‘MY HUSBAND’, DAPHNE wrote to Tod, after three months of married life, ‘is the most charming person in the world.’ Life was ‘a whirl’, divided between Fowey and Hampstead, and only a very little of it devoted to the army camp at Pirbright where Tommy spent most of his time. Never slow to ask her parents for favours, in spite of her desire to be independent, Daphne had suggested they let her have one of the two cottages at the foot of the Cannon Hall garden – ‘we would love one of the little Providence corner cottages, if not all knocked into one’ – and this had duly been given to her as a wedding present.
She was finding housekeeping, which had come so easily to her mother, ‘a bit of a cope’. Any kind of cooking was beyond her – ‘it is a bit of a strain when one sits and thinks how to do up the beef sort of thing’ – so she had to have a cook, especially since Tommy, though ‘easy’, liked good food. Fortunately, Tommy had an excellent batman called Richards, who had a wife willing to help the young Mrs Browning with ‘the agony of linen and pans’. She was relieved, distrusting her ability to hire servants and, even more nerve-racking, to keep them. She told her mother that she still got a shock every time her eye fell on her wedding ring and another when sharing a double bed. Double beds, she commented, were most uncomfortable – ‘we keep waking up and barging into each other . . . then the other person seems to make such a noise breathing’.
She was extremely happy, but it was to her mother that she chose to confess a few doubts. The change in her attitude to her mother began as soon as she was married – their entire relationship shifted from being hostile and difficult to being most harmonious, with the impetus for this coming from Daphne. She saw her mother as someone who would sympathize, whereas before sympathy was what she had needed but had never found forthcoming. Now she was married, now Gerald had been obliged to let her go, she drew her mother into a little conspiracy against the trials and tribulations of being a wife. ‘One realises the trials of being married,’ she wrote solemnly, ‘the way you never leave Daddy. Rather awful. One must be a bit firm and not give way to them . . .’ Enough to make Muriel smile with amusement, but what followed was more serious. ‘I feel I mustn’t leave Tommy too much, all the same,’ wrote Daphne, ‘he has these awful nervy fits of misery, ten times worse than Daddy’s old horrors,1; all harking back to that beastly war.’ In her innocence, she could not believe that the events of fourteen years ago, however hideous, still had the power to make a man like Tommy wake up screaming. She was frightened by the violence of these nightmares and distressed when she found ‘he clings to me just like a terrified little boy, so pathetic, it wrings one’s heart’. Watching him go off in the mornings, so smart and strong, and listening to him barking out orders at Pirbright, so fierce and confident, the young wife could hardly reconcile this soldier with the creature whose sobbing she sometimes comforted in the middle of the night. It was like possessing a terrible secret which she had no wish to know, and mixed up with her compassion was an unmistakable alarm. She had never wanted a dependent husband, one who needed her. She wanted what she thought she had married, an utterly self-reliant war hero, somebody calm, solid and stable. ‘Whenever I’ve imagined being married,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘I’ve imagined someone who knew about horses and dogs and the country and wore smelly tweeds, but . . . he is so exactly like the husband Ralph in Portrait of Clare, who got killed in the Boer war.’ Nor did she like what she termed Tommy’s hypochondria – ‘he gets irritable . . . and sorry for himself if he gets a cold’. Since this was exactly how all du Mauriers reacted to colds her annoyance was surprising, but then she found that the real trouble was her husband’s need to be looked after and ministered to. The nurturing side of Daphne was almost non-existent and it horrified her to have any kind of care demanded of her.
When Tommy left Fowey or Hampstead to go back to camp, Daphne described him with dismay as ‘like a miserable boy being sent to school’ and commented again, ‘how awful if he gets like Daddy about being left’. It was rapidly dawning on her that whereas she thought she had married a man who was the opposite of her father (except for the charm, and it was a very different kind of charm) she was discovering disquieting similarities all the time. Tommy’s need of her was blatant. He yearned to be with her all the time, whereas she could tolerate small separations very well. It was like the situation in her early short story ‘A Difference in Temperament’, though not so extreme, and of course, unlike the couple she had imagined, she and Tommy still loved each other and were happy. But she felt already, in the first months of marriage, that in some curious as yet unproven way she was stronger than Tommy; and she did not like that feeling. She never, ever, wanted to find herself in the position she had found herself in with her father, with him desperate for support and demanding a complete devotion of body and soul, which she did not want to give. She had seen her mother devote her life to upholding Gerald during his bad times and appearing to bear no resentment. Daphne knew she was not like Muriel – no matter how deep her love for her husband, and it was deep, she had no intention of becoming indispensable to him. She was not going to be a motherly wife: men who were like children did not appeal to her.
Children themselves she expected to have, six of them, all sons. By November, four months after her marriage, she was reporting to Tod that there was ‘no sign of the pattering of tiny feet’ with what reads like regret and certainly an acknowledgement that the tiny feet were anticipated. Two months later she knew she was pregnant. The thought of her son being born was exciting and during her pregnancy she dreamed of him as Janet did of Joseph in The Loving Spirit. She felt serene and placid and also, which came as a surprise, found she had the urge ‘to wax’ (du Maurier code for making love) very strongly. So these were happy months. Waiting for her son to be born was an occupation in itself and she had no desire to write. The Progress of Julius came out that spring (1933) and, though the two newspapers whose reviews she most valued at the time – the Observer and The Times – found some praise for it, the general reception was much more critical than she had expected. It did not sell as well as The Loving Spirit, but then neither had I’ll Never Be Young Again. She was puzzled that nobody seemed to appreciate that her second and third novels were, in her own opinion, actually better books than the first and that no one gave her credit for attempting more ambitious and relevant themes.
In idle moments, she made lists of what she should prepare for her son’s arrival, aware that this was what one did. She was amused at her own vagueness as to what would be needed. ‘One yard of flannel,’ she jotted down, wondering what on earth one did with it, ‘four vests (luxury weight chillprove [sic], four flannels, four neighties [sic], four dresses, two small shawls . . . baby’s chamber pot’. But she knew all this was playing and what she would really need was a nanny to put her right. The thought of having to have one bothered her – she disliked the idea of any personal relationship being forced on her and yet did not know how to keep such relations impersonal. It was one of the most attractive sides of her character that she was never haughty, never treated servants as inferiors or exerted any authority over them, even if her expectations of them were high and invariably disappointed. She advertised in The Lady and the Daily Telegraph for a nanny who ‘need not be highly trained’, hoping that this would protect her from the kind of fearsome, dominant character she dreaded. The young woman she liked the sound of, and whom she selected for interview, was two years younger than herself – she thought if she had a young nanny she might feel less intimidated. Margaret Eglesfield had had one previous job and had been trained at Putney Nursery Training School. Confronted with her, Daphne was at a loss for words. She had no idea how to conduct an interview and in desperation asked Margaret what they should talk about. Startled, Margaret replied that they should discuss Mrs Browning’s requirements. But Daphne could not think how to be specific about these, so Margaret interviewed herself and agreed to £42 a year, all found, the standard rate. She noticed, when she asked to see the nursery which had been prepared, that everything was in blue and the boy’s name ‘Christian’ was painted on the cupboard doors. She commented that this might be a little awkward if the baby turned out to be a girl. ‘Heaven forbid,’ said Daphne.
The baby was due at the beginning of July. ‘I still go for long walks on the heath every morning, even when it is 90º in the shade,’ Daphne wrote to Foy. She wished she was down at Ferryside, walking by the sea, but Hampstead was so much more convenient for the birth. She had no fear of childbirth, but when the time came the reality shocked her. On 15 July, four days before her first wedding anniversary, Daphne gave birth not to the son she longed for and confidently expected, but to a daughter. She found the pain excruciating – ‘a hundred times worse than an appendix – real hell’ – and wrote to Tod, ‘all the old wives’ tales about childbirth are true! Of all the hellish performances – so beastly degrading too, lying on a bed with legs spreadeagled and feeling exactly as though one’s entire inside plus intestines and bowels were being torn from one! Pheugh! It makes me sweat to think back on it.’ It also made her sweat to think of going through it again. ‘Let’s hope I shan’t be like the rhyme about the poor Queen of Spain, how does it go? “What a life for the Queen of Spain / Two minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain / Three weeks’ rest and she’s at it again.”’ She was determined to ‘take steps’ to safeguard herself from this fate – ‘a good two and a half years, I hope, before I make an effort to get a son’.
Her disappointment was intense, nor did it disappear quickly, and she made no attempt to hide it. But in spite of the pain she had suffered and her dismay at being the mother of a daughter some pride did come through. ‘The child is flourishing,’ she wrote to Tod. ‘Exactly like Tommy, but fair hair and blue eyes. Very well-formed body, though I say it myself. Strong limbs and nice skin, never red or pasty. Name of Tessa.2 She was also proud that she was ‘by way of coping with feeding her myself’, though this did not last long. By the time Margaret Eglesfield took over from the monthly nurse, Tessa was being bottle-fed. Daphne wrote to Tod that she was not only disillusioned with childbirth but also with breast-feeding – ‘have always heard it left one in a state of ecstasy, but can assure you that the pastime leaves me unmoved. The child hiccups most of the time and kicks me in the stomach. But then I never was sentimental.’ She was nevertheless more devoted than she was sometimes prepared to admit. Although in every letter Tessa was referred to in a detached, ironic way as ‘The Child’, Daphne was reluctant to leave her. Tommy had a month’s leave after Tessa’s birth and was keen that Daphne should go with him down to Fowey, but although she longed to go she resisted the temptation, because ‘I wouldn’t like to leave The Child at so tender an age’.
Once the nanny was installed, Daphne’s life went on much as before. Her involvement with her baby was minimal. The nanny had complete charge and Daphne had nothing to do with the care of the baby – she was prepared to put her total trust in the nanny. When Margaret arrived it was August and still very hot, but she was disconcerted to find that, although there was a yard of flannel, there was no pram and evidently no thought of one being needed. She could not bear to be inside on such beautiful days, with Hampstead Heath so near, and decided to take short walks carrying the five-week-old Tessa in her arms. On one such walk, she wandered along to the nearby Vale of Health pond on the heath, where she sat on a seat. It was cool there, beside the water, shaded by a tree and she was perfectly happy until a man came and sat beside her. He asked her how old the baby was. She replied, but then turned pointedly away to make it quite clear she did not speak to strange men. The man would not be put off and persisted in questioning her – was it not tiring carrying a baby, did her arms not ache, would it not be better to purchase a pram, and so on. Margaret decided this had gone far enough. She got up and began walking home. To her alarm, the man followed her. She walked more quickly. So did he. By the time she reached the Cannon Hall cottage she was running. She banged on the door and when Richards opened it told him a strange man was following her, who seemed suspiciously interested in the baby. Richards looked past her, saw the man who was now coming up to the door and, smiling, said, ‘This is Sir Gerald du Maurier, the baby’s grandfather.’
Feeling extremely foolish, Margaret apologized. Gerald sighed and said it was typical of Daphne not to have thought of a pram and that one must be bought at once. Next morning, a Harrods van arrived at the door and six prams were wheeled out for Margaret’s inspection. An hour later, a Selfridges van arrived with a similar cargo, followed by a third from Milson’s. Quite overcome, Margaret chose a big grey Osnath, for which Gerald paid, instructing her to come to him should she need anything else for his granddaughter. But there was nothing else she lacked. Her days settled into a pleasant routine with no interference from, and not much contact with, her employer. Daphne got up late, went for walks, visited her parents and sisters. Angela and Jeanne were still living at home, just round the corner, and Angela in particular loved Tessa and adored playing with her. Since neither sister worked, though Angela, too, was trying to write, and Jeanne had begun to take her painting seriously, they had plenty of time, still leading the privileged life which had made Daphne so discontented, to see a great deal of their sister. Daphne and Tommy went to theatres with them and dined out with various friends of their own, including Bunny and Phyllis Austin, known as ‘Mr and Mrs A’ to their ‘Mr and Mrs B’. Margaret had no idea she was working for a writer and saw no writing being done. Every now and again there would be visits to Fowey, which sometimes included her and Tessa, and sometimes not. After nearly six months of this, Margaret realized that, though her days were perfectly easy, and life in the Browning household extremely pleasant, she had not had a single day off and Mrs Browning appeared not even to have noticed or thought anything of it. But Major Browning did. One evening he came bounding upstairs to the nursery, asking if it was very hard to give a baby its bottle. Margaret assured him it was simple. Encouraged, the Major then suggested Margaret should have a night off, going with Richards and his wife Lily to the theatre, for which he would get tickets, and he and Mrs Browning would take care of Tessa.
Tickets were duly provided and off the three of them went. They had a wonderful time, but as they arrived home, Richards pointed out that all the lights were blazing in the nursery and as they entered they could hear piercing screams. Margaret rushed upstairs to find the Major pacing the floor and shouting ‘Oh my God!’ and Daphne sitting with a look of agony as she tried to force a bottle into the mouth of her blue-faced baby, while Bunny Austin sat watching, helpless. Within seconds, Margaret had calmed Tessa, brought up the wind that was troubling her, cleared the hole in the bottle’s teat, which had become clogged, and all was well. But it was from then onwards that she began to insist the young mother should become more involved in the care of her own baby. Dutifully, Mrs Browning agreed. She was perfectly aware how incompetent she was, and anxious to do her best whatever her feelings towards her baby.
It was rather too clear by then what these feelings were. Daphne had still not got over Tessa being a girl, and Margaret went so far as to consider that she was rejecting her own baby. She did not cuddle or kiss her, she did not talk or sing to her, she did not in any way appear to dote on her or want to be with her. She seemed, in fact, to have difficulty with the whole idea of being a mother. But Margaret could see that even if Mrs Browning was no earth-mother, she was also no socialite, however idle her days appeared to be. There were ‘words’ over various engagements Major Browning wished to accept and Mrs Browning did not. It turned out there was a side to Tommy that Daphne had not known about.
It was true that, as she had told Tod before they were married, he liked nothing better than to mess about in boats, wearing old clothes, just as she did; but it was also true, which she had never suspected, that he could occasionally also enjoy a kind of socializing she loathed. Her idea of socializing, if she had to be sociable, was to be among like-minded people in a relaxed and casual setting, all being what she called ‘jam-a-long’ – easy-going, informal, with no need for any pretence. But Tommy had been in the habit before he met her of accepting invitations to rather grand country house weekends, and now that he had a lovely young wife he was eager for her to share this pleasure with him. Daphne did not find such experiences a pleasure – in fact, she hated them. Reluctantly, she was sometimes obliged to accompany him, but put up great resistance. She wrote to Grace, Tommy’s sister, in the autumn of 1933, after such a visit to Leeds Castle, that she had ‘never known anything like it’. There were twenty-one people to dinner every night and to her amazement the dinner was held in a different dining-room each of the three nights. The footmen were ‘like cabinet ministers’ and her bedroom ‘like a stateroom at Versailles’. She vowed she needed opera glasses in bed to see the dressing-table across the room and that the marble lavatory, disguised as an armchair, was distinctly insanitary. ‘I am afraid they are a dreadful set,’ she commented to Foy, ‘. . . the sort of people one would gladly see guillotined.’ She found such opulence distasteful and wished herself at home with a hot-water bottle. Nor did the sight of Tommy enjoying himself, and proving an obvious hit with every woman present, make her feel any happier. She came back from such weekends feeling furious.
There were signs that she was suffering from a mild post-natal depression. She confessed to Grace that a ‘shameful weakening of the eye-duct’ kept coming over her. She found herself weeping for no reason and was horrified – she was not that sort of woman and did not want to be. She despised tears as weakness and was proud that only rarely, under extreme stress, did she give way to them. Though she had nothing else to do in Hampstead but rest, if she so chose, she wondered in her letter if she might come to her sister-in-law’s home, where Grace lived with her widowed mother, and rest. All she would need was ‘a glass of water and a lettuce leaf every now and again’, and she would only need the sheets changed every two weeks. Maybe, she suggested, Grace would like to swap places – a switch for them both ‘might be amusing and act as a tonic’. Apparently the energetic Grace, tireless worker for the Girl Guides and countless other organizations, had no need of a tonic.3
Daphne went home to her hot-water bottle. Tommy, concerned over her weepiness and general low spirits, reacted much as her parents had done: he thought she needed amusement and bought her ‘a little Morris . . . in a frenzied fit of divine generosity, for me to go about in’.4 But ‘going about’ did her little good, and she was disturbed to find herself feeling as restless as she had done before she got down to her first novel at Ferryside in the winter of 1929–30. Being a wife and a mother ought, she felt, to fulfil her, but the truth was that it did not; it was writing which made her content. But there was more to her restlessness than that. Not only did she miss writing, she missed being alone, far away from everyone, walking on the Gribbin or sailing. And now she could not indulge herself exactly as she wished – she had a husband and a baby to think of, even if her duties were minimal. Instead of making her unselfish, as she had hoped, marriage had made her desire to return to being more selfish again in spite of her love for Tommy.
Things got worse in the New Year of 1934. Tommy was now second-in-command of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards (he became commanding officer in January 1936) and had to take up residence at Frimley, in Surrey. The Cannon Hall cottage was given up and the Brownings moved, though not to any army quarters – they rented a beautiful Queen Anne house, the Old Rectory, and though Daphne had groaned at the thought of suburban Surrey, she was charmed with it. The country round about was pleasant and afforded some tolerable walks which were better than Hampstead Heath. Tommy was very busy which left her with more time on her own, and she quite frankly relished this. Margaret looked after Tessa, except for an hour a day, which she insisted Mrs Browning should devote to her daughter, and she began to see that if she wanted to she could begin to write again.
But then Gerald became ill. He was to go into hospital for an exploratory operation, and though she was told there was no cause for alarm, the entire family shared her fear. Gerald hated hospitals – which, in du Maurier code, were always called ‘slaughterhouses’ – and was always frightened of illness. Daphne did not want him to have any kind of operation. She was, she wrote to Tod, ‘against all operations on principle, believing, as I do, three-quarters of them to be unnecessary’. But the week after his sixty-first birthday Gerald went into a clinic in Devonshire Place and was operated on. Cancer of the colon was diagnosed. The malignant tumour was removed and everyone informed that the operation had been a complete success. But on 11 April, his thirty-first wedding anniversary, Gerald died.
The shock for his wife and daughters was profound. None of them had had the faintest inkling that Gerald would die, and they had had no time even to adjust to his being seriously ill. For Daphne this was grief of a kind she had never experienced, but she gave no overt signs of it. She was controlled and fatalistic: what would be, would be. She quickly convinced herself that ‘death has come at the right moment for him, like a way of escape’. She thought of Gerald as someone who could not possibly face the horrors of old age, who was simply not equipped to age gracefully. He was the sort of person who ‘ought always to be young’, just like Peter Pan, and to condemn him to a gradual decline would have been too cruel. Hand in hand with this determined philosophy went another: she was sure that in some way Gerald was not dead. She was no more religious than he had been himself (in spite of her new habit, since her marriage, of saying prayers at night because Tommy did so) but she had a strong presentiment, from the moment she was told of her father’s death, that he was somehow around her. She concentrated hard on keeping this strange sensation alive and managed successfully, except for the moment when she had to witness her mother’s appalling distress. Then, seeing the placid, dignified, always elegant Muriel devastated by grief ‘broke me up’. She wrote to Foy that this utter wretchedness of her mother’s, the sight of her lying on her bed, her face obliterated by tears, racked by sobs, unable to speak, was ‘the worst thing of all’. She knew that, for all Gerald’s womanizing, it was Mo he had truly loved, and now he was dead she was utterly bereft. Daphne suffered for her and in doing so a compassion completed the softening of her attitude to her mother which had already begun. She felt close to her for the first time, even physically close, able to embrace her as she never had done before, and she felt instantly protective. There had never, or so she had thought, been any role for her in her mother’s life, but now that she could see how much support was going to be needed she was eager to acknowledge her new responsibilities. A kind of love for her mother touched her for the first time.
But she did not go to the funeral.5 Gerald was buried with the other members of his family in Hampstead churchyard after a ceremony kept very simple and held in the evening to ensure privacy. Daphne went on to the Heath instead and released some pigeons. She was perfectly aware that this might seem an extravagantly romantic gesture, but she thought it in keeping with the spirit of Gerald and it comforted her to watch the birds soar into the sky and imagine Gerald equally free of the earth. Since she was persuading herself Gerald was not really dead, she saw this as a celebration and she felt reassured and almost happy. Then she helped her sisters deal with all the letters of condolence and found ‘it helped an awful lot, because we were able to do it in a sort of rather ruthless cold-blooded way, and we kept thinking how many of them would have made Daddy laugh, and so they made us laugh too. We kept thinking how Daddy would say “Good God – what the hell is old so-and-so writing for, he’s hated my guts for years”, or “Listen to this one – I never knew what’s-her-name had a bent for religion”, and though a lot of people might have thought us heartless and cursed with a mordant beastly type of humour, I don’t think we were – we were really being much closer to Daddy than all the people with the solemn faces.’6
This feeling of closeness to Gerald stayed with her when she returned to Frimley, and instead of being depressed she found herself curiously expectant. One day she went into the local church and sat down, not to pray but simply to be quiet. She closed her eyes and an extraordinary conviction that Gerald was there came over her. She did not hear his voice or see his body, there was nothing ghostly or visionary about the experience, but she simply had the knowledge that he was with her. At the same time she had a sudden desire to begin to do what, at the back of her mind, she had been wanting to do ever since she heard of his death: write about him. She had only ever written fiction, but she knew this could not be fiction. It would have to be, she supposed, though she shied away from the word, a biography, but a biography intent on telling the story of Gerald’s life and catching the essence of him rather than a record of his theatrical achievements. The idea excited her, but at the same time made her nervous. She had all the du Maurier horror of being ‘wain’ (embarrassing) or ‘see me’ (showing off) or committing a ‘tell him’ (being boring). All three would have to be avoided. Then she was not sure if any publisher would be interested, and she felt she could not embark on such a venture without some assurance that it would be looked kindly upon. For two weeks after her visit to the church, she turned the idea over in her mind, wondering whether she should act on it or not. Was the challenge too great? Would Gerald have approved? Was it too near to his death to be decent? Would she be able to tell the truth without being disloyal or hurting anyone still alive? She felt hesitant and yet inspired and finally decided that there was no harm in trying, and seeing what resulted.
In May 1934, she signed a contract for a biography of her father, but she signed it with Victor Gollancz, not with Heinemann, the publisher of her first three novels. This naturally caused everyone at Heinemann great concern. They felt they had done well for her and certainly did not want to lose her. John Frere, then a director of Heinemann and married to Daphne’s old friend Pat Wallace, rang her up, puzzled and hurt, when he heard the news, to find out what had happened. Daphne’s explanation was that Victor Gollancz had approached her with the idea of doing a biography of her father, immediately after Gerald’s death, and she had felt she therefore had to do it for him. This was untrue but a typical way of avoiding any confrontation, which she hated, or unpleasantness. In fact, the agent Curtis Brown himself had suggested Victor Gollancz7 as a more suitable person to publish it than Heinemann, who he did not think had done so well with Daphne’s second and third novels as he would have liked. Since the new book would be non-fiction there was no need for Daphne to feel disloyal. What was significant was Daphne’s own eagerness to try Gollancz – she might genuinely hate publicity, if it meant exposing herself personally to it, but at the same time she wanted to make an impact and see her books do as well as they possibly could, especially now that she was married and living on Tommy’s pay. She had shrugged off his worries about money, saying what she earned from her books would make up any deficit; but, now that she had been married over a year and produced nothing new, and the income from her last two novels was shown to be considerably less than that from the first, she was beginning to see that she would have to do better. According to Curtis Brown, and everyone else in the literary world, there was no one more likely to help with self-advancement than the dynamic head of a publishing house only six years old, Victor Gollancz.8
Within a very short time Victor had developed a relationship with Daphne which she had never enjoyed with anyone at Heinemann. The strange thing was that, although she had a horror of any ‘showing off’ kind of behaviour, and was herself very reticent, Daphne greatly admired Victor’s vigorous approach to his work. In an era when advertising books was a discreet affair he had startled other publishers with his huge (some said vulgar) splashes in the serious newspapers. His first bestseller, after he set up on his own, was Isadora Duncan’s My Life, and true to his style he had immediately celebrated with a lavish party at Claridge’s, which became an annual event. By 1934, when Daphne contracted to write Gerald, his list was already impressive: A. J. Cronin, Joyce Cary, and Ivy Compton-Burnett were among the names. There was nothing Victor liked better than having a young author full of potential to promote, and in Daphne du Maurier he saw he had a gift: a talented, pretty young woman, already known for her novels, writing about her famous just-dead father. It was irresistible, a natural for the bestseller lists. And the bestseller lists were where Daphne wanted to be, not because she craved glory, not that she was greedy, not because she valued such a thing in itself, but because she wanted to fulfil her promise to be the breadwinner. She would write only what came naturally, but once she had done so her aims were practical and she saw no contradiction in that.
Gerald: A Portrait was written in four months, in the summer of 1934. ‘The book was finished this morning,’ Daphne wrote to Victor on 31 August. ‘I am going to correct it with a severe blue pencil and you shall have it next week. I am glad to have done it up to time – never expected I would. Shows one can do anything if one tries hard enough.’ Victor, realizing the urgent need to bring out the biography while Gerald was still in everyone’s mind, had stipulated she must hand in the manuscript by the last day of that same year. He was delighted to have it ready by mid-September, and pushed ahead immediately for publication on 1 November to catch the Christmas trade. His enthusiasm thrilled Daphne – she recognized it as genuine and treasured her new publisher’s intelligent appreciation of what she had done. He praised the pace of the biography, the way it read like a novel, and this was exactly what she had aimed at – she wanted all the facts in but she did not want these to weigh the narrative down and get in the way of conveying Gerald’s spirit. This made for the lively style she wanted, but it also made the book a curious hybrid. It was written in the third person, even when Daphne was referring to herself, and yet it covered certain events in an intimate way more suited to the first person. Daphne struggled to be objective, hence the third person, but when she wanted to demonstrate the psychological insight only she possessed, she was constrained by her own style. Those passages in the book where she described Gerald’s character, are by far the most interesting and brave. She was not in the least afraid to be critical, pointing out that however successful her father had seemed, he was a man ‘whose soul cried out for a goal in life’ and that he ended his life ‘still without his creed’. She did not dwell upon his affairs with women, though she managed to make it clear these existed, but his depressions were the subject of her most piercing analysis. She saw him as a man whose ‘brain and his entire nervous system’ yearned for work of ‘a more intensive kind’ and who, when it failed to appear, became ‘stagnant and discouraged’. She stressed how spoiled he had been all his life and what a fatal effect this had had, and yet she rejoiced, too, in Gerald’s joie de vivre in his younger days and in a humour which had remained utterly childish. His work as actor and manager she praised, seeing as the pinnacle his performance as Will Dearth in Dear Brutus in 1917.
Gerald rises out of this portrait wonderfully real and colourful, with all his charm intact, his eccentricities amusingly portrayed, and with the dark side of his nature sensitively drawn. About his relationship with her, Daphne’s character study was astute, but she pulled back from revealing the full extent of her own very mixed feelings about him. The book states frankly that he could not cope with the adolescence of any of his daughters and that the ‘very quality of his emotion’ made them all shy and made them want to distance themselves from this father to whom they had been so close in childhood. It also tells of Gerald’s constant refrain of ‘I wish I was your brother instead of your father’, and what a burden this at first amusing desire became. But the real misery Gerald had caused her, much of which went into The Progress of Julius, is lacking – Daphne wanted to keep faith with her father, to tell the truth, but only so far as she thought acceptable at that time. It was a shock to her to discover that a great deal of what she had so lovingly written was regarded on publication as, on the contrary, quite unacceptable. Many of Gerald’s contemporaries regarded the book as a betrayal of a father by a daughter and thought the descriptions of Gerald’s depressions distasteful, the exposure of his weaknesses crude, and the mention of his extramarital relationships outrageous.
Fortunately, the reviewers did not agree. Michael Joseph, Daphne’s agent at Curtis Brown, had prophesied that Gerald would be hailed as ‘the most vivid, original and sincere biography for years’ and he was right. The Times, the newspaper Daphne revered most, called it ‘A remarkable book . . . some brilliant comic writing . . . the description of the family’s start for a holiday cannot be read . . . without laughing and then . . . the laughter dies and the reader’s heart sinks into sadness.’ Other reviews were equally laudatory and the sales were excellent. But from Daphne’s point of view what was even more encouraging was what she had earned. On publication day she received £1,000 and 20 per cent of the home sales up to 10,000 copies sold. Beside that, the disapproval of some old men sitting in the Garrick Club was nothing, and in any case the only people who really mattered, her family, had all read the book before publication and thoroughly approved.
But after all the excitement was over, reaction set in. December found the triumphant biographer reporting to Tod that she felt ‘distinctly off colour’. All her insides felt mixed up and she was terrified she was pregnant again (though she wasn’t). She had come to the conclusion in Frimley, as she wrote to Foy, that she was only really happy ‘in the middle of Dartmoor in a hail storm within an hour of sundown of a late November afternoon’. Instead there were rumours that she might soon find herself in the boiling heat of Egypt where Tommy’s battalion might be posted. This dismayed her, but luckily the rumour turned out for the moment to be untrue. Her spirits remained low over Christmas – the first without Gerald as master of ceremonies – and though she had never expressed any affection for Cannon Hall, she was upset that it had been sold. Her mother and sisters moved for the time being into the Cannon Hall cottage she and Tommy had vacated, but there was talk of withdrawing from Hampstead entirely and moving to Ferryside. Unmistakably, an era had ended and, though she had always prided herself on not being sentimental, Daphne now found herself wallowing in sentiment and, something else more worrying, she found herself thinking more and more about the past, even the past beyond her own memory, just as Gerald had done. This was perhaps, she reasoned, what everyone did on the death of a parent, it was perhaps an inevitable rite of passage, but what puzzled her was how attractive the past already seemed, more attractive than the present; and yet she was not only happy in the present but knew that a great deal of this past had not been happy.
The truth was that, although fundamentally happy, quite a large slice of her life was far from satisfactory and this irritated her. With Tommy as second-in-command she could not always shut herself up, as she had just done while writing Gerald, but was obliged to show some interest in the wives and families of the soldiers. She found this agonizing. ‘Can you picture me’, she wrote to Tod, ‘going round the married quarters and chatting up forty different women? “And how is the leg, Mrs Skinner?” and “Dear little Freddie, what a fine boy he is”, (this to a swollen-faced object obviously suffering from mumps, who comes and breathes over one.)’ She could not understand how the wives put up with their miserable existence – ‘I must say, though, the poor things are very cheerful on the whole, and clean.’ This apparent acceptance of their fate by the soldiers’ wives fascinated her – how could they bear such awful living conditions? It was her first glimpse of any kind of deprivation, since the only ‘poor’ she had come into contact with had been people like Miss Roberts, about whose cottage in Bodinnick there was nothing dreary in spite of the outside lavatory, and the Cannon Hall servants, who she had always felt lived rather well. But when she went into the army married quarters she was easily thrown by what she observed. ‘There was one wretched woman’, she told Tod, ‘whose husband was only a private and she had nine children under nine! They live in a room half the size of yours . . . and three of them wouldn’t walk and had a skin disease and they were all propped up on chairs round the room while the poor woman cooked the rather unsavoury stew for midday dinner.’ It disturbed her to witness such scenes and she knew she ought to try to do something about the more pressing problems these women had, so she dutifully tried to do her bit. She found out that several wives were entitled to certain benefits they were not getting, and on their behalf filled in forms and corresponded with the appropriate authorities. This, she knew, was the least she could do, but she shrank from any more serious involvement. She shrank, too, from other duties as an army officer’s wife, loathing any kind of social gathering and hating things like the presentation of prizes. Once, she got lost in the barracks and ended up in the middle of a group of soldiers who never guessed that she was the wife of the officer second-in-command of the battalion – ‘I had to run the gauntlet of wolf whistles,’ she told Foy, and thought of the scene with extreme embarrassment, dreading the men’s eventual discovery of her identity. Part of the trouble, she knew, was that she did not look like the received image of an officer’s wife. She looked like a slip of a girl, blonde and pretty enough to whistle at, always with a rather diffident air, someone who blushed easily and had no air of authority whatsoever.
Getting away from army life was her prime object throughout 1935. She went down to Fowey as often as possible and even when it poured found the place ‘too lovely’ and felt better at once. A trip to Bodmin Moor put her in mind of a previous visit with Foy and she began to make notes for the new book she had contracted in February to write – for Victor Gollancz. Heinemann were still supposed to be her publisher for fiction, but Victor was determined to keep her and suggested to Curtis Brown: ‘A way out of this situation occurs to me. Why not suggest she signs an agreement for one novel with no tie-ups or options.’ It would be, he argued, ‘inefficient to have Gerald with one publisher and then a novel with another’ (but not, apparently, inefficient to have had three novels with one publisher then to have come with Gerald to him). This, he thought, would ‘enable her to satisfy herself about my suitability . . . as her novel publisher before committing her destinies rather more permanently to my hands’. Given this chance ‘I feel sure that when the time comes she will want to go with me’. He was prepared to pay an advance of £1,000 with the same royalties as for Gerald, and Daphne had been glad to accept. She had promised him another kind of novel from the ones she had already written – ‘a tale of adventure . . . set in Cornwall, full of smugglers and steeped in atmosphere’. On Bodmin Moor again, she felt it take shape.
It was annoying that almost as soon as she had begun, she had to return to Frimley and, worse still, waste time preparing to be presented at Court. She resented all the fuss this involved and thought it silly, but told Tod that Tommy wanted it. Yet in spite of this assertion there is no doubt that if she had really objected to the Court presentation – as she had vehemently objected to a formal wedding – Tommy would never have been able to persuade her. There was, whatever she said, a respect in her for such conventional honours and she was a confirmed royalist as well as a lover of pageantry. But it was true, she found it an interruption she could have done without, though it was a good excuse to go to Tod’s Baker Street flat, where she was now trying to make a living as a milliner, and ‘have a good laugh’ getting ready.
Victor kept enquiring how the novel was going, and by November she was able to tell him it would soon be finished and she thought he would like it. Once she had started she adopted a strict regime of writing for three hours in the morning, another two in the late afternoon after her walk and, if Tommy was not home from his duties with the battalion, another hour in the evening. She had a typewriter now and had taught herself to type (very badly). Margaret looked after Tessa, she had a cook to look after meals and a woman to clean, and there were neither interruptions nor calls on her time. When she finished the novel, at the beginning of 1936, and sent it to Victor, he liked it very much, recognizing at once that this was by far the best fiction Daphne had yet produced and that he could do great things with it. It was called Jamaica Inn and was a completely new departure.