Born on the east side of the park
Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, on the eastern edge of Regent's Park. Cumberland Terrace is among the grandest of the neoclassical ranges John Nash laid out around the park under the patronage of the Prince Regent. It was completed in 1826, built by William Mountford Nurse with James Thomson as resident architect, and its central block carries a large sculptural pediment by J. G. Bubb above a long colonnade of Ionic columns. The terrace was sited to face a palace the Prince never got round to building, which is part of why it is so theatrically dressed for a row of houses. It is now Grade I listed.
An actor-manager's household
She was the middle of three daughters — Angela, Daphne and Jeanne — born to the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier and the actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, the cartoonist and novelist whose Trilby had been one of the publishing sensations of the 1890s. In this family, invention was a trade rather than a pastime.
The connections ran further still. Daphne was a first cousin of the Llewelyn Davies boys, the children J. M. Barrie drew on for Peter Pan, and her father appeared in the first production of the play in 1904, taking both George Darling and Captain Hook — a doubling that became a lasting stage tradition. A child growing up in that household heard about imaginary worlds as ordinary shop talk.
The nursery and the daily walk
Accounts of her early years, including her own memoir Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, published in 1977 and issued in the United States as Myself When Young, dwell less on the grand reception rooms than on the nursery at the top of the house and on the routine of being taken outside. Regent's Park was effectively the garden: across the Outer Circle from the front door lay the lake, the Broad Walk and, at the northern end, the Zoological Society's gardens. Biographical accounts describe outings into the park almost every day with a succession of nannies through her earliest childhood.
It would be too neat to say the park made the novelist. What can fairly be said is that her first landscape was a designed one: a composition of stucco, planting and water, built barely a century before she was born and made to look older and more permanent than it was.
North to Cannon Hall
In 1916 Gerald du Maurier bought Cannon Hall in Hampstead, a substantial red-brick house dating from around 1720, and it was there that Daphne spent the rest of her childhood. The move traded Nash's parkside formality for the older, more irregular fabric of a hilltop village, with summers increasingly spent at the family's house at Fowey in Cornwall.
What the London years left behind
Du Maurier is remembered as a Cornish writer, and reasonably so: Cornwall supplied the settings for Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek and My Cousin Rachel, while her short story The Birds became a Hitchcock film. But the novelist who could make a house behave like a character — brooding, watchful, more alive than the people in it — began her life in one of the most consciously composed houses in London, in a terrace built as scenery for a park.