What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy. Her outward form was a mistake: inside, she was a boy, with a boy’s mind and heart and ambitions.10 Everything she did, she did as she judged a boy would do. This made the onset of puberty at twelve absolutely devastating for her. It was for the first time impossible for her to be a boy once menstruation had begun. The shock was profound and she took a long time to recover. She hated her periods – given the code name ‘Robert’ – and saw them as signifying ‘the end of being boyish’. The level of her distress was so acute that she retreated even more into her fantasy world, the one place she was truly happy. The only person who recognized how fiercely Daphne resented her own gender was her governess, Miss Maud Waddell, who came into the du Maurier household in 1918 when Daphne was eleven. Maud was a Cumbrian, born at Head’s Nook near Carlisle in 1887, and was as far from being a timid, subservient governess figure as it was possible to be. She came from a comfortably off family, of some standing in the area where they lived, and had been well educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. Maud had a great desire to travel and after a brief spell teaching took herself off to Paris where she suddenly decided to train as a milliner. She served her apprenticeship with a Madame Paulette and then, with equal suddenness, went to Australia to visit her sister Winifred who had emigrated. But Maud disliked Australia and returned to England where she found lodgings in Hampstead and a job as governess to the du Maurier girls.

  Daphne was from the beginning greatly intrigued by the new governess, who quickly, du Maurier fashion, became known as ‘Tod’.11 Tod was a strong character who talked a lot and had decided opinions. Since she had never been trained as a teacher her methods were a little haphazard, but she was a naturally disciplined person and very firm with her pupils. She was appalled by Daphne’s handwriting and particularly by her spelling – both gave her sleepless nights – but impressed by her wide reading. The best thing about Tod, from Daphne’s point of view, was her love of literature and her ability to feed her with the right books at the right time. They read Browning together and Keats and Shelley and then moved on to more difficult poets – Donne, Dryden, Swinburne. Tod was very much the teacher, with no taste for familiarity, but this was what appealed to her young pupil. Daphne hated people who were anxious to curry favour or who showed too great a desire to be friendly. She preferred those who were clearly independent and could not care less whether they were going to be liked, were even a touch aloof and critical. Tod’s direct, confident manner, and the fact that she had been fairly adventurous in her thirty-one years, were all marks in her favour and within a very short time Daphne was devoted to her. The age gap of twenty years was immense, but then a younger governess would have lacked the authority Daphne craved.

  The relationship with Tod was the first, outside family relationships, which Daphne developed and it was very important to her. The letters she wrote to Tod from family holidays were confessional in nature, revealing a great need to express herself to someone she could trust and who understood her. From Birchington-on-Sea, where the joint du Maurier and Freddy Lonsdale12 families holidayed when she was thirteen, Daphne wrote to Tod of how she had been unable to bear being part of a big gang and had gone off on her own for long walks, which had led to scoldings, because she was presumed lost. She felt restless and discontented and did not even have a good book to console her. She’d been reduced to a ‘soppy book’ from which she quoted a sentence to show her disgust at ‘romantic slush’ (‘One glimpse only had she of his eyes and it was as if she was looking into the deep, deep heart of the fire unquenchable’). She longed to be off on a European Grand Tour just with Tod – ‘we would live in a Bohemian way (baths, of course), talk French and you’d do a lot of painting.13 I think I should take up writing or poetry!! Life might be romantic in Rome.’ It was certainly far from romantic in Birchington-on-Sea, where the popular playwright Freddy Lonsdale and Gerald played energetic games and forced their daughters to compete with each other. ‘Life is a curious problem’, wrote Daphne soulfully to Tod, ‘and always will be. One is so selfish about one’s own happiness . . . I have become an idealist, realism is so earthy and sometimes sordid – very often in fact.’

  From another holiday venue Daphne wrote to Tod, feeling even more disillusioned: ‘You don’t know how I long to have a good talk with you and pour everything out. I never tell anyone anything and there is no one to talk to. I must be an awful rotter, as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is. The feeling is always there and I don’t think I shall ever find it. It is no good telling the others things like that, they would only laugh . . . everyone thinks I am moody and tiresome . . . I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I am acid and bitter . . . it’s terrible at my age to get bored with life.’ She was echoing her father’s restlessness without realizing it and, since she was so extremely sensitive to his moods, it is always possible she was reflecting them and not simply suffering from teenage Angst. What made these feelings worse was that Angela never seemed to suffer from them. Angela adored the ‘ripping time’, lapped up the travelling and parties, and was enjoying the crushes she had, usually on actors. Daphne was disapproving of these – ‘Angela’s got a crush on Ronald Pertwee,’ she told Tod, ‘she is quite hopeless over crushes.’

  Daphne herself was wary of crushes. She permitted herself ‘a sort of crush’ on Ivor Novello, whom she and Angela had met backstage after a performance of Betrothal, but her only real admiration was reserved for Gladys Cooper. It was often remarked that Daphne bore a startling resemblance to Gladys, and encouraged by this she used to ‘work up in my mind that I was her daughter, smuggled at birth into Mummy’s care (except that Mummy would never have stood for it)’.14 But it was the done thing to have a crush on some male actor, so for a while she fixed on Basil Rathbone until the development of a genuine crush wiped him from her memory. This crush, when it hit her, was something more serious.

  When Daphne was fourteen and on another family holiday she was suddenly and violently attracted to her thirty-six-year-old cousin Geoffrey Millar, who had joined the du Mauriers, together with his second wife. Geoffrey held her hand and she felt, for the first time, a physical thrill which she identified immediately as quite different from any feeling she had had before – dangerous, exciting, having little to do with schoolgirl crushes. What disturbed her most was the confusion between the physical and the emotional: she felt towards Geoffrey something like and yet quite different from what she felt towards her father. Her reaction was to be both elated but also a little frightened. For a long time, as she had written to Tod more than once, she had been searching for something nameless and now she wondered if this was ‘it’, and if ‘it’ was love. But she was controlled and analytical in her response to Geoffrey, and most alert to the effect his attentions to her had on Gerald. Even before this holiday she had noted and seemed to relish her father’s agitation if she appeared attracted to any man or boy. Once, on holiday in Dieppe, she wrote to Tod that there had been ‘a young French officer, who I see on the front every day . . . Daddy thinks he is an awful bounder and I pretend I like him very much just to annoy him’.

  In the case of his nephew Geoffrey Millar, Gerald had every right to be alarmed. Geoffrey had a reputation, established in his own adolescence, for being dangerously attractive to women and taking great advantage of this. He treated his women badly once he had lost interest in them and, though his charm and good looks made him popular, everyone in the family was well aware how far he could go. Gerald, knowing of his history, watched him not as he had watched the harmless French sailor, but with real dread. It was no good assuring himself that Geoffrey would surely never even think of seducing young Daphne: nobody could be sure what Geoffrey would or would not be capable of. Nor, for that matter, could anyone know how Daphne herself would respond. She had a great desire to be daring, as Gerald knew, and might, at her tender age, prove more susceptible to the kind of flattery, not to mention expertise, Geoffrey could subtly employ. Both of them had a streak of wildness in them, shared the ‘devil’ that Gerald knew to be in himself. The potential for catastrophe was there. ‘I am feeling rather depressed at the moment,’ Daphne wrote to Tod, ‘I am always having rows with the parents. The latest is about Geoffrey . . . Daddy overhears certain conversations, the rest I leave to your imagination.’ When Geoffrey left to return to London, Gerald was vastly relieved, not knowing that Dorothy Sheppard, the maid, carried notes between Daphne and Geoffrey when she made the journey backwards and forwards from Cannon Hall during the holidays. Once Geoffrey had gone, Daphne turned to Swinburne’s poetry for consolation and found a verse in The Garden of Prosperine which summed up what she felt (it begins: ‘I’m tired of tears . . .’). It was, she wrote to Tod, ‘foul’ for a girl her age to be in such a state.

  Her sexual awakening – and that is what it was, even though Geoffrey had only held her hand – left her more dissatisfied with life than ever. ‘The future’, she announced to Tod, ‘is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly . . . If only I was a man.’ And yet even as she wrote this, she wondered why on earth she wanted to be a man when ‘I like women much better than men’. She was coming to the conclusion nevertheless that ‘I may as well run the race with the rest of the pack instead of being a damned solitary hound missing the game’. But ‘the game’ itself she was beginning to believe was primarily about sex, and playing this game with a vengeance was her own father. Sex, she now knew, did not take place only within marriage, but she was not sure whether it had anything to do with love either. ‘Daddy says love is the only thing worth while,’ she wrote to Tod, ‘real, ceaseless love. I don’t know.’ For years she and her sisters had heard Gerald mock those young actresses who made up his ‘stable’, and though it had always seemed such fun she was, at almost fifteen, less sure. She watched Gerald carefully – became ‘beady’, in du Maurier code – noting his flirtatious behaviour and her mother’s apparent indifference, and wondered. ‘Father has been playing golf with Eileen,’ she told Tod, adding, ‘she likes him, doesn’t she?’ She set Gerald little tests and reported to Tod the result. One arose from reading Somerset Maugham’s volume of short stories, The Trembling of a Leaf, especially one story, ‘Rain’. This is the story about a missionary who reforms and converts a prostitute only to succumb to her himself. ‘It had’, wrote Daphne, ‘finished men forever in my eyes,’ but she gave it to Gerald to read and invited his comments. Predictably Gerald was ‘horrified . . . said it was terribly pas pour les jeunes filles’. Daphne agreed it was ‘foul’. What she thought foul was the missionary’s lust, his inability to resist sex, and what she saw in her father’s life was the same inability to resist young actresses. If ‘the stable’ really was kept for sex, where did that leave love, and most of all where did it leave Mo?

  Her mother’s attitude puzzled Daphne. She could not understand, at that stage of her life, how her mother could seem to love her father so much, and be loved by him, and yet know, as she must, how unfaithful he was to her. She watched her mother and saw no sign of anger or distress. This made her think that what this might signify was that sex itself was unimportant – her parents could love each other without it. If this were so – and she was by no means convinced it was – then it surely made marriage a sham. But this did not make sense to her either: Gerald and Muriel’s marriage was clearly not a sham but very real and enduring. It was all very confusing and so was her mother’s treatment of her. She felt not only unloved by Mo but actively disliked. She craved her affection, the same affection she saw given to her sisters, particularly Jeanne, and did not receive it. The lack of it inhibited her and drove her further into herself. Gerald, she knew, did love her and gave her all the affection she wanted, and which was not available from Mo, but this now only added to her confusion.

  Disturbed by her own newly recognized sexuality, and puzzled about her father’s, Daphne was still at this stage very close to Gerald. In public, people saw his pride in her grow all the time. She went to the Eton and Harrow cricket match with him, to first nights, to lunch at famous restaurants and hotels and occasionally (because she was not yet officially old enough) to dances. Daphne loved to dance, losing all her social inhibitions once she was on the dance floor, especially if the dance were a foxtrot. ‘When I hear a foxtrot I go mad for want of dancing,’ she wrote to Tod. Dancing was the only form of socializing she relished and when her parents gave a dance at the Piccadilly Hotel, during the Christmas season of 1921, Daphne, aged only fourteen but allowed to attend as a special favour, was ecstatic. She took part in a tableau with Ellen Terry ‘and my adorable Gladys’, and enjoyed herself thoroughly. Her life that night seemed privileged in the right kind of way and when, soon after this event, she read Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories she found they filled her with ‘a helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s lives . . . a sort of feeling life is merely repetition and monotony’. She appreciated how fortunate she was that her own life was so varied and exciting, and yet could not work out why her good luck did not make her happier, why she always seemed to appear ungrateful when she was not.

  The measure of contentment she did have was shattered at the end of that year when Tod left to take up an exciting sounding new post as governess to the children of a Sultan, Prince Abdul Madjid, in Constantinople. Almost as soon as she had departed, Tod was begged to return by Daphne, who wrote, ‘I miss you awfully, sweetest.’ Tod’s departure was like an act of betrayal and, though Daphne could well understand her governess’s desire to travel again, she did not like to think this was preferable to being with her at Cannon Hall. In fact, though Daphne lost a close confidante – except, of course, by correspondence, which was continual – she did gain something from Tod’s desertion. Miss Vigo, the new governess, lived, as Tod had done, in lodgings nearby, but was in many ways a better teacher. ‘Vigo . . . is not bad’, Daphne reported grudgingly, ‘but different.’ She was not a kindred spirit and their relationship was formal. To her annoyance, Daphne was set French homework out of the Oxford Junior, a standard she felt she had long since passed, but not in Miss Vigo’s opinion. It was difficult to settle down with someone new, not only from the teaching point of view but because, without Tod, she had no close friend. Angela, three years older and a debutante, had many friends of her own, and Jeanne, aged eleven, went to school locally and was part of a quite different world. But to Jeanne’s schoolfriends, Daphne was a figure not of pathos, wandering about on her own, always with a pencil stuck behind her ear in case she had a sudden urge to write, but of awe. She looked haughty and rather fierce.

  Her urge to write was known about by her family and encouraged but not at this stage taken seriously even by Daphne herself. She reported to Tod that her spare time, without Tod to talk to, was ‘taken up with writing a book. It’s great fun. It is about a boy who is searching for happiness, at least not exactly happiness, but that something that is somewhere, you know. You feel it and you miss it and it beckons and you can’t reach it . . . I don’t think anyone can find it on this earth.’ The book she mentioned was a story she called ‘The Seekers’. She wrote it in a beautiful Italian sketch book which fastened with dark green ribbons. The writing, in ink, is her very best effort, incomparably superior to her normal scrawl in letters, and covers twenty-six of the large folio pages. As a piece of juvenilia, ‘The Seekers’ is impressive but its autobiographical significance is greater. Into this tale of a boy called Maurice, aged six at the beginning, Daphne worked all the angst about which she wrote to Tod: Maurice is clearly herself. It was an obvious, even crude, device: if she wrote about a boy she felt free to write about herself.

  Maurice, who ‘began to think’ at six, has problems. The first is his Nurse, who thinks Maurice is ‘soft-headed’. Maurice doesn’t laugh at things others find funny, such as the clowns at the circus. Instead, he laughs when Nurse slips on orange-peel and crashes to the ground hurting herself. But a bigger problem is the lack of a father. Maurice’s father is dead. His mother – bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Daphne’s own mother – pines not for her dead husband but for another man she once loved, called Tommy.

  It is hard to see the direction the story is going to take until the day Maurice gets lost and is befriended by ‘the man with the pipe’. He has merry brown eyes and thrills Maurice by telling him: ‘You are a lonely traveller in mexico [sic] who has lost his way in a terrific storm. You have come to me for shelter and do not know I am a brigand who will take your life.’ They play this game for hours then the man takes Maurice home. Later, on holiday, Maurice’s mother meets him and the story ends with their reunion: the man is Tommy, her long lost lover. Tommy is forty but ‘it didn’t matter very much . . . you see, he’d never grown up’. Even his daughter, Maurice’s age, is said to be ‘in reality’ years older than her father. Tommy, who sounds exactly like Gerald (though physically like J. M. Barrie), is described with great affection as a show-off, brilliant at imaginary games, but also with a slight edge of contempt. Maurice, although he loves him, sees through him – ‘he was like a very little boy’, like Peter Pan in fact, about whom his mother told him stories.