IN AUGUST 1966, Daphne finished writing the book about Cornwall, to be called Vanishing Cornwall (after she had rejected the suggestion ‘Romantic Cornwall’, declaring that she hated the word). She was pleased with the book and felt she had been quite outspoken in her acid comments about tourism. When Victor and Sheila both suggested ‘some anti-tourism stuff’ should be cut, she was indignant, though as usual gave way to their judgement. But what really annoyed her sufficiently to record her displeasure was the news that although she sent the book to Gollancz at the end of August, they said they could not publish it until the following year. She could see no reason for this – every book she wrote seemed to take longer to publish and she wished she was back in the days when, if she delivered a manuscript one month, it was published the next. At least, she thought, the book should come out in the spring of 1967, ready for the holiday trade. But no – it was to be July, and she was furious. As usual the storming letters about this were not written to either Victor or Sheila, who simply received mild enquiries as to the reason for the delay.
It was some consolation that when the book did appear it was well reviewed, Kits’ photographs as well as Daphne’s prose receiving praise, and that it became a bestseller even though Gollancz had published what Daphne thought of as an ‘absurdly low’ number of copies – 7,500 (perfectly good for a travel book). Victor himself died that year, in February, and everyone at Gollancz was nervous about how Daphne would react, especially his daughter Livia, who took over as head of the publishing house. She had no need to worry – loyalty was everything to Daphne, and though some authors considered their loyalty belonged only to Victor himself and left, she never thought of it. She valued Sheila immensely – ‘she knows my ways’ – and as ever loathed the idea of change. But it was true that with Victor gone – and she mourned his death greatly – she had lost both a mentor and a powerful influence on herself. For thirty-three years she had abided by his judgement in literary matters and only when money came into the dispute did she overrule him. Now, there was no one at Gollancz, not even Sheila, who could give her the same guidance and if necessary save her from herself. She was too valuable for anyone to risk upsetting, not a healthy position for any author to be in.
The plan of Vanishing Cornwall on the whole pleased the critics, who enjoyed the mixture of history, description of landscape and evocation of atmosphere together with Daphne’s personal reminiscing. The prologue, in which she described her holidays as a child in Cornwall and then her memories of learning to love it as an adult, was particularly liked and much preferred to the account of Cornwall’s origins. There is a lot of historical background and a good deal of retelling of legends in the first part of the book, before any attempt is made to grapple with the Cornish character. Daphne felt on strong ground here, though the Cornishmen among the reviewers felt that she had failed to capture their real character. However, even the Cornishmen liked her ‘affectionate summoning of the Cornish world’ – ‘place’ was her strength. The Sunday Times could not fault the evocation of ‘scenery and the changing weather’, and the Observer thought she had captured ‘the special essence of the place’. All in all, not even Daphne, with her paranoid view of critics, could maintain that the book had not been generously received.
She was glad about this, assuring friends that she was about ‘to land in the bankruptcy courts’. Kilmarth was financially draining and she claimed to have spent £8,000 on Kits’ project of making Vanishing Cornwall into a film, which meant ‘my own finances are low’.1 Curtis Brown, her agents, were requested to tell her how many copies of all her books had been sold to date, so that she could see if she was ‘sliding towards ruin’, which threw them into something of a panic. It was, they replied, ‘a really enormous labour’ to calculate, and there was no need, because they could assure her that she was still making large amounts of money from royalties on Rebecca alone. In addition, she was receiving, from Doubleday in America, £30,000 every year, under an agreement whereby they held her accumulated royalties there and released only this sum, so that the tax to be paid on her whole income in England would not be prohibitive. Knowing all this made no difference – she was worried about money even more than she had been since her letter to Victor in 1956, when she first began to be anxious that she was finished as a high earner. Unfortunately, the bank manager in St Austell chose this moment to write and make some mild enquiries about her overdraft.2 She was furious – and interpreted the enquiry as ‘insulting’ and also inexplicable, because she couldn’t understand why she had an overdraft anyway. Her accountant, Richard Pegler, had just been obliged to retire, owing to ill health, and she was even more worried than usual about her financial affairs.
Her only comfort was that she could feel ‘another novel growing’ after she returned from a second Swan Hellenic cruise (as good as the first) in the spring of 1967. She wasn’t sure if the idea would continue to grow, but it was sparked off by her now regular visits to Kilmarth to see what needed to be done. The history of the house interested her, as did the history of the area in which it stood. A Mr Thomas of the Old Cornwall Society lent her a ‘glorious full-scale tithe map of Tywardreath’ and she became fascinated by a priory which had stood there in the fourteenth century. Throughout the summer and autumn she explored Kilmarth itself and at the same time read up on its past occupants, from the fourteenth century onwards. She was most intrigued ‘by a young woman called Isolda who married Sir Oliver Carminow’ and also by a recent tenant of Kilmarth, Professor Singer. Some bottles containing animal embryos were found in the basement and she suddenly saw how she could interweave two stories – the old and the new – connecting them by means of some kind of time-travelling. She thought she might ‘switch in time to the fourteenth century in a Scapegoatish kind of way’. This was exactly the kind of story she loved to concoct, and once she had thought of a device whereby the connection could be made – her hero taking an experimental drug – she was excited by the tremendous possibilities. She could combine historical fact with psychological study, and that was going ‘to give me a lot of fun’. It would, she thought, produce something ‘unusual . . . and a bit frightening’.
She did not start to write until after Christmas – all the de Zulueta family were there except Peter (whose alcoholism had made him seriously ill, and over whom she thought it ‘better to draw a veil’). Privately, she was prepared to confess to the Wolfendens that Tessa had ‘a sometimes difficult home life’, but that she was sure her daughter, who had ‘loads of courage and guts’, would ‘keep her particular flag flying’. The grandchildren were ‘dear’, but she was bewildered by their ‘lack of initiative to entertain themselves’. Her own brood, she wrote, never needed to be entertained – all of them had always been perfectly happy, ‘Tess with her nose in a book . . . Kits and Flave playing imaginary games and never at a loss’. She had not the slightest idea of how wretched Tessa had once been, lonely to the point of gloomily contemplating suicide and reduced to playing with her goats, nor how displaced Flavia had felt when for years she was obliged to play with Kits and be ‘old dopey’. The past was always a happy place for Daphne, childhood enchanted. Pooch and Paul de Zulueta were spoiling her romanticized vision; Freddie Browning, aged two, by contrast, and Robert, born just before Christmas, were still babies and she adored them, and of course Rupert Tower, Flavia’s son, continued to please her with his quietness. But thoughts of modern children were in her mind when she started writing her new novel, as well as thoughts of Isolda and of Professor Singer’s experiments.
Once she did start to write, she had that feeling of exhilaration she had not experienced since The Scapegoat. Again, she had a male narrator, Dick, who agrees to take an experimental time drug which plunges him back into the fourteenth century around Kilmarth, the house where he lives. He never knows at which precise point in time he will arrive when he travels back to the past, which makes the fourteenth-century drama constantly exciting. But the contemporary story has its own appeal. Dick, a rather unlikeable fellow, true to du Maurier form, is married to an American, who has two sons by a previous marriage. They arrive at Kilmarth for a holiday, interrupting his time-travelling, to his extreme annoyance. This gave Daphne the chance to write caustically about marriage and children. Dick doesn’t really like either his wife or any of the female sex – women have ‘one-track minds and to their narrow view everything male, be it man, dog, fish or slug, pursued but a single course and that the dreary road to copulation’. The only exception to this contempt is Isolda, the woman in the fourteenth century, whose life he has been studying whenever he takes the drug. With her lover, she has ‘the kind of relationship that I myself would never know’ – blessed, a full communion of spirit and soul as well as passionate. Her husband does not have this closeness with her – ‘he has women wherever he goes, but his pride would never brook a faithless wife’. The further the story develops, the more complex Dick becomes, an ultimately sad and wistful figure, disillusioned with his own times, wanting to retreat into the past, yet coming to believe ‘there was no past, no present, no future. Everything living is part of a whole.’
So completely did Daphne become immersed in The House on the Strand – ‘I got so hooked on the story I actually woke up one day with nausea and dizziness’ – that she could hardly bear to leave it for more than a few hours. When Dick says he feels that the people he loves in the past are himself, he voices Daphne’s own sense of unity – she was ‘being more truly myself’ through Dick, her creation, just as he is through the fourteenth-century characters. She did not feel she was pretending to be him but that she was him. His fever – ‘if you get bitten by the past it is like a fever in the blood’ – was hers, and when his wife and stepsons arrive to drag him away from using the experimental drug, she felt as he did when her own family arrived for holidays. It became a race to finish the novel before August, and she just made it, writing to Livia Gollancz on the 7th that she thought it was ‘unusual, moves fairly fast, and would come under the suspense category’. She specifically requested that Sheila should come down and work through the editing with her, since she had such trust in her, and in September Sheila duly arrived. Daphne took her to all the places mentioned in the novel and Sheila saw only too clearly how alive was the story in her mind.
The summer of 1968 was a happy one. Kits and Olive and their family came to visit and she revelled in ‘the Browning boys’. Freddie was ‘bliss’ – and she would have liked to keep him forever ‘even if I take to my bed in exhaustion’. It appalled her, though, to see Kits changing nappies or giving the baby his bottle – she felt quite faint wondering what Tommy would have said. Once everyone had gone she missed them all and, in spite of the pleasure she drew from knowing she had a good novel coming out the next year, she began to dread the approaching move to Kilmarth. Every time she walked down the lawn and through the woods to the beach she was thinking that soon she would never do this again, and the thought seemed cruel and unbelievable. She kept hoping that Philip Rashleigh would change his mind at the last minute, but there was no basis for this fantasy: she had to be out by September 1969.
Fighting the beginning of depression, after such a happy summer, she was suddenly shocked by a real tragedy which occurred that autumn. On 21 October, Esther’s thirty-eighth birthday, her husband Henry died, aged only thirty-six. He was ill a mere three weeks, with what turned out to be a virulent infective hepatitis, and everyone, especially Esther, was quite unprepared for his death. Daphne was stunned and immediately cancelled a visit from the Wolfendens saying she could not bear to see anyone for several weeks. Her sympathy for Esther and for Ralph, her son, was deep but she found it hard to convey. It was mostly a silent sympathy, in which she tried to be considerate and kind, without any overt gestures of comfort. But she was more affected and felt for her ‘lovely young Esther’ more than Esther was able to know. Henry’s death set her off into wondering, as she had not done for a long time, what she really thought about death. She did not believe in reincarnation nor in ‘any idea of heaven’, but she saw Tommy so often in her mind’s eye that she believed there was ‘something’. When Henry Rowe died, the idea that death was natural and only a stage, a transition, suddenly seemed false. Henry’s death was not natural, nor had his time come, as she felt both Gerald’s and Gertrude’s had done.
It was very disturbing and saddened her last Christmas at Menabilly. It was sad, in any case, since neither her children nor her grandchildren were there. Both daughters were off on winter sports holidays (she kept hearing about avalanches and worrying), and Kits could not come because Olive had had an operation on her throat and both children had been in a car crash which had left Freddie with a fractured leg. So she was ‘solitary, alas’ with only Angela to join her on Christmas Day. She found she could not bring herself to decorate the house, though she had flowers everywhere. But then she missed the glory of the Christmas tree, and remembered how Tommy had taken charge of the decorations and how beautiful the long room had looked. She felt nostalgic and sentimental, and was further pulled down by Tessa’s divorce from Peter having come through that autumn. Everything seemed in the process of being destroyed, and leaving Menabilly was all part of that destruction.
Every day in the New Year she went to inspect progress on the building work at Kilmarth and was shocked by the expense of everything. The builder, who she was amused to discover seemed shyer than herself – ‘he backs into the bushes when I approach’ – seemed constantly to uncover new jobs which needed to be done, and then there were all the fittings and furnishings, half of which she swore she did not want, to be paid for. But she was getting some pleasure out of the chaos. She had given orders that a small cellar in the basement was to be made into a chapel – ‘for my little Catholic Browning grandsons to say their prayers’ – and for separate quarters to be made at the back of the house so that the older grandchildren could be there and make as much noise as they wished. By April, she could see how convenient the new arrangement was going to be, and also how full of sunshine the rooms could be on a good day compared to the gloom of darker Menabilly. When she stood in what was to be her bedroom, at the front of the house, she could see the sea all the way across St Austell Bay and out to the open ocean, and she thought how much Tommy would have loved the view. Her memories of him were by now sanctified – she saw him in her mind’s eye forever happy and energetic, and she had even forgiven him for putting his work before her. The previous summer she had been invited to open the new barracks at Aldershot, named the Browning Barracks after him, and had found it one of the proudest moments of her life when three parachutists dropped from the air and presented her with a bronze statuette of a paratrooper. All memory of hating the army and thinking army life pointless had left her.
So, very nearly, had the memory of her infatuation with Christopher Puxley. On a holiday with Kits and Olive to Ireland she visited the old home of the Puxley family, which she had used in Hungry Hill, and afterwards found herself wanting to write to him. It was a short, friendly, unemotional letter, which none the less betrayed some anxiety that she had injured him more than she had thought, and asked that only happy memories should remain. It was essential to her, that year, as she prepared to uproot herself from Menabilly, that the past should be tidied up – Tommy was the love of her life, their marriage had been happy, Christopher was only an aberration, and Gertrude Lawrence not acknowledged, except to Ellen, as ever having been her lover. Whenever she thought of Tommy now, she saw the familiar picture of him waiting for her and went towards him eagerly, knowing they would recapture their early married days. These were very much in her mind because, every evening when she got back from Kilmarth, she was in the process of sorting her possessions. She found many of her own letters to Tommy and suddenly decided to burn them, but she kept the photographs and sometimes, one of them capturing her attention, she would be taken by surprise. A snap of Tessa, aged two, in her pram made her pause – ‘she does look so sweet’ – and wonder why she had not been as enchanted by her at the time. Some of the letters she found did not belong to her – there was a packet containing Tommy’s father’s love-letters to his mother and these quite upset her. She felt they were so highly personal that they too should be burned, as she had burned her own, but she could not bring herself to do it and sent them to Grace to dispose of. ‘This is always the crux,’ she observed, ‘what descendants should read and what not.’ Knowing how she had valued certain du Maurier family letters, and how glad she was to have been given such insight into her ancestors through them, she could not wholly advocate the destruction of all biographical material. It was up to the next generation, she felt, to make its own decision.
A bigger problem than the letters were the boxes of objects belonging to other people and all the odd bits of furniture which had been stored for years in the closed wing of Menabilly, known as ‘The King’s Road’.3 ‘All this junk’, as Daphne referred to it, had to go. She gaily invited family and friends to come and take their pick, informing them that ‘half the stuff is white with mould’. Mould or not, some of it belonged to elderly relatives, for whom she had stored it, and who still valued it in spite of never having claimed it. Her children were rather annoyed at her cavalier approach to the disposal of certain valuable items, but all she wanted was to be rid of them. She was determined to be as ruthless and matter-of-fact as possible, but was more disturbed by the endless reminders of the past involved in clearing out Menabilly than she realized. She spent hours and hours on the task and felt both physical and emotional energy draining away.
Deciding that she ought to have a break ‘before the final push’, she agreed to attend a Royal Academy dinner in London, because ‘it is such an honour and . . . the family say I must accept’.4 Very quickly she wished she had not done so. She had no evening dress, ‘have not worn one for fifteen years’, and to her dismay the invitation said ‘Decorations’. Did this mean gloves? Or worse – ‘if it means a tiara, I am sunk’. Assured that no tiara was necessary, she went up for the dinner, feeling distraught at the mess she had left behind. She was so overcome with exhaustion, the heat of the room and a kind of claustrophobia induced by sitting with so many people, that she fainted. This was a warning to her and, though she felt perfectly well afterwards, she tried to take things easier when she returned home.
The move to Kilmarth was finally made at the end of June 1969, when she suddenly got into her car and drove there to spend the first night, not having made any conscious decision to do so. It had become a kind of game, this moving, stretching over two years and played only when she felt like it. Theoretically this had made it easier but, in another sense, it had increased the strain – she felt permanently as though she were teasing herself and could not quite let go. Once she was actually in residence at Kilmarth, which she knew she had for life, she found it ‘a very welcoming house’, open-faced and cheerful, but, though she managed to control ‘the ache for my old home’, she could not prevent herself from feeling disorientated. She tried to establish the same ‘routes’, but, even though she had her meals at the same time, walked her dog at the same time, read her newspaper at the same time and went to bed at the same time, nothing seemed the same. She felt she had been ‘reshuffled’ and could not settle down. None of the new carpets and curtains gave her much pleasure, because all she could think of was the cost – ‘I am now so broke, having paid for the new drawing-room carpet, that I may have to hire myself out as a daily help . . . but I should prove “unsatisfactory”.’5 She felt as if a nice house had ‘been lent to me by friends’ and that soon she would be returning home. But returning even to walk in the Menabilly grounds upset her – Menabilly seemed ‘as remote as Cannon Hall’, and she could hardly bear to glimpse it through the trees knowing it was no longer hers. She dealt with this pain by keeping away and restricting herself to her new walk, across the field beside Kilmarth and down the steep cliff to the tiny beach, which was not nearly so satisfactory. She named the hill ‘thrombosis hill’ and she wondered how long she would be able to manage it.
By July, the month The House on the Strand was published, she still felt strange in Kilmarth. It was ‘not a creepy house’ but she felt shivery, even though ‘I do like it very much’. The trouble was that Menabilly haunted her and, when she was down in the little chapel at Kilmarth, she found herself not so much praying as communing with the old house. ‘It is just like saying good-bye to someone one knows is going to die,’ she wrote to Foy. ‘I know this is fanciful, but anyway die as far as I am concerned. And I find myself missing it now in the way one misses anyone who has died and whom one loved, but the process of time will adapt one.’
In the very month of her move to Kilmarth, before the Royal Academy dinner, she had been made a Dame of the British Empire in the June Honour’s List.6 It was, she wrote, ‘wasted on me’, and she joked that she would much prefer to have had Menabilly conferred on her (‘and Philip Rashleigh sent to the tower’). Her great worry was the scope for mockery – ‘Dame Daphne sounds like something out of a pantomime’. She, a great mocker herself, could just hear the wisecracks and shuddered. The mere idea of herself as a Dame was ‘ludicrous . . . I don’t feel a scrap like one’. She felt she lacked not just the necessary gravitas but also, as more than one teasing friend pointed out, the clothes. Michael Thornton commented that he was sure she would ‘wear the title like a duffle-coat’, and another friend told her, ‘Now you’ve got to wear a dress – Dames don’t wear pants, I’m sure.’ The congratulations flowed in and there was no doubt at all that, however ambivalent her feelings about the honour itself, she was proud and delighted and touched by the reactions of her family and friends. She laughed most at her cousin Nico Davies’ description of reading the news – ‘Swallowed my egg the wrong way . . . I had managed to control myself through Bobby Charlton, Basil d’Oliveira, Arthur Askey and Co. . . . then hoorah . . . how rapturously pink Uncle Gerald and all would have been.’ This, of course, was what made even the prospect of mockery worthwhile – the certainty of her father’s and her husband’s pride in her, had they been alive. As Alec Guinness commented, ‘How your father would have rejoiced in it.’ And, as Lord Mountbatten assured her, ‘How thrilled and proud Boy would have been.’ Nevertheless, she thought of pleading illness for the investiture, until her children insisted it would be a great day for the older grandchildren. So she went through with it, though she slipped out quietly afterwards to avoid the attention of the press. Sir John Wolfenden wrote a poem about it which summed up her feelings and made her laugh:
So there it is, the girl’s a Dame,
The so-called accolade of Fame
Is hers. But what on earth’s her name?
Is she Dame D du M? But no.
Is she Dame Daphne Browning? No.
Or Browning DBE? Not so.
I don’t know how you’ll work it out.
Here is a thing without a doubt
Some folk will make a fuss about.
Dear Daphne by whatever name
They call you in the honours game
To us who love you, stay the same.
But there was no question of her changing – she never used the title. Her family were far more excited by it than she was, though it did cheer her up and make her feel less neglected by her peers. Convinced as she was that critics were prejudiced against her, and that the literary world had never given her her due, this official honour was an acknowledgement that she had worked hard. She was especially pleased that the honour had been awarded during a Labour government – Harold Wilson7 had been ‘my pin-up boy’ ever since the early sixties, and she had astonished a coach-load of other Swan Hellenic people by shouting ‘Hurrah!’ when his election victory was announced during one of their outings in Greece. This was certainly no indication that she had thought through, and approved, of Labour policies, but rather an example of her liking to be different from her die-hard Tory friends, plus a genuine attraction to Harold Wilson himself, who she was convinced seemed honest and straightforward and had a sense of humour.
But any real interest in political issues was still not her style.8 She cared about many controversial issues in Cornwall, but did not see that this obliged her to do the things she hated, such as attending meetings or making speeches. There were those who took it upon themselves to lecture her on her ‘duty’ to Cornwall in offensively self-righteous letters. One man told her that since she had made such a lot of money out of writing about Cornwall, she had an obligation to become its financial benefactor. This rightly incensed her. She had taken nothing from Cornwall in any material sense and had given a great deal to it. Tourism is an industry in Cornwall upon which many people depend and her books had brought many thousands of visitors flocking to the county. Though she made no large bequest to silence her critics, she contributed steadily and widely to a huge variety of charities and organizations concerned with helping Cornish people or preserving the Cornish countryside. Always, she requested anonymity after her experience in 1936, when she gave various Jamaica Inn rights to the Lantivet Bay Fund9 and wrote to her mother that she was ‘so embarrassed’ by the publicity. Her annual contributions mounted with every year and were widely spread – from the South West Cornwall Society for the Mentally Handicapped to the Bodmin Countryside Group – until in all she supported sixteen particularly Cornish causes as well as national ones. The sums were small, but they were steady. It would have perhaps been more politic to buy a tract of land, or a house, and give it to Cornwall in her name, as many others did – to have du Maurier fields as there are Allday fields in Fowey – but her failure to make this gesture was never a sign that she did not care about Cornwall, or that she was mean.
Privately she also kept up a stream of concerned letters to local councils about litter on the beaches and illegal parking. She had no desire to keep away from these beaches those who, like her, loved them, but she could not bear to see any place of outstanding beauty ruined. The Town Clerk at St Austell grew used to her letters of protest and always took notice. But though she cared about preservation, she had no interest in innovation – she looked backwards rather than forwards and was more concerned with stemming tides than initiating change. An invitation to join the Cornish Nationalist Party was therefore exactly in tune with her thinking, and she accepted at once, greatly amused, after a warning that she would never attend any meetings ‘because I am a recluse’. She wrote to Foy that she was thinking of wearing the Party’s black kilt and quite fancied ‘blowing up bridges’ should the need arise. The whole idea appealed to her sense of the ridiculous, but there was also a real belief in what the Cornish Nationalists were about. So long as she could maintain her low profile and not be asked to do anything more strenuous than write for their journal, she was happy and proud to think she belonged to a ‘rebel’ organization.
The rebel in her was still strong, though she knew it was only in spirit and not in her actions that she had been rebellious. At the end of this decade she was beginning to be depressed that she had ‘never really broken out’, except in her books. Now she felt she never would, and yet the desire to do so had not quite died. She gave a rare radio interview in 1969 to Wilfred De’Ath, a friend of Kits, and talked to him of the things she would like to have done – travelling, climbing, archaeology. When he asked if she were afraid of drying up creatively (which, of course, she was) she said she accepted that her powers were declining, that she could no longer ‘churn books out’, and tried to reconcile herself philosophically to this. But, in fact, the start of the 1970s looked ‘stale and anti-climax’ after the excitement of writing The House on the Strand (critically received with great enthusiasm) and the move to Kilmarth, together with the fuss of being made a Dame. She wrote to the Wolfendens that ‘my batteries are flagging’ and ‘my muse is absent, ideas will not come out . . .’ Even worse, she was ‘rather pushed for money’ and was trying ‘to keep my actual living expenses down to £4,500 a year’.
She began, at the end of the sixties, to be bolder in her dissatisfaction over the sales of her books. Victor was dead and she felt freer to complain to Gollancz that she kept hearing ‘from fans and friends that it’s impossible to buy any hardback Rebecca nowadays’. John Bush (Sheila’s husband, now managing director of Gollancz) replied that Rebecca was still selling 2,000 hardback copies a year after thirty years and was in plentiful supply. Her agent came in for the same complaints and Spencer Curtis Brown handed her over to Graham Watson, ‘an expert on saving authors money on tax’. What she wanted from now on was ‘more spending money for myself’ and to improve her earnings as much as she could before it was too late. She had forgotten her previous dislike of paperback firms, other than Penguin, and, when their licence expired, was prepared to consider other companies who would pay more.
Graham Watson urged her to stay with Penguin and tried to calm her anxiety about money, assuring her, ‘If at any point . . . you need a substantial financial payment, it can easily be achieved.’ She was not convinced. Her old age was just round the corner, and she was concerned that she would not be able to support it. Despite being sent encouraging lists of all the royalties her past books were still bringing in, she saw only the outgoings, which, instead of decreasing, seemed to increase. Her children were grown up, but she had grandchildren whose educational future she wished to finance; and she had just taken on responsibility for her Aunt Billie, whom she planned to move from Golders Green to Cornwall, to live not far from her in a bungalow with full-time help. Then there was Cousin Dora, to whom she did not owe as much, but who was family and needed help. In looking after these relations she was not simply acting with kindness but making a statement about how old people should be treated. She believed more firmly than ever that to put the old in institutions was monstrous: since she herself was tough and planned to live to a great age, she was doing as she wished to be done by (except that she would be able, she hoped, to pay for her own independence).
The year, and the decade, ended with feelings of ‘nothing to look forward to’. Esther, who lived next door in a separate cottage, sprained her foot and then Ralph, her son, had to have a dental operation, so Daphne was managing on her own. As she sat in bed reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, a drip started coming through the ceiling. Soon the drip became a persistent thin stream and she was reminded of being in Yggy with Tommy, when leaks always seemed to happen above her head and not his. The builder would have to come and fix the roof: more expense. Pulling her bed into the middle of the room, she vowed she would get herself to the sunshine as soon as possible and find something to write.