Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

He then had apparently kissed her hand. Such bliss!

Her father, however, ruined it all for his eldest daughter with his desire to amuse, even at the expense of another, however vulnerable. ‘Gerald, who never missed a trick, used to call me “Puffin’s latest crush”,’ Roland wrote, ‘then Angela would go a kind of black red, for whatever her feelings may have been, nobody was supposed to know anything about them.’

Gerald amused himself with his men friends, talking shop, fooling around, changing subjects as rapidly as shadows passing over water and Roland thought there could be no one in the world who was a better companion, investing ordinary events with a spirit of gay adventure. Meanwhile, his daughters went about their very different interests. Angela’s emotionalism affected everyone; Daphne found her crushes oppressive and told Tod her sister was quite hopeless. Daphne was filled with an irritable ennui, perhaps affected by her father’s innate restlessness but also isolated and alarmed by Angela’s obsessional mooning over one love object after another. Is this what it was to grow up? To Tod, she confided:

I must be an awful rotter as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is … Everyone thinks I’m moody and tiresome and I suppose I am; and I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I’m acid and bitter, perhaps I am on the outside but I’m not really.

Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as Jeanne. She was grieving for the childhood she was being forced to leave behind, while her sister, four years her junior, was still in that uncomplicated place, sturdy and boy-like, safe in the pretence that she was one of the Dampier brothers. Only a couple of days after Roland Pertwee first met Jeanne, he was disconcerted by her arrival in his bedroom where she wordlessly folded his trousers and underwear before putting a strip of Kolynos toothpaste on his toothbrush. ‘When I asked her what it was all about she replied: “I’m Dampier, your fag. Shout if you want anything else”,’

and gravely left the room.

Before the end of their time in Algeria, an expedition into the desert and the Atlas Mountains was planned by the men, and the sisters and Muriel were driven to meet them at Bou-saada, a small trading town surrounded by date palms in a true oasis on the edge of the Sahara. Having had all kinds of desert adventures, the men eventually met up with the women for dinner. Afterwards, Roland linked arms with Daphne and Angela and walked them into the night to watch the moon rise over the desert. To Angela it must have seemed as if The Garden of Allah had come to life. But before they had got very far, the romantic and mysterious atmosphere was suddenly riven with a ghastly cackling laugh, dwindling to a moan. The girls clutched his arm. The shrieking laugh came again. Roland enquired of a passing young Arab who was it laughing so devilishly. ‘A hyena in the cemetery,’ he replied. ‘He is eating the dead.’

Then when a shot rang out in the still air, and the young man explained it was the armed guard in the gardens firing at desert robbers, Angela and Daphne decided they had had enough of moonlight and romance and would rather go home.

Cannes and Monte Carlo were their next destinations. Gerald liked to live life with a flourish: he carried gold sovereigns, using them to tip extravagantly and after paying for a purchase with gold would not bother with the change. Occasionally he was a spectacularly lucky gambler on the horses, no doubt encouraged by his partner at Wyndham’s, Frank Curzon, who became as famous and successful as a racehorse breeder as he was a theatrical manager. Gerald chose horses purely on their names reminding him of something significant in his life: he naturally backed Frank Curzon’s horse Call Boy, which went on to win the 1927 Derby. Then he bagged the 1928 Derby winner Felstead (the name was an amalgamation of Hampstead and his sister’s house Felden) a 40–1 outsider on which he won the considerable sum of £500. He probably made an even bigger return on the 1929 Grand National when his pick Elton, at even more remarkable odds of 100–1, romped home. During the good times, when Frank was running the show, the money kept on rolling in and Gerald was extremely generous and adept at spending it, with little thought of the morrow.

During the euphoric 1920s, the Casino in Monte Carlo was filled with rich and well-connected Englishmen and women intent on diversion. Daphne found it energising: ‘It had a great atmosphere of a sort of suppressed excitement all the time.’

Here was another natural stage for Gerald’s flamboyant insouciance. His friends and daughters observed him in his familiar role:

There was something about a casino which inspired Gerald to put on an act. He was conscious of the interest he excited, and moved briskly through admiring crowds – alert and on his toes. He had a dashing air as he roved among the tables, saying, ‘Banco’; greeting a friend: ‘Hello Portarlington!’; picking up cards and tossing them down: ‘Neuf! Too bad!’; ignoring the money he had won, and having to be reminded of it. A casino offered the opportunity to display his casual, throw-away methods.

Not only was he a great showman, Gerald also relished confounding people’s expectations. On their escapade to the Atlas Mountains, the four men had stopped at the oasis at Laghouat, having drunk a good deal of Cointreau. Here they were entertained by the famously beautiful belly-dancing prostitutes of the Ouled Nail. These Englishmen, however worldly wise, were nevertheless born Victorians and hardly immune to the earthy sensuality of the girls, dancing in magnificent costumes and then naked, except for their elaborate jewellery and headdresses, their exotic looks made more dramatic with make-up and kohl-rimmed eyes.

Gerald took one young beauty aside and began to tell her the plot of his forthcoming production of The Dancers and determined, against his friends’ advice, to act out every scene. Ronnie Squire lost his temper and told him to pay the poor girl some money and let her go, but Gerald took offence. ‘This intelligent girl is highly interested,’ he said in clipped actorly tones, and insisted on keeping her into the night while she sat perplexed, uncertain what was required of her and whether her traditional services might be called upon, and if so, when.

Significantly, perhaps, Gerald was not as keen on practical jokes if he was the victim. One of the actresses who sprang to fame in Gerald’s successful production of The Dancers – alongside Tallulah Bankhead – was Audrey Carten. She became a great friend of the family, a romantic interest of Gerald’s, and was as much a practical joker as was he. She went too far one night, however, when she filled the fountain outside the eminently respectable Cannon Hall with empty champagne bottles, suggesting some great Bacchanalian orgy had taken place behind its genteel walls. Gerald was not amused.

After Monte Carlo, Roland Pertwee and Ronnie Squire were deputed to take Angela with them to Paris where she was to return to finishing school. The train was packed and they could not get any sleeping berths, so huddled together and eventually slept, Angela’s head on Roland’s knee. When she awoke she was green with motion-sickness and dashed for the lavatory. Roland noticed as they approached the school that Angela shed her newly acquired veil of sophistication – ‘she had the smiling gravity of a small Mona Lisa’

– and became a schoolgirl again as they deposited her at the Ozannes’ front door. Angela’s diary recorded her feeling like a dog being left at the vet’s.

While Jeanne perfected her tennis and took up golf, Daphne’s mind turned questioningly to religion. She was confirmed at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London in the early summer of 1922, in spite of Gerald’s atheism – as this was just the done thing – but within the year lost any zest she may have felt for organised religion when the priest she liked became interested in spiritualism. In a letter to Tod she attempted to work out what she believed:

I suppose some people would say that I’m an atheist, but I’m not exactly that. I sincerely believe that the world is in a state of evolution, and so is everybody in it. Also I think the idea of re-incarnation has a lot in it. As for Heaven & Hell & all that rot, its absurd. Everyone, sooner or later, gets punished for their sins, in their own lives, but not by the way priests tell one.

Daphne compared herself with Angela, who was much less critical and tough-minded. She was ill at ease with the extremes of emotion that characterised her elder sister and was proud of her own rational self-sufficiency:

I know she secretly wants to become [a Roman Catholic]. Of course some people do need an emotional sort of religion like that! You know how emotional and rather sentimental she is. It wouldn’t do for you & me I’m afraid! Not that I’m matter-of-fact but I do hate sloppiness, & I think R.C. is rather bent that way.

This thoughtful, mistrustful adolescent was painted by Harrington Mann during this time. His portrait captured Daphne’s wariness, her shoulders hunched, her body in an S-shaped slouch, her world-weary eyes slipping away from the gaze of the spectator. She was persevering with her short stories, exploring with a thoroughly unsentimental eye relationships and ideas that concerned her. She showed some to her father who found them quite good, and this encouragement spurred her on. Years later she explained the creative spring of her fiction:

the child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows … the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him … But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it.

The fact Daphne was becoming rather an accomplished writer of stories had come to the attention of a young dandy photographer out to make his name, Cecil Beaton. The elder du Maurier sisters had become friendly with him, possibly at the Peter Pan party where he had taken many photographs of famous people, including the du Mauriers, and sold them to the papers. He had begun to get his strikingly posed portraits accepted by Tatler and the daily newspapers. ‘We’d worked & plotted for our success & we’d got out in every paper except the Mirror and the Evening Standard!’

Beaton declared in triumph at the beginning of the new year of 1923. It was during this time, when Beaton was making a name for himself in society, that Angela began to meet him at parties and dances.

When Angela returned to Cannon Hall she was officially ‘out’. A ball was given for her at Claridge’s and she became part of the generation of Bright Young Things who went to each other’s parties, not always in the company of parents. This important event in Angela’s young life caused great anxiety and grief to her, and a temporary rift in the family. Angela was so afraid of being upstaged by her prettier younger sisters that she declared she did not want either Jeanne or Daphne at her coming-out party. Muriel gave her an ultimatum: your sisters or your dance, and Angela gave in. She nevertheless could not but think that they inadvertently stole her show:

They wore pale blue velvet frocks and both looked dreams, dancing every dance; I was at my fattest and wore a white satin frock that stuck out like a crinoline and must have made me look even fatter. I wore my hair in a low knot or bun at the back of my neck, and I would imagine a tear-stained face.

During the celebration that should have been one of the more triumphant moments of her entry into adulthood, she was given an unkind letter from her latest crush telling her he did not want to have the all-important supper dance with her.

Despite the advent of the Jazz Age and the general casting off of stays, the social life for young women of the du Mauriers’ social class was still very formal. Anyone going to the theatre and sitting in a box or the stalls or first rows of the dress circle was expected to wear full evening dress. No woman or girl would dream of lunching out without an immaculate frock, and a hat on her head. If you were a well-brought-up young woman you could not be seen in nightclubs, although it was considered safe for Angela and her friends to flock to the Embassy Club or Ciro’s, the glamorous dance club and restaurant that had been favourite family venues and where birthday parties were often held after an evening at the theatre.

In January 1923, Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss gave a party for their daughter Betty’s coming out. Like Angela’s, it was at Claridge’s. About one hundred people were invited to dinner with dancing afterwards. One of the guests was their new friend Cecil Beaton, whose remarkably detailed diaries recorded the merry social scene. This party he considered terrific good fun, with ‘such a riot of interesting people’, whom he then proceeded to criticise. ‘The du Mauriers were all there,’ he wrote, ‘they are charming except Sir Gerald whom I simply loathe. He is so conceited and so ridiculously affected. He gets completely on my nerves.’ This from an equally self-conscious dandy.

Beaton seemed to be amused by Angela’s grave and innocent demeanour and enjoyed dancing with her and teasing her mercilessly: ‘I ragged [her] as looking [rather] Shaftesbury Avenue in a dress from Idare [the famous theatrical costumier]. It was dreadfully chorus girly & when she swished around the skirt swished up revealing knickers to match.’

But his attention must have helped restore some of Angela’s fragile confidence. Beaton himself did not so obviously lack self-confidence, but nevertheless was immensely gratified when Seymour Hicks sought him out to tell him he had a reputation as the wittiest young man in London. He was even happier to find himself seated at dinner in a more favourable place than the precocious novelist and journalist Beverley Nichols. They were natural rivals as talented, exquisite young men on the make.

The family’s annual summer escape from London took the sisters to Frinton on the Essex coast and then to Dieppe in August, where Jeanne’s sporting prowess continued to grow. She was entered for tennis tournaments but Daphne’s diaries do not mention how well she did. Angela sought out another crush, this time a girl named Phil, and Daphne joked to Tod that her sister’s emotional nature would lead her into ‘more and more compromising [situations] and I fear she is on the road to ruin!’

The elder sisters went to stuffy afternoon dances and complained about the body odour hanging in the air. Daphne pretended to fancy a handsome French officer purely to irritate her father, who of course rose to the bait and raged that the man looked ‘an awful bounder’.

Their glamorous life continued with the whole family, including their Aunt Billy, spending Christmas in Monte Carlo, again visiting the Casino regularly, and Daphne and Jeanne playing tennis and golf with each other and their father.

Female fashion had changed radically and young women at parties abandoned their restrictive undergarments and appeared in slim columns of beaded and sequinned silk. Angela, still dressed by her parents’ favourite theatrical costumier, remained in the waisted dirndls of her youth. While she was dancing in old-fashioned flouncy dresses, laughing at the inoffensive jokes of effete young men, Jeanne was focusing on her art and sport. Daphne, always more introspective and intellectual than her sisters, meanwhile wrote disconsolate letters to Tod about the impossibility of conventional happiness and her fear of growing up: ‘It seems a morbid and stupid thought but I can’t see myself living very long,’ wrote Daphne, ‘but the future is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly, marriage doesn’t thrill me – nothing – nothing remains. If only I was a man! That is the one slogan to me … I like women much better than men.’ She then described how dance music made her long to dance with someone she had a crush on, but these barely understood emotions disturbed her: ‘It annoys me though to feel like that! I should love to be free from all that sort of thing.’

Full of anxiety and dread of the future, this was the girl who had once bitten her nails so savagely that her parents had sought medical help; theatrically she recalled what she considered a symbolic act – that of being offered bitter aloes as a cure rather than an attempt at understanding and the unconditional love she craved.

Another great theatrical family who were very much part of the sisters’ youth was the Trees. Viola, the eldest daughter of the legendary Edwardian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was larger than life and greatly loved. To call her an actress hardly did justice to her many talents; she was co-writer with Gerald on The Dancers, had an eccentric newspaper column in the Daily Dispatch and was a natural and unselfconscious comedienne. Viola was also blessed with a wonderful singing voice and would touch the heart, or the funny bone, with anything from German lieder to the rudest vaudeville ditty. Angela remembered her as ‘the most brilliant, most witty, most amusing – and at times most maddening – woman it has been my pleasure to have known’.

Viola was married to the drama critic Alan Parsons, and their daughter Virginia was a contemporary of Jeanne’s. Jeanne was being tutored at home with her friend Nan Greenwood but at fourteen she went to school in Hampstead and made closer acquaintance with Virginia. Unsurprisingly, this younger Tree was much shyer than her mother but had her own generous helping of the family’s therapeutic charm. She was beautiful and lacking in cynicism or side. She loved most humans and all animals but, most importantly for Jeanne perhaps, she was highly artistic. Her enlightened parents allowed her to have private lessons with the Bloomsbury Post-Impressionist Duncan Grant, and then with the realist painter William Coldstream. When Virginia was only sixteen she became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, the prestigious college that Coldstream would eventually direct as Professor of Fine Art.

This was liberated, even libertine, company for a young woman of the privileged yet sheltered classes. There was no evidence as to whether Jeanne was included in her friend’s art tutoring. Considering Gerald’s antipathy to anything modern in art or in the education of daughters, it seems unlikely, but as Virginia’s contemporary, and given the closeness of the du Maurier and Tree families, there was little doubt that Jeanne was influenced by the fact that a young woman’s artistic talents could be taken so seriously. Virginia Parsons did not go on to make painting her life, but she did end up as the wife of the 6th Marquess of Bath and chatelaine to the glorious Elizabethan confection of Longleat (and its lions) in Wiltshire. Here she started Pets Corner and exercised her concern for all living creatures, charming friends, animals and visitors alike.

Angela’s debutante days of gadding-about from social lunches to shopping, to attending every new film and play, all punctuated by gay conversations with other debutantes, were followed by nights of wittily themed parties, treasure hunts and extravagant balls, before the dash home by chauffeured car. They were privileged times indeed. The du Maurier girls took it for granted that Hollywood royalty like Rudolph Valentino (so incredibly handsome and charming, they thought), Gary Cooper and Jack Barrymore (ditto) would dine with them at home at Cannon Hall. It was unremarkable that Arthur Rubinstein and Ivor Novello, also incredibly handsome and charming – and bagged by Daphne as a future husband, despite Angela’s first claim on him – would play the piano to entertain them and their guests in the drawing room. It did not seem remarkable that actors of the calibre of Gladys Cooper and Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier should be family friends, and that exotic acquaintances like Nelly Melba, Tallulah Bankhead, Cecil Beaton and Lady Diana Cooper would enliven the show. Unremarkable too, that the Savoy Hotel was the du Mauriers’ home from home, the place to which they decamped when cook was ill or the maids had flu. This grand hotel was their regular haunt for Christmas Day lunch with friends, their own table specially kept for them by the vast windows overlooking the river.

Enforced sexual ignorance and unwelcome parental control took their toll on these apparently carefree days. When Angela was eighteen she spent a happy September week in a country house in Gloucestershire under the aegis of Lady Cynthia Asquith. Staying in the house was a collection of young people, among them her cousin Nico Llewelyn Davies and the rest of the Eton cricket XI, which included Lord Dunglass – the future Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After a great deal of innocent games and dancing into the night, Angela allowed one of these young gods chastely to kiss her in her bedroom. When she felt vaguely sick the next morning (probably from too much gaiety the night before) she was panic-stricken by the thought that the kiss, so riskily proffered in such a taboo place as a bedroom, might somehow have made her pregnant. She could not confide in Daphne, who was even more ignorant in the facts of life than she was. She could never confess such a thing to her mother, and her father’s reaction was too terrible even to imagine. So she wrote to her Aunt Billy, who luckily kept her secret and reassured her with a sanitised version of the truth.

Angela never let on whether the young god with the prepotent kiss was the nineteen-year-old Lord Dunglass. She suggested in a later memoir that it was. This young aristocrat was already a boy hero, captain of the Eton cricket team, Keeper of the Field (captain of football, in the college’s own form of the game) and President of the Prefects’ Society, called Pop. He was a gallant, golden, effortlessly accomplished youth who may well have attracted the over-romantic girl. Certainly Lord Dunglass trumped Daphne’s creation, Eric Avon. Eric merely went to Harrow (Gerald’s school): Milord went to Eton. Eric excelled at sports and acts of simple bravery; Alec did all this and was also rather good at the intellectual and social stuff too. To the eldest daughter of a family enamoured of its own breeding, Lord Dunglass held the ace, the inheritance of the earldom of Home. This dated from the beginning of James I’s reign and included several thousand acres of the Scottish borderlands. Angela, whose memoirs are full of veiled clues (at least for those of a forensic mind), rather gave the game away in her second volume, where she was musing on education and recalling her ecstatic teenage self: ‘I’m eighteen and last week I met an absolutely wonderful boy who’s just left Eton. Actually he’s a viscount – I wonder …’

Her readers, perhaps, did not need to wonder.

This young viscount who caught Angela’s eye and was to become an earl and then renounce his title in order to sit in the House of Commons as an MP was described by his contemporary at Eton, Cyril Connolly, with remarkable prescience as, ‘a votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part’. Connolly thought had Douglas-Home lived in the eighteenth century, to which he so obviously belonged, this kind of effortless brilliance would have made him Prime Minister before he was thirty (he managed it by sixty). As it was, ‘he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life’.

Sundays at Cannon Hall provided another stage for fun, flirtation and amusing conversation, and had become an institution amongst the theatrical circles in which Gerald moved. He was always the centre of attention, and Muriel the gracious and well-organised hostess. There were liveried maids (in grey and white alpaca uniforms) who acted as waitresses, serving champagne and delicacies to a large and varied mix of beautiful people. Angela enjoyed the relentless socialising. Daphne did not.

While Angela was beginning to grow up and learn about love, in rather limited circumstances, Daphne was reading voraciously (Oscar Wilde for a while was her favourite), still writing stories and thinking a lot. At the suggestion of Tod, she had discovered Katherine Mansfield. Daphne declared her short stories the best she had ever read, although they left her feeling melancholy, with ‘a kind of helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s lives’.

She identified with the author as a sensitive outsider, but the expectations and hypocrisy of the adult world alarmed and dismayed her, and sex seemed to be fraught with menace. To Tod, she wrote:

have you ever noticed, (I think its vile) that if one marries its considered awful if one does’nt do it thoroughly (you know what I mean) and yet if one does certain things without being married, its considered awful too. Surely that’s narrow-minded, and disgusting. Either the Act of – er-well, you know, is right or wrong. A wedding-ring cant change facts. An illegitimate child is looked on as a sort of ‘freak’ or ‘unnatural specimen’, whereas a child whose parents are married is wholesome and decent … Oh is’nt it all unwholesome?

She and Jeanne were exposed to another unwholesome aspect of adult life when, at the beginning of 1924, their father took them to Pentonville Prison. He was rehearsing Not in Our Stars, a play about a man involved in the murder of his romantic rival, and wished to investigate the experiences a convicted murderer would endure. It was just a year after a sensational trial and double execution of Edith Thompson and her young lover Frederick Bywaters for murdering Edith’s husband. Angela’s new friend Beverley Nichols was a young journalist on the case and he wrote about the awful tragedy that was played out to a packed house at the Old Bailey, and the heartbreak of the lovers’ letters read aloud in court. All of London was talking about it. The double executions were synchronised for 9 a.m. on 9 January 1923, Thompson’s in Holloway and Bywaters’s in Pentonville, the prisons just half a mile apart. Rumours of Edith’s grotesque last minutes on earth filled the newspapers.