Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ and walked to an armchair where she knelt and gave thanks. Jeanne was born on 27 March 1911, the day after Gerald’s thirty-eighth birthday. Perhaps by now he was resigned to the lack of a son, for Muriel, at thirty, seemed unwilling, or unable, to add to their family.

      Luckily, Jeanne too was a pretty baby who managed to keep her crowd-pleasing charms; according to Angela, between the ages of two and six, Jeanne was the loveliest child she had ever seen. This verdict was not just a big sister’s pride, for the infant won a baby beauty contest. Having given up work during her pregnancy, it was not perhaps surprising that with more energy and time for her children Muriel’s youngest became her favourite. Gerald’s energies too had shifted. His career had been given greater propulsion when in 1910 he became an actor-manager by joining with partner Frank Curzon to manage Wyndham’s Theatre, in London’s West End. Although the current play there, Mr Jarvis, was a flop he was to have many more successes than failures and the family’s income and consequent standard of living rose dramatically.

      The girls’ childhoods were lastingly vivid to them, revisited often in memory and in the atmospheric energy of Angela’s and Daphne’s fiction. Their experiences, however, were very different. Angela was romantic and theatrical and easily gulled. Daphne was critical, detached and distrustful, even from young, of some of the stories told by the adults who cared for them. Angela was convinced that Father Christmas was real and, overcome with excitement, had swept the lowest curtsey possible when, aged seven, she came across an actor friend of her father’s in full fig of snowy beard, buckled red tunic and a throaty Yo ho ho. She was twelve when a friend’s insistence that the philanthropic old gent did not exist sent her to her mother in panic, certain she would be reassured: ‘When poor Mummie apologised and said, “I’m sorry darling, I’m afraid there isn’t,” [it] knocked the bottom out of childhood. With that bit of news went a bit of one’s trust.’ It was remarkable that she had maintained her belief almost into adolescence, testament to their isolation from other children, but also to Angela’s resolute romanticism and childlike sense of wonder.

      The maintaining of childish innocence, even ignorance, was positively encouraged by their father who loved having his family around him and dreaded his children growing up. Through his profession he conjured the theatrical template for Captain Hook, but in life he was a true Peter Pan, ever youthful, full of tricks; ‘gay, innocent and heartless’⁷ as the boy who was afraid to grow up. Nowhere was this enforced innocence more pernicious in its effects than in the area of sex. Angela was told some fantastical story of where babies come from involving angels descending from the sky bearing fluffy bundles; a common enough deception at the time, but one that the highly emotional Angela would take to heart. When she was enlightened with the real truth in graphic detail by a ‘Miss Know All’, she was disgusted. ‘My father would never do such a thing,’ Angela declared in alarm. But worse than the crude explanation was the realisation that she had been lied to by the people she trusted most.

      The twelve-year-old worked out that the reason for these lies was ‘because the truth was so HORRIBLE that they couldn’t bear to tell it to me’. Inevitably, the parents got to hear of the schoolgirl chatter and Angela, somehow singled out as the source of this taboo revelation, and overcome with fear and shame, faced her appalled mother. Muriel ‘harangued [her] like the devil for having learned the truth’,⁸ and histrionically declared she could never trust her daughter again. Angela’s anger and dismay were still alive three and a half decades later when she wrote in her memoir how it was inevitable that she concluded, ‘“all that” [sexual intercourse] was horrible, unnatural, repulsive, disgusting and ugly’.⁹ It came close to blighting her emotional future, she explained; her youth, her whole life even, ‘came near to ruin’,¹⁰ through this particular piece of evasion and the shame-filled aftermath.

      Daphne was never so blindly trusting of those closest to her. Nor was she ever as naïve. When she was six, and Angela nine, she saw through Nanny’s pretence that there were fairies on the lawn who made the fairy-ring of flowers and wrote little notes addressed to both girls by name in tiny fairy writing:

      Angela, eyes wide open in wonder, smiled delightedly. I stared at the circle. I must pretend to be pleased too, but the trouble was I did not believe in them … ‘They [the adults] wrote it themselves,’ I said after we got back.

      ‘They wouldn’t! Of course it was real.’ Angela was indignant.

      I shook my head. ‘It’s the sort of thing grown-ups do.’¹¹

      All three du Maurier sisters were taken to the theatre from babyhood, to proper adult plays in which their father starred. They were treated by the cast and the theatre staff as special mascots: the glamour of the performance and the excitement when the lights went down deeply impressed these little girls and the memory stayed with them for life. Only once did Angela go as a small child to a pantomime, but she was so horrified by the harlequinade at the end – ‘something about a sausage shocked me at four’¹² – that she would not subject herself to another until she was nearly grown up.

      The girls regularly saw their father and mother dress up, put on make-up and become other people. It was the most natural thing to do. They visited Gerald in his dressing room after performances to find him high with adrenaline, charismatic, laughing and talking animatedly to the hordes of friends and acquaintances that always surrounded him, wiping the greasepaint off his face to return in stages to a heightened version of himself. It was thrilling and confusing and somehow conspiratorial, this almost magical transformation. Most of the family friends were also actors and actresses and they too practised this occult art. They seemed to live more intensely, their lives shiny with colour and light but speeded up, and soon over. The excitement fuelled childish imaginations and the glamour and theatricality of their existence blurred the boundaries between truth and fantasy. But if childhood certainties were proved no longer safe, what other truths would disappear as the lights went up?

      For Daphne, the fantasy world she inhabited was created by her own imagination, a refuge from a world in which she felt alien and adrift. She remembered that at only five years old, after being bullied in nearby Park Square Gardens by a seven-year-old called John Poynton, she came to the cheerless realisation that everyone was ultimately alone. From very young, feelings of powerlessness and being misunderstood made her long to be a boy and therefore stronger, braver, and more important – not this outer, more vulnerable, female self. She discovered that she, like her parents, could dress up and pretend to be someone else, but for her it was a private thing, a protection from a real world in which she was a stranger. Assuming the persona of another made it less painful when surrounded by unknown adults and their expectations. It ‘stopped the feeling of panic when visitors came’.¹³

      Although Angela recalled her first eight years as being blissfully happy in the secure love and care of Nanny, ‘all my very happy early childhood can be laid at [her] door’,¹⁴ this was brought to a traumatic halt when, completely without warning or explanation, Angela saw this precious mother figure leave the house never to return. ‘I can see Nanny now,’ she wrote at nearly fifty, ‘going down the top flight of stairs and carefully shutting the gate behind her, tears pouring down her face, and only then myself being told she was going for ever.’ Eight-year-old Angela’s cheerful spirits were replaced with ‘a horrible sense of loneliness’.¹⁵ Daphne remembered this unhappy incident too but with much greater detachment: she was puzzled to see Nanny in tears because surely grown-ups don’t cry. Already, at five, she was aware that adults should never lose their dignity and she herself would very rarely cry, even as a child.

      Sadly grown-ups did cry. Tragedies befell the du Maurier family during the earliest years of the girls’ childhoods and it shadowed their father’s careless gaiety. First, Uncle Arthur Llewelyn Davies, married to their beautiful and gentle Aunt Sylvia, died after a long battle with a painful and disfiguring cancer of the jaw. He was only forty-four and his death in 1907, the year Daphne was born, left his wife with СКАЧАТЬ