LITMIR.BIZ

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world. She grew watchful and wary, aware always of an uneasy exile. ‘You could never be quite sure of any of them, even relations.’²¹

      She recognised Gerald behind his many dramatic personae, but she was disconcerted by Muriel, fearful that her role as mother was just a façade and that she was really the Snow Queen in disguise. If those closest to you appear unpredictable and powerful, as beings possessed of knives, where as a child can you feel safe? This sense of domestic menace fuelled her extraordinarily fertile imagination, expressed all her life in macabre stories and dreams. Where Angela was wide-eyed and believed anything, Daphne took nothing on trust. Extreme wariness and diffidence followed her into adult life, perhaps magnified by her sensitive apprehension as a child that beneath her mother’s lovely exterior existed something deadly to her emerging self. Even in middle age, when she was no longer afraid of a mother who had grown frail and grateful, Daphne’s anxieties found outlet in cinematic nightmares about her, ‘in which my anger against her is so fearful that I nearly kill her!’²²

      There was a cool steely quality behind Muriel’s delicate beauty and this contrast was confusing. She seemed so compliant with Gerald’s extravagances, so ready to act the perfect wife and mother, but even Angela, her responsible eldest and ever eager to please, did not elicit much sympathy from an impatient Muriel who took it upon herself to teach her eldest to read when small and reduced her to tears every time. Despite the apparent self-sacrifice of herself and her career, Muriel was considered by some of her daughters’ friends to be charming, but selfish. Like many of her generation born towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign she was a snob and very keen that her daughters mixed in the right circles. The girls understood the code of the du Mauriers, as Angela recalled:

      blatantly the upper classes and lower classes were alluded to, but the middle class, to which lots of us belonged and we belong, was never mentioned by us! We probably kidded ourselves that we were of the first category, and I squirm when I remember how my darling mother would talk with a sniff about ‘that class’ when speaking of some servant or other.²³

      The highlight of the year for the young du Maurier sisters was the summer retreat to the country. Every May they were dispatched to a rented house with maids and a nurse and there they stayed until August, often without their parents who remained for some of the time in London, acting or dealing with the business of the theatre. Although their behaviour was still constrained by adults’ demands, their country surroundings offered a whole range of new experiences and freedoms denied them in town, where routines and lack of space stifled the spirit of childish adventure and freedom. One significant freedom was to be able to make a noise, to walk and talk without constraint, instead of creeping in silence around their London house in the mornings while their parents slept. Everything became slightly looser. The servants seemed more cheerful, the sisters squabbled less and Mummy did not wear a hat at lunch.

      In the summer of 1913, when Angela was nine, Daphne six and Jeanne still only a toddler, the girls arrived at Slyfield Manor in Great Bookham in Surrey. Rented by their parents for the summer, this house impressed the elder sisters with its ancient mystery and the beauty of its surroundings. It was dark and creaky inside, a manor dating back to the Domesday Book, but the current building was largely Elizabethan: the great Queen was meant to have stayed a night here. Perhaps they learnt too of stories of the ghostly blue donkey that leapt the high gates at the bottom of the stairs (installed in an earlier age to keep fierce guard dogs at bay) to disappear into the gloom. Daphne was scared of walking these dark-panelled stairs alone, but the atmosphere of the place and the conjured presence of Elizabeth I stirred her imagination: ‘Where had they all gone, the people who lived at Slyfield once? And where was I then? Who was I now?’²⁴

      To Angela it was much less complicated. Slyfield was ‘the loveliest house I have ever lived in’.²⁵ It was there that this city girl discovered the beauty of bluebells and the intoxicating smell of lilac from a bush beneath her bedroom window. Her happiness that summer was made complete by her infatuation with a farmhand called Arthur who sat her on his great horse. For the first time Daphne felt she ‘had come off second-best’, for Angela ‘smiled down at me, proud as a queen’.²⁶ Daphne preferred the farm animals, the great shire horses and the luscious countryside with the River Mole flowing through the manor’s grounds. But mostly the country meant the precious freedom to go off on one’s own, on some adventure, only to return to the adults’ dominion with reluctance and impatience at their intrusion into her world.

      Already very unalike in character, both girls seemed to inhabit parallel universes, Angela’s emotional, connected to others and Daphne’s bounded only by her imagination and peopled with her own creations. With a macabre detachment she could dispassionately watch the gardener at Slyfield nail a live adder to a tree, declaring it would take all day to die, and return at intervals to watch it writhing in its desperate attempts to break free. Aunt Billy had given Daphne two doves in a cage and she found it tiresome to have to feed and care for them when she would rather be out doing interesting things. She was struck how Angela loved administering to her pair of canaries and sang while she cleared out their droppings and sprinkled fresh sand on the base of their cage. Daphne’s solution was to set her doves free and accept without complaint the scolding that would be forthcoming, for this was the price of her freedom from care. Jeanne, so much younger, amenably slipped into whatever game or role her elder sisters required. She was pretty and jolly and loved by her mother and nurse, and her life had not yet deepened into its later complexities.

      While the children spent the summer at Slyfield, Gerald enjoyed one of his great theatrical successes up in town. He had produced Diplomacy, a melodrama by the nineteenth-century French dramatist Victorien Sardou who was known for the complex constructions of his plots and the shallowness of his characterisation. This play sprang the young actress Gladys Cooper to fame, playing Dora the beautiful spy at the centre of the action. All her life, Gladys was to remain a close friend of the whole family, loved and admired by the du Maurier daughters as much as by Gerald. Angela and Daphne were both taken to see the play in which their father, as producer, had given himself a minor role that he played with characteristic nonchalance. Angela never forgot the dramatic impact at the end of Act Two as the exquisite Dora banged the door hysterically crying, ‘Julian, Julian, Julian!’ When Sardou was asked what tips he would give an aspiring playwright he famously advised: ‘Torture the women!’ It certainly made the play memorable for an impressionable girl of eight and in their nursery productions, Angela would reprise with gusto Dora’s tortured door-banging and weeping. This dramatic scene and the part of Wendy from Peter Pan were her two favourite acting roles, repeated many times with her sisters.

      Angela also never forgot her first meeting with Gladys, not just for her luminous beauty at barely twenty-two, but for one of her father’s characteristic roles as the unpredictable joker. On a summer Sunday morning in 1911, when Angela was seven, she and Gerald drew up in the family car at Rickmansworth station to meet the London train. Angela was sent off alone to pick up ‘the prettiest lady’ she could find amongst the throng on the platform. Luckily, Gladys stood out with her fine fair hair and dazzling blue eyes and this small child in her sun bonnet emerged from the crowd and solemnly took the prettiest lady by the hand and without a word led her back to the car where Gerald waited, highly amused. ‘How like my father, Gerald du Maurier!’ recalled Angela decades later, with a mixture of exasperation and affectionate pride.

      The year after this great success, Britain was at war. The assassination on 28 June 1914 of the Archduke of Austria in a little known part of the Balkans was the start of what became known as the Great War. Initially, however, there was no great concern at home as eager boys were waved off as part of an expeditionary force; most people thought they would all be home by Christmas. And although everything had changed, in some respects life for the du Maurier children went on in much the same routine. They still spent the summer months in the country, each year gaining greater freedoms. In 1915 they were in Chorley Wood in Surrey and Angela, by now eleven years old, had lessons every day with a family across the common. Daphne was left on her own with their first family dog, Jock, a much-loved bottlebrush of a West Highland Terrier that became her loyal companion on solitary adventures in the gardens and countryside beyond. Jeanne was growing up and at four had become more use to Daphne in her dramatic recreations of adventure

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