I take after my father Gerald and my grandfather George. I was born into a world of make-believe and imagination. In the short film The Make-believe World of Daphne du Maurier, Daphne said: Being ‘menaced’ meant being attracted to someone to ‘wain’, was to be embarrassed and if you were doing a ‘tell him’ you were being boring. He talked with them in a language peppered with constantly evolving code words that excluded their mother and others.

Gerald’s charm and high spirits masked a struggle with depression and a sense of meaninglessness that was to deepen with age.īut when his daughters were small, Gerald was their moon and sun and stars, swooping into their nursery to involve them in magical games. Muriel was the calm foil to her debonair husband, who was in constant need of an adoring audience. At weekends they would entertain the likes of Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Lady Diana Cooper Ivor Novello would amuse them on the piano. Muriel and Gerald du Maurier were a glamorous couple. There were trips to the theatre and the Tower of London, and daily walks in Regent’s Park along the Broad Walk, bordering the zoo. The girls would wake to the call of a bugle playing ‘Reveille’ at the Regent’s Park Barracks in Albany Street, and from the wide window in the day nursery they could watch the Life Guards, with breastplates gleaming and plumes waving from their helmets. There was a doll’s house and a toy cupboard with a shelf for each sister, a cretonne-covered toy box, and an old armchair that doubled as a ship imperiled at sea. In this room, Daphne’s imagination was first shaped. She and her sisters Angela and Jeanne spent their early lives in this room upstairs, overseen by a succession of nannies, who were mostly kind.

Towards the end of her life when she was starting to write Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer (later renamed Myself When Young), Daphne considered basing the book on the houses she had lived in and their influence on her development, beginning with her birthplace, which ‘I remember vividly’.ĭespite the grandeur of this house, with its high ceilings, fluted columns, and large windows overlooking the park, it was the warmth and refuge of the nursery that Daphne remembered best. The family had grown prosperous the previous year Gerald had played the lead in a long running play, and they were able to move to a larger, more distinguished home at 24 Cumberland Terrace, a Nash terrace overlooking Regent’s Park. Born on 13th May, 1907, she was the middle of three daughters to the famous actor Sir Gerald du Maurier and his actress wife Muriel Beaumont. Daphne du Maurier’s childhood was typical of the privileged upper classes of her time.