LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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