The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier

Author:Daphne du Maurier [Maurier, Daphne du]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: autobiographical, historical, memoirs, non-fiction, women authors, writing
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-12-17T07:00:00+00:00

All childhood memories are visual. A face, a figure, somebody smiling or frowning, and the image stays forever. A moment in time, held captive. Sometimes the drone of adult conversation sounding as a foreign language suddenly becomes clear. A sentence becomes imprinted on the memory box. No explanation. Silence again.

I do not remember my aunt Sylvia, the second daughter of my grandfather George du Maurier, and the little I do know was told to me, through the years, by my father Gerald, the youngest of the family. He adored all three sisters, and his brother, but somehow I formed the impression that Sylvia, who married Arthur Llewelyn-Davies and bore him five sons, was the sister he loved the best. As I have said, I do not remember her, for she died when I was barely three years old; yet my mother used to tell me that she would ask for me to be taken down to see her, when she was lying in bed already suffering from the cancer that would kill her, so that she could hold me in her arms. This was no mark of favouritism. My sister Angela would go too. But Sylvia adored babies. So I have often wondered why my memory box does not hold the impression of that dying woman, beautiful, witty, tender and loving, whispering words of comfort, or possibly even jokes, to a shy and stubborn baby.

I am three, I am four, I am five, and why is it that Cousin Jack, Aunt Sylvia’s second son, already a midshipman surely in naval uniform, takes to calling at Cumberland Terrace, where we live, to bring me sweets, and once a balloon?

‘Someone to see you,’ says the parlourmaid. ‘Just go into the dining room.’

I wander in and he is there, sitting in the chair at the far end of the room.

‘Hullo, Daphne,’ and he stands up and smiles at me. At four, at five years old, I am smitten on the spot. Cousin Jack is the only one in the world for me. But now, in retrospect, why did he come? Was it because he knew that his mother Sylvia loved little children, and when I sat on her bed as a baby he remembered this? I do not know.

The image of Cousin Jack persists. He has come to see all of us in the country, where we are spending the summer. He climbs an enormous tree in the garden with supreme confidence. Yet to enter the dining room and say, ‘Hullo, Cousin Jack,’ overwhelms me with shyness. My heart beats. I nearly faint with embarrassment.

Another image. We are at Ramsgate. Our grandmother takes a house there every summer. We go to stay, and the cousins too. I overhear my mother say, ‘I don’t know why the Davies boys have to have the best front rooms, and our children are put at the back.’

At five, six, I know the answer. The Davies boys are boys. Hurrah for them! They are all playing in a front room, and we join them.

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