Читать книгу Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters - Jane Dunn - Страница 12

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 joined in the fun, pursuing policemen’s helmets or some other trophy, before speeding away to breakfast on quails’ eggs and caviar, champagne and cake.

This was a highly visible group that intersected with the du Mauriers’ theatrical milieu, with Angela on the verge of being carefully launched on a world that seemed half-crazy. One of the revellers, and barely a year older than Angela, was Evelyn Waugh. He famously satirised this period of relentless futility and emotional dead-ends in his novel Vile Bodies:

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …¹

The popular press was also hungry for distraction and avidly followed the antics of this gilded youth, reporting in middle-class papers such as the Daily Mail and Evening Standard activities that made Bertie Wooster and the Drones look positively intellectual and patrician. Journalists coined a term for this group of gorgeous wastrels: they were the Bright Young Things, and by breathlessly recording every move in their newspapers, from the scandalous to the banal, they initiated modern celebrity culture. The Bright Young Things were delighted with this newfound fame based on nothing more than being fabulous. They courted the publicity, dashing for the papers each morning and counting how many photographs or news flashes they could find in the accommodating press.

Among this group exaggeratedly camp behaviour became the norm, and male homosexuality, at the time illegal and socially suicidal, was accepted, its mores copied and celebrated. Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Stephen Tennant, Brian Howard and Beverley Nichols were amongst the more flamboyant and it was only their influential connections that protected them from the dangers of prosecution and ostracism by mainstream society. Lesbians too were suddenly fashionable and famous comedy revue acts like Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney were extremely popular and welcomed into the boisterous parties thrown by these giddy young. Norah played the piano and sang in a sweet girlish voice while Gwen, with circular horn-rimmed glasses and a cello between her knees, played the fool with her comedy basso profundo voice. The bisexual American actress/phenomenon Tallulah Bankhead and Radclyffe Hall, known as John, were part of these artistic social sets. Severely cropped hair, masculine attire, male nicknames and a swaggering culture of smoking, drinking and drug-taking became daringly chic.

The blurring of gender and flaunting of an exaggeratedly theatrical style caused great unease as social norms appeared to break down. A popular song of the 1920s sung by, amongst others, Gwen Farrar, was called Masculine Women, Feminine Men:

Hey, Hey women are going mad today

Hey, Hey fellers are just as bad I’ll say,

Masculine Women, Feminine Men

Which is the rooster, which is the hen,

It’s hard to tell ’em apart today? And SAY

Auntie is smoking, rolling her own

Uncle is always buying cologne …

You go and give your girl a kiss in the hall

But instead you find you’re kissing her brother, Paul

And so it continued, with the suggestive frisson of what was still considered by the law, and society at large, to be aberrant behaviour.

The richer or more famous you were the easier it was to express such freedoms. Amongst this social group, largely centred on London, the 1920s became notorious for its subversive energy and flair, for freedom from the social constraints of the previous generations and for a feverish pursuit of pleasure that loosened rigid hierarchies of class and behaviour. The anarchic spirit of Peter Pan presided over the age in the irrepressible energy and rejection of responsibility, unlike the elder brothers who had marched so tragically to war. The newspapers built a picture of celebrity idlers dancing their lives away, when not otherwise engaged in various amoral pursuits.

The gossip of drug-taking and heterosexual promiscuity, however, was much exaggerated. Given that many of these young men were only just out of all-male public schools and universities with drinking clubs like the Oxford Hypocrites Club that lived by the unwritten law that ‘gentlemen may prance but not dance’, and that young women were mindful of their marriage prospects, it was not surprising that both were still sexually shy in each other’s company. Nevertheless, the gossip appalled the mothers of well-brought-up girls – and none more than the du Maurier parents who watched as their two elder daughters entered the dubious social fray.

Before Angela was let loose, but in a very controlled way, she had to ‘finish’ her education in Paris. When she was nearly eighteen she and Betty Hicks, the daughter of the actor Seymour Hicks and his actress wife Ellaline Terriss, were sent to the smartest and most famous finishing school, situated close to the Eiffel Tower and run by the three unmarried Ozanne sisters, daughters of a Protestant minister. Angela had known Betty since she was fourteen and would come to consider her ‘my extra sister’;² they would remain close friends for life. They shared similar upbringings: both were daughters of actress mothers, celebrated for their beauty, and ambitious actor-manager fathers, and both girls were made to feel they were plain and failed to live up to their parents’ high aesthetic expectations.

After a bout of flu, Angela arrived a little late in January 1922 full of excitement at the idea of being in Paris, but once again poleaxed by homesickness. Betty had been a boarder at Roedean School and was used to being away and consequently found the regime free and easy in comparison. Angela, horrified by the rules and regulations, thought it more like a prison. A wide range of rich and glamorous young women passed through the doors of what was a strictly run establishment more concerned with culture than education. Angela and Bet were slightly disconcerted to overhear themselves described in hushed tones by one of the Mesdemoiselles Ozanne as filles d’artistes and rather patronisingly commended for being surprisingly well brought up. Angela felt she learned little; in fact her French, which under Tod’s tuition had progressed quite well, actually deteriorated.

Nancy Cunard, who had attended the Ozanne school a few years before, bitterly complained that the lessons were almost infantile and she loathed the dull, heavily chaperoned outings to churches and museums. But her visits to the Opéra and the discovery of César Franck’s music saved her sanity. Angela’s love of music was nurtured by the richness of Parisian culture but her singing and piano teachers crushed the life out of her dreams of performance. Her voice training was put in the fiercely competent hands of Gabrielle Ritter-Ciampi, a famous lyric soprano who, in her mid-thirties, was still in her prime with many performances before her. She declared herself initially quite impressed with Angela’s voice but her rigorous demands and tempestuous response to any slackness or stumble – she once flung across the room a small bunch of violets Angela had brought her – destroyed her pupil’s fragile confidence.

The eldest du Maurier daughter was not a fighter. Her sheltered and genteel education had not taught her resilience. ‘I have to be encouraged; whether over a short story, a song, a love affair or the receipt of a bunch of flowers.’ If Angela’s voice wobbled over the middle C, Madame ‘behaved as though the Huns were at the gates of Paris, and oneself just the most imbecile of an entirely imbecile race’.³ This was too much for a student who had offered her heart in her singing and now quivering, tearfully excused herself from any further training.

Her natural exuberance and pleasure in playing the piano was similarly extinguished by an unimaginative and overambitious piano teacher, who declared that her knuckles were out of joint, her hands lacked the right tension and poise, and she was forced to spend the next term doing remedial finger exercises on the lid of a closed piano. She felt both these teachers in their heavy-handed ways had silenced her natural expression and joy through music. ‘I would liken it to a stoppage of all private enterprise of the soul.’⁴

Angela’s sentimental nature found outlet, however, in crushes on other girls. The highly attractive Ozanne sisters, vivacious and beautifully dressed, and with the added frisson of authority, were also a natural focus for girls seeking favour, attention and love. This experience of attraction between girls and the need for affection from charismatic women may well have set her thinking about the radical theme of the first novel she was to write. After rereading her diaries from this time, she went to great trouble in a memoir to defend the dawning erotic feelings of young women in institutions:

it’s such an entirely natural thing, this ‘falling’ for older girls and mistresses, that I cannot think why there is always such a song and dance made when novels deal with the subject. Victorian adults put their heads together and mutter ‘Unhealthy’; what is there unhealthy in putting someone on a pedestal and giving them violets? Or hoping – in a burst of homesickness – to be kissed goodnight?⁵

Although Angela would always appreciate the beauty and fascination of Paris, her unhappiness during two terms at school there clouded her feelings for the city. She never recaptured the rapture that Daphne, for instance, never lost. But then Daphne enjoyed a seminal experience and successfully established herself as the centre of attention when it came to her ‘finishing’, three years later. Angela’s confused emotions and homesickness were slightly relieved, however, by the arrival in March 1922 of her family, who whisked her off on holiday with them to Algiers, and then on to the South of France.

Daphne was almost fifteen and fell for Paris in a big way. She wrote to Tod, ‘I adored [all the sights] and loved Paris. You don’t know how I long to have a good talk with you and pour out everything. I never tell anyone anything and there is no one to turn to.’⁶ Gerald had been knighted in the New Year’s Honours and this was their first holiday as Sir Gerald and Lady du Maurier. They travelled in style, or as Angela remarked, ‘en prince’. They were due to be away from England for seven weeks and in their party was not just the family of five but Aunt Billy, Gerald’s secretary, as well as two of his theatrical pals, the actor Ronald Squire and playwright E. V. Esmond, invited as the entertainment.

They travelled by rail and Billy had booked a fleet of cabins for their use. All Gerald’s needs were accommodated, his clothes and brushes and potions all set in place, every eventuality catered for. When it came to holidays he was difficult to please as he complained he would rather be at Cannon Hall or in his favourite club, the Garrick, where he would always find his friends offering admiration and bonhomie. If anything did not meet his approval he would cast a stricken look at Billy, ‘and soon some wretched manager bowed to the knees with grief would emerge and some Rajah would be turned from comfort and ourselves installed, and – “Send the chap a case of cigars, Billy darling,” Daddy would remark.’⁷ His mercurial emotions and lurking dissatisfaction made everyone rather tense and edgy, and keen to keep him happy if they wanted the holiday to continue, as he seemed to be always on the verge of flight.

Algiers was the most exotic place yet for a du Maurier family holiday. Settled into the Hotel Mustapha St George, the girls were excited by this assault on the senses. Daphne wrote to Tod, displaying her cavalier approach to spelling, ‘lovely hotel, beautiful gardens. Full of luxerious flowers and orange trees.’⁸ She was fascinated by the Arab quarter, the Moorish buildings, the carpet stalls and the noisy bartering over every transaction. Jeanne, not yet eleven, was still in her tomboy stage but perhaps her painterly eye was stimulated by the patterns of crimson madder, yellow ochre and soft turquoise that made the street and its inhabitants so vivid. Angela was more in the mood for love. She had just read The Garden of Allah, an atmospheric and intense romance by Robert Smythe Hichens where an unconventional Englishwoman (Domini) and an inscrutable stranger (Boris) meet and fall in love at an oasis in the desert. Angela thought it the greatest book ever written. Desert erotica was becoming all the rage since Valentino’s smouldering portrayal of The Sheik in the silent movie sensation of the previous year, and young women were full of romance about the Orient. Angela described herself at the time as, ‘eighteen, rather plump, hair just up (and in consequence always falling down), desperately serious and very much under the influence of [the novel]. I was ready to find a Boris under any palm tree.’⁹ Soon after their arrival their paths crossed with the talented Mr Pertwee.

Roland Pertwee was a thirty-six-year-old actor, artist, playwright and producer. He had booked into the hotel seeking distraction from the shock of being dumped by his wife, and mother of their two young sons, for a wild Russo-French soldier, whom he had befriended and was half in love with himself. His pain had been slightly mollified by the payment of a remarkable £2,000 for his first serial to be published by The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most widely circulated weekly, famous for its Norman Rockwell covers.

Angela immediately recognised her Boris. He, however, was not inhabiting the same novel and failed to recognise the femme fatale she hoped to be. ‘Very different [the sisters] were from each other,’ Roland noted in his memoir. ‘Angela was admittedly romantic. Daphne practical, observant and a shade cynical. Jeanne was sturdy, and behaved like the boy she was supposed to have been … Angela spent most of her time writing infatuated letters in reply to infatuated letters from girlfriends from her finishing school.’¹⁰ Roland was amused to find that she was not just in love with these nameless girls but her infatuation extended to him too. In a mad moment he wished she was ‘not so dreadfully young, for no one was ever sweeter. Her grave, thoughtful eyes, fixed on me were very disturbing.’¹¹

Looking back at her diaries in middle age, Angela was highly embarrassed by her behaviour. She thought Roland deserved a knighthood for gallantry for not taking advantage of her naïve eighteen-year-old self: ‘If anyone threw themselves – unconsciously – at someone’s head, I did.’¹² In Roland’s memoir of these two weeks of intimacy with the du Mauriers, he teasingly reproduced part of a letter Angela had shown him from one of her Parisian school friends:

I never actually saw what [Angela] wrote of me, but I saw a letter replying to one of hers, in which was the phrase: ‘If he is all you say he is, how could his wife ever have left him.’ There was another passage that struck a warning note. ‘Darling, do be careful!!!!! I know, but you have yet to learn, how deceiving men can be!!!!! I would not have your heart broken for all the world.’

Roland found her admiration and affection rather gratifying. She wrote in her diary how she had smoked her first cigarette and rather liked it and, in another attempt at grown-up cool, had her hair washed and waved, much to her parents’ dismay: ‘Looked topping, row over it, however, but Roland liked it.’¹³ He then had apparently kissed her hand. Such bliss!

Her father, however, ruined it all for his eldest daughter with his desire to amuse, even at the expense of another, however vulnerable. ‘Gerald, who never missed a trick, used to call me “Puffin’s latest crush”,’ Roland wrote, ‘then Angela would go a kind of black red, for whatever her feelings may have been, nobody was supposed to know anything about them.’¹⁴

Gerald amused himself with his men friends, talking shop, fooling around, changing subjects as rapidly as shadows passing over water and Roland thought there could be no one in the world who was a better companion, investing ordinary events with a spirit of gay adventure. Meanwhile, his daughters went about their very different interests. Angela’s emotionalism affected everyone; Daphne found her crushes oppressive and told Tod her sister was quite hopeless. Daphne was filled with an irritable ennui, perhaps affected by her father’s innate restlessness but also isolated and alarmed by Angela’s obsessional mooning over one love object after another. Is this what it was to grow up? To Tod, she confided:

I must be an awful rotter as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is … Everyone thinks I’m moody and tiresome and I suppose I am; and I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I’m acid and bitter, perhaps I am on the outside but I’m not really.¹⁵

Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as Jeanne. She was grieving for the childhood she was being forced to leave behind, while her sister, four years her junior, was still in that uncomplicated place, sturdy and boy-like, safe in the pretence that she was one of the Dampier brothers. Only a couple of days after Roland Pertwee first met Jeanne, he was disconcerted by her arrival in his bedroom where she wordlessly folded his trousers and underwear before putting a strip of Kolynos toothpaste on his toothbrush. ‘When I asked her what it was all about she replied: “I’m Dampier, your fag. Shout if you want anything else”,’¹⁶ and gravely left the room.

Before the end of their time in Algeria, an expedition into the desert and the Atlas Mountains was planned by the men, and the sisters and Muriel were driven to meet them at Bou-saada, a small trading town surrounded by date palms in a true oasis on the edge of the Sahara. Having had all kinds of desert adventures, the men eventually met up with the women for dinner. Afterwards, Roland linked arms with Daphne and Angela and walked them into the night to watch the moon rise over the desert. To Angela it must have seemed as if The Garden of Allah had come to life. But before they had got very far, the romantic and mysterious atmosphere was suddenly riven with a ghastly cackling laugh, dwindling to a moan. The girls clutched his arm. The shrieking laugh came again. Roland enquired of a passing young Arab who was it laughing so devilishly. ‘A hyena in the cemetery,’ he replied. ‘He is eating the dead.’¹⁷ Then when a shot rang out in the still air, and the young man explained it was the armed guard in the gardens firing at desert robbers, Angela and Daphne decided they had had enough of moonlight and romance and would rather go home.

Cannes and Monte Carlo were their next destinations. Gerald liked to live life with a flourish: he carried gold sovereigns, using them to tip extravagantly and after paying for a purchase with gold would not bother with the change. Occasionally he was a spectacularly lucky gambler on the horses, no doubt encouraged by his partner at Wyndham’s, Frank Curzon, who became as famous and successful as a racehorse breeder as he was a theatrical manager. Gerald chose horses purely on their names reminding him of something significant in his life: he naturally backed Frank Curzon’s horse Call Boy, which went on to win the 1927 Derby. Then he bagged the 1928 Derby winner Felstead (the name was an amalgamation of Hampstead and his sister’s house Felden) a 40–1 outsider on which he won the considerable sum of £500. He probably made an even bigger return on the 1929 Grand National when his pick Elton, at even more remarkable odds of 100–1, romped home. During the good times, when Frank was running the show, the money kept on rolling in and Gerald was extremely generous and adept at spending it, with little thought of the morrow.

During the euphoric 1920s, the Casino in Monte Carlo was filled with rich and well-connected Englishmen and women intent on diversion. Daphne found it energising: ‘It had a great atmosphere of a sort of suppressed excitement all the time.’¹⁸ Here was another natural stage for Gerald’s flamboyant insouciance. His friends and daughters observed him in his familiar role:

There was something about a casino which inspired Gerald to put on an act. He was conscious of the interest he excited, and moved briskly through admiring crowds – alert and on his toes. He had a dashing air as he roved among the tables, saying, ‘Banco’; greeting a friend: ‘Hello Portarlington!’; picking up cards and tossing them down: ‘Neuf! Too bad!’; ignoring the money he had won, and having to be reminded of it. A casino offered the opportunity to display his casual, throw-away methods.¹⁹

Not only was he a great showman, Gerald also relished confounding people’s expectations. On their escapade to the Atlas Mountains, the four men had stopped at the oasis at Laghouat, having drunk a good deal of Cointreau. Here they were entertained by the famously beautiful belly-dancing prostitutes of the Ouled Nail. These Englishmen, however worldly wise, were nevertheless born Victorians and hardly immune to the earthy sensuality of the girls, dancing in magnificent costumes and then naked, except for their elaborate jewellery and headdresses, their exotic looks made more dramatic with make-up and kohl-rimmed eyes.

Gerald took one young beauty aside and began to tell her the plot of his forthcoming production of The Dancers and determined, against his friends’ advice, to act out every scene. Ronnie Squire lost his temper and told him to pay the poor girl some money and let her go, but Gerald took offence. ‘This intelligent girl is highly interested,’ he said in clipped actorly tones, and insisted on keeping her into the night while she sat perplexed, uncertain what was required of her and whether her traditional services might be called upon, and if so, when.

Significantly, perhaps, Gerald was not as keen on practical jokes if he was the victim. One of the actresses who sprang to fame in Gerald’s successful production of The Dancers – alongside Tallulah Bankhead – was Audrey Carten. She became a great friend of the family, a romantic interest of Gerald’s, and was as much a practical joker as was he. She went too far one night, however, when she filled the fountain outside the eminently respectable Cannon Hall with empty champagne bottles, suggesting some great Bacchanalian orgy had taken place behind its genteel walls. Gerald was not amused.

After Monte Carlo, Roland Pertwee and Ronnie Squire were deputed to take Angela with them to Paris where she was to return to finishing school. The train was packed and they could not get any sleeping berths, so huddled together and eventually slept, Angela’s head on Roland’s knee. When she awoke she was green with motion-sickness and dashed for the lavatory. Roland noticed as they approached the school that Angela shed her newly acquired veil of sophistication – ‘she had the smiling gravity of a small Mona Lisa’²⁰ – and became a schoolgirl again as they deposited her at the Ozannes’ front door. Angela’s diary recorded her feeling like a dog being left at the vet’s.

While Jeanne perfected her tennis and took up golf, Daphne’s mind turned questioningly to religion. She was confirmed at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London in the early summer of 1922, in spite of Gerald’s atheism – as this was just the done thing – but within the year lost any zest she may have felt for organised religion when the priest she liked became interested in spiritualism. In a letter to Tod she attempted to work out what she believed:

I suppose some people would say that I’m an atheist, but I’m not exactly that. I sincerely believe that the world is in a state of evolution, and so is everybody in it. Also I think the idea of re-incarnation has a lot in it. As for Heaven & Hell & all that rot, its absurd. Everyone, sooner or later, gets punished for their sins, in their own lives, but not by the way priests tell one.²¹

Daphne compared herself with Angela, who was much less critical and tough-minded. She was ill at ease with the extremes of emotion that characterised her elder sister and was proud of her own rational self-sufficiency:

I know she secretly wants to become [a Roman Catholic]. Of course some people do need an emotional sort of religion like that! You know how emotional and rather sentimental she is. It wouldn’t do for you & me I’m afraid! Not that I’m matter-of-fact but I do hate sloppiness, & I think R.C. is rather bent that way.

This thoughtful, mistrustful adolescent was painted by Harrington Mann during this time. His portrait captured Daphne’s wariness, her shoulders hunched, her body in an S-shaped slouch, her world-weary eyes slipping away from the gaze of the spectator. She was persevering with her short stories, exploring with a thoroughly unsentimental eye relationships and ideas that concerned her. She showed some to her father who found them quite good, and this encouragement spurred her on. Years later she explained the creative spring of her fiction:

the child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows … the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him … But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it.²²

The fact Daphne was becoming rather an accomplished writer of stories had come to the attention of a young dandy photographer out to make his name, Cecil Beaton. The elder du Maurier sisters had become friendly with him, possibly at the Peter Pan party where he had taken many photographs of famous people, including the du Mauriers, and sold them to the papers. He had begun to get his strikingly posed portraits accepted by Tatler and the daily newspapers. ‘We’d worked & plotted for our success & we’d got out in every paper except the Mirror and the Evening Standard!’²³ Beaton declared in triumph at the beginning of the new year of 1923. It was during this time, when Beaton was making a name for himself in society, that Angela began to meet him at parties and dances.

When Angela returned to Cannon Hall she was officially ‘out’. A ball was given for her at Claridge’s and she became part of the generation of Bright Young Things who went to each other’s parties, not always in the company of parents. This important event in Angela’s young life caused great anxiety and grief to her, and a temporary rift in the family. Angela was so afraid of being upstaged by her prettier younger sisters that she declared she did not want either Jeanne or Daphne at her coming-out party. Muriel gave her an ultimatum: your sisters or your dance, and Angela gave in. She nevertheless could not but think that they inadvertently stole her show:

They wore pale blue velvet frocks and both looked dreams, dancing every dance; I was at my fattest and wore a white satin frock that stuck out like a crinoline and must have made me look even fatter. I wore my hair in a low knot or bun at the back of my neck, and I would imagine a tear-stained face.²⁴

During the celebration that should have been one of the more triumphant moments of her entry into adulthood, she was given an unkind letter from her latest crush telling her he did not want to have the all-important supper dance with her.

Despite the advent of the Jazz Age and the general casting off of stays, the social life for young women of the du Mauriers’ social class was still very formal. Anyone going to the theatre and sitting in a box or the stalls or first rows of the dress circle was expected to wear full evening dress. No woman or girl would dream of lunching out without an immaculate frock, and a hat on her head. If you were a well-brought-up young woman you could not be seen in nightclubs, although it was considered safe for Angela and her friends to flock to the Embassy Club or Ciro’s, the glamorous dance club and restaurant that had been favourite family venues and where birthday parties were often held after an evening at the theatre.

In January 1923, Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss gave a party for their daughter Betty’s coming out. Like Angela’s, it was at Claridge’s. About one hundred people were invited to dinner with dancing afterwards. One of the guests was their new friend Cecil Beaton, whose remarkably detailed diaries recorded the merry social scene. This party he considered terrific good fun, with ‘such a riot of interesting people’, whom he then proceeded to criticise. ‘The du Mauriers were all there,’ he wrote, ‘they are charming except Sir Gerald whom I simply loathe. He is so conceited and so ridiculously affected. He gets completely on my nerves.’ This from an equally self-conscious dandy.

Beaton seemed to be amused by Angela’s grave and innocent demeanour and enjoyed dancing with her and teasing her mercilessly: ‘I ragged [her] as looking [rather] Shaftesbury Avenue in a dress from Idare [the famous theatrical costumier]. It was dreadfully chorus girly & when she swished around the skirt swished up revealing knickers to match.’²⁵ But his attention must have helped restore some of Angela’s fragile confidence. Beaton himself did not so obviously lack self-confidence, but nevertheless was immensely gratified when Seymour Hicks sought him out to tell him he had a reputation as the wittiest young man in London. He was even happier to find himself seated at dinner in a more favourable place than the precocious novelist and journalist Beverley Nichols. They were natural rivals as talented, exquisite young men on the make.

The family’s annual summer escape from London took the sisters to Frinton on the Essex coast and then to Dieppe in August, where Jeanne’s sporting prowess continued to grow. She was entered for tennis tournaments but Daphne’s diaries do not mention how well she did. Angela sought out another crush, this time a girl named Phil, and Daphne joked to Tod that her sister’s emotional nature would lead her into ‘more and more compromising [situations] and I fear she is on the road to ruin!’²⁶ The elder sisters went to stuffy afternoon dances and complained about the body odour hanging in the air. Daphne pretended to fancy a handsome French officer purely to irritate her father, who of course rose to the bait and raged that the man looked ‘an awful bounder’.²⁷ Their glamorous life continued with the whole family, including their Aunt Billy, spending Christmas in Monte Carlo, again visiting the Casino regularly, and Daphne and Jeanne playing tennis and golf with each other and their father.

Female fashion had changed radically and young women at parties abandoned their restrictive undergarments and appeared in slim columns of beaded and sequinned silk. Angela, still dressed by her parents’ favourite theatrical costumier, remained in the waisted dirndls of her youth. While she was dancing in old-fashioned flouncy dresses, laughing at the inoffensive jokes of effete young men, Jeanne was focusing on her art and sport. Daphne, always more introspective and intellectual than her sisters, meanwhile wrote disconsolate letters to Tod about the impossibility of conventional happiness and her fear of growing up: ‘It seems a morbid and stupid thought but I can’t see myself living very long,’ wrote Daphne, ‘but the future is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly, marriage doesn’t thrill me – nothing – nothing remains. If only I was a man! That is the one slogan to me … I like women much better than men.’ She then described how dance music made her long to dance with someone she had a crush on, but these barely understood emotions disturbed her: ‘It annoys me though to feel like that! I should love to be free from all that sort of thing.’²⁸ Full of anxiety and dread of the future, this was the girl who had once bitten her nails so savagely that her parents had sought medical help; theatrically she recalled what she considered a symbolic act – that of being offered bitter aloes as a cure rather than an attempt at understanding and the unconditional love she craved.

Another great theatrical family who were very much part of the sisters’ youth was the Trees. Viola, the eldest daughter of the legendary Edwardian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was larger than life and greatly loved. To call her an actress hardly did justice to her many talents; she was co-writer with Gerald on The Dancers, had an eccentric newspaper column in the Daily Dispatch and was a natural and unselfconscious comedienne. Viola was also blessed with a wonderful singing voice and would touch the heart, or the funny bone, with anything from German lieder to the rudest vaudeville ditty. Angela remembered her as ‘the most brilliant, most witty, most amusing – and at times most maddening – woman it has been my pleasure to have known’.²⁹

Viola was married to the drama critic Alan Parsons, and their daughter Virginia was a contemporary of Jeanne’s. Jeanne was being tutored at home with her friend Nan Greenwood but at fourteen she went to school in Hampstead and made closer acquaintance with Virginia. Unsurprisingly, this younger Tree was much shyer than her mother but had her own generous helping of the family’s therapeutic charm. She was beautiful and lacking in cynicism or side. She loved most humans and all animals but, most importantly for Jeanne perhaps, she was highly artistic. Her enlightened parents allowed her to have private lessons with the Bloomsbury Post-Impressionist Duncan Grant, and then with the realist painter William Coldstream. When Virginia was only sixteen she became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, the prestigious college that Coldstream would eventually direct as Professor of Fine Art.

This was liberated, even libertine, company for a young woman of the privileged yet sheltered classes. There was no evidence as to whether Jeanne was included in her friend’s art tutoring. Considering Gerald’s antipathy to anything modern in art or in the education of daughters, it seems unlikely, but as Virginia’s contemporary, and given the closeness of the du Maurier and Tree families, there was little doubt that Jeanne was influenced by the fact that a young woman’s artistic talents could be taken so seriously. Virginia Parsons did not go on to make painting her life, but she did end up as the wife of the 6th Marquess of Bath and chatelaine to the glorious Elizabethan confection of Longleat (and its lions) in Wiltshire. Here she started Pets Corner and exercised her concern for all living creatures, charming friends, animals and visitors alike.

Angela’s debutante days of gadding-about from social lunches to shopping, to attending every new film and play, all punctuated by gay conversations with other debutantes, were followed by nights of wittily themed parties, treasure hunts and extravagant balls, before the dash home by chauffeured car. They were privileged times indeed. The du Maurier girls took it for granted that Hollywood royalty like Rudolph Valentino (so incredibly handsome and charming, they thought), Gary Cooper and Jack Barrymore (ditto) would dine with them at home at Cannon Hall. It was unremarkable that Arthur Rubinstein and Ivor Novello, also incredibly handsome and charming – and bagged by Daphne as a future husband, despite Angela’s first claim on him – would play the piano to entertain them and their guests in the drawing room. It did not seem remarkable that actors of the calibre of Gladys Cooper and Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier should be family friends, and that exotic acquaintances like Nelly Melba, Tallulah Bankhead, Cecil Beaton and Lady Diana Cooper would enliven the show. Unremarkable too, that the Savoy Hotel was the du Mauriers’ home from home, the place to which they decamped when cook was ill or the maids had flu. This grand hotel was their regular haunt for Christmas Day lunch with friends, their own table specially kept for them by the vast windows overlooking the river.

Enforced sexual ignorance and unwelcome parental control took their toll on these apparently carefree days. When Angela was eighteen she spent a happy September week in a country house in Gloucestershire under the aegis of Lady Cynthia Asquith. Staying in the house was a collection of young people, among them her cousin Nico Llewelyn Davies and the rest of the Eton cricket XI, which included Lord Dunglass – the future Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After a great deal of innocent games and dancing into the night, Angela allowed one of these young gods chastely to kiss her in her bedroom. When she felt vaguely sick the next morning (probably from too much gaiety the night before) she was panic-stricken by the thought that the kiss, so riskily proffered in such a taboo place as a bedroom, might somehow have made her pregnant. She could not confide in Daphne, who was even more ignorant in the facts of life than she was. She could never confess such a thing to her mother, and her father’s reaction was too terrible even to imagine. So she wrote to her Aunt Billy, who luckily kept her secret and reassured her with a sanitised version of the truth.

Angela never let on whether the young god with the prepotent kiss was the nineteen-year-old Lord Dunglass. She suggested in a later memoir that it was. This young aristocrat was already a boy hero, captain of the Eton cricket team, Keeper of the Field (captain of football, in the college’s own form of the game) and President of the Prefects’ Society, called Pop. He was a gallant, golden, effortlessly accomplished youth who may well have attracted the over-romantic girl. Certainly Lord Dunglass trumped Daphne’s creation, Eric Avon. Eric merely went to Harrow (Gerald’s school): Milord went to Eton. Eric excelled at sports and acts of simple bravery; Alec did all this and was also rather good at the intellectual and social stuff too. To the eldest daughter of a family enamoured of its own breeding, Lord Dunglass held the ace, the inheritance of the earldom of Home. This dated from the beginning of James I’s reign and included several thousand acres of the Scottish borderlands. Angela, whose memoirs are full of veiled clues (at least for those of a forensic mind), rather gave the game away in her second volume, where she was musing on education and recalling her ecstatic teenage self: ‘I’m eighteen and last week I met an absolutely wonderful boy who’s just left Eton. Actually he’s a viscount – I wonder …’³⁰ Her readers, perhaps, did not need to wonder.

This young viscount who caught Angela’s eye and was to become an earl and then renounce his title in order to sit in the House of Commons as an MP was described by his contemporary at Eton, Cyril Connolly, with remarkable prescience as, ‘a votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part’. Connolly thought had Douglas-Home lived in the eighteenth century, to which he so obviously belonged, this kind of effortless brilliance would have made him Prime Minister before he was thirty (he managed it by sixty). As it was, ‘he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life’.³¹

Sundays at Cannon Hall provided another stage for fun, flirtation and amusing conversation, and had become an institution amongst the theatrical circles in which Gerald moved. He was always the centre of attention, and Muriel the gracious and well-organised hostess. There were liveried maids (in grey and white alpaca uniforms) who acted as waitresses, serving champagne and delicacies to a large and varied mix of beautiful people. Angela enjoyed the relentless socialising. Daphne did not.

While Angela was beginning to grow up and learn about love, in rather limited circumstances, Daphne was reading voraciously (Oscar Wilde for a while was her favourite), still writing stories and thinking a lot. At the suggestion of Tod, she had discovered Katherine Mansfield. Daphne declared her short stories the best she had ever read, although they left her feeling melancholy, with ‘a kind of helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s lives’.³² She identified with the author as a sensitive outsider, but the expectations and hypocrisy of the adult world alarmed and dismayed her, and sex seemed to be fraught with menace. To Tod, she wrote:

have you ever noticed, (I think its vile) that if one marries its considered awful if one does’nt do it thoroughly (you know what I mean) and yet if one does certain things without being married, its considered awful too. Surely that’s narrow-minded, and disgusting. Either the Act of – er-well, you know, is right or wrong. A wedding-ring cant change facts. An illegitimate child is looked on as a sort of ‘freak’ or ‘unnatural specimen’, whereas a child whose parents are married is wholesome and decent … Oh is’nt it all unwholesome?³³

She and Jeanne were exposed to another unwholesome aspect of adult life when, at the beginning of 1924, their father took them to Pentonville Prison. He was rehearsing Not in Our Stars, a play about a man involved in the murder of his romantic rival, and wished to investigate the experiences a convicted murderer would endure. It was just a year after a sensational trial and double execution of Edith Thompson and her young lover Frederick Bywaters for murdering Edith’s husband. Angela’s new friend Beverley Nichols was a young journalist on the case and he wrote about the awful tragedy that was played out to a packed house at the Old Bailey, and the heartbreak of the lovers’ letters read aloud in court. All of London was talking about it. The double executions were synchronised for 9 a.m. on 9 January 1923, Thompson’s in Holloway and Bywaters’s in Pentonville, the prisons just half a mile apart. Rumours of Edith’s grotesque last minutes on earth filled the newspapers.^fn2

With the horror still raw, somehow Gerald thought it a good idea to take his young impressionable daughters with him to Pentonville. The girls were shown over the whole prison by the governor Major Blake; they saw the locked cells with their miserable inhabitants, the patients in their beds in the hospital wing, the condemned cell and the hanging shed, and even had the drop gruesomely demonstrated. The unmarked graves of the hanged added their own grim melancholy. Amongst them was wife-murderer Dr Crippen, the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and, perhaps most poignantly, the twenty-year-old Bywaters, whose unfailing loyalty to his lover was remarked on by all in the press.

Daphne could not get the images out of her mind and sketched the cell and the hanged man’s drop in her diary. This episode showed how peculiarly contrary Gerald could be. He was almost hysterically protective of his daughters and wished to keep them as children for ever, but then he was capable of taking Jeanne, just thirteen, and Daphne, seventeen, to see people at their most degraded and dangerous. He had even exposed them to the horror of the process and apparatus for judicial murder by hanging. Had Angela been there too it might well have elicited a fit of uncontrolled crying, but Daphne just digested the images and added them to her already jaundiced view of human nature and the harm people do each other. She wrote a poem in her diary and wondered later if it was inspired by the visit:

Sorrow for the men that mourn

Sorrow for the days that dawn,

Sorrow for all things born

Into this world of sorrow.

And all my life, as far as I can see,

All that I hope, or ever hope to be,

Is merely driftwood on a lonely sea.³⁴

Emboldened by her first kiss with a member of the Eton cricket XI, Angela next attempted to break out from the social straitjacket of home. Aged twenty, she developed a crush on a woman notorious for her lesbian proclivities. It showed a certain courage and boldness of character that this conscientious and obedient young woman should make a stand over this friendship. Her father was particularly hard to withstand. He was emotionally extreme and a practised actor and could work himself into a fit of temper that seemed close to insanity. Beverley Nichols had watched this amazing facility in action in rehearsal: ‘He can precipitate himself into a state of hysteria with the speed of a sporting Bugatti, and the moment afterwards is playing a love scene with admirable timing and sentiment.’³⁵ When Angela persisted with her desire to see this forbidden woman, both parents raged and threatened. Angela resorted to asking the Almighty to intervene. ‘Oh God,’ she wrote in her diary that autumn, ‘help something to happen to get them to change their minds.’³⁶ Their minds remained made up and Angela later reflected that this intensive control of her behaviour pushed her, from this time on, into subterfuge, secrecy and barefaced lies.

She did not name the focus of her desire in her memoir, but she was almost certainly an actress and most likely Gwen Farrar – the sensation of the highly successful revue at the Duke of York’s Theatre, The Punch Bowl, that ran through 1924 and the following year. She was witty and lively, a natural boyish clown who attracted men and women alike. She was partnered in the revue by her partner in life, the more conventionally pretty Norah Blaney, a friend of Angela Halliday, who was to become a close and lifelong friend of Angela du Maurier’s.

Daphne’s eye had also been caught by the unconventional attractions of the crop-haired Gwen when she saw the revue and wrote a fan letter to the actress. She admitted this to Tod and begged her discretion:

I adored Gwen Farrar! I wrote to her last night (not a word of this) saying ‘Dear Gwen, I think you are quite perfect, Daphne.’ Shall I be drawn into the net too? I wonder. I hope she won’t show the letter to anyone, or I shall be tarred with the same brush!

Being ‘drawn into the net too’ implied that someone else was in that net, and perhaps this was a reference to her elder sister, whose stormy rows with their parents over her unsuitable friendship could not have gone unnoticed. Daphne then added a significant coda: ‘Life’s no fun, unless theres’ a spark of danger in it.’³⁷

Angela did not relish the fights with her parents and, although she held out for a couple of months, in the end the force ranged against her was too much to withstand. She regretted her parents’ slur on the reputation of this intriguing woman and the thwarting of her own longing for friendship with her: ‘in all the weeks and months I knew her I never met anyone kinder, more generous, more amusing and so utterly uncontaminating in influencing the impressionable girl I was’. Angela’s diary at the end of October 1924 relayed the rollercoaster of her life, the italics are hers:

Dreadful scene with Daddy over X and Z (another friend) [possibly Gwen and Norah]. He stormed like a madman. Went to the dentist, awful time as he injected me with cocaine and jabbed a colossal needle into my jaw. Extraordinary feeling. Lilian and Joyce to lunch (Lilian Braithwaite and [daughter] Joyce Carey). Spent rest of day making frock. Polling Day – exciting results on wireless.³⁸

What Angela, and no doubt her family, considered ‘exciting results’ was an increased majority for the Conservatives and a rout of the Liberals under Asquith.

Gerald perhaps decided it was time to divert his eldest daughter’s energies away from unsuitable love affairs and into some kind of suitable career. Out of the blue he suggested that she play Wendy in the annual Christmas and New Year performance of Peter Pan at the Adelphi. This was a daunting role for someone who had never been trained as an actress. Peter Pan, however, was so well known to the du Maurier sisters, and loved by them all that each was word perfect in every character. Daphne did not envy her one bit. To appear before an audience, even in such a special play, she said, ‘would be agony’.³⁹ Angela, more extrovert, trusting and naïve, did not hesitate. She could have ‘jumped over the moon with glee’. This was always her part in the family shows and she had not missed one of the professional productions since she was first taken at the age of two. Highly professional and famous actors were hired to co-star with her. The lovely Gladys Cooper was Peter Pan, Mrs Patrick Campbell was Mrs Darling, and Hook and Mr Darling were played by a young South African actor, Ian Hunter, for whom Angela had already conceived a crush.

There were rehearsals all day and Angela was still socialising at night. She had always found attending rehearsals generally fascinating and enjoyed nothing more than sitting in the darkened stalls watching her father tease performances out of his company as they brought a play to life. This time, Angela struggled with the director’s vision of Peter Pan, which contradicted her own childhood memories of how it should be played. She also struggled with the acting. After weeks of work, her diary for late October 1924 lamented:

rehearsal all day 3rd act morning. Daddy came down and I was very bad. Lisped worse than ever, spoke quickly and forgot my words. Lunched Jill [Esmond, who was playing Nibs]. Last act afternoon. Ian so sweet, I had to prompt him and he said, ‘Bless you.’ I am a fool.

The middle-aged Angela wrote of her youthful sense of folly: ‘How true, how true!’⁴⁰ In retrospect she realised also that she had been parachuted in ahead of all the other young actresses who would have hoped for the part. Jill Esmond for instance, although younger, was fully RADA-trained and merely had a minor part. The nepotism involved in her selection and Angela’s lack of training, together with her naïve belief that she could just reprise her nursery performances, all set her up for a fall. Unfortunately it was a literal and almighty one.

Each actor who was required to fly had to don an uncomfortable harness and then be lifted into the air and manipulated by a man pulling wires in the wings. In the last act Wendy, John and Michael all flew through the window back to their nursery, alighting in the middle of the stage. But Angela was flown too vigorously and crash-landed on the footlights. She was catapulted into the orchestra pit, taking the double bassist and his instrument with her. There was an appalled hush from the audience: no one knew if she would emerge alive. She was dazed and in pain but recovered enough to creep under the stage and reappear as Wendy in her bed in the nursery. ‘The ovation which greeted me was almost frightening. The audience stood and clapped and yelled, and with tears running down my face by then (from emotion not pain) I blew them all a kiss and then the play went on.’⁴¹

Angela dined out on the story of her flying debacle so many times that the family and her closest friends coined the phrase ‘an orchestra’ to mean a long tale of melodramatic disaster. After this mishap she realised she hadn’t the mettle to be a proper actress because she did not believe that the show had to go on regardless. She was much more inclined to take to her bed if she felt under the weather. But although she was battered and bruised, her nerve shattered, Gerald insisted she return to the theatre the next day, conquer her fear of flying, and perform in the afternoon show.

Angela’s careering flight was one of the few outside incidents to merit a mention in Daphne’s continuing angst-ridden correspondence with Tod, who was living in some splendour at Burrough Court in Leicestershire, tutoring Averill the daughter of a rich, recently widowed businessman, the 1st Viscount Furness. Daphne teased Tod by suggesting that her much-loved governess should become the next Lady Furness. In fact, the Viscount’s taste unhappily ran on rather more exotic lines as he was already engaged to one beautiful American socialite, and would end up married to another, who promptly became the mistress of Edward, the Prince of Wales.

Daphne’s adolescent introspection and sense of the pointlessness of life was about to be challenged. At eighteen it was her turn to go to finishing school in Paris, the city of her imagination. She was not bound for the Ozannes’, where Angela’s experiences had been mixed, but to a school run by Miss Wicksteed at Camposena, some five and a half miles south-west of the city. Miss Wicksteed, or ‘Wick’ as she was known by the girls, was a reassuringly solid middle-aged Englishwoman with white hair and a no-nonsense manner. On 16 January 1925, after a blast of Christmas parties and dances, Daphne headed off to Paris for what would be the defining experience of her life.

Jeanne was now nearly fourteen and life for her was changing too. She was enrolled in Francis Holland School at Clarence Gate near Regent’s Park to start in the autumn term a more formal education with art and sports on the curriculum. Having had generous notices for her Wendy the first time round, Angela contracted to do one more season of Peter Pan, but the critics this time sharpened their quills. Already ambivalent about her future as an actress, exhaustion, demoralisation and a stage fight with real swords, in which her nose was almost severed, put paid to her faltering ambition. Her famous theatrical name was both a boon and a liability. If she was to be an actress as a du Maurier she would have to be particularly dedicated and particularly good, and she feared she was neither.

During her run as Wendy, Angela had been conned by a well-known elderly photographer into posing for him in the nude, and been appalled and embarrassed by the results. A happier experience was provided by their young friend Cecil Beaton when he asked Angela and Daphne to be models in two of his earliest photographic experiments. They were shown into his old nursery where he had set up his props and various cameras and tripods and, with the help of his elderly nanny, and a great deal of laughter (and ineffectual fiddling around it seemed to the girls), produced his inventive portraits of the sisters: ‘Daph’s and my heads appearing magically under wineglasses.’⁴² Stilted and ludicrously artificial to the modern eye, the photographs were considered by Angela later in life to be the most flattering portraits of them both ever created. Hers hung in pride of place in the Italian house of her great friend Naomi Jacob, until the Germans arrived in the Second World War and either purloined or trashed it.

Angela could never confide her hopes or fears to her parents and without prospects of a career she drifted rudderless and ill-equipped for independent life. Years later she mused on how celebrity affected those closest to it:

I wanted to be a good actress, and with a name like du Maurier I could not afford to be a bad one … Possibly too much is expected of the children of the great; I would definitely say, in fact, that both as an actress – admittedly of only one part – and as a writer, I have found my name as big a handicap as ever it was a help. As Wendy I was Gerald du Maurier’s daughter – and it had been an amusing ‘stunt’ to try me out in a star part straight off …⁴³

Her lack of training and the chance to work her way up from the bottom had also robbed her of the opportunity to graduate to being a producer, which was where her true talents possibly lay, though as a young woman gazing into the unknown she could not have been aware of this at the time. Girls of her background and education did not aspire to have serious careers apart from becoming actresses and the wives of famous men. While Angela waited for the man she would marry, the parties continued. In a private room at the Garrick, Gerald occasionally invited an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to lunch. One memorable gathering on 23 October was recorded by Angela in her diary, and also by her old crush, Roland Pertwee.

The party was organised to wave off in style on an Australian tour their friends and colleagues, the actor-director Dion Boucicault Jnr and his actress wife Irene Vanbrugh. Apart from Muriel, Gerald, Angela, Roland and the Boucicaults, there was also (with Angela’s comments in italics) ‘Dame Nellie Melba (most excited about [her] for whom I had (rightly) boundless admiration), H. G. Wells (too sweet), Augustus John (overawed by him and sat far away), Sir Squire Bancroft,’ and the sisters’ lifelong heroes, John Barrymore and Gladys Cooper. Roland continued the tale:

half-way through lunch Irene said to Melba: ‘Tip us a stave, Nellie.’ And Nellie Melba, over a loaded fork, for she was a hearty trencherman, opened her throat and sang like a lark.

That lunch, which started at one fifteen went on until seven thirty, when John Barrymore rushed off to appear as Hamlet at the Haymarket, and gave one of the most sensational performances of his career.⁴⁴

This was the kind of glamorous world that the du Maurier sisters inhabited, some of them more happily than others. Angela, still childlike at twenty, was standing tentatively on the edge of this world she was reared to join, while Jeanne was allowed to remain a girl for a few years more. Daphne, who had been so reluctant to grow up and did not care for her parents’ kind of high society or attitudes to love, was back in Paris in the heat of her first real love affair. This time she would give her father real reason for outrage. Luckily, he never knew.