela, she could not accept her loss of power with equanimity. She longed still for the chance to write another novel, for the thrill of being once more possessed by a force larger than herself.

  Once more she had to make do with historical biography, immersing herself in research into Anthony and Francis Bacon. She could still cope with the intellectual challenge of onerous research and discovered information about Anthony Bacon’s fearful brush with the capital charge of sodomy (with one of his pages), an event that cowed his brother Fr
ancis, who was homosexual too, and affected some of the political decisions he made in his remarkable career. A. L. Rowse, whose speciality was the Elizabethan age, commended her warmly for this insight, but her second book on Francis showed up her lack of academic rigour in what was more of a ragbag of partial research and wishful-thinking. Desperate to work, Daphne then agreed reluctantly to cobble together a memoir from her early diaries that she chose to call Growing Pains: the Making of a Writer. Doubleday preferred a title with less negative connotations, and she changed it for the American market to Myself When Young.

  Daphne immediately regretted writing the book, for reading these old diaries so engrossed her and filled her with a painful sense of how much she had lost: ‘[that youthful world] became more vivid than my life now … I can see myself in the day nursery at the Regent’s Park, and going for walks, far more vividly than anything in my adult life. In fact my adult life is more or less a blank. Oh, dear …’39 Daphne was not yet seventy when she revealed this despairing thought to Oriel Malet. The memoir was published in 1977, but from then on her writing self fell silent: the wellspring of her life had run dry. She was already suffering from the forgetfulness and anxiety that aged her so rapidly in the last ten years of her life, as she clung desperately to the straws of her ‘routes’. Oriel was shocked after a visit to Kilmarth in these later years to find the brilliant, funny woman she had known and loved so diminished:

  Nothing now will make Track [Daphne] budge one iota from her ‘routes’, and she shuts herself off from the world behind a wall of newspapers, or turns on the radio to prevent anyone from talking to her, although I don’t believe she is really reading, listening or taking anything in. She has simply given up.40

  So the sisters’ daily lives shrank back as they clung to their houses and the routines that over decades they had engraved into their day. There was a fourth element in their relationship and this was Cornwall, the duchy they had first seen as children and had loved at first sight. They had been brought up as pampered metropolitan girls in the glamorous milieu of Edwardian and then early twentieth-century theatreland, in the heyday of the actor-manager, with Gerald du Maurier at its very zenith. The family’s friends who congregated on the lawns of Cannon Hall or sat around the dining table for Sunday lunch were the stars of Shaftesbury Avenue and Hollywood, from Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead to Ivor Novello, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. The sisters went dancing at the Savoy and did the Season, but never felt truly at home.

  Once they had discovered Cornwall, it always beckoned, a symbol of escape and freedom, an ancient land of mysterious beauty and revelation that would offer a spiritual homecoming. With some of the most dramatic landscapes in the country and an anarchic prehistoric past still close to the surface, it was also the creative inspiration for much of their best art.

  Jeanne really began to paint with colour here and found encouragement and love in the artist colonies of St Ives and Newlyn, before making her home in neighbouring Devon on its uncompromising moors. Angela wrote one of her most successful novels Treveryan, a gothic tale with Cornwall as its star. But it was Daphne, whose love affair with Cornwall and sensitivity to its spirit and history, who immortalised the county and its people in her finest works of fiction. Her atmospheric prose drew her readers into its powerful sense of place. She captivated them as she was captivated by its ancient menace and insinuating charm.

  So these London girls one by one turned their backs on the city, Daphne leading the way while Angela, with her gregarious nature and love of music and theatre, the last to cut her ties. Jeanne’s sensitivity to landscape was one of the main influences on her life and art. She cared more for places than people and her paintings rarely included a human figure, but her love for the rocky outcrops and distinctive tors of Dartmoor was to her endlessly rewarding. Angela had first fallen in love with Cornwall when the sisters were parked with a nurse in an ugly bungalow at Mullion Cove, while their parents left for the more glamorous shores of France. A lifetime later she looked back on what Cornwall meant to her as she relaxed on one of many evenings at Ferryside:

  An hour or more has passed, and the lights are now glimmering in Polruan, the water has reached the grass, a small row boat has passed and a neighbour has waved; the swish of the waves behind me and the Schubert Octet are the only sounds; clouds are parting and soon the full moon will appear; maybe the light under which I’m writing will attract a bat; the three tiny gulls are slowly drifting towards me, it is time for them to go to bed. How could I live anywhere else? This is my Cornwall.41

  Daphne had been a teenager when the family first discovered Ferryside and made it their country retreat, and she saw Cornwall as the first place she could be herself and essentially alone. She likened the young sisters’ pampered existence to that of caged birds, like the ones she had set free as a child, and then again at her father’s funeral. The weight of their destiny as well-brought-up girls, who had to be turned into respectable married women, weighed heavily on them:

  We were all ready for adventure but the cage imprisoned us. The cage, indeed, was all we knew. Ours was the sanded floor, the seed, the water, even the rod on which to perch, the swing to make us gay. We were cherished, loved, protected. No trio of turtle-doves could wish for more … The cage was not fastened, and of the three doves I should be the first to fly.42

  Conventional as they may have appeared, none of them lived conventional lives; at times they were not even respectable. All three sisters did fly the cage and chose to live and love in ways their parents would not have approved and, in Jeanne and Angela’s cases, against the tenets of their faith. It was to their advantage that Cornwall was so far away it was out of the orbit of their father’s influence and he, so restless in the country, only made infrequent and fleeting visits, leaving as withdrawal symptoms from London and the Garrick Club set in.

  They had grown up in a family that felt itself distinguished and all three girls overcame the handicap of not being boys to become writers and artists on their own account. Angela wrote at least one courageous pioneering novel and a sparkling memoir of her younger days. Daphne brought to life some of the most compelling stories and fictional characters of the twentieth century, which in their turn inspired at least three unforgettable films. And Jeanne found a place amongst the best Cornish painters at the height of their powers, and continued to paint all her life. After quite different adventures, all three sisters alighted when still young in close proximity to each other in the wildest parts of the West Country. They grew old in their separate citadels but were united for ever by the bonds of family and place. Despite Daphne’s marriage and her titles, for which she cared little, she, Angela and Jeanne remained until death what they had always been, children of Neverland, bold musketeers, the three sisters du Maurier.

  AFTERWORD

  The du Mauriers have streaks in common, even the distant branches down to the third and fourth generation who no longer bear their name. They hover between incurable optimism and profound despair … Their hearts are large, like their purses which contain so little. And their sense of humour is apt to be warped and tinged with satire … They die before middle age, often rather painfully, and are soon forgotten. But they leave behind them a dim fragrance of their presence, like a whisper in the air.

  Letter from DAPHNE DU MAURIER to Ellen Doubleday

  The alphabet is finished, the song is ended.

  ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember

  FOR THIS LAST generation of du Mauriers, death did not come stealthily nor too soon. Confounding the family romance, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne lived on into old age. However, they did withdraw prematurely from life, pulling up a metaphorical drawbridge in the process. Rheumatoid arthritis increasingly confined Angela to the top floor at Ferryside, looked after by carers from the neighbourhood, of whom she grew fond. She had been determined not to move and hoped that the last view she ever gazed upon would be the spectacular panorama from her window at Ferryside.

 
; Daphne also was determined not to leave Kilmarth and her familiar routines. At first her children managed to tempt her away on the occasional motor trip or cruise but increasingly she grew more withdrawn, forgetful, at times angry, and lost. The valiant Esther Rowe continued to care for her and, as Daphne’s condition deteriorated, live-in nurses were hired to help. She had always been physically strong and fit and her decline was largely emotional and intellectual. Having lost her power to spin stories and inhabit worlds outside her own, she was now trapped in a mundane reality that no longer seemed worth living. On the day before she died, she unexpectedly telephoned Oriel Malet and asked if she was writing. When Oriel hesitated she told her urgently: ‘You must, it’s the only way!’1

  The love of her grandchildren, children, her sisters, friends and dogs all paled in significance as Daphne struggled with this alarming loss of identity. Her last ten years seemed tragically diminished to those who loved her, finding her at times almost catatonically withdrawn and sometimes frightening. No one knew whether the drugs she had always taken rather carelessly in order to sleep were contributing to her deteriorating mental state, but any idea that she should move closer to her family she firmly resisted. Daphne’s invincible will that had made her life so much to her own design was still in evidence. Just as she insisted in life on being master of her fate, so she would not relinquish control in the matter of her death. Instead she tried to will it, rather than give in at this last frontier. She attempted a drug overdose, and then alerted Esther to what she had done. She later tried to starve herself, despite Esther and the nurses’ watchful care. She did not intend to wait patiently for death’s call.