In the footsteps of Daphne...

I've just got back from the Du Maurier Festival in Cornwall, after a weekend of sunshine and blue skies (the first time it hasn't rained in the three years I've being going there, so this must have been third time lucky). I got there on Friday evening, and it was still light enough to go for my favourite walk -- along the Esplanade, past the big house, Point Neptune (complete with its grand iron gates, transplanted there by previous inhabitants, the Rashleigh family, from Menabilly, and now keeping the world at bay from its current owners, Dawn French and Lenny Henry), down to Readymoney Cove, and then up the steps from the beach to St Catherine's Castle, pausing for breath to gaze at the view out to sea, before going along the cliffs to the lovely, hidden cove at Coombe.
It's a walk I did many times over when I was researching and writing my book, and this is also the way that the narrator of my novel walked from Fowey to Menabilly, following in the footsteps of Daphne du Maurier. So it seemed fitting to be back here again, on the same path, the night before I was due to talk about 'Daphne' at the Du Maurier Festival.
It can be very conducive to meditative thought, walking at the close of a long day -- the sun slipping at the horizon, where the sky meets the sea -- and on Friday evening, I found myself wandering around and about the path that led me to Daphne; both literally and otherwise. It's been a long journey -- and there were times when I thought I was entirely lost, and would never find my way out again. But as I looked out across the water, in the strange, magical silvery light that often seems to gleam along this stretch of Cornish coastline, I was glad that I had followed this path, with all its twists and turns.
As for what was to come... well, it's getting late now, so I will write more tomorrow about my conversations with the du Maurier family.

A psychic reading

So, the Du Maurier festival is about to start in Cornwall, and I'm going to be there on Saturday, for an event which I think will be very unusual, and definitely worth coming to. (If any of you can get to Fowey for the event -- 11.45 on Saturday morning -- I'm offering four free tickets. Just let me know...) The talk will be chaired by Professor Helen Taylor from Exeter University -- she's the editor of the excellent 'Du Maurier Companion' -- and I'll be in conversation with Daphne du Maurier's grandson, Rupert Tower, who is a psychoanalyst, and Henrietta Llewelyn Davies, who is the great-grand-daughter of Daphne's aunt, Sylvia (the mother of the five Lost Boys who inspired 'Peter Pan'). I talked to both Rupert and Henrietta when I was researching 'Daphne', but what I haven't mentioned before is that Henri (as she is known to her friends) is a psychic. She's very low-key about it, but nevertheless I happen to know she counts some Very Famous Authors amongst her clients -- as you might expect of a psychic with such a literary family tree, not to mention a degree in English Literature from Oxford -- and whether or not you're a believer in a sixth sense, Henri has a knack of coming up with apposite remarks and insights. Have a look at her website here.
Whatever happens on Saturday, it won't be boring... and you never know, it might give new meaning to the phrase 'psychic reading'. Hope to see you there.

Bluebells and bank holidays

I've just had the loveliest of bank holidays -- doing nothing out of the ordinary, yet all of it felt like a gift, because of the sunshine (walking the dog in the woods, eating ice-cream, seeing my husband, who has been away for weeks...) Anyway, as I was walking home with the dog, I realised that bluebells had flowered on our road -- not just in some of my neighbours' front gardens (where they grow year after year), but for the first time in the small patches of grass around the plane trees that line the street. There is something so unexpected -- and cheering -- about seeing wild flowers in the city; especially when seedlings take root, as if by magic, in cracks along the pavements or the crevices in brick walls.

Coincidences; ghost dresses; and comfort blankets...

I've just been catching up on this blog, and others, and I was struck by the strange coincidence of dovegreyreader writing about my book, "My Mother's Wedding Dress", on my sister's birthday. There's no mention in the book that Ruth was born on Mayday, so it seems all the more serendipitous that dovegreyreader should choose May 1st, of all days, to write. Ruth loved clothes -- they were a reflection of her intensely joyous response to life -- and that's one of the reasons that the Lavender Trust has had such longstanding relationships with fashion companies (everyone from Chanel to Miss Selfridge has supported our fundraising for women with breast cancer).
Anyway, in celebration of serendipity, here's a little bit from "My Mother's Wedding Dress", from a chapter called "Ghost Dresses". (As it happens, this chapter also includes passages on Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca", reflecting on the profoundly disturbing scenes where the second Mrs de Winter is haunted by her predecessor's clothes; but no room for that here). In case it seems confusing taken out of context, in the following extract, I'm writing about Ghost the fashion label, rather than du Maurier's more spectral creations:
"One might question why it is that women want to look, if not like ghosts, exactly, then somehow wraithlike (it's a question of fragility, I suppose, of choosing to give an impression of otherworldliness; half Titania, half Ophelia; something like that, perhaps). Except it didn't seem that way when my sister started buying lots of Ghost clothes after she was diagnosed with breast cancer; and it didn't feel that way when I bought some for her, as well, on shopping expeditions that took place after we'd met for tea and cakes in Sagne's Patisserie, a cafe just a few yards away from the block of flats where we'd lived, all those years previously, on Marylebone High Street... Of course, if you were being objective -- which I am not -- you might also ask why a woman with terminal cancer should want to wear the Ghost label; but it didn't seem possible that she would die, even though she was spending money like there was no tomorrow...

"When Ruth died, in the night, towards the end of an Indian summer, she was not wearing any of her Ghost clothes. Her dress was dark charcoal-grey jersey wool; the colour of ashes, I could say, except she was fond of that dress, it was not quite as sombre as it sounds. It was long, though not down to her ankles; and when she had come back to the hospice on a Sunday afternoon -- having made her escape for the weekend, as she often tried to do -- she had on black opaque tights beneath her dress, covering her frail wasting legs. Her husband, Matt, had taken their children home (they were tired, only two years old) and I stayed with her, though she was leaving, it seemed to me; too sick to want me to read to her, as I'd done in the weeks before, sitting beside her hospital bed; too far away to be comforted by her favourite story of brave-hearted Pippi Longstocking. First, she'd clawed at her tights, in pain, crying out loud, and I'd helped the nurses take them off; but then they gave her morphine, and she was peaceful, in her long dress, drifting, dreaming. My mother was there, too, as day turned to night, and she placed a soft filigree cashmere scarf at my sister's cheek; pale cobwebby grey, like the worn baby blanket Ruth had loved as a little girl; her comfort blanket, the one she'd never wanted to throw away."

The Lavender Trust -- ten years old

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the Lavender Trust, the charity I set up after my sister Ruth died of breast cancer at the age of 33. It's also her birthday -- hence the date we chose for the launch of the charity -- and had she lived, she would have been 44 tomorrow. I'm feeling such a mixture of different emotions right now. Part of me is in an organisational frenzy, because there's a huge fundraising event taking place tomorrow night, upon which a great deal depends (the Lavender Trust raises all the money for Breast Cancer Care's services for women under the age of 50 -- and 8,600 new cases are diagnosed each year).
But now I've just stopped for a few minutes -- stopped running through the lists for tomorrow night, stopped sending emails, stopped fretting about who is coming, and how much is being donated -- and I'm thinking of my sister. I miss her so much; I wish so much that she was still alive -- still my best friend; still the person I could turn to on dark days, and to celebrate all the good things in life, too... Of course, time heals -- that old adage, often repeated to the newly bereaved -- and I am healed, in that I no longer feel as if part of me has been severed and lost forever. But you don't stop loving someone, just because they have died. You can't turn off love, and make it go away, however many years have passed since the one you loved was still alive.
And that's a kind of miracle, isn't it? That love survives the passing of time, and does not fade, even as we grow older, and more faded. It's like a kind of springtime; the capacity of love to renew itself, with the changing of the seasons, and the turning of the years.
Thus Mayday will always be Ruth's birthday, in my heart.

Miss Austen Regrets

Did anyone else watch this on BBC1 tonight? I enjoyed it immensely -- I thought the script was excellent (based on Jane Austen's letters, apparently), and Olivia Williams was perfect as Austen.
But I wondered -- would I have liked it as much if I knew as much biographical detail about Jane Austen as I do about, say, Charlotte Bronte? What do the Janeites make of it? Were you annoyed by the liberties taken with the truth? For example, that in reality, she wrote anonymously, but in the film, she is feted and recognised?

Paul Gallico: "Flowers for Mrs Harris"

I've just bought my fourth copy of this -- second-hand -- from amazon, because I've given the other three away as presents to friends. It's such a lovely book -- hence the fact that I want my friends to read it -- so why is it out of print? I'm sure I'm not the only reader who returns, over and over again, to Paul Gallico's story of Ada Harris, a London cleaning lady who scrimps and saves in order to buy herself a Dior dress from Paris (hence the alternative title in American editions: Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris).
It's one of the most evocative books I've ever read about the emotions threaded through our clothes -- about how what we wear on the outside is sometimes an indication of what lies beneath (which is a theme of my previous book, "My Mother's Wedding Dress"). The Dior dress cannot transform Mrs Harris back into a young girl -- 'the creation worked no miracles, except in her soul' -- but a kind of magic is nevertheless woven into its seams, and survives the material damage wreaked on its fabric, so that by the end of the story, "Mrs Harris hugged the dress to her thin bosom, hugged it hard as though it were alive and human..."
Now, I'm off to bed, to re-read it for the twentieth time -- and it never fails to make me laugh, and also tug at my heart.