Daphne Du Maurier, page 50
At the moment, there is a brief plan that Peter may bring Kits here for his Long Leave, and I come up with them (July 15th – Tessa’s birthday – perhaps Moper go to her for it, and see Paul?) and then I bring Moper down her again for anniversary, if he is well enough to come. Because for all our sakes, we must know that dark side, which I don’t think he has shown to– –, might conceivably come up if he comes here and sees Sixpence, with me here. Something berserk might snap, with that revolver, and that Tommy gun, and the arrows. I am not talking madly. I know. And I shall have to discuss this with doctors. Meanwhile, Gran, whom I thought was dying, is gradually better, and so dependent on me that it’s torture, so I can’t just chuck her to Ferryside, but must see that it’s done in the right way. Angela still nervy, but her broadcast has given her confidence. Tod still a major problem, but I may learn how to deal with that one too. No more for the moment, too absolutely spent. I write to you both because I think you both understand.
Lots of love,
Bing
* * *
fn1 Monty Baker-Munton.
fn2 Tommy, Daphne’s husband.
fn3 Daphne’s nickname.
fn4 This could be misunderstood: Daphne is referring to Philip’s boyish affection and hero worship of his cousin Ambrose, who was modelled on Nelson Doubleday, without the slightest suggestion of any sexual undertone. She identified in My Cousin Rachel with Philip, cousin of an older man who died leaving a widow about whom he had mixed feelings. But Philip had no mixed feelings about Ambrose, any more than Daphne had about Nelson.
fn5 Kits, Daphne’s son.
fn6 Name of Tommy’s mistress.
fn7 Code for making love.
fn8 Name of Tommy’s boat.
fn9 Name of Tommy’s mistress.
fn10 Code name for girl in Fowey with whom Daphne believed her husband to be having an affair.
Works of Daphne du Maurier (with first publication)
The Loving Spirit, Heinemann, 1931.
I’ll Never Be Young Again, Heinemann, 1932.
The Progress of Julius, Heinemann, 1933.
Gerald: A Portrait, Gollancz, 1934.
Jamaica Inn, Gollancz, 1936.
The Du Mauriers, Gollancz, 1937.
Rebecca, Gollancz, 1938.
Rebecca (play), Gollancz, 1939.
Come Wind, Come Weather, Heinemann, 1940.
Frenchman’s Creek, Gollancz, 1941.
Hungry Hill, Gollancz, 1943.
The Years Between, Gollancz, 1945.
The King’s General, Gollancz, 1946.
September Tide, Gollancz, 1949.
The Parasites, Gollancz, 1949.
The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters, 1860–1867 (ed.), Peter Davies, 1951.
My Cousin Rachel, Gollancz, 1951.
The Apple Tree, Gollancz, 1952.
Happy Christmas, Todd, 1953.
Mary Anne, Gollancz, 1954.
Early Stories, Todd, 1955.
The Scapegoat, Gollancz, 1957.
The Breaking Point, Gollancz, 1959.
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, Gollancz, 1960.
Castle Dor, J. M. Dent, 1962.
The Glass-Blowers, Gollancz, 1963.
The Flight of the Falcon, Gollancz, 1965.
Vanishing Cornwall, Gollancz, 1967.
The House on the Strand, Gollancz, 1969.
Not After Midnight, Gollancz, 1971.
Rule Britannia, Gollancz, 1972.
Golden Lads: Anthony Bacon, Francis and their Friends, Gollancz, 1975.
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, his Rise and Fall, Gollancz, 1976.
Echoes from the Macabre, Gollancz, 1976.
Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, Gollancz, 1977.
The Rendezvous and Other Stories, Gollancz, 1980.
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, Gollancz, 1981.
Classics of the Macabre, Gollancz, 1987.
Notes and References
CHAPTER ONE
1 There is an account of these liaisons in Gerald, Daphne’s biography of her father (Gollancz, 1934), and in Gerald du Maurier by James Harding (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989).
2 Arthur Llewelyn Davies was the second son of John Llewelyn Davies, the brilliant scholar who was Honorary Chaplain to the Queen and a radical who supported women’s suffrage. His sister Emily founded Girton College, and his daughter Margaret was a co-founder of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Arthur was called to the bar in 1891, aged twenty-eight, and married Sylvia du Maurier – the union of two very different families.
3 The games Gerald played with his daughters are well documented in Daphne’s autobiography Growing Pains (Gollancz, 1977), and in Angela’s It’s Only the Sister (Peter Davies, 1976).
4 The first house in Hampstead lived in by the du Mauriers was 4 Holly Mount, then they moved to Gangmoor House, facing Whitestone Pond on the summit of Hampstead Hill; a year later, in 1870, they settled at 27 Church Row (where Gerald was born in 1873) and from there went to New Grove House, where they stayed twenty-one years.
5 Mrs Beaumont also at one time wrote articles on household and domestic subjects for The Bystander, the magazine edited by her son.
6 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett, second daughter of Ellen Doubleday), 7 October 1948.
7 Gerald himself finally volunteered, in 1918, at the age of forty-five, and was accepted by the Irish Guards. He was a disastrous soldier (amusingly described in Gerald – see note 1 above) and was luckily still being trained when the Armistice was declared.
8 There is no date on this poem, but it is likely it was written around 1920.
9 There is a description of ‘Eric Avon’ in Growing Pains (see note 3 above). Daphne claimed there were ‘no psychological depths’ to this invented character, who was Captain of Cricket at Rugby and shone at everything. She played the Eric Avon character in games until she was fifteen.
10 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, 10 December 1947, quoted more extensively in Chapter Fourteen.
11 Maud Waddell’s surname, with the emphasis on the first syllable, was pronounced by the du Mauriers as ‘Waddle’. This made them think of a waddling walk, which in turn led to the thought of toddling and toddle, and was shortened to Tod: a typically convoluted way of bestowing nicknames.
12 Frederick Lonsdale was the successful playwright of the 1920s and early 1930s. He met Gerald in 1904 and they were friends from then onwards. The two of them worked many times together and used to sit up all night smoking, drinking and playing cards. There is an entertaining description of the du Maurier and Lonsdale families holidaying together in Frances Donaldson’s biography of her father, Freddy Lonsdale (Heinemann, 1957).
13 Tod was an accomplished painter of watercolours. When she decided she hated Australia, she paid for her passage home, first-class, by selling her paintings. She was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society and also the Société des Artistes and had her work exhibited in both London and Paris.
14 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett – see note 6 above), 23 August 1949.
15 Daphne considered that J. M. Barrie understood Gerald better than anyone else and that this understanding went into the creation of the part of Will Dearth in Dear Brutus. (Recording, ‘Portrait of Gerald’, made for the centenary of Gerald’s birth in 1973, BBC Sound Archives.)
CHAPTER TWO
1 Patricia Hastings, who was at Camposena with Daphne, has provided me with information about the school.
2 To describe a man as ‘dago-like’ shows Daphne as a creature of her class and time, and was not seen by her as derogatory, though it undoubtedly was. In a similar way she refers to Jews and Negroes without stopping to think about the terms she uses. This could be interpreted as being antisemitic or anti-black, but, in fact, she was neither. Later in life she was tremendously pro-Israel and also strongly against apartheid, and signed petitions to that effect.
3 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, December 1947.
4 Gerald du Maurier hated homosexuality, and when The Vortex was staged in 1924, which dealt not with homosexuality but with an ambiguous mother-son relationship, he used it to protest against the theatre becoming besmirched with ‘filth’. The play’s author, Noël Coward, replied with a spirited defence, and though this did not change Gerald’s mind, the two became, if not friends, at least tolerant of each other.
5 Letter to Ellen Doubleday (see note 3 above).
6 Daphne always had dogs from now onwards, all of them West Highland terriers (except Bingo, half-Spaniel half-Sheepdog). There was Mouse, Moray and Bibby, whom she had for ten years each, and finally Mac and Ken, who survived her. She was devoted to her dogs, lavishing affection upon them, but disciplined them very strictly.
7 A board game, rather like ludo.
CHAPTER THREE
1 There is a description of going to Cornwall as a child in the prologue to Vanishing Cornwall (Gollancz, 1967).
2 Daphne records in her memoir Growing Pains that she had to be led from her seat in tears after watching Gerald in Dear Brutus.
3 Recorded by Angela du Maurier in her first volume of autobiography, Old Maids Remember (1966), where she describes her father as a ‘mixture of Mr Barrett and a schoolboy brother’ and reflects that his conversation with his daughters was often ‘strangely bawdy’.
4 Described by A. L. Rowse in Quiller-Couch: A Portrait of ‘Q’ (Methuen, 1988).
5 Daphne told her son this.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 The best description of Daphne finding Menabilly is given by her in an article called ‘The House of Secrets’, written in 1946, for a book entitled Countryside Character. This later appeared in The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories (Gollancz, 1981).
2 Gerald’s first film was Escape (1930), made on Dartmoor, which proved a gruelling experience. He followed this with Lord Camber’s Ladies (1932), made by Alfred Hitchcock, in which he starred with Gertrude Lawrence. The money he earned got him out of financial difficulties but, compared to the income from lending his name to a brand of cigarettes – ‘Du Maurier cork-tipped’ – it was extremely hard work and he detested the experience.
3 For Carol Reed’s career see The Man Between, a biography by Nicholas Wapshott (Chatto & Windus, 1990).
4 Daphne’s real feelings towards her mother are given in a letter to Ellen Doubleday, January 1948, quoted at length in Chapter Fourteen.
5 The trip with Otto Kahn is described in Growing Pains. Daphne tells, with great relish, how she avoided her host’s unwelcome attentions by stripping her clothes off and diving naked into the water. Later, he offered to buy her a fur coat, but she asked for a dagger instead.
6 Clara Vyvyan was forty-five when Daphne, aged twenty-three, met her. Her husband, Sir Courtenay, was still alive and they were both great gardeners. Four years previously she and a friend, with two Indian guides, crossed the divide from Canada to Alaska, collecting and pressing wild flowers for Kew Gardens.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Mentioned in Growing Pains.
2 Daphne uses this simile – that sex is like a game of tennis – frequently in her correspondence.
3 The first print-run for The Loving Spirit was 2,300 and the advance £75; for I’ll Never Be Young Again it was 2,000, and the advance £125; and for The Progress of Julius, the last novel published by Heinemann, 4,000, with the same advance.
4 Angela’s The Little Less, dealing with a lesbian friendship, was turned down. It was eventually published in 1941.
5 Both Daphne (in Gerald) and Angela (in her two volumes of autobiography) describe scenes with Gerald near to the kind portrayed in The Progress of Julius.
CHAPTER SIX
1 Why a boy named Frederick was called ‘Tommy’ nobody can now remember, but he was called ‘Boy’ in the army – ‘the boy Browning’ – to distinguish him from his father, who was also serving in 1916. After his father died, ‘Boy’ stuck, and those who did not know assumed Browning was called this because of his extremely youthful appearance well into middle age.
2 Tommy became very attached, not just to George (who was best man at his wedding), but to the entire Hunkin family. He backed George Hunkin’s boatyard and later, with Daphne, bought it. George was a regular visitor to tea later on, and his wife’s sister, Mrs Hancock, known as ‘Hanks’, was the Brownings’ cook in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
3 Volumes I and II of Lt.-Col. Sir Frederick Ponsonby’s The Grenadier Guards in the Great War 1914–1918 has details of Tommy’s battalion’s action.
4 Mr Hubert Browning, Tommy’s cousin, described this incident to me in a letter.
5 Laila Spence made available to me a copy of Guy Westmacott’s memoir, privately printed in 1979.
6 Argument still rages among the contemporaries of both Tommy and Jan over who broke off the engagement. I am inclined to believe those who say that Tommy did.
7 Daphne describes how she and Tommy met in Growing Pains. Mrs Hunkin informed her that Major Browning wished to meet her and later she brought Daphne a note. It said their fathers were once ‘fellow members of the Garrick Club’ and that, since he heard she was recovering from an appendix operation, he would like to take her sailing. She accepted.
8 Leo Walmsley (1892–1966) was best known in the 1930s for his autobiographical novels. Three Fevers (1932) was greatly admired by Daphne and she wrote to Tod that she wished she could write like Walmsley. He lived in a derelict army hut, overlooking a creek of the River Fowey, with a young actress who later became his second wife.
9 Tommy reminded Daphne of this in a letter written on their thirteenth wedding anniversary, quoted in Chapter Twelve.
10 Angela’s nickname was Puff, shortened from Puffin, and Jeanne’s was Queenie. Daphne herself was known as Bing, and later also sometimes as Track, and Tray.
11 ‘Chink’ was a controversial figure in the army during the Second World War, when he felt he was made a scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the Eighth Army in the Desert Campaign. He was a friend of Ernest Hemingway and was reputed to be the prototype for the hero in Across the River and Into the Trees. He was demoted in 1943, and afterwards allowed his home to be used as an IRA training ground. See Chink – a biography by Lavinia Greacen (Macmillan, 1989).
12 It was thought at the time by fellow officers in the Grenadier Guards that Tommy had, in marrying an actor’s daughter, rather let the regiment down. Lord Carrington remembers his father being disgusted with those who said so.
13 Lt.-Col. Frederick Henry Browning CBE died in 1929 at the age of fifty-nine. He was a great sportsman – rackets and cricket – at Oxford, and after taking his degree went into business, becoming chairman of Twiss, Browning and Hallowes. He was on the board of the Savoy Hotel. During the First World War he worked in Intelligence and was afterwards attached to the Foreign Office for services at the Versailles peace conference. He was an immensely popular man, though rather overbearing in his behaviour to his gentle wife Nancy.
14 Why there were no Brownings at this unconventional wedding nobody knows. Tommy’s mother was neither abroad nor ill at the time and neither was Grace, his older sister. He was very fond of both his mother and sister and of his cousins, which makes their absence strange. Since both Mrs Browning and Grace liked Daphne and were delighted at the marriage, their absence was certainly not a mark of their disapproval.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 ‘Daddy’s old horrors’ can only be a reference to Gerald’s drinking. Daphne quotes him in Gerald as saying, ‘Too many whisky and sodas, that’s my trouble. They give me the horrors.’ How serious his drinking was, and whether it continued all his life, she does not say. Whatever the truth, his ‘horrors’ never prevented him working, and he never drank before a performance. The form the ‘horrors’ took was that ‘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’ and he had stopped hearing voices in his head. (Gerald.)
2 The name ‘Tessa’ came from Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, and not, as sometimes believed, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
3 Grace Browning, sixteen months older than her brother, never married. She was an indefatigable worker for the Girl Guide movement (she was Commissioner for Westminster), and Chairman of the National Association of Training Corps for Girls, and was awarded the OBE in recognition of her work for this organization.
4 It was a surprise to Daphne’s children to discover that she had ever driven after her marriage. They had assumed that their father, who adored his cars, would not let her drive.
5 Letter to Foy Quiller-Couch, 14 April 1934.
6 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett), 12 January 1949.
7 Victor Gollancz to Daphne, 15 March 1961.
8 For accounts of Victor Gollancz’s life and work see Victor Gollancz by Ruth Dudley Edwards (Gollancz, 1987), and Story of a Publishing House: Gollancz 1928–1978 (Gollancz, 1978) by Sheila Hodges (née Bush), Victor Gollancz’s secretary, who became Daphne’s editor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Jamaica Inn is the only one of Daphne’s books for which there is no record of the first print-run. The production book covering 1936 is missing from the Gollancz files.
2 Not only did Daphne never sew, she also was proud to tell her daughters that she had never even lifted an iron. Their domestic skills were a constant source of amazement to her.
3 Oscar Yerburgh, whose stepfather was sent to Alexandria to command the Coldstream Guards, lived in the house after the Brownings left. He and his family ‘adored the lovely house and garden’ and thought Hassan ‘gracious, tactful and silent-moving’.
4 Queen Anne’s Mansions was a block of flats in Queen Anne’s Gate, off Petty France, St James’s, where flats could be rented by the week or month.
