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).