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