But first she wanted to complete an adaptation of her own novel Rebecca for the stage. She had decided to attempt this because, as she wrote to Victor Gollancz, ‘my next book has not come in any definite form yet, not even in my mind’, but she wanted some work to do to take her mind off the thought of war and this was the only thing that had presented itself. (The success of Rebecca had, she commented, been ‘the cause of my present laziness’.) She had also decided that if the newly released film of Jamaica Inn was anything to go by, she would be wise to try to adapt her own work for any other medium. She was furious with the film. ‘Don’t go and see it,’ she told Victor, ‘it is a wretched affair.’ The depiction of the wreckers particularly enraged her – instead of being violent and ugly she thought they had been made into ‘Peter Pan pirates’, and the effect was quite the opposite of her intention.

  The literary exercise of adapting her own book proved interesting. Once she started examining Rebecca she was struck by how difficult it was to keep both atmosphere and suspense without having the heroine’s interior monologues and without being able to describe the landscape. Dialogue was not her strong point, and once everything had to take place within the framework of the spoken word she was surprised at how constricted she felt. She tried to introduce more banter between Maxim and his sister, and to heighten the already dramatic episodes, but she felt something had gone out of the story and only hoped the acting would restore it. She finished the script at the beginning of June 1939, not entirely convinced it would ever be produced, and was immediately overcome with domestic problems, which had been there all the time, but which, while writing, she had managed to ignore. The chief of these was the health of Margaret, the children’s nanny. Ever since their return from Egypt she had had appalling migraines which incapacitated her for two or three days every month. Clearly, she needed a complete rest, so as soon as the stage adaptation of Rebecca was finished, Daphne packed her off home for a holiday. This left her with both children to look after. Tod, who was coming to stay, was warned that she would find herself with both girls climbing on top of her, which was ‘very wearing’. So wearing, that Daphne, after less than a week, employed a temporary nursemaid to look after them until Margaret returned. ‘I must say,’ she wrote to Tod, ‘I am not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time and I sincerely look forward to the time when Flavia and Tessa will be of a decent, companionable age.’ Since they were almost six and two there was a long way to go.

  It was a relief when Margaret returned, just in time for the move from Fleet to Hythe, in Kent. Tommy was now to be Commander of the Small Arms School, and Hythe was near his headquarters. The new house at Hythe was not as beautiful as Greyfriars but it had a good garden. The change of residence as usual unsettled Daphne, and Tommy was irritated by the temporary disorder. He was working very hard and when he came home wanted peace and quiet and a well-run house. His wife’s inability to run it as efficiently as he had always run his battalion resulted in some heated rows. One was over a cook who served poor food, which Daphne maintained was not her fault. Tommy said, of course it wasn’t, but it was her job to confront the cook and either get her to improve or dismiss her and find another. This made Daphne miserable – she hated all confrontation and had no faith in her ability to engage staff. She struggled to provide Tommy with the kind of home life he expected and needed, but resented being thought a failure and resented, too, his emphasis on anything as trivial as how a house was run. Ferdy came to stay for a week, which at least kept Tommy from complaining. He tolerated Ferdy (knowing nothing, of course, of her past relationship with Daphne) but Tod infuriated him. At least Daphne never invited Tod and Ferdy together. She never, ever had friends or even relatives staying at the same time. Everyone invited came on their own, not even overlapping by a day. ‘It is a fearful thing of mine’, she once wrote to Ferdy, ‘that I want people to myself. If I don’t have them I just lose interest . . .’ But she also realized she was different things to different people, and if she had to cope with these differences she became confused as to who she was. So the rule was always one at a time with the result that people could be part of her life for years and yet never meet or know each other.

  Once Ferdy had departed, Daphne found herself getting involved in Civil Defence preparations, much to her own amazement. Tommy predicted that war would be declared against Germany at the end of the summer and he was right. The moment it was, Daphne began practising, at the first aid post where she had enrolled, in how to deal with gassed casualties. She described to her mother how ludicrous it all was, trying to undress people while wearing oilskin gloves, and how difficult to keep her face straight. She said she adored her squad – ‘Oh, the uniformed harpies who have lain perdu since 1918 and who now come into their own again.’ A certain ‘Mrs G’, the quartermaster’s wife, had on ‘a large gent’s lounge suit plus her cloche hat’ and even ‘the fair and fluffy wife of the staff sergeant has suddenly become brisk and determined’. At home, she reported to Tod that there was ‘an endless rush of generals to stay’ and that Tommy seemed to be becoming more important all the time, but she was pleased that she had managed to cope with such guests to Tommy’s satisfaction. She passed on his views on the international situation, all of which were gloomy. He was furious because ‘for years [he] on manoeuvres has urged the army should have aeroplanes to work with them . . . and all the old generals said “Oh nonsense, aeroplanes are no use to troops” . . . so we have one squadron only trained’. He frightened her, too, by pointing out that the French would have to be depended on ‘because we only have four divisions out there and the Germans have a hundred’. But she herself desperately hoped some agreement would be reached ‘before the real slaughter begins’. It seemed to her, confronted with the thought of this slaughter, that more than ever ‘the MRA people are right . . . We ought to give up trying to make money, trying to be successful, trying to live by the values of the world and get back to simplicity in all things, kindliness and simple faith . . . selfishness is the root of all evil.’

  In this mood it was irresistible to use the occasion of an American broadcast to campaign for MRA. The American Literary Societies had awarded her a prize for Rebecca, and she took the invitation to speak to them as her chance both to thank them and to urge them to ‘try to do for the twentieth century what our ancestors did in the sixteenth, when they worked for that glorious Renaissance . . . If we writers faithfully dedicate ourselves . . . to giving . . . the real sincerity and honesty and truth that we feel in our hearts . . . there will be . . . a new spirit . . . and the false values of the early twentieth century will be forgotten.’ Flushed with triumph at the success of this broadcast she agreed to let a young Oxford graduate, Garth Lean, Bunny’s co-worker, come down to Hythe to discuss an idea Bunny had put to her. This was that she should be provided with some true stories of individuals who had put MRA principles into practice and transformed their lives. Garth took some of these stories to her and they went for a long walk – ‘one always had to go for a walk with Daphne’ – and discussed how they could be turned into articles which Garth would place in regional newspapers up and down the country. Tommy was at this time on a brief mission to France and she wanted very much to contribute more to the war effort than fooling around at a first aid station, so she agreed. It was fear, which she could no longer philosophize away, that made her decide to do her best.

  It also made her decide, as the New Year of 1940 brought disastrous war news every week, to have another baby. ‘I somehow felt’, she wrote to Tod, ‘the time had come for another effort at a son, but I’m quite prepared for another lumping daughter.’ But a son, more than ever, was what she craved and, now that Tommy was likely to be in danger, she seized her chance before it was too late. The moment she knew she was pregnant she felt more hopeful and calmer, though she joked to Tod that the birth ‘will probably coincide with the invasion and Hitler’s march through London. A decree will go out that all children are to be named Adolf.’ One thing she was adamant about: no matter how serious the threat of invasion – and in the spring of 1940 it was very real – she would neither leave England herself nor send the children out of the country. People who did so earned her contempt. Many contemporaries were sending their children to America, and she refused to accept the homes offered for Tessa and Flavia. She commented to Tod, that she didn’t want to take the risk of sending the children – ‘even if they got there safely, what’s the odds on seeing them again? And who’s to say that prospective hostesses are not going to get fed-up with English kids after a bit and dump ’em in a camp altogether.’ She didn’t want her children dumped and exposed to neglect, so she resolved to face out the war with them, however terrible.

  In May, Tommy relinquished his post at Hythe and became commander of the 128th Hampshire Brigade. The house at Hythe was given up and Daphne went first of all to Fowey with the children. She had just been up to Edinburgh to see Rebecca performed and was pleased by how well it was going, in spite of Owen Nares not being ‘really right’ as Maxim, though she loved Celia Johnson as the second Mrs de Winter. Once in Fowey, theatrical successes seemed a long way off and she was worried about how she could keep the family together with no real home except her mother’s at Ferryside. Tommy’s brigade was stationed in Hertfordshire, and wanting to be as near as possible she asked his new batman, Johnson, to try to find them a house to rent in the vicinity.

  What Johnson found was not a house to rent but a house where the Brownings could, as Daphne told Tod, ‘P.G. in a state of great comfort . . . with some perfectly charming people called Puxley, who have a delightful Lutyens house . . . host and hostess most congenial. I breakfast in bed and wander in the garden and go for walks to my heart’s content. She copes with WVS and Red Cross and two evacuee children, and is never rattled or tired (40-ish, tall, good-looking, not terribly strong I should say either). He is a LDV [Local Defence Volunteer] but otherwise does nix, wanders about and gardens, plays the piano beautifully, also 40-ish and looks like portraits of the writer Compton Mackenzie when young.’ The Puxley house was called Langley End and the children joined their mother there in July. Both girls, now seven and three, soon adored Mrs Puxley, known as ‘Paddy’, and she became extremely fond of them. She had no children of her own, but was what Daphne referred to as ‘naturally maternal’. She took the children for walks, played games with them, brushed their hair and generally acted as a kind of surrogate mother with Daphne’s full approval.

  This gave her the time to work the newspaper articles she had written for Garth into a small book. The first of these stories had appeared in March 1940 in the Edinburgh Evening News headed ‘A Mother and her Faith, comforting words by Daphne du Maurier’. Bunny Austin had given her the bare bones of this true-life story via Garth Lean before he went to join Buchman in America. It was about a woman called Mrs Brown, who had two sons in the navy. She hears a voice in her head assuring her that God will look after them, so that when she is told that the boat one son was in has been torpedoed she has no fear. Instead of being distraught, she is calm and in the end news comes to justify her faith: her son has survived. The story itself, however true, was trite, but even more banal were Daphne’s introductory paragraphs. Striving for simplicity and sincerity, she succeeded only in sounding sanctimonious, as though her normal style was crippled by the need to be uplifting (though the stories with which Bunny, then Garth, provided her would have needed nothing short of genius to make them palatable and to transform them into an inspirational message for the MRA cause). She put her heart into the job but, for once, was quite unaware of how unsuccessful the results were in literary terms. Of course, they were not meant to be of any literary merit – they were intended as messages of comfort for ordinary people and on those terms the evidence was that they succeeded. People wrote in saying how much the Mrs Brown story had meant to them and the Edinburgh Evening News promptly ran some more comforting words from Daphne du Maurier. A huge variety of provincial papers ran Daphne’s version of this and other true stories. Garth Lean worked hard at spreading the net until at one time in April 1940 every corner of England was being comforted by Daphne.

  She was naturally very pleased to think she was doing something positive, her own little war effort, so when Garth suggested the newspaper articles should be gathered together and made into a small booklet with an introduction by her she was happy to oblige. She wrote to her agent, Curtis Brown: ‘I feel strongly that this is quite apart from my literary work, and is more a sort of National Service . . . and I do not wish to receive any money from the sales of such a booklet,’ and stressed: ‘I do feel this is a chance for getting money for the Red Cross.’ She selected ten stories and was eager to accept Garth’s tentatively offered editorial suggestions. But Daphne had been unable to work any magic; the stories were competently written, but they did not seem as impressive as they had done as newspaper articles, though her introduction was everything for which a believer in MRA could hope. There was a need, Daphne wrote, to discover once again old fundamental values, ‘truth, honesty, selflessness’ and a need to ‘learn to give’ instead of the inevitable ‘to get’. The real cause of war was the putting of self first and the refusal to listen to one’s inner conscience, ‘the Voice within’. If only everyone would listen to this Voice there would, she vowed, be forged ‘a chain of steel round this island that no enemy from without can ever break’.

  There was no doubting Daphne’s absolute sincerity and she saw no element of humbug in what she wrote. She was trying hard to follow her own advice but worried that she was failing. ‘I think I must be a rotten receiving set,’ she wrote to Garth, ‘a valve loose or something – all I get is a “wait and see” signal, and it will arrange itself.’ The publication of her booklet, entitled Come Wind, Come Weather (from the John Bunyan hymn), seemed to her the best effort she could make and she was keen to do everything possible to help it along, even instructing Garth to ‘ginger up Heinemanns’ because to them a sixpenny booklet was small fry. She wanted it to reach as many people as possible and so reluctantly conceded that Garth was right to want to put ‘author of Rebecca’ under the title, however embarrassing this felt to her. All the proceeds, she had decided, should go not to the Red Cross but to the Soldiers, Sailors and Air Force Association – ‘I would feel rather ashamed if it couldn’t make a good bit for them.’ The booklet was published in August 1940 and sold very well (the first edition of 340,000 sold out by October and a second edition of 250,000 was printed).

  Daphne’s mother was one of the first to write and say how she loved it – ‘I adored your little book. The stories were so simple. They made me weep,’ and Tommy was ‘very pleased with it’, she told Tod. Victor Gollancz was not. Daphne had written to him, when the booklet was already being printed by Heinemann – ‘just a line to tell you Heinemann are bringing out a 6d booklet shortly . . . just a simple morale propaganda affair . . . didn’t think it was your line of country.’4 Victor was most aggrieved and wrote back saying anything of hers was his line of country and would she please remember that. Lord Leverhulme read it and asked her to contribute to a series he was running in his newspaper, and she also had lots of letters from perfect strangers praising the stories. She felt she had provided ‘a sort of mid-way signpost among the blind and deaf’ even though also feeling she had ‘a ghastly cheek to suggest anything to anybody’. The reception of her booklet gave her the greatest satisfaction and encouraged her to try even harder to follow MRA principles.

  By the autumn of 1940, she was feeling strangely happy in spite of the war. It had been a summer full of bad news, justifying Tommy’s gloomy predictions. The Germans had overrun Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium, and then in June France had surrendered. From August to October the Battle of Britain raged and, though the Germans failed to bomb Britain into submission, the whole country was anticipating invasion. But Daphne felt cut off from the realities of war. Her baby was due in November and as usual the state of pregnancy had made her more relaxed and calmer. Deciding it was unfair on the Puxleys to give birth in their house, she had rented another house for three months from the beginning of October – Cloud’s Hill, at Offley, not very far from Langley End – and here she waited for her third child, hoping desperately for a son.

  PART THREE

  The Years Between

  1939–1946

  Chapter Ten

  AT CLOUD’S HILL, Daphne had plenty of time to reflect on the progress she had made in trying to reform herself. She was not pleased with her reflections, confessing in a letter to Garth that when she looked back on her behaviour during Tommy’s weekend leaves over the past few months, she saw she had acted ‘like a sour old Army wife in an Indian hill station, who has a disapproving eye on all gaiety’. She had found herself jealous of Tommy’s response to the adoration of the eight unmarried daughters of a local family – known as the ‘Brigade Butterflies’, because of their attachment to the whole brigade – even though she knew perfectly well it was harmless. The Brownings both joked about these girls, du Maurier style, mocking them. But there had been one particular Saturday, just before she left Langley End, when she and Tommy had lunched with the family of the ‘Butterflies’ and she had been horrified at herself. There was ‘a lot of tennis afterwards, and poor Tommy thoroughly enjoying himself as a contrast to hard work, and because, of course, I could not play and felt I looked awful with my floppy clothes, I resented his enjoyment and gaiety amongst a troop of pretty girls . . . and was quite snappy and sour and horrid to him in the evening. I was most ashamed of myself and disheartened to think I could get like that . . . the whole incident quite depressed me.’