Daphne Du Maurier

Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer

Victor Gollancz, 1977.

Walks became longer with the Norlands. Instead of the Broad Walk in Regent's Park, bordering the Zoo...we were marched to Park Square Gardens some way off, and I soon saw the reason for this, for the current Norland nurse met friends, and once inside the gardens, which were enclosed by tall railings, so that you had to enter with a key, she would sit with the other nurses in a cosy shelter out of the cold wind, and they drank hot cocoa out of a Thermos flask, and ate biscuits. Baby, lucky thing, was snug and warm in her pram beside them. "Now then, run along and play." I did not want to play. My feet were frozen. My boots were too small. I wanted to sit in the shelter and be warm with them. No use though

The author of Rebecca spent the greater part of her life in Cornwall, the setting of her best-known stories, but as a child lived at 24 Cumberland Terrace, where she was born in 1907. Her world began to change in 1914. 'Soon there were soldiers everywhere...wearing khaki, marching down Albany Street and through Regent's Park.'

One day Angela told me that she had overheard someone tell Nurse Netta that in wartime everyone made eyes at the soldiers. "What does it mean, making eyes?" I asked her. "I think it's like this," Angela said, looking sideways out of the corner of her eyes. We practised this awhile, and afterwards, when we were walking in Regent's Park, and saw soldiers coming towards us, we used to stare at them sideways, in a squinting sort of way, smiling at the same time. Angela said it was patriotic. But I don't think they noticed, which was disappointing

Angela, the author's elder sister, did not recall this incident in her autobiography, It's Only the Sister... (Peter Davies, 1951). Her earliest memory was 'wetting my knickers in Regent's Park, when dressed in my Sunday clothes...I wore a pink coat (pelisse) and a pink and beaver-edged poke bonnet, and white suede boots. I was very smart, and in either the Outer or Inner Circle of Regent's Park this shame befell me'. She was then aged two.