Piffy, Bird & Bing Read online

  In fact, Angela came off worst of all, as, after Nanny left, she was special to nobody and was hungry for approval and affection. Very early she recognised that in her family she was considered plain and had therefore failed the most important test of womanhood. Her need for notice and love found expression in hero-worshipping men and women alike, so much so that her father teased her mercilessly for her swooning expression. ‘Puffin with her swollen look,’ he would say in a not entirely affectionate way. It was partly his manner, his need to be funny and make people laugh, but there was also an element in that phrase of exasperation that his eldest daughter was slightly plump, too earnest to be cute, and not the refined beauty she ought to have been.

  Daphne was clear-eyed about Gerald’s lack of sensitivity to his family, describing how at the theatre he was careful not to hurt anyone’s feelings but was ‘constantly tactless and continually thoughtless in private life’.14 From this jest about Angela’s looks, reiterated many times, came the family nickname that would accompany her through life, Puffin, Puff, Piffy. She tried to be a good sport and see her father’s comment as a trifle, something amusing, but years later was moved to write: ‘DON’T always tease your children when they fall in love, it can be dangerous’. Eventually Angela grew resigned to her family’s insensitivity, admitting bleakly that by the age of sixteen she knew, ‘if one couldn’t be the beauty one might as well be the butt’.15

  For good and ill, Daphne was the daughter most affected by Gerald’s peculiarly narcissistic character. She had been chosen as his favourite at a young age perhaps because she was the most beautiful, perhaps the one most closely resembling his longed-for son, perhaps because she reminded him of his father. She alone saw through his charming gay exterior to the uncertain, dark and flawed human being within, and yet still loved him; that might have been the most compelling reason of all. The historian A. L. Rowse, who became a good friend in Daphne’s middle age, suspected that her relationship with her father haunted her adult emotional life.16 What was problematic was not Daphne’s love for Gerald so much as his cloying yet controlling need of her.

  Her remarkable third novel, The Progress of Julius, written when she was only twenty-four, explores a pathological obsession of a father for his daughter. Julius has some of the overbearing yet mercurial qualities that made Gerald irresistible to his daughter. His intensity and high emotionalism (she feared he was always acting and so could never be sure what he really felt) made her own inchoate emotions oscillate between ecstasy and despair. In an extraordinary passage in the novel she conjures up something of this oppressive power that borders on psychological abuse:

  [She was] aware of Papa who watched her, Papa who smiled at her, Papa who played her on a thousand strings, she danced to his tune like a doll on wires – Papa who harped at her and would not let her be. He was cruel, he was relentless, he was like some oppressive, suffocating power that stifled her and could not be warded off … she was like a child stuffed with sweets cloying and rich; they were rammed down her throat and into her belly, filling her, exhausting her, making her a drum of excitement and anguish and emotion that was gripping in its savage intensity. It was too much for her, too strong.17

  Gerald’s adult neediness extended to her was far too weighty for her childlike, uncomprehending heart.

  Overarching it all was his manipulative favouritism that tainted all other relationships within the family. The close emotional connection that grew between them disturbed Daphne and inevitably unsettled her mother. Musing on why there was such a mutual wariness between her and Muriel, Daphne wondered, ‘could it be that, totally unconscious of the fact, she resented the ever-growing bond and affection between D and myself?’18 Again in Julius, she explores this tragic transference to melodramatic effect. Not only did the intense Electral bond between Daphne and her father distress her mother, it inevitably unbalanced the family dynamic between the sisters.

  It was Angela who felt most acutely the lack of admiration: the spotlight that might have fallen on her for a while, as the eldest, always seemed to swerve off towards Daphne. It was not her younger sister’s fault, Daphne did not seek it and in fact the limelight made her uneasy, but her beauty and detachment seemed to draw people’s attention in a way that Angela’s expressive eagerness to please did not.

  The huge painting of the three sisters, executed in 1918 by the society artist Frederic Whiting, and exhibited to acclaim, epitomised the shift in power between the sisters. Angela was fourteen and feeling her way tentatively towards a sense of herself in the world. Much as she had feared growing up, she was beginning to see there were some advantages. This painting captured her on the cusp of womanhood but reduced to a rather big child. She hated the pose she was expected to hold, unflatteringly dressed in baggy clothes, sitting uncomfortably with her rump to the viewer and all her weight on one hand. She resented how she was encumbered for all time with a shiny red nose, quite possibly the result of the crying fit when she had been told that she would have to spend the whole Sunday posing in Whiting’s studio. The unfairness of this representation of her she felt was made more stark by the way Daphne was portrayed. Placed apart from the undistinguished bundle of Jeanne and Angela and Brutus the dog, she stood as straight and noble as an arrow with a visionary spark in her eyes. Every time she saw the painting Angela was reminded of this memorial to her eclipse. ‘I realised I should be handed down to posterity with a flaming shining nose, and Daphne looking rather like a flaming shining Jeanne d’Arc.’19

  At about the time this group portrait was painted, Angela was ‘suicidally inclined for Love’ and her gaze fell on a young soldier who put up with her devotion, mailing her a box of chocolates from Paris that filled her with excitement. To Angela’s overactive imagination he was, ‘Apollo, Mars, God, Romance, IT’. On the one occasion she got to accompany him, Muriel insisted Daphne should go too. Their destination was the Military Tournament at Olympia in West London. In a fever of anticipation Angela carefully chose something grown-up to wear a pretty pink dress with a lowish neckline, but her mother immediately ordered her upstairs to change into a frock that matched the one Daphne was wearing. Her sister was still as slim as a sapling, and Angela felt humiliated, stuffed into the childish mauve dress that did not suit her, the linen too tight across the bust. Tears of frustration and disappointment welled in her eyes. ‘Daphne looked a dream as always, and by the time my swain had called to take us to Olympia I was red-nosed with heat, discomfort, mortification and a fit of the sulks.’20

  This god-like being was a young cadet who was training alongside her father. In what appeared to be an odd caprice, with more than an element of despair to it, Gerald had decided in the last year of the Great War to enlist in the Irish Guards. His restlessness and growing sense of futility, together with the long shadow of his hero-brother Guy, made him long to prove he was more than just the ephemeral entertainer. He was forty-five and had lived the last two decades of his life as a successful, pampered thespian, chauffeured around, clad in the most luxurious clothes and fed on the best foods and wine. Daphne understood his despair. ‘He was nothing but a mummer, a trickster, playing antics in some disguise before a crowd. All he had won was a cheap popularity, and what good was that to him or the world?’21 He had just pulled off one of his greatest theatrical successes, a new production of J. M. Barrie’s play Dear Brutus, where night after night he received the audience’s ovations. The play’s conceit – whether, if we could return to something deeply regretted in our past and choose a different path, it would change anything – suffused his thinking, for he always lived his character for the duration of a play. Would life have been more satisfactory if he had taken the more difficult road?

  There was a kind of bathetic heroism in Gerald’s turning his back on his glittering London life to go to training barracks in Bushey, where even the officers bawling at him were young enough to be his sons. Never the most physically or mentally robust of men, he had to submit to the gruelling training and
spartan conditions alongside boys who were straight out of school. Removed from home comforts and denied the reassuring balm of his wife’s and friends’ concern, he had only the rough camaraderie of men to sustain him. Muriel moved the whole household to Bushey to be close to him. Angela explained her mother’s blinkered focus on Gerald:

  My mother, for whom wars only meant parting her from her family (me at my school in Wimbledon, and now my father) one day met the famous actress and beauty Lily Elsie in Piccadilly and burst into tears with the remark, ‘Poor Gerald has gone to Bushey.’ Elsie’s husband was in the thick of the fighting but she was sympathetically full of horror for poor Gerald’s plight.22

  Although Muriel had done her best to remain close to him, Gerald could only escape infrequently to eat big teas surrounded once again by his womenfolk. Angela remembered how his face had ‘an abject hungry misery’.23 It was a nightmare from which he was luckily awoken by the Armistice. He could return home having not encountered any of the fighting, but perhaps feeling some kind of personal honour had been satisfied. The play he had left behind centred on two unhappy people, mired in misery, being given a second chance of a life different from the one each had chosen, but realising it was better to just get on and live. Perhaps Gerald returned to his life in the theatre relieved at the choices he had made, and ready for the next project.

  1918 was also the year when the girls’ patchy education was taken in hand by a dynamic new force. Miss Maud Waddell came into their lives to tutor them in every subject, although history was the universal favourite. Miss Waddell was quickly nicknamed Tod, as a partial rhyme on her surname, or a nod to Beatrix Potter’s Mr Tod, a wily, tweed-jacketed fox. Born in 1887, she was ten years younger than their mother and a completely different kind of woman. Miss Waddell was well educated, adventurous and independent minded, with a wealth of exotic stories of her past to tell. Before she ended up in Hampstead she had already tutored the grandson of Belgium’s Minister for Finance. She had enjoyed living with the family in the beautiful Château de la Fraineuse at Spa, inspired by Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles. The Kaiser then had appropriated it and had a bedroom for himself redecorated in pink silk.

  Tod became important to all the du Maurier girls, but particularly to eleven-year-old Daphne. She quickly recognised her as someone in whom she could trust and confide, a woman who filled part of the vacuum left by her mother’s emotional absence, but also a woman who responded to her intellectual curiosity and creative mind. Daphne liked to think of Tod as one of her heroines, Queen Elizabeth I. In an early letter she wrote to her:

  Divine Gloriana,

  Why look so coldly on your slave who adores you? Have you no commpasion on the billets written with the blood of my heart (jolly good).24

  Tod responded to this clever, imaginative child (so ill-schooled that her spelling and wayward punctuation kept Tod awake at night) and understood the yearning in Daphne for something beyond the ordinary: ‘That something that is somewhere, you know; you feel it and you miss it, and it beckons to you and you cant reach it. It is’nt Love I’m sure … I don’t think anyone can find it on this earth.’ This longing for the unattainable owed something perhaps to Barrie’s Neverland that entranced the sisters’ childhoods. Daphne told Tod she was the only person to whom she could express her confused feelings, having been silenced on the things that mattered most to her by her family’s mockery and lack of understanding. Although Angela, and occasionally Jeanne, wrote to Tod also, the only letters the governess kept were those written by Daphne, in what became a lifelong correspondence full of frankness and humour. Tod later told a reporter on the Australian Argus that Daphne was ‘the most beautiful human being I have ever seen’.25 An intelligent, feeling woman who never married, Tod was to love her all her life.

  Angela had endured one last experiment with formal schooling that had failed dismally. Gerald had accompanied his nephew Michael Llewelyn Davies to visit a friend of his, Eiluned Lewis, at Levana School in Wimbledon. Eiluned was a clever girl, four years older than Angela, who became a successful journalist, novelist and poet. Whether Gerald was impressed by her or the school, he determined to send Angela to the school as a boarder. Angela was fourteen and although she made some friends she was so desperately homesick she only lasted half a term, and was soon back at Cannon Hall. Tod then became responsible for educating all three girls.

  Although she would remain committed to the du Mauriers, Miss Waddell for a while had other adventures to pursue. Soon after her stint tutoring the sisters she headed off in 1923 to Constantinople to teach the Sultan’s son English. This was a fascinating time for an Englishwoman in Turkey, just after the last of the Allied troops had left Constantinople, having been in occupation since the end of the First World War. Tod lived in the magnificent Dolmabahçe Palace in great splendour but did not think much of the Turks themselves. ‘What an unprogressive, aggravating people they are,’ she told the same Australian reporter. She thought them a nation lost in passive contemplation and her no-nonsense Cumbrian self wanted to pinch them awake from their reveries.26 Maud Waddell then sailed for Australia in 1926, where her brilliant mathematician sister Winnie had emigrated, eventually rewarded with an MBE for her pioneering work establishing wild flower sanctuaries. For a while Maud thought she might stay, teaching in the Outback, but finding it ‘too rough and windy’27 returned to England. There, after more, but less exciting, adventures, she eventually ended up tutoring Daphne’s children in Cornwall at Menabilly.

  The du Maurier family’s move to Hampstead had been an emotional return for Gerald to the place of his childhood where he had been happiest. Restless and increasingly dissatisfied with his working life, and missing the close bond with parents and sisters, for all except May were now dead, he began to revisit the past, recalling his youth with fond nostalgia. He had always idealised his father George and the bohemian life he lived with family and artist friends, but now that he had returned to his father’s old stamping grounds the obsession with him grew. He shared his romantic reminiscences with his daughters, taking them to gaze at the old family home, New Grove House, where he had hoped to live with his own family but had had to settle for Cannon Hall instead. He would point out the studio window at which his father had once worked and then walk them up to Hampstead Heath to a twisted branch where he sat as a boy, imagining it was his armchair. The girls would climb in too, and think of their father as a boy. Then up the hill to Whitestone Pond where George du Maurier, weak-sighted and kind-hearted, had noticed a dog splashing about and plunged in, intent on rescue. But the dog was swimming not drowning. The girls then learnt how the great man, dripping wet and slightly foolish, was tipped by the dog’s owner for his trouble.

  As Gerald walked them through his romance of boyhood, his daughters grew more interested in the grandfather they had never known and who, in dying before Angela was born, had been ignorant even of their existence. They had seen the leather-bound copies of Punch, with George’s elegant witty drawings, and had not thought much about the artist who had made them; but through their father’s memories they began to discover a man who was important in their own stories, whose life belonged with theirs. His novels exerted the greatest imaginative pull, most importantly Peter Ibbetson, with its compelling central theme that people can exist in a world they had purposefully dreamed. They could meet others there, possessed also of the gift for ‘dreaming true’ that joined them in this extra dimension, brought into being through will and emotion. The love story between Peter and his childhood sweetheart, the Duchess of Towers, conducted in this dreamscape, freed from conventional restraints of time and space, fuelled the imaginations of his two elder granddaughters. It was a powerful idea that offered whatever the dreamer most desired: escape and adventure for Daphne; love and romance for Angela.

  At about the age of thirteen Daphne’s desire for escape from impending womanhood, and all the attendant embarrassments and constraints, caused her to dream up a boyish alter ego: Er
ic Avon. In real life she had been taken aside by Muriel and warned of the advent of menstruation, a rubicon that would unite her to her mother and the female half of experience and separate her, it seemed, from everything she valued and held dear. Nothing was explained to the horrified and bemused girl, only that she would bleed, and with it came confusing intimations of illness, incapacity, secrecy and shame. Just as Angela had been forbidden to mention the facts of life to her friends or younger sisters, so Daphne too was told not to discuss with anyone this looming threat to her freedom and integrity.

  Eric Avon sprang to her aid. He was the imaginary personification of the boy she should have been, the embodiment of uncomplicated male energy, the son for whom her father had longed. He was sporty and brave, captain of cricket at Rugby School, and his day of glory came each year at the imaginary cricket match between Rugby and Marlborough School, played out in the garden at Cannon Hall. Jeanne and her friend Nan were drawn into this fantasy. Renamed David and Dick, the Dampier brothers, they bowled and batted for Marlborough, the opposing team, and invariably lost to the one-man sporting hero, Daphne in her role as Eric Avon. Angela and Tod were roped in as spectators to clap politely from the sidelines.

  Daphne inhabited the persona of Eric Avon for more than two years. Only once she had turned fifteen (and Eric turned eighteen) did she have him play his last triumphant cricket match, for he would have to leave Rugby for Cambridge University the following autumn. Daphne walked into the lower part of the garden at Cannon Hall, scene of so many of Eric’s triumphs. ‘He wept. The moment of sadness was intolerable. Then someone from the house called “Daphne!” and it was all over. Eric Avon had left Rugby School for ever.’28 This had so much of the emotional force of Peter Pan, where Peter angrily repels any suggestion he might grow up and become human, the whole play suffused with sadness at what is lost when childhood is left behind.