LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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