The Pool

by Daphne du Maurier

Genres: Short Stories

25 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was a painter.

She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.

She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.

Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.

While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.

In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.

In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.

Reviews

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The Pool' is a perfect, subtle coming of age story. The main character, a young girl is enjoying her summer holiday at their grandparents' country house which she loves because the surrounding lovely garden, the forest and the pool are her paradise. However, for the very first time she is attracted by the new, dark and vaguely menacing 'secret world' nearby. She is confused. Should she resist the tempation?

[Traveller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story gives a lyrical depiction of a highly imaginative young girl’s passage from childhood to womanhood. The magical world of childhood, where there are no rules and regulations, is poignantly sketched. There’s quite a lot going on here. At first, the girl’s immersion into the natural world is at the forefront. She is an introvert, always trying to escape the demands of her gregarious young brother. She secretly manages to escape to her own private world in the woods which though wild, is yet sanctified by ritual and an almost spiritual beauty.

The story has a lot of mystical and semi-religious undertones. The protagonist plays in her mind with religious concepts and rituals of varied origin - some Christian (Jesus on the cross, etc), some pagan (the sacrifice to the pool, etc), and she is aware of Buddha and (one deduces) at least some of the tenets of Buddhism, but these thoughts are all mish-mashed in a playful, childlike manner.

Du Maurier succeeds with a competent depiction of the troubled young mind of this intelligent and highly imaginative pre-pubescent girl, caught on the cusp between the wild abandon of childhood and the structured world of adults. The girl’s way of thinking is still child-like, yet she is starting to grapple with the existential questions that more mature minds struggle with. She is able to look at certain situations with the maturity of objectivity and compassion, and yet is still very child-like in some of her thought-processes. She seems to realize that Jesus and Buddha have aspects in common with one another and recognizes the vengeful aspect of Jehovah in her grandfather when he crushes a bug.

The pool is at first the symbol of the magical world of childhood, filled with endless possibilities, and unmarred by the routines and rules of adult civilization. As she runs to visit the pool at night in order to escape from her hum-drum reality into this fantasy world, the magical spell is broken upon the revelation that the girl is still suffering from the PTSD of losing her mother at the birth of her younger brother. When the reality of this loss intrudes, her beautiful safe imaginary world is shattered, and everything that seemed magical and enticing, now turns hostile. She feels betrayed by the fact that the memories of her loss intrudes even here, where she sought to escape it. She flees back to the safety of her known little cocoon – the house of her grandparents, (houses being an age-old symbol of emotional and physical security, of course).

After oppressive heat, comes the catharsis of a violent storm. For one last time, the girl tries to escape back into the wildness of her childhood world, only to be expelled from it, forever, by the appearance of her first menses, and the now feminine symbolism of the pool becomes oppressive. The pool which is now to be rendered harmless and bound, filled and fenced off, is to be kept within the ‘safe’ confines of adult rules and regulations. Of course a pool of water is also a Freudian symbol of the subconscious, so does its fate in the story also symbolize the adult desire to divorce themselves from the subconscious, to tame it and try to subjugate it?

My main beef with the story is that it runs on a bit excessively in the middle, where the little domestic scenes at her grandparents’ home play out – these quickly become boring with repetition. The story would have been even better if it had a third of this kind of hum-drum filler culled from it. In spite of that, I’m still giving it 4 stars for the beautiful rendering of the wildness of the woods and the pool, and of the depiction of the mind of the child grappling to come to terms with the harsh realities of human existence.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

You need an umbrella to get through this because it rains similes and metaphors here so hard that often you wouldn't know already whether to follow the plot or just ignore it and just enjoy the poetry of Daphne du Maurier's language. If you choose to follow the plot then there are the mundane: the grandparents, their house, the teenage girl, her younger brother who likes to play, the garden, the pool. But if you go beyond the plot, turn your face up to meet the rain, then maybe you'll feel the impermanence of things, soundless music, the great silence, listening to the earth, the intensity of peace, the submerging of soul, prayer, the black stillness, discarded treasures and death.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good !!!!!!

[Shuggy L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story describes the beginning of a summer holiday for two school children who are visiting their grandparents' house in Par, Cornwall in the late 1950s.

Roger, the younger brother, immediately wants to be active, playing cricket, visiting an orchard or building a summer house. He likes talking in bed with his sister at night before falling asleep. He too resents the intrusion of the adult world of responsibility into his world of play but he is well behaved and does what he is told

Deborah, the older sister, is dreamy and wants to spend some time by herself and away from other people, even her brother; the thought filled focus of her mind, creates some conflict between herself and others.

Deborah is thinking about her surroundings, personifying the garden by imagining that it is waiting for her throughout the school year and other holidays: "the fact that the garden waited for them was a miracle known only to herself".

Like Virginia Woolf, Deborah's focus is on her stream of consciousness. Deborah's life away from the grandparents' garden is evoked in small snippets of information as an aside to the inner workings of her mind.

Deborah thinks about the garden in the "middle of French" with a longing "ache": ..."that it should be the hard grain of a desk under her hands, and not the grass she bent to touch now".

The children spend the Easter holidays with their aunts in Hunstanton, Norfork and Christmas with their dad in London "riding on buses and going to theatres".

She reflects her own feelings of how she felt when she was away from the garden, onto the garden. She imagines the garden having difficulty waiting for her and Roger:

"a year was so long ... how did the garden endure the snows clamping down upon it, or the chilly rain that fell in November?".

She also projects her feelings about her grandparents onto the garden and thinks of the garden as gently mocking her grandfather "pacing up and down the terrace in front of the windows" and her also grandmother "calling to Patch".

Eventually, Deborah visits a pond on the property where she able to think and be alone for a while. Here she is able to collect herself and adjust t0 the demands of the world and the requirements placed on her by other people.




A touching coming of age story.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here we have another Short Story by Daphne du Maurier. Two siblings are staying with their grandparents out in the countryside and enjoy playing outside. Whilst playing in the woods the young girl finds a secret world through a pond.

It was quite sweet in parts, occasionally reminiscent of The Secret Garden

[Justine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out as intriguing short story, with an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. Maybe that was the point. If so, it's a bleak take on the coming of age of a young girl who discovers a portal to another realm through the pool in her grandparents' backyard.

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing coming-of-age story, fused with religious speculation and the secret rituals of childhood. All written with Du Maurier's typical mastery and skill.

[Stella · Rating 4 out of 5]

ending was kinda unfulfilling, but deborah was very relatable in the way she connects with nature

[Evie Pereira-Mendoza · Rating 3 out of 5]

even girls in the 50s have weird first period stories. definitely the least strange of the short stories we had to read for this week (the pool, tame cat, and terror), but still a bit odd.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short story by Daphne du Maurier that did not connect with me at all.
The story is about a young girl named Deborah who finds herself drawn to a mysterious pool in the garden of her grandparents home. At night she wanders outside and enters a magical world or is it just a dream.
As always Daphne du Mauriers stories are very well written but as I previously stated the story failed to connect with me and I found myself easily distracted from it and had little interest to how the story would finish.