The most anguished though was Gerald. He had received the telegram while he was in the middle of his evening performance of the play Raffles and had to go the moment the curtain fell to tell Guy’s widow, Gwen, the awful news. Guy had been the epitome of the heroic elder son. Attractive to everyone for his breezy good humour, he had engaged in the manly things that mattered, and given his life for King and Country. He had also created An Englishman’s Home, the play that seemed to grasp the spirit of the age and for an extraordinary moment take by storm the theatre-going world on both sides of the Atlantic. His success as a writer had somehow proved to Gerald that their father’s genius had not died with him but lived on in Guy, until extinguished tragically too soon.
Guy had added his own robust heroism to his father’s creative flame. All Gerald had done so far was pretend to be other people and provide a few hours’ distraction while momentous events happened elsewhere. He was overcome with regret at having taken his big brother for granted, for not writing often enough; he despaired at the apparent futility of his own life. The devoted family who had loved Gerald as their baby, protected and spoilt him, had been lost to him within a period of only five years. ‘Poor darling D[addy],’ Daphne wrote, ‘had none of his family left but Aunt May.’16 Gerald and May, whose health had never been good, had been considered the weaklings and now they were all who remained from the close-knit and glamorous du Maurier clan.
The next tragedy, just a few days later, was made no less painful by the knowledge that personal catastrophe had become commonplace: young men with all their promise before them were dying in their thousands in filthy trenches in a foreign land. The sisters’ cousin, George Llewelyn Davies, one of the orphaned boys, had excelled at Eton and just gone up to Trinity College Cambridge when he joined the Army on the outbreak of war. Less than a week after his Uncle Guy’s death, George, a second lieutenant with the Rifle Brigade, was killed at the front, aged just twenty-one. Everywhere were families overborne by grief.
The sisters could not turn to the comforts of religion and the belief that the beloved dead would be reunited at last, for Gerald had no faith and was an emphatic atheist. Although their mother Muriel and her family were conventionally religious, Gerald’s lack of belief set the tone for the du Maurier children: ‘the Church was a World Apart to us’.17 Angela, however, remembered the occasional treat of attending a very high Anglican Mass with her Aunt Billy (her mother’s sister Sybil) where, she admitted, the scent of incense and the ritual ringing of little bells appealed to her emotionalism and theatricality. The rituals of the Anglo-Catholic Church would become a solace to last a lifetime, long after the appeal of Peter Pan had faded.
As for most children, however, the full impact of these family tragedies did not strike as hard, for the routines of daily life continued, offering comfort and entertaining distractions. London was milling with soldiers and their songs penetrated the genteel portals of Cumberland Terrace. Angela, Daphne and Jeanne marched and sang, as the troops did, memorable ditties like Who-Who-Who’s Your Lady Friend? Angela had overheard someone tell their nurse that in wartime everyone made eyes at the soldiers. She interpreted this to mean that it was a patriotic duty and so the girls would practise ‘making eyes’. Daphne thought that the soldiers in Regent’s Park, rewarded with an encouraging smirk and sidelong squint, luckily did not notice.
Their father Gerald, however, was not as emotionally resilient as his children. His mercurial character had found easy expression in his early years through acting. His capricious and light-hearted delivery had pioneered a new informal, conversational style, refreshing after the more self-conscious theatricality of the older generation of actors like Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree. Easily bored, Gerald needed constant diversion and had already been tiring of his stage work. However, even the greater challenges in becoming an increasingly successful actor-manager, sharing the responsibilities of selecting plays and cast, directing the acting and reaping the not inconsiderable rewards when a show was a hit, did not banish entirely the sense of ennui that sometimes overcame him.
With the approach of middle age and the harsh realities of death all around, Gerald’s facile emotions as readily flipped into existential gloom. This volatile seesaw of elation and depression ran in the family; his father had sought comfort in his wife and children and a wide circle of artistic friends, and Gerald did the same. To evade the abyss he filled his leisure hours with an endless round of social activity, handled with aplomb by Muriel, whose only desire apparently was to make him happy. Family holidays often involved a small party of friends and hangers-on, largely funded by Gerald whose capacity to earn money increased dramatically along with his readiness to spend it.
He was a demanding and devoted father and, given his emotional nature and love of fun and practical jokes, became the shining sun in his young daughters’ universe. He was a regular in their nursery, ready to play games with them, read stories and preside over mock trials when squabbles broke out between his daughters. More than once he brought J. M. Barrie up to the nursery where the du Maurier girls, without any self-consciousness, acted out for him the whole of Peter Pan: Daphne as Peter, Angela as Wendy and Mrs Darling, and when necessary a pirate or two, while Jeanne was Michael and any other part as necessary. Gerald slipped into his old blood-curdling role of Hook. The girls would slither as mermaids on the floor and fly from chair to chair, thrillingly immersed in their own fantasy of Neverland. In fact for years Angela liked to believe that the lights in Regent’s Park were fairy lights, ‘like those in the last scene of Peter Pan’.18
All three sisters pretended to be characters other than themselves throughout their childhood. It seemed that everyone they knew did the same. Histrionics were a way of life. It was not just Angela who screamed she was being murdered if the nurse got soap in her eyes when washing her hair. With Gerald, emotions were magnified; from the anchoritic groans of a man in despair he could become the clown in the nursery or a capriciously domineering Hook. Amongst the children, Daphne was already in thrall to her imagination and became the main mover in the sisters’ dramatic reconstructions of history (executions and torture were popular) or action scenes from books of adventure and derring-do.
Daphne insisted on playing the hero, only deigning to be a girl if the character was warlike and heroic, like Joan of Arc. Angela was happy enough for a while to play the female roles, even though they often ended in tears or death. She remembered the lure of The Three Musketeers, with herself as the responsible, elder Athos. Daphne of course was the upstart outsider d’Artagnan, their natural leader, and ‘poor Jeanne becoming Aramis’.19 The older girls didn’t rate the amorous, ambitious Aramis so left him to their little sister who would not complain. No one wanted to be Porthos, whose good-natured gullibility made him too dull to be heroic.
Although Angela recalled being blissfully happy up to the age of eight, in Daphne’s memory her childhood lacked even a few years of uncontaminated happiness. From early on she stood out in the family as the beauty but also as the difficult one. Angela was gregarious and outgoing and in her own estimation was a highly nervous child, but never shy. Manners were everything. The correct appearance of things mattered to the family, and shyness was considered by their parents to be extremely bad manners. Angela could converse with the adults and sweep impressive curtseys when required, but Daphne was not sociable and charming in the way that privileged Edwardian children were expected to be. Already brave and individual, in society Daphne was introverted and shy. When introduced to grown-ups, she was more likely to scowl than simper, and escape to the nursery and her own private world as soon as she could.
Being singled out in the family by her father as his favourite was a perilous honour Daphne was ill-equipped to receive. It was perhaps a major reason for the lack of sympathy between herself and her mother, ‘someone who looked at me with a sort of disapproving irritation, a queer unexplained hostility’. Daphne insisted that from the age of two, when memories began, she had never once been held by her mother or sat on her lap and that this sense of thwarted longing and alienation turned her inwards. ‘I became tongue-tied with shyness, and absolutely shut in myself,