Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Maurice’s mother Sylvia, ‘dark, with Maurice’s eyes’ and ‘an adorable smile of her own’, is fêted by many men, none of whom she cares for. Daphne even caught the little bit of cruelty in Sylvia’s humour: Maurice’s mother does not laugh at the circus, but at Nurse when she slips on some orange peel. Naturally, Tommy has an ‘affair’ with this Sylvia look-alike and loves her ‘as much as it was possible for him to love anything but himself.

  Maurice first meets Tommy when he gets lost in Regent Street and is picked up by ‘depressive Mr Tibbs’, a grocer who takes him to meet Tommy, who, we learn, ‘likes young gentlemen’.

  Tommy lives in a block of flats overlooking the river (recognisably Jim’s flat in Adelphi Terrace House). He opens the door to Maurice looking ‘rather tired’. He offers the boy tea and after asking his name and where he lives, and why he has not asked a policeman the way home, he fixes him with his eyes and says darkly:

  ‘You are a lonely traveller in Mexico who has lost his way in a terrific storm. You have come to me for shelter and do not know I am a brigand who will take your life.’

  And so their hypnotic adventure begins; it was ‘one of the most thrilling games Maurice had ever played’.

  The story confirms that Daphne’s imagination at the age of 14 was inspired by Jim, that she was au fait with his flat at Adelphi, with his penchant for boys, with his captivating stories, and with his supernatural take on life.

  But the effect of the ‘indelible bond’ between Jim and her father cut deeper. She makes this clear in her fictional exposé, The Progress of Julius, where, as Margaret Forster noted, what Daphne crossed out in the original manuscript, a series of school exercise books, is more suggestive even than what appears in the published novel. She draws on a family holiday to Algiers in 1922.

  Sexuality oozes with ‘the heat and sweat of humanity, the scorching, dusty, amber, Alger smell’. Her father’s favourite music was ‘the music thumped on drums in the native quarter of Alger and danced to by little naked prostitutes of twelve years old’. Daphne was 15, Gerald 49. In the novel, Gabriel is 15, Julius 50.

  ‘We have fun, don’t we?’ She took hold of his hand and crumpled up his fingers, squeezing them against each other so that his signet ring cut his skin and he cried out.

  ‘I like your hands,’ she said, ‘they’re the best things about you,’ and then she dropped them and moved away, humming a tune.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’s what I meant. Are you a child or do you do it on purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ he said.

  They were silent for about five minutes. It was getting dark. He could scarcely see her face. The fire burst in the grate and shot up in a quiver of flame, lighting them to one another. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t want you to be angry.’ She crossed over and pinched the back of his neck.

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘Is it that you’re a child and happy like that?’ he said.

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘You’ll tell me, won’t you, when you begin to feel things? You’ll come to me?’

  ‘You’ll know without me telling you,’ she said.

  Back in Cannon Hall, Daphne’s life was intense and unrelenting. Angela was dispatched to boarding-school, Jeanne attended day school locally; Daphne alone was taught by a governess at home. Her life was so confined that she forged a special friendship with one of the maids to find out about the ordinary world outside. She wrote to Tod, whom she missed terribly as a confidante: ‘When I hear a foxtrot I go mad for want of dancing.’

  In the summer of 1921, while lying on a beach in Thurlestone in Devon on another family holiday, her cousin Geoffrey Millar, Trixy’s son, and at 36, twenty-two years older than Daphne, caught her eye.

  My heart missed a beat. I smiled back... I knew instinctively that we shared a secret... When we all lay out on the lawn like corpses to catch the sun, rugs over our knees, Geoffrey would come and lie beside me, and feel for my hand under the rug and hold it. Nothing, in a life of seventy years, has ever surpassed that first awakening of an instinct within myself. The touch of that hand on mine. And the instinctive knowledge that nobody must know.

  Geoffrey, an actor, was fun, devastatingly attractive, and a philanderer. Daphne, of course, was forbidden fruit. When Geoffrey stayed at Cannon Hall, Daphne would come down to the drawing-room after the others had gone to bed and let him kiss her.

  Kissing Geoffrey is ‘exciting, and it’s fun creeping down late in my pyjamas,’ she wrote in her diary.

  The strange thing is it’s so like kissing D. There is hardly any difference between them . . .

  What sort of kissing with her father was like kissing as illicit as this?

  Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias. D is Pope Alexander, Geoffrey is Cesare, and I am Lucretia. A sort of incest.

  Lucretia married at 13; Cesare was her brother and Pope Alexander her father. Incest indeed! But whatever she felt about Geoffrey, all the while it was her father, not Geoffrey, who was on her mind, as she discovered when given an anaesthetic by a dentist to remove wisdom teeth. Coming round, Daphne heard ‘someone groaning, “Daddy, Daddy!” through a mist and it was myself emerging from the darkness’.

  So it was not the Borgia brother but the Borgia father that the unconscious self demanded.

  Daphne’s ‘Daddy complex’ was at the centre of everything, and she used this ‘affair’, maintained for at least six years, to tantalise her father mercilessly, just as Gabriel tantalises her father in Julius. She deliberately made him suspicious that something was going on with Geoffrey, enjoying the power it gave her over him. Gerald became wildly irritable.

  What ‘the secret city’ was making of Daphne’s personality was clarified again in 1925 when she was sent away from home for the first time to a finishing school at Camposena outside Paris. It was run by Fernande Yvon, ‘thirty-ish, slanting green eyes, [with] a manner that seemed a blend of sarcasm and veiled amusement’ (an easy mix with the du Maurier personality). Showing off her knowledge of what it took to be a master of manipulation, Daphne invaded Ferdie’s inner sanctum to the consternation of the in-group girls already there. She picked up Ferdie’s dropped handkerchief, ‘anointed’ it with perfume and returned it to her. Ferdie, a lesbian, knew how to respond and took Daphne, still legally a minor, to a health resort at La Bourboule where she was to take a ‘cure’, and where, Daphne claimed, she loved Ferdie ‘in every conceivable way’.

  And yet her poetry had shown another side. She wrote about beauty, and the ‘warm, maternal’ love which had eluded her, thanks to Gerald and Jim and their ‘indelible bond’. Here was the unrealised light of Daphne’s imagination, her true inheritance, her grandfather’s sense of beauty, the secret that Uncle Jim could never understand.

  On returning from Camposena she took off with Jeanne to a farm in Cumberland, near Derwentwater, and found fulfilment of a different sort – in nature.

  Mountains, woods, valleys, farms – earlier holidays in the South of France could not compare with this, my first experience of rugged scenery, of running water coursing through the hills down to the lake.

  They walked. One of their excursions was to Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. Daphne felt blissfully free from the pressure of the ‘secret city’. ‘This was all so different from the world that I knew – a real awakening – a feeling for the countryside as opposed to the city, primitive, elemental, a desire for roots in the soil,’ she wrote in her diary. And yet, even here, thoughts of Jim were never far away. She noted that the lakes were ‘Mysterious, often shrouded in mist, and with little islands upon them like the island in Mary Rose:

  It is possible that following the furore over Michael’s death Daphne’s meetings with Uncle Jim had become clandestine. Gerald was still seeing Jim, but it is unlikely that Mo actively encouraged Jim’s relationship with Daphne to continue
. An unsigned letter to her in the summer of 1926 alludes to a secret rendezvous in Richmond Park, miles out of the way for Hampstead-based Daphne, but a favourite meeting-place during Jim’s courting of Mary Ansell. Daphne was now 19. The letter reveals her through the writer’s eyes, a most original and attractive young woman, chic, self-possessed, shrewd, but full of life; amusing, and with an elusive, beguiling nature all her own.

  The mysterious correspondent, a man with ‘a certain twisting smile’, returned home with a bunch of bluebells – Jim’s favourite flowers – which she had picked for him. At once he had ‘shot’ into a trance, from which he declared he never wanted to wake up. He advised her to remain young rather than become old and wise. Daphne had shown him her diaries, which he described as ‘dangerous, indiscreet and stupid’.

  Later, she wrote a poem with more clues to the writer’s identity. His business was

  Fashioning for children nursery rhymes

  Or listening to a sentimental waltz.

  The references hint at Sentimental Tommy himself. Indeed, at the moment of their meeting Jim had been engaged in putting the finishing touches to his contribution to Cynthia Asquith’s The Flying Carpet (1926), an anthology of prose and verse for children.

  This meeting prompted an inquisition at Cannon Hall. Daphne said that they ‘had played halma, talked and read’. Subsequently she wrote a second poem called ‘Richmond Hill’. The day had left her with a memory of:

  Crushed ferns amidst a haze of blue

  The sun, egg sandwiches – and you.

  The meeting inspired her. She went on holiday to Brittany with Ferdie and returned with three stories under her belt – but they were desperately cynical.

  Since reaching puberty, Daphne had entered into a relationship with a man twenty-two years her senior, which she had used to ‘juice up’ a highly questionable relationship with her father. She had become self-centred and manipulative, and initiated a relationship with a French woman, also much older. The stories she was writing at this time reflected the turmoil going on inside. Was there perhaps the fear in the family of another Michael situation? No one could let that happen.

  On 13 September 1926, Daphne found herself in Bodinnick in Cornwall, with her mother, Angela and Jeanne, viewing a romantic old boathouse later named Ferryside, a short pull across the river from Fowey, the river lapping against its outer walls, the granite cliff-face an integral part of one wall within.

  Daphne’s ‘condition’ was the reason for its purchase. In a 1973 BBC Radio interview, her sister Angela said:

  We came down to Cornwall because Daphne was very delicate in those days and we were told that she should have a place in the country to live in always.

  Nothing could be further from the picture that we have been given of Daphne at this time – the strong, even manipulative and cynical young woman in control of her life. The emotional reality was that she was vulnerable, even ‘delicate’. The family was concerned, and no temporary solution would do. She must live in the country – away from the secret city – ‘always’. Her strange life was taking its toll.

  Cornwall was the best prescription possible. Once released from Cannon Hall, her spirits soared.

  Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone. One feature of my excitement was the feeling that it could not be mere chance that brought us to the ferry. It seemed so right.5

  Fowey was of course home to Jim’s great friend Q, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. Cornish to the core, Q had held the chair of English at Cambridge University since 1912. Daphne was soon taking tea with him, not in Cornwall, but in his rooms at Jesus College. No one from the du Maurier family accompanied her. Why should they? They did not know Q The meeting confirmed Jim’s awareness of the Ferryside arrangement, if not his initiation of it. Q’s daughter Foy, sister of Bevil (another casualty of the First War), became Daphne’s best friend.

  Gerald, meanwhile, remained distinctly uninvolved and was never very happy visiting Ferryside. From this period, his star was on the wane. There were money difficulties, discontent, disenchantment, regret, and at length some inexplicable depressive symptoms of the sort that invariably affected those whose fate Jim commandeered.

  Daphne’s relationship with her father, still strangely in step with Michael’s with Jim, entered a new phase. When first Angela and then Daphne began to show an interest in boys, Gerald became incensed. In her memoir Angela recalled having to put boys off from taking her home, for fear that Gerald would be there:

  Daddy’s face was to be seen peering through the landing curtains on the rare occasions one had been ‘seen home’. And my goodness! The catechisms.

  ‘Who brought you home? Who is he?’

  ‘Did he kiss you?’

  . . . Having His Daughters Kissed was the last straw to poor Daddy . . .

  In 1929, as the guest of Edgar Wallace, in whose plays Gerald was acting, Daphne was introduced to Carol Reed,* the illegitimate son of Sir Herbert Tree, at the Palace Hotel, Caux, the resort where Jim and Sylvia, with Gilbert Cannan and Mary Ansell, had holidayed with the boys after Arthur’s death.

  Daphne was 22. Reed was Daphne’s first serious boyfriend. Gerald was deeply jealous. In an effort to thwart the affair, he arranged for Daphne to join a three-week cruise to the Norwegian fjords with the millionaire Otto Kahn on his private yacht, the Albion. It was not a good idea. At one stage Daphne had to escape the clutches of her host by stripping off and diving into the sea.

  Aware that Daphne was slipping away (as Jim had prophesied in Dear Brutus she would), Gerald began to look with clearer eyes at what had befallen Arthur and Sylvia. There was anger and bitterness in his cry: ‘Why should a fellow like Arthur be taken who never said an unkind word in his life, and what possible good can it be to anyone in the world for darling Sylvia to break her heart?’ Daphne’s response revealed a chillier allegiance: ‘Gerald would not acknowledge that Arthur and Sylvia were spared many things [by their early deaths] – the war, and fear for their sons, and the reaction of a weary country; that had they lived longer they must have suffered greatly, for they would not have belonged, they would have been out of place in a hurried, fevered world.’6

  In Daphne’s eyes, Gerald’s questioning made him an apostate to the ‘secret city’, and she could not countenance her father’s betrayal. In her 1934 biography, she berated him for being blind to ‘the real treasures of life that lay within his grasp’. She criticised the shallowness of his art, while over-praising Jim. Most would consider her assessment of Jim’s plays not just exaggerated but partisan. None, except Peter Pan, has endured. But nowhere was her subjugation to Jim more sadly expressed than in her praise for ‘the upbringing and the security’ he gave the boys.

  Here was the true neurotic basis of Daphne’s ‘Daddy-complex’, an emotional conflict caused by Gerald’s disenchantment with Uncle Jim and Daphne’s love, deep down, for her father. Evidence of it is everywhere in her fiction.

  Now that Gerald was awakening to Jim, and his favourite daughter was fading from his life, he began drinking heavily, waking up ‘gloomy, spiritless, flat’, suffering ‘black fits’ of depression. He ‘kept breaking down and crying’. Gerald was beginning to see beyond the web in which he had been caught, to see the lie that he had lived. Terrible anxieties rushed in and he suffered repeated attacks of what he called ‘the horrors... He put his hands over his eyes and [would] stand and tremble and hold on to Mo or one of his children... until the terror, fear and loneliness were gone.’ We will see Daphne suffer in the same way in the 1950s after her own ‘awakening’.

  Without Cornwall, Daphne would surely have been lost. When she first stayed at Ferryside she seized every opportunity to explore, and no adventure was more exciting than the day she set out with Angela to find Menabilly, whose roofs she had espied from afar –

  It was an afternoon in late autumn I first tried to find the house. Oct
ober, November, the month escapes me. But in the West Country autumn can make herself a witch, and place a spell upon the walker. The trees were golden brown, the hydrangeas had massive heads still blue and untouched by flecks of wistful grey, and I would set forth at three in the afternoon with foolish notions of August still in my head . . .We came to the lodge at Four Turnings, as we had been told, and opened the creaking iron gates with the flash courage and appearance of bluff common to the trespasser. . .We slunk away down the drive... We did not talk... That was the first effect the woods had on us.

  The drive twisted and turned in a way that I described many years afterwards, when sitting at a desk in Alexandria... The woods were sleeping now, but who, I wondered, had ridden through them once? What hoof beats had sounded and then died away? What carriage wheels had rolled and vanished? Doublet and hose. Boot and jerkin. Patch and powder . . .7

  This is vintage du Maurier experience. Kicky used his imaginative powers to explore the deeply rooted memories of his own mind; Daphne is after the unconscious memory of place. All around she saw clues to the past, ‘footprints in the sand’, ‘imprints of the suffering and the joy’. She believed in this ‘shadow-world that marches a hand’s breadth from our own’8 to the point of keeping the aged, fading wallpaper on her bedroom wall when finally she moved into Menabilly in 1943.

  Who can affirm or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been.9

  For Kicky (and for Jung), to know your past was to know yourself. But for Daphne, to sense the past in a place was to know something mysterious about life, a nameless truth that Kicky experienced euphorically in his peak experiences, and that had something to do with the limitation of human perception and the great possibility of what lay beyond.