Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  It is probable that Jim backed Gerald in the venture with Curzon. More than that, it is likely that he put the idea to Curzon in the first place. Jim was rich. The deal was struck as Sylvia died. Could Jim now count on Gerald’s tacit approval when he took the boys for his own? Events showed that he could.

  I believe that Jim’s bankrolling of Gerald was the material foundation of the control he held over him. According to Mackail, there were ‘plenty of reasons for mutual gratitude, but plenty, undoubtedly for rankling resentment as well’. Whenever the du Mauriers suffered tragedy, which was often during Jim’s tenure, Gerald’s star rose. And Gerald never resisted.

  Jim had Gerald where he wanted him, so for the whole of Daphne’s childhood, even when Gerald was not acting in a Barrie play, Uncle Jim was a fixture. Margaret Forster wrote:

  Barrie was ‘Uncle Jim’ to the du Maurier girls just as he was to the Llewelyn Davies boys... He and Gerald were great friends and he was in the habit of coming home with Gerald to play with the girls in the nursery. Daphne not only liked Uncle Jim but identified totally with his creation of fantasy lives. His imaginary islands and woods, which featured so heavily in the stories he told the children, were real places to her.5

  Daphne claimed him as ‘part of our family life’. To Angela, he was ‘almost as a relative’, and Peter Pan ‘practically our birthright. Barrie used to visit us in our nursery and we used to act it for him by the hour. Daphne always bagged Peter, and I was Wendy and Mrs Darling and several of the pirates, Jeanne was Michael and I rather think Eliza. It was quite easy to act all the parts in turn, and we flew from chair to chair and swam as mermaids on the floor, completely without any fear or shyness that Barrie might be sitting on the fender watching us. Daddy, at such times, was probably Hook.’

  Evidence of Jim’s influence on Daphne’s imagination filters through as early as 1911: ‘An incident – strangely relevant – comes to mind,’ Daphne wrote. Her first governess, Miss Torrance, had just arrived. ‘She asked me if I could write. I turned to her and said, “Yes, I have written a book.”

  ‘“What is it called?”

  ‘“It’s called John, in the Wood of the World.”

  ‘It was not true, of course. I could barely turn pot-hooks into capitals let alone form sentences to write a book. So why say it? Showing off, no doubt. But what on earth made me choose such a title?’

  As early as four, Daphne was making her way through Jim’s ‘wood of make-believe’ in which the du Maurier children swung one by one ‘monkey-wise from branch to branch’ and ‘reached the tree of knowledge’, as Jim put it.

  In her autobiographical fantasy, The Parasites (1949), written nearly forty years later, Daphne, as Celia Delaney (‘One of the three people in the novel I know myself to have been’), looks back at the passing of the children’s make-believe way of looking at things then:

  Celia shut the door of the children’s bedroom behind her. It is true, she said to herself, what we were saying this afternoon; they are different from what we used to be. Our world was one of fantasy. Theirs is reality. They don’t pretend. An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The patterns on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk. Games like draughts, or ludo, are games of skill and chance; even as bridge and poker are to an adult. Draughts to us were soldiers, ruthless and malignant; and the crowned king on the back line a puffed-up potentate, jumping with horrible power, backwards and forwards, from square to square . . .

  As a child, Daphne was always going to be interested in fairies. It was an interest both matured and complicated by being in and around the theatre, the great fantasy generator powered by Gerald and Jim. At six she was furious with a maid who fabricated a fairy ring on the ground and pretended it was real, while ‘I knew the light that danced about on the stage [representing Tinkerbell in Peter Pan] was really shone by the theatre men.’ Angela, three years older, could not countenance such deception, but Daphne understood that these things had to be done for ordinary children. She rather liked the idea of being on the side that manipulated the imaginations of the people she could see sitting there in the front row, because she, a du Maurier, knew when something supernatural was real:

  I have more memories of hanging about backstage as a small child than I have of actually seeing Gerald perform. The scene all set for the next performance was tidy and neat, like an empty room, and then behind the backcloth, out of sight, the moveable set for the next act, which might be a garden, or another room, and somehow this was fascinating, the pretence flowers, the pretence trees, or perhaps a street of houses on a backcloth, and it was like being let into a secret that only the people behind the footlights shared. These others, who sat in front, did not know! In today’s language, they were being conned! I enjoyed this.6

  Daphne’s favourite fairy tale was The Snow Queen, which tells of a wicked hobgoblin. He is the trickster of myth, who makes a looking-glass which has the power to make everything good or beautiful that is reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything worthless and bad is exaggerated and made worse than ever. The wicked demon laughs till his sides shake when young Kay gets a splinter of the glass in his eye. Only when Kay bursts into tears, and weeps so that the splinter swims out of his eye, does he recognise little Gerda again, and see that he has been away in a different world, a world distorted and distinct from reality.

  If Jim was the imaginative guru, Gerald was the lighter, more theatrical influence. A terrific father at this stage, he saw something ridiculous in every sort of situation and had his children in stitches pulling faces behind people’s backs. On family holidays, Daphne recalled, he would arrive on the station platform ahead of time, and ‘as soon as he caught sight of his daughters, he would act a part, bending suddenly, his hand to his heart, coughing and groaning as one in the last stages of a malignant disease, feigning conversation with an unknown old lady whose back was mercifully turned, and who did not perceive the maniac who gibed at her with trembling finger and incredible grimace.’7

  To settle disputes between the girls, he might hold an imaginary court, with himself as judge and the girls doubling as plaintiffs, witnesses and jurors, until everybody was having such fun that the original argument was forgotten. Angela, Daphne and Jeanne were their father’s captive audience.

  Soon, the girls were caught up in the spirit of Jim’s Castaway games. Wielding a piece of wood for a sword, Daphne was determined to ‘be a boy’, using his mantra and emulating her Llewelyn Davies cousins, whom she held in awe, while at night she lay awake like Michael, expecting ghosts to come in through the window.

  In Myself When Young, her autobiographical fragment, Daphne describes all three du Maurier girls enacting male heroes from history and the novels they were reading. Although Gerald bothered little about their education, said Daphne, ‘he encouraged us to read historical novels, and bought us all Alexander Dumas and Harrison Ainsworth and Walter Scott, and then, of course, we pretended to be the various characters in the novels, and sometimes Gerald joined in... he was a tremendous feeder of the imagination... the actor in him . . .’

  In the enactments of Peter Pan, Daphne pushed herself forward, leading her sisters in fantasy games: ‘I was never myself in those days,’ she wrote, ‘I was whatever character that I was reading or interested in at the time.’

  There were boyish team games also, as there had been for their cousins:

  Gerald taught us to play cricket, and without boasting, I think he taught us rather well! We played with a Harrow Yard ball – the kind they use at the school – and he even put up nets to make the practice seem more real. Then he encouraged our imagination to run riot, and we became in turn the members of the Eton and Harrow elevens, all with different personalities!... The only one to raise a mild objection was our mother, who said the wear and tear on our pitch spoilt the lawn which I’ve no doubt it did. But it was even worse in winter because then we played Rugger. Oh, ye
s, we did! And the dog Brutus joined in, and used to make off with the ball . . .8

  This world of fantasy play, particularly the enactment of male swashbuckling roles such as Hawkins and d’Artagnan, was seen by Margaret Forster as indicative of a deeply laid male persona in Daphne, but I think the directive and precedent came from Jim’s boy-cult. From his earliest contact with Barrie, Gerald was reiterating the Master’s mantra – ‘be a boy and never grow up’. In 1900, he wrote to his mother, ‘Give my love to Sylvia and the boys, and tell ‘em it’s not worth growing up.’ And in 1902, after the Black Lake holiday: ‘Thank Sylvia for her dear words of wisdom, and tell the boys to stay young while they can.’ Now, a decade on, he was making his daughters do boyish things.

  Gerald fell in line with Jim’s boy-cult in all that he encouraged his girls to do, and Daphne threw herself into the activities admired by both Jim and Gerald. That it was a pattern imposed from outside, by Jim, one that Gerald acquiesced in but deep down suspected was not best for his middle daughter, was made clear in a touching lament which he wrote for Daphne when she was 10:

  My very slender one

  So brave of heart, but delicate of will,

  So careful not to wound, never kill,

  My tender one –

  Who seems to live in Kingdoms of her own

  In realms of joy

  Where heroes young and old

  In climates hot and cold

  Do deeds of daring and much fame

  And she knows she could do the same

  If only she’d been born a boy.

  And sometimes in the silence of the night

  I wake and think perhaps my darling’s right

  And that she should have been,

  And, if I’d had my way,

  She would have been, a boy.

  My very slender one

  So feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet,

  So full of fun and womanly deceit.

  My tender one

  Who seems to dream her life away alone.

  A dainty girl

  But always well attired

  And loves to be admired

  Wherever she may be, and wants

  To be the being who enchants

  Because she has been born a girl,

  And sometimes in the turmoil of the day

  I pause, and think my darling may

  Be one of those who will

  For good or ill

  Remain a girl for ever and be still

  A girl.

  Daphne suffered many years of heartache sorting out the confusion of gender and imagination in ‘being a boy’; the concept at the centre of Barrie’s boy-cult.

  For Daphne’s grandfather, Kicky, boyishness was the quintessence of the Romantic ideal, Little Billee’s artistic sensitivity. It went with ‘a quickness, a keenness, a delicacy of perception in matters of form and colour, a mysterious facility and felicity of execution, a sense of all that was sweet and beautiful in nature, and a ready power of expressing it’. Boy was ‘the secret of eternal youth’, irrespective of age or gender (both Trilby and Mary, Duchess of Towers are boyish). It was liberation from ‘the regular action of the world’, an ability to be a true-dreamer and to possess a psychic ‘sixth sense’.

  Barrie traded on Trilby’s boyishness in his seduction of Sylvia, writing to her that Sylvia herself was ‘very very nearly being a boy’. And of course Tommy was ‘a boy’, and there were times ‘when Grizel looked like a boy’. And Peter Pan was a ‘demon boy’, having, like Jim himself, made ‘the great mistake’. George and Michael were literally boys, and they had that special aura endemic to du Maurier boyishness. Now Daphne, as ‘the being who enchants’, was a more natural boy (in Kicky’s sense) even than Sylvia, but as Gerald’s poem shows, he doesn’t understand what this means. Gerald gets stuck in the gender politics and makes his daughter long to be masculine.

  Boy is what Uncle Jim, physically and emotionally impotent, was after, and would never know. In his pursuit of it, he brought many of the du Mauriers to destruction. Here, in Daphne’s early immersion in his boy-cult we have a glimpse of the emergence of a masculine self-image that would be with her for decades hence – a real desire to be a boy, which would in the years following be encouraged ten-fold in the ‘special relationship’ (as Angela described it) with her father, again under the tutelage of Uncle Jim.

  Only in 1954, in the company of Peter Davies, having begun to ‘chimney sweep’ her mind of Jim and Gerald, did Daphne realise that she could be a boy in her grandfather’s sense without ceding her femininity, that boy meant what Kicky had meant it to mean in Trilby – her fantasy side, her creative side, the part of her that was a dreamer.

  Earlier she had devastated her own daughter, when Flavia reached puberty, by telling her that now she was ‘no longer really boyish, but just a boring old girl.’9 Once she saw Jim’s boy-cult for what it was, she was able to write to Flavia that being ‘madly boyish... has a lot to do with my writing’.

  Between 1907 and 1915 many of the du Mauriers died or were killed: Arthur, 1907; Sylvia, 1910; Trixy, 1913; Emma, 1914; George and Guy, 1915. Of Kicky’s children only Gerald and May remained. Gerald was now head of the family, and as after Sylvia’s death, family tragedy marked a rise in his fortunes.

  In 1915 Viola Tree, daughter of the actor producer, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree,* and one of Jim’s regular cast, took Gerald to view a spectacular house, Cannon Hall on Hampstead Heath. It was close to his boyhood home, New Grove House.

  Nineteen huge windows looked across a hard terrace and broad sweeping lawns. There were, in addition, two Queen Anne cottages in the grounds. Inside the main house, a huge staircase swept through three floors. Daphne was fascinated by the paintings that Gerald bought to decorate the massive walls: ‘sad King Charles in profile came on the right-hand wall as one started to climb the stairs, and above him I remember, stretching the whole width of the wall, was a great battle scene, which would be enacted by us children again and again.’10

  In the same year as Cannon Hall was purchased, Gerald accepted the lead role in A Kiss for Cinderella, the first role written for him by Jim for six years. It was no coincidence that with Gerald back on Jim’s team, Gerald’s lifestyle soared. He even took delivery of a Rolls-Royce. ‘Largesse was distributed liberally and without hesitation,’ Daphne recalled. There were many servants, holidays abroad (Algiers, Cannes, Monte Carlo, a villa in Italy) and stunning parties. Sundays, Gerald’s one day off, were extra special, as Angela wrote –

  If it was summer people came to lunch who afterwards would stay on to play tennis, remaining to tea and often to supper. If it was winter the lunch would be more serious perhaps, followed by a nap and sometimes people to supper followed by bridge or bezique.

  The summer was by far the greatest fun. . . the Shakespeare border a riot of colour... tennis with John Drinkwater and the ‘Bunny’ Austins... Irene Ravensdale, Mary Newcomb, Madeleine Seymour... names, names that mean nowt to me. Tennis would be played for hours, with new Slazengers for every set (one of Daddy’s many extravagances), and the silent grey-alpaca-clad maids brought terrific spreads of cakes and cucumber sandwiches and iced coffee and tea, to the terrace.

  They were wonderful Sundays; I loved them, Daphne couldn’t bear them... Cannon Hall Sundays were frankly anathema to her.11

  Daphne didn’t like the loud, gushing, theatrical world that now enveloped them, not because she was shy, although she appeared to be, but because these actor friends, with a few exceptions such as Gladys Cooper and Viola Tree, were artificial.

  Angela was gregarious, and destined to ‘come out’ as a debutante. Daphne was an introvert, withdrawn, highly imaginative. ‘Daphne was always pretty and became quite lovely at ten . . .’ wrote Angela. ‘Luckily I never realised I was so plain.’ Yet it was Angela who fancied she could make a career in the theatre as an actress; she would play Wendy to Gladys Cooper’s Peter Pan in 1923–4 and to Dorothy Dickson’s Peter in 1924–5, although not i
nappropriately for the less imaginative sister her flying harness broke and she crashed to the stage, hurting herself badly.

  Meanwhile, Jim and Gerald were preparing something special for Daphne. They had been working together on the script of a new play, Dear Brutus. The key act (Act II) reveals Gerald in a magic wood as Will Dearth. The script challenges the value of Dearth’s love for his wife and offers him instead a highly questionable relationship with a fantasy daughter. At the end of the act, this fantasy daughter is cruelly written out as a ‘might-have-been’,* a figment of his imagination.

  Early in the play, the daughter is terrified that people will want to take her Daddy away from her, because ‘things that are too beautiful can’t last’. In her Daddy’s arms she wonders whether she is ‘sometimes stranger than other people’s daughters’. She can’t countenance the image of her Daddy wandering about the world without her. She thinks ‘Men need daughters.’ Her father agrees that ‘Daughters are the thing’, because ‘by the time a son is ten you can’t even take him on your knee’. The best time in a father’s life is the year before his daughter ‘puts her hair up’, when a girl turns 18. The girl counters that there is one time better, ‘The year she does put up her hair.’ She then puts her hair up and asks him, ‘What do you think? Will I do?’ Dearth’s eyes fall on the young woman ‘that is to be’, with ‘the change in his voice falling clammy on her’, as Jim’s stage direction reads. Smitten, Dearth speaks ‘with an odd tremor’, and his daughter manhandles him, ‘bumping into him and round him and over him’, saying he will be sick of her with her hair up before he has done with her. Then she teases and tantalises him with the thought of one day being in love with a boy.