Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ the girls play for her friends after lunch, and she refused to let them use sheet music, it all had to be from memory. This became a misery particularly for Angela who had to stumble through some standby like the Moonlight Sonata in front of a long-suffering audience, accompanied by her mother’s audible intakes of breath at every wrong note, of which there were many.

      She much preferred practising with their enthusiastic music mistress, who would come to the house and inspire Angela and Jeanne to play exciting duets, the Ride of the Valkyries being one memorable favourite. In fact her visits sparked both girls’ love of music. Angela’s love of opera and of Wagner began with these lessons.

      At sixteen, Angela had a good singing voice and dreamed of being an operatic diva. She had no ambitions to be an actress but longed to sing, and as nothing but the most romantic roles attracted her, she wanted to be a soprano. This proved to be difficult as she was naturally a good contralto, but Daddy was paying, so a succession of well-regarded singing teachers attempted to turn her into a less good mezzo-soprano and finally into a reedy excuse for a soprano. ‘My future at Covent Garden was soon doomed to a still-birth.’³⁷ This frustration of a musical career was a lasting regret to her but her love of music was to last a lifetime. Ballet too was a lasting pleasure, introduced to her when she was fifteen by one of the most beautiful women in England, Lady Diana Cooper, or Lady Diana Manners as she was then, who whisked her off to the Diaghilev season at the Alhambra, a spectacular Moorish-inspired theatre dominating the east side of Leicester Square. ‘I was her slave for life,’³⁸ was Angela’s characteristically effusive reaction to this thrilling experience.

      By 1921, Jeanne was becoming more than just her mother’s pet and Daphne’s willing sidekick in her make-believe worlds. She was not only developing into a talented artist and pianist, she was also growing surprisingly good at tennis, and would soon be entering tournaments. Photographs showed this pretty girl growing into a sturdy, strong-limbed youngster whom Daphne nicknamed ‘The Madam’. She wrote to Tod that Jeanne had grown upwards and outwards: ‘her legs resemble what a stout Glaxo baby may eventually grow into, and she will probably be ten feet each way! Her taste in literature takes after Angela, she has just finished “The Great Husband Hunt”!^fn1 which she gloated over.’³⁹ Jeanne retained for many years the alternative identity of David Dampier, schoolboy sports star, given to her by Daphne. Many years later her partner in life, Noël Welch, who knew all three grown-up sisters very well, commented that Jeanne, ‘the youngest, would have made the best boy … She has never got over not being able to lower a telescope from her eye with a suitably dramatic or casual remark, her feet apart, her square shoulders, so elegant on a horse, braced against the wind.’⁴⁰

      In another letter, Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as her youngest sister and was disconcerted that she felt bored with life before it had even begun. She was already writing a book about a boy called Maurice who suffered from her own sense of dislocation from humanity and who identifies with the freedom of the natural world, for trees and water and sky. The whole story is imbued with a Peter Pan-like longing for something unattainable. Even the father figure whom Maurice finds to console his widowed mother is an amalgamation of her own father and Barrie, a man who had never grown up.

      After four years of tutoring the du Maurier sisters, Tod had left for Constantinople at the end of 1922. In her reluctant progress to adulthood, Daphne especially missed her sympathetic and practical approach to life. Miss Vigo had replaced her and although she lacked Tod’s personality she was a good teacher, encouraging Angela and Daphne’s writing efforts and Jeanne’s drawing. Ever inventive, Daphne, as a Christmas present for Angela, created a magazine where all the stories, news, gossip, poems and articles were as if written by ‘Dogs of Our Acquaintance’. Angela remembered it all her life as a brilliant piece of work that anyone who loved dogs, and was prone to give them individual characters and voices, would appreciate. The girls were not educated in science and barely any mathematics, but their French was passable. They were keen readers, could play the piano, and knew how to behave in polite society; like well-bred girls of their time and class they were being schooled to become good wives to well-bred men who were wealthy enough to keep them in style. Their lives would be determined and their horizons described by the men whom they married. But little did their parents know that an inchoate rebellion was already stirring in their breasts for there was not much about a woman’s life in the first decades of the twentieth century to commend itself to them. Each sister would take her destiny in her own hands: none would become the exemplary wife that their mother had so gracefully embodied.

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      The Dancing Years

      I suppose we all led pretty empty lives of enjoyment, with snatches of good works to salve our consciences … I was amazed and fascinated by the days I’d led, hardly even a meal at home or an evening in, parties, parties, parties – always falling in love with this or that Tom, Dick and Harry.

      ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember

      THE DU MAURIER sisters grew up with the century. They were in their teens and early twenties during the 1920s when much of the nation entered a delayed adolescence. It was an era that became known as the Jazz Age, when this new music provided the soundtrack, its syncopated beat the tempo that sped the young from party to party on a febrile flight to nowhere in particular. Dancing became all the rage; dancefloors were rapidly laid in smart restaurants – the du Maurier family’s favourite, the Savoy, being the first to lead the way. The waltz and the foxtrot were replaced by the highly energetic Charleston and Black Bottom, an import from African-American culture and based on an earlier pimp’s dance, all of which brought to its English adherents a sense of their own exotic naughtiness.

      All this was a stark reaction to the general mood of the country. Having emerged from the Great War, Britain was stunned by grief, exhausted, broken-hearted and spiritually crushed by the scale and brutality of the slaughter of its young. More than three quarters of a million men, many straight from working the fields or not long out of school, had died. The sense of loss seemed almost insurmountable. Even the inspired idea of honouring all these dead by interring, with the greatest ceremony, the body of an unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in November 1920, could not staunch the mourning for what became known as the Lost Generation. The ramifications were far-reaching: emotional, economic, political and personal. In the 1921 census it was revealed that there were nearly two million more women than men. Few families escaped unscathed.

      Society was changed for ever, most notably perhaps the place of women, now that married women over thirty (and those on the Local Government Register) had gained the vote at the end of the war and Nancy Astor took her seat in Parliament in 1919 as the first woman MP. As the nation slowly began to rebuild, the wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George famously declared in a postwar electioneering speech that he wanted a land fit for heroes: some kind of hope for a new future began to bubble through the daily drabness. A group of well-off, aristocratic or otherwise well-connected young people reacted against the general mood of deprivation and worthy social responsibility and decided to throw a non-stop party.

      It was largely a privileged and metropolitan phenomenon. Young men and women came together for extravagant fancy dress balls, ‘stunt parties’, elaborate practical jokes and outrageous treasure hunts with flashy cars driven at breakneck speed through the midnight streets of London, their exquisite occupants seeking nonsensical clues and odd objects of desire. Everything was screamingly funny or pointlessly naughty. The heroes of the hour were not Lloyd George’s magnificent young servicemen, who had given their lives for their country’s freedoms, but epicene youths, posing as maharajas or fairies, drawling their witticisms to a beautifully dressed crowd of braying young. Closely shingled girls in diaphanous, jewelled dresses СКАЧАТЬ