Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

Daphne preferred the farm animals, the great shire horses and the luscious countryside with the River Mole flowing through the manor’s grounds. But mostly the country meant the precious freedom to go off on one’s own, on some adventure, only to return to the adults’ dominion with reluctance and impatience at their intrusion into her world.

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

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

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

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

Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific and highly successful historical nineteenth-century novelist, became for a while Angela and Daphne’s favourite author, his stories providing Daphne with plenty of dramatic incident to re-enact with her sisters. The Tower of London provided ample opportunity for torture and death. Angela was happy enough to play Bloody Mary (for whom she admitted some affection) but was proving less tractable to joining in with Daphne’s imaginative games, keener on pursuing her own more grown-up interests. Jeanne, however, was happy to be Daphne’s sidekick and was beheaded many times by her elder sister without complaint. ‘Jeanne, strutting past, certainly made a moving figure, her curls pinned on the top of her head, while I, the axeman, waited …’

Unsurprisingly, Daphne could not recall in these childhood games ever being felled herself by the executioner’s axe, although she would submit occasionally to the torturer’s rack or to energetic writhing in simulating a victim of a rat attack. Catholics and Huguenots provided another thrilling enactment with all kinds of grisly tortures and deaths, but on her terms.

More memorable and exciting even than Slyfield Manor was the family’s visit in 1917 to Milton, a stately colonnaded country mansion near Peterborough, owned by a friend of their mother’s, Lady Fitzwilliam. Daphne recalled with some puzzlement that her usual shyness and diffidence as a child, when confronted with new people and experiences, was here swept aside as she stood in the grandeur of the great hall. Instead she was overwhelmed by an instantaneous feeling of happiness, recognition, even love. This sense of familiarity and affection for the house never left her and much later became conflated with her mysterious Cornish mansion, Menabilly, to create her most famous fictional house, Rebecca’s Manderley.

The girls were only at Milton for ten days, Angela and Daphne sharing one spacious bedroom and their mother and Jeanne another. The sisters entertained and played cards with the convalescing soldiers who were nursed by the Red Cross in the centre of the great house, but there was so much laughter and good humour among the men that the terrors of war did not impinge on the young girls’ thoughts at all. There was too much fun to be had, hiding and seeking in the unused wing, visiting the pack of Fitzwilliam hounds, rabbiting with the soldiers, hanging over the huge jigsaw puzzle that Lady Fitzwilliam worked on most of the time. She nicknamed the du Maurier girls Wendy, Peter and Jim, much to their delight, particularly Daphne’s for she was awarded Peter, that most promising of boy personas.

Despite the war, plays continued to be performed in the West End and Gerald’s successes added to his reputation and his growing fortune. He was becoming more interested in producing than acting but nevertheless, in The Ware Case by George Bancroft, his triumphant production in 1915, took the lead in what his daughter Angela considered one of the finest parts of his career. He played a financier who murdered his brother-in-law, found dead in his garden pond. After a tense trial he was declared not guilty. The trial scene itself was a dramatic novelty for the time and all the more nerve-racking for that. Daphne was gripped by it and recognised Gerald’s acting skills in making the audience believe in Hubert Ware’s innocence, despite so much evidence to the contrary. Angela found it impossible to forget the final scene and the look on her father’s face ‘of hopeless hatred and bitterness’ as he cried: ‘You bloody fools, I did it!’ before taking poison and dramatically collapsing to the stage. She insisted, perhaps a bit defensively, that there was nothing hammy in this at all.

Daphne herself appeared in a charity production at Wyndham’s of a musical version of a play by J. M. Barrie, The Origin of Harlequin, performed in August 1917. The star of the show was a boy, the Honourable Stephen Tennant, at eleven only one year older than Daphne herself, who was struck by how grown up he looked and how well he danced. Stephen was a pretty, clever child who was to grow into an exquisite and talented young man whose life and body became his greatest work of art. The dancing boy had also noticed the young Daphne, but then it was hard to miss her as she was dressed as a Red Indian. Reminded of this fact fifty-five years later, Daphne recalled that the costume was probably a birthday present and she had refused to appear in the show, ‘unless I could be disguised, self-protection I suppose’.

It was inevitable that highly imaginative children, living with this everyday theatricality, would wonder what life was really about. Murderers and fairies crowded the stage, but did the dream end when one awoke? When the lights went up and the crowds left the foyer streaming into the bright night, what was real of whatever remained? Young men were dying in a bloody war just a few hundred miles away; their young cousin, their uncle, were already dead in the slaughter. Confusingly, at home the show went on, with actors pretending to die and children executing each other with imaginary axes, and Daphne dancing on stage as a fully-feathered Indian brave.

Two years earlier Gerald had viewed a Georgian mansion for sale in the leafy village of Hampstead. Cannon Hall had once been a courthouse and it stood in proud command of its demesne of large gardens and various outhouses including a lock-up – much to the sisters’ pleasure – a real jail at last. Gerald was immediately struck by the Hall’s theatrical staircase and decided then and there that he would have it. To return in some style to the area of London where his father had lived and he had grown up seemed to add a nice symmetry to his restless life and would perhaps help to recapture some of the happiness and contentment that had gone. As Gerald attempted to reconnect with his past, he was unconsciously setting a new scene for his daughters’ future.

2

Lessons in Disguise

Sisters? They should have been brothers. They would have made splendid boys.

NOËL WELCH, The Cornish Review

CANNON HALL WAS the du Mauriers’ last London home. The family moved there in 1917 in the darkest days of the war, and life for the girls aged thirteen, ten and six changed for ever. The house was much larger than their town house at Cumberland Terrace, and Hampstead Heath was a vast wild territory on the borders of urban civilisation, so much more alive with possibility than genteel Regent’s Park. The Hall’s gardens were enormous and beckoned the sisters into a private world of make-believe and adventure, a place where they did not have to wear coats and hats when they went out, while the wider horizons of the heath were just a hop and a skip away. Gerald was earning a great deal of money from his continued successes at Wyndham’s and, proud of his elegant new house, he imported furniture and objets d’art to match its early-Georgian splendour. The historical paintings he bought to grace the theatrical staircase impressed Daphne most: a mournful portrait of Charles II, a vast battle scene, food for many re-enactments, and a portrait of Elizabeth I, majestic on the stairs, made every trip to bed full of fascination and not a little menace.

The most dramatic change for the du Maurier sisters was school. For the first time in their lives, Angela and Daphne were to mix with a group of children and adults who did not belong to the glamorous circle of their parents’ acquaintances. It was an alien experience that ten-year-old Daphne, self-sufficient and already armoured against the world, thoroughly enjoyed and Angela, three years older, nervous, conscientious and over-emotional, loathed. The school was a small private establishment in a large house in Oak Hill Park, a road in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. It was owned and run by an elderly, strict Scot called Miss Tulloch. Elizabeth Tulloch, like many schoolmistresses at the time, was an unmarried woman whose energies and talents had few outlets apart from teaching. She had established her school in 1884 and at sixty-seven was at the end of her career when the two, largely unschooled, du Maurier girls turned up on her doorstep.

Angela and Daphne walked to school every day with satchels on their backs to enter very different worlds. Daphne had a sympathetic teacher who thought her stories were the best in the class, but her spelling and handwriting were atrocious. Daphne was not particularly troubled by this criticism, although she was miffed that another girl won the short story competition with an inferior tale but better presentation. She quickly became leader of a gang of girls who intimidated any classmate who displeased them by threatening to burn her at the stake. The punishment was straight out of Daphne’s historical re-enactments. She enjoyed being able to exercise her imagination and power on a bigger stage, and with a larger cast than just two sisters.

Angela admitted that she was terrified of the teachers from the start and was unprepared for the classwork, particularly arithmetic – an arcane mystery she would never fathom. Unfortunately her teacher was a fearsome Miss Webb who attacked her fumbled sums with a forbidding blue pencil and little sympathy. Maths homework was a torture and so many tears were shed that Gerald, unable to make sense of any of it himself, would ring up his business partner for help. What appeared to upset Angela as much was the chaos and noise of nearly two hundred girls going about their school day, banging desks, their feet thumping carelessly on wooden boards, their voices raised; she had been brought up to creep noiselessly from room to room while parents slept, not to chatter and laugh in corridors and stairwells. Her only companions previously had been her well-behaved younger sisters and polite adults. The cacophony of girls en masse alarmed her, until she discovered a few nice quiet girls like herself. But it was these quiet girls who revealed the real truth of how babies are made and thereby destroyed, by Angela’s own admission, her trust in her parents and stunted her social development in adolescence and young womanhood.

The school got to know of these clandestine conversations and Muriel was summoned. The shame of her mother’s wrath and her own horror at the grotesqueness of sexual intercourse meant Angela’s reaction to the next incursion of her safe world was even more extreme. Every day on their way to and from school, the sisters would walk along a lane so secluded it seemed almost to be deep country. Just another morning turned into a day that Angela would not be able to recall without shuddering. She noticed a wounded soldier in the lane. The sisters had been taught to think of all soldiers as heroes. Their soldier-uncle Guy had died defending his country, and their young cousins were still fighting the Germans, one already killed before he had grown to be a man. This young soldier before her was not only wounded, and therefore even more heroic in Angela’s naïve imagination, but was wearing a uniform of the most beautiful celestial blue. The colour so attracted her that she gazed at the man full of sympathetic feeling.

Then, this embodiment of courage and virtue, exposed himself to the schoolgirls. Angela was shocked and bewildered at the betrayal of his noble appearance and the sight of this terrible dark hidden thing. She was naturally highly strung and quite ignorant of the naked male body and had certainly never seen a man’s genitals before. The shock was compounded many times by the fact she had already been sworn to silence over the previous schoolgirl debacle. She had been forbidden by her mother to mention anything about sex to Daphne, who was walking beside her and, lost in her own thoughts, completely oblivious to the situation. Angela could not turn to her, in fact felt a sense of responsibility for her – slightly misplaced in this case as Daphne, more intellectually curious and emotionally detached, would not have been so disturbed by the situation. In fact, Daphne was to be shielded from the facts of life until she was eighteen when, enlightened by a school friend, was astounded: ‘What an extraordinary thing for people to want to do!’

But twelve-year-old Angela, more confused and distressed, could not even confide in the girls at school as, after the earlier showdown with her mother and Miss Tulloch, the small group of sexual know-alls there had been dispersed and warned not to talk of such things again.

So Angela’s shock of discovery combined with disgust and fear was internalised. Years later she insisted there was no exaggeration in her description of the devastating effect these two incidents of sexual revelation and the accompanying secrecy, silence and shame had on her development. She became self-conscious, she said, felt an uneasy burden of taint and alienation, her mind straying to ghastly imaginings when confronted by any recently married woman. Hers was an elephant’s memory, she declared, and her scared younger self lived on within her well into adulthood. ‘Not for many years did I tell anyone, and for what it’s worth not for more years than anyone would believe possible could I bear to think about a man, much less look at one.’

Instead, she retreated to the safer alternative of idolising her male cousin Gerald Millar, nine years her senior and already fighting in the Great War (in which he would be awarded the Military Cross). A girl given to serial crushes and longing for affection, Angela inevitably fell in love with the head girl at school but gained emotional satisfaction by imagining marrying her off to Gerald, with nothing more than a chaste kiss between them: ‘Love to me meant romantic young soldiers in khaki, Keeping the Home Fires Burning, the Prince of Wales, Handsome Actors, Beautiful Actresses, and falling in love, and no sex in any of it.’

Not surprisingly perhaps, Angela and Daphne’s schooling at Miss Tulloch’s was soon over. They attended for four terms, punctuated by most of the childhood diseases they had so far evaded. Angela thought they were withdrawn from school once a uniform of neat blue gym tunics was mooted; their parents would rather their girls gave up their education than their pretty print dresses. But a more serious reason occurred to Angela in middle age: their parents, particularly Gerald, were militant about maintaining their daughters’ innocence when it came to sex and they feared what the girls might learn ‘in giggled whispers from our contemporaries’ about ‘the wicked World’.

Silence and ignorance were not bliss, as Angela painfully discovered when she and Daphne returned to the routines of nursery life to continue to learn what they could with a nursery maid as teacher. The du Maurier parents did not value academic education for their girls. The maid was already engaged in trying to teach six-year-old Jeanne to read, but luckily both older girls were already keen readers and they absorbed much about history, writing style and romance from the adventures of Alexandre Dumas and Harrison Ainsworth. Angela and Daphne became well informed on the most arcane and melodramatic elements of Louis XIII’s France, Guy Fawkes, witches, London’s Great Fire and Great Plague, and executions through the ages, but they were not learning much about life in their own rapidly changing century. German Zeppelins overhead occasionally broke the Hampstead calm, sending the family and their servants running for the cellar, shattering Angela’s already over-sensitive nerves, but no one really discussed the drama that engulfed them all.

Beyond the graceful façade of Cannon Hall, beyond the garden parties and glittering first nights at Wyndham’s with Daddy and Mummy, their supporters and friends, the world of 1917 was convulsed by total war. In England, the movement for female equality and emancipation was gaining support, with women from all walks of life campaigning with ingenuity, determination, violence and occasional hilarity. For the du Maurier girls, growing up surrounded by beautiful actresses and make-believe, it was hard to comprehend that women would rebel against the status quo. More distant still was the thought that women’s work could be dirty, gruelling and dangerous – and essential to the nation’s efforts, not just in the factories but also at the front line as nurses and ambulance drivers. Mrs Pankhurst had even suggested that women could be trained up as a fighting force, as they were in Russia. She saw women taking their full part in all aspects of war as strengthening her call for women’s vote.

Most privileged middle-class girls of the time were shielded from the worst horrors of the war, but for the du Maurier sisters their retreat from school not only limited their contact with the wider world, it also meant their narrow view of what it was to be a woman remained unchallenged. Beauty, fine manners and charm were prerequisites, as demanded by their father and embodied in their mother, regardless of what darkness or mutiny went on beneath the surface. The lack of an independent school life with friends and exposure to different perspectives meant the overwhelming influence on the sisters’ thinking and opinions came from their reading, their imaginations and their parents – and the du Maurier parents were more influential and odder than most.

As an Edwardian father, Gerald set the family’s ethos and was opinionated and melodramatic in the expression of his views. Fascinating and contradictory, he was terrified of boredom yet easily bored, seeking distraction in other people and gossip. Extravagant in most things and a natural show-off, he was ever fearful of stillness and introspection. He was a physically elegant man, not tall, but slightly built with a large head and raw-boned features in a highly expressive face. Witty, light-hearted and terrific company, Gerald so often played the joker in the pack. Roger Eckersley, the genial Director of Programmes at the BBC, was struck by his subversive energy: ‘I have seldom met anyone more bubbling over with the absurdist nonsense than [him].’

But Gerald would as easily swing into depression and self-pity when nothing seemed to be right, and he could be as petulant as a spoilt child.

Greatly fond and easy-going with his children, Gerald alternated between laxity and ridiculous strictness. Angela thought him ‘a strange father because in a lot of ways he was much more like a brother, but he could be very difficult’.

What she found problematic was how, on occasions, he became an emotional bully: possessive and intrusive in their lives, unaware of the pernicious effects of his blundering comments and flippant ridicule. She recalled a story of how her father had often had flaming rows round the dining table with one of his sisters, probably Aunt May, and on one occasion, when she burst into tears, he had shouted after her as she left the room ‘that she was “a barren bitch”’.

He appeared to get away with this kind of cruelty. Aunt May had indeed wanted children but not managed to have them. Their father George had only gently remonstrated with Gerald over his comment, and then rewarded him with a wink. Evidently, Gerald was still the indulged youngest child. The kindly husband of his humiliated sister could only manage a startled clearing of the throat.

His daughters liked to remember their father more as a Peter Pan than a Captain Hook. He entered their games with gusto, playing cricket on the lawn and teaching Daphne and Jeanne to box by tapping each other on the nose. As an atheist he gave his daughters no formal religious education, but he was however sentimental and superstitious. He did not rate modern art or music, even though Millais and Whistler had been some of his father’s closest friends. He hated and feared homosexuality, despite many in his profession and among his friends being quite clearly sexually unconventional.

All these strongly held opinions were absorbed by the sisters. One of the contradictions most difficult for them to integrate into their own social behaviour was exhibited daily by Gerald. He was courteous and charming to a fault to everyone he met, from strangers to his closest associates, but mocked and mimicked them when their backs were turned. One of the most important lessons inculcated into the sisters was the necessity of social grace and politeness at all times. The contradiction of being expected by their father to curtsey sweetly to his friends was hard to reconcile with the encouragement to ridicule them once they had gone. Such double standards were confusing. It was hard for a child to fathom what was real in love and friendship if it all appeared to be a sham.

The mockery was often fond, aimed at his closest friends, and bonded him with his audience of admiring daughters. But it also encouraged a sense of superiority, setting them apart from the mocked, making it difficult to empathise or be intimate with someone reduced to a caricature. The du Maurier family language, wonderfully visual and effective with distinctive words and phrases practised by Gerald and expanded by his children, entertained and strengthened the sense of tribal feeling. It also excluded outsiders and reinforced the family’s separateness. The writer Oriel Malet, who became a great friend of Daphne’s in her middle age and then of Daphne’s daughter Flavia, recalled how the coded language, colourful and intriguing as it was, could make one feel a foreigner among friends.

Daphne in her 1949 novel, The Parasites, evoked brilliantly the theatricality of the sisters’ childhood that set them apart, describing how disconcerting the fictional Delaney (and du Maurier) children could be:

[Maria] had the uncanny knack of exaggerating some little fault or idiosyncrasy … and her unfortunate victim would be aware of this, aware of Maria’s large blue eyes that looked so innocent, so full of dreams, and which were in reality pondering diabolical mischief … [Niall]’s silence was full of meaning. The grown-up individual meeting him for the first time would feel summed-up and judged, and definitely discarded. Glances would pass between Niall and Maria to show that this was so, and later, not even out of earshot, would come the sounds of ridicule and laughter.

Unusual for his generation, Gerald enjoyed his daughters’ company and this intimacy meant his influence on their growing minds was all the more powerful and potentially malign. Unusually for any generation, Gerald confided his romantic entanglements with young actresses to Angela and Daphne and made an entertainment of it, inviting them to scoff at the young women’s naivety and misplaced hopes, and compromising the sisters’ natural loyalty to their mother, who was not included in these confidences. These young actresses were nicknamed ‘the stable’ by his daughters, who were encouraged to think of them as fillies in a race for the prize of their father’s attentions. His daughters ‘would jeer, “And what’s the form this week? I’m not going to back [Miss X] much longer”,’

and they laughed as their father brilliantly mimicked the voices and mannerisms of the poor deluded girls.

These conversations made them feel uneasy though. Their father was positively Victorian in his attitudes to his own daughters’ morals: he was pathologically suspicious of any male with whom they socialised, implying that something dreadful lurked behind the friendly wave or kiss on the cheek, and did not want them to grow up. Angela found his intrusiveness hard to bear. As a young woman returning from a party, she would see him peering from the landing window: ‘“Who brought you home?” he would say, if the chauffeur had not collected us. “Did he kiss you?” he would ask. Absolutely frightful. He was easily shocked.’

He darkly threatened that they would ‘lose their bloom’, which suggested to them that a young man’s kiss somehow tarnished their looks, that the rot would set in, making their corruption visible to all. Angela concluded her father would have been happiest if his daughters had been nuns, with Cannon Hall as the nunnery.

Yet Gerald’s own behaviour belonged more to the Restoration age where self-indulgence and the desperate desire for distraction cast constraint to the winds. Angela was confused and scared by her father’s sexual hypocrisy. Daphne, wary of adults and suspicious of their motives, perhaps grew even less inclined to look to conventional love and marriage as the path to happiness, with the example of her own adored father before her. In her teenage diary she wrote, ‘I suddenly thought how awful just being married would be. I should be so afraid, so terribly afraid, but of what? I don’t know.’

Jeanne was still young and protected by her mother’s love and less susceptible to her father’s charm. She spent much more time with Muriel and was a sweet-natured child who was musical and good at drawing and looked most like her mother. But all the sisters, such close companions in their games and make-believe yet temperamentally so unalike, were bound with family pride and affection. They shared too a taboo on discussing with adults the things that really mattered.

Their father had been spoilt and adored by women all his life, first his mother and elder sisters, now his wife and daughters, and the actresses who depended on him for their careers. A young John Gielgud was struck by Gerald’s gift for getting what he needed from others: ‘He was a very great director, particularly of women. He was a great fancier of pretty women, and he taught them brilliantly, but very often they were never heard of again.’

Taken up and dropped, these young women never ruffled the surface calm of his wife who had become, in effect, a second mother to him. Even Muriel’s unmarried sister Billy devoted herself to Gerald in the role of personal secretary and made her life’s work his every ease and comfort. Nobody challenged him or called his bluff. He was the grand panjandrum of his universe, but fundamentally weak and dependent on a constant flow of feminine admiration and solicitude. In order to maintain this life-giving stream, he had become adept at making himself as irresistibly charming and seductive as he could. And his daughters were as much ensnared as anyone.

If their mother Muriel had been more of a presence in the older daughters’ lives, she might have added a creative counterbalance to Gerald’s powerful influence. Strikingly attractive all her life, with fine manners and surface charm, her absorption in Gerald’s life and career meant her true character was somehow effaced, leaving just a sense of chilly detachment and inner steel. Only Jeanne received the unconditional love that was left after Gerald’s needs and demands had been answered. ‘He was her whole life,’ Daphne recalled, ‘and next to D[addy] came Jeanne, petted and adored though never spoilt, while Angela and I … came off second-best.’

In fact, Angela came off worst of all, as, after Nanny left, she was special to nobody and was hungry for approval and affection. Very early she recognised that in her family she was considered plain and had therefore failed the most important test of womanhood. Her need for notice and love found expression in hero-worshipping men and women alike, so much so that her father teased her mercilessly for her swooning expression. ‘Puffin with her swollen look,’ he would say in a not entirely affectionate way. It was partly his manner, his need to be funny and make people laugh, but there was also an element in that phrase of exasperation that his eldest daughter was slightly plump, too earnest to be cute, and not the refined beauty she ought to have been.