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inhabited the persona of Eric Avon for more than two years. Only once she had turned fifteen (and Eric turned eighteen) did she have him play his last triumphant cricket match, for he would have to leave Rugby for Cambridge University the following autumn. Daphne walked into the lower part of the garden at Cannon Hall, scene of so many of Eric’s triumphs. ‘He wept. The moment of sadness was intolerable. Then someone from the house called “Daphne!” and it was all over. Eric Avon had left Rugby School for ever.’²⁸ This had so much of the emotional force of Peter Pan, where Peter angrily repels any suggestion he might grow up and become human, the whole play suffused with sadness at what is lost when childhood is left behind.

      Years later, Daphne recognised that Eric Avon became submerged in her subconscious and never really left her, emerging in various guises as her inadequate male protagonists in I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, and The House on the Strand. Although they were weak while Eric, like Daphne herself and many of her fictional heroines, were resolute and self-sufficient, these men relied on strong male mentors, perhaps echoing something of her father’s relationship with Tom Vaughan, his supremely capable and efficient business partner, or with his competent and heroic elder brother. Tom Vaughan was a remarkably successful man and central to the functioning of the du Maurier household. He managed Wyndham’s Theatre with great creative and professional acumen, and fixed all the family’s financial and practical problems too. Angela appreciated how crucial he was to everything. ‘That the du Mauriers could get on without Tom Vaughan seemed an impossibility. Alas, when he died it became all too evident that life without him was a sadly complicated affair.’²⁹

      The intolerable sadness felt by Daphne/Eric in the garden the day of the last cricket match was the realisation that she could not remain this boyish child for ever. At fifteen she was aware of Angela on the verge of ‘coming out’ and having to enter the dreaded social whirl. The expectations of family and society would hedge Daphne in too. Perhaps the prospect of her growing up caused her father unease as well for, about the time that puberty and Eric Avon arrived in her life, he wrote Daphne a remarkable poem, celebrating her as the Eternal Girl, yet recognising her own, and his, disappointment that she was not that longed-for boy:

      My very slender one

      So brave of heart, but delicate of will,

      So careful not to wound, never kill,

      My tender one –

      Who seems to live in Kingdoms all her own

      In realms of joy

      Where heroes young and old

      In climates hot and cold

      Do deeds of daring and much fame

      And she knows she could do the same

      If only she’d been born a boy.

      And sometimes in the silence of the night

      I wake and think perhaps my darling’s right

      And that she should have been,

      And, if I’d had my way,

      She would have been, a boy.

      My very slender one

      So feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet,

      So full of fun and womanly deceit.

      My tender one

      Who seems to dream her life away alone.

      A dainty girl

      But always well attired

      And loves to be admired

      Where ever she may be, and wants

      To be the being who enchants

      Because she has been born a girl.

      And sometimes in the turmoil of the day

      I pause, and think my darling may

      Be one of those who will

      For good or ill

      Remain a girl for ever and be still

      A Girl.

      This was a poem full of complex meaning when written by an adored and influential father for his favourite daughter. Daphne stood on the threshold of adulthood, confused by her identity and struggling to find a sense of herself in the world. Gerald’s elegiac words could only compound that confusion. He regretted the son that might have been, and celebrated the lovely daughter whose gender made her second best. But she was lovely only as long as she remained a girl and managed somehow not to grow to womanhood. Becoming a woman meant losing so much of value: joy in action, beauty of form, simplicity, freedom, integrity of the self.

      At a time when women had been risking their lives in wars abroad, and at home taken on the Establishment and won the first concessions in their battle for the vote, Gerald’s view of the roles of men and women was old-fashioned and stultifying. In the poem Daphne as a boy is full of action, a hero figure, ‘brave of heart’ and spurred to ‘deeds of daring and much fame’. On the other hand, her place in the world as a girl is passive, her looks and the effects she has on others paramount – ‘so fresh and sweet’, prone to ‘womanly deceit’, ‘dainty’ and ‘well attired’. Muriel was the role model for this kind of woman, and Daphne did not want to be like her at all.

      Daphne and Jeanne were happiest in boy’s shorts, thick socks and stout shoes. They did not care about their hair or the grime on their faces. Daphne hated her white knees after a winter of being covered up and would rub dirt into them each spring to reclaim her tomboy self. Their prettiness belied the masculine characters that swaggered in their imaginations and peopled their games. The stereotypical sporting hero Eric Avon was not based on the kind of men who loomed largest in their lives like their father and the romanticised view of their grandfather. These immensely successful men were artists and darlings of the drawing room, not men made on the sports field or battleground. In fact, George in later life had lost much of his sight and was in thrall to his womenfolk, and Gerald’s love of gossip about friends’ private lives, tireless practical joking, and enjoyment of the company of women made him an exceptional entertainer with an effete and dandified air, rather than an all-conquering hero. His propensity to go to pieces if separated for too long from Muriel also disqualified him from the square-jawed masculine ideal. In the du Maurier household, where the women were capable and robust and the men were pampered and indulged, sexual stereotypes were not the norm.

      Unlike her sisters, Angela did not want to be a boy. She was happy enough to be a girl even though she bitterly regretted she was not beautiful and therefore felt handicapped in the great marriage game that her family considered a woman’s natural destiny. She too was afraid of growing up, but it was her emotionalism that bothered her, the embarrassment of her crushes and the torrent of feeling that they unleashed. The young Angela was sensitive and serious and hated being teased, the default position in her family. She was also ignorant and afraid of the sexual male, that scary other that had grown sinister in her imagination as a result of early shocks and her inadequate education:

      The business of growing older, into ‘double figures’, I disliked. I was unhappy when I was told I was too old to wear my nice white socks in the summertime, and made to wear horrible brown stockings … one was a fish out of water, too young to listen to sophisticated conversation, at the same time not wishing to play cricket on the lawn with younger sisters and their friends … pulled both ways, misunderstood at times by young and old alike, and not always understanding oneself.³⁰

      Angela’s literalness of mind and the inadvertent hurt caused by adults who did not understand was illustrated by an unhappy infatuation she never forgot. At weekends, Cannon Hall was filled with various stage people: one Sunday, even Rudolph Valentino came to lunch, to general excitement, as too did Gary Cooper, the embodiment of Hollywood star power. There were the long-established acting friends like Gladys Cooper, Viola Tree and John Barrymore, and any number of glamorous others who passed through their

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