Picture the scene: a beautiful young woman aged 24, having published her first novel, watches a motor yacht cruise past her family’s seaside home. It is piloted by a tall handsome young man, Frederick “Boy” Browning, a major in the Grenadier Guards. But he is a sensitive soldier, who has read her book The Loving Spirit, a family saga set against the background of Cornwall’s boatbuilding industry. He knows of the girl, and she of him, but on this visit they do not meet.
This may seem the stuff of romantic fiction, but actually it is fact. The date was 3 October 1931. The setting was Ferryside, “a strange-looking house by the water’s edge, built like a Swiss chalet,” she called it, on the quay at the hamlet of Bodinnick, which lies across the estuary from the small Cornish port of Fowey. The woman was Daphne du Maurier. And the man? Reader, she married him.
The wedding, which took place in the little church of Lanteglos, three months after their meeting, was no less romantic – “The houses opposite had put out flags to greet the bride who went to church by water,” she remembered in Vanishing Cornwall (1967) – if unconventionally so. The bride wore a blue suit, neither had many family members present, and the best man was a local boatman rather than a friend of the groom’s. But the marriage endured, even, if like many of those in her novels, it was rarely conventionally happy. Both had affairs (she, not least, with the Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence) and each had rather different expectations. Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning KCVO, DSO, as he became, subsequently comptroller of the future Queen Elizabeth’s household at Clarence House, remained in London after he left the army, while du Maurier craved solitude and country life. As the principal earner, the choice of family home – they had three children, the youngest of whom now lives at Ferryside – was hers, and the place she settled on was Cornwall.
As you turn off the A390 towards Fowey, you pass a sign saying “Daphne du Maurier country”. Yet du Maurier had no innate connection with the county. Born in London 100 years ago this month, she spent family holidays there aged five and ten, but it had made no obvious impression for when in 1926 her parents decided to buy Ferryside, she wondered why they didn’t buy a house in France instead. She had finished her education in Paris and had loved the time she’d spent in Brittany. (As the pirate hero of her novel Frenchman’s Creek observes, “Cornishmen and Bretons are very much alike. Both are Celts.”) Even her most famous novel, Rebecca, its first quarter written when she was a homesick army wife in Egypt, never mentions Cornwall; its setting is no more specific than the West Country. But even if none of the houses she lived in around Fowey is open to the public – instead attractions include a Literary Centre on South Street with an exhibition devoted to her, an annual Daphne du Maurier Festival (10 to 19 May; dumaurierfestival.co.uk), and any number of guided walks and Daphne souvenirs on offer – “du Maurier country” has a resonance for those who’ve loved her novels and know something of her life. (Margaret Forster’s exemplary 1993 biography, Daphne du Maurier, is the one to read.) For Cornwall, its villages, its landscape, its coast, its birds and its weather influenced and suffuse her fiction.
Take the opening chapter of Jamaica Inn (1936), a gothic tale of smugglers, in which she compares the “gentle rain that fell at Helford” – a benign and pretty place of clustered white cottages and shining water – “a rain that pattered in the many trees and lost itself in the long grass…” – with the “lashing, pitiless rain” on the “hard and barren soil” of Bodmin Moor. “No trees here, save one or two that stretched bare branches to the four winds, bent and twisted from centuries of storm…”
