Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ