by A. A. Milne
‘Henry,’ says my father, ‘you’re late again.’
‘Yes, sir. Please, sir, it wasn’t my fault—’
‘No excuses, Henry. You must put your chair away and stand.’
So Henry eats his first course standing.
‘All right, Henry, you may take your chair now.’
‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Please, sir, Matron sent me upstairs for her spectacles just as I was coming in.’
Awed silence. ‘Sucks for J. V., the boys are thinking, he’ll have to apologize.’ The younger assistant-masters look up anxiously. Do schoolmasters ever apologize? Isn’t it bad for discipline?
‘Then in that case,’ says my father, wishing to get it quite clear, ‘it wasn’t your fault you were late?’
‘Please, sir, no, sir.’
‘Oh!’ (Everybody is waiting.) ‘Oh, well, then, you’d better take two chairs.’
And everybody laughs and is happy.
6
At the time of my grandfather’s death, J. V. had passed the Intermediate, and was working for his Final B.A. He was also looking for a job. Two were suggested to him by the agents; assistant-master in a school at Wellington, Shropshire, and tutor in a private family at Tottenham. He would have preferred the former, for he was now beginning to feel at home in the rough-and-tumble of a school, but, for safety, he applied for both. The Tottenham reply came first, inviting him to lunch with the family for the purpose of mutual inspection. Unwilling to lose his chance of the Wellington post, he sent a reply-paid telegram to the headmaster, as from the Tottenham address, to say, ‘What about it?’—or more politely, ‘Has my application been successful?’ The interview at Tottenham was satisfactory. He liked the family, and the family liked him. Over the luncheon-table he was offered the tutorship. Should he take it or was there still a chance of hearing favourably from Wellington? He put off an answer as long as he could; talked feverishly of the weather and Mr Gladstone’s Government; upset his glass of claret, and spent another five minutes apologizing. And then, in the last moment of delay, in came the maid with a telegram. His application to the school had been accepted.
A trivial business anyway. The salary in either post was only £100 a year, and the tutor might have become a schoolmaster again, or the schoolmaster a tutor. But he never thought it was trivial. To him it was the decisive moment of his life.
And, you might almost say, of mine.
For at Wellington, Shropshire, he met my mother.
Chapter Two
I
My mother came, as novelists say, of ‘good yeoman stock,’ or, more simply, was a farmer’s daughter. At least, I think she was, but I am as uncertain of the farmer as of the stone-mason. When my father met her, she was keeping a School for Young Ladies. This piece of family history, which we picked up as children, never seemed authentic; for it was part of our creed that Papa knew everything, and Mama knew nothing. She didn’t even know that mensâ meant ‘by, with or from a table’ until we told her, and our daily triumphs over Euclid aroused an enthusiasm unrelated, only too obviously, to the proportions of the victory. This, which we were learning, was Knowledge; this was what was taught in schools. Mama teaching! How funny.
But I see now that it is what clever women teach in girls’ schools which is funny. My mother’s girls were taught to be good wives to hard-working men, and there was never anybody so good as she at that. She could do everything better than the people whom so reluctantly she came to employ: cook better than the cook, dust better than the parlourmaid, make a bed better than the housemaid, mend better than the sewing-maid, wash clothes better than the laundress, bandage better than the matron. She was simple, she was unemotional, she was common-sensible. Nothing upset her. At one of those inevitable end-of-term entertainments Father would be twittering like a sparrow with nervousness, wondering if the claret-cup would go round, and whether he would remember Tommy Tucker’s parents, whom last term he had mistaken for Peter Piper’s; and Mother would be completely calm, knowing that if there weren’t enough claret-cup, it was all they were going to get, and that if she mistook Mrs Tucker for Mrs Piper, as she always did, it wouldn’t matter, as she would probably call them both Mrs Hogbin. She was a great believer in the name of Hogbin, and often offered it to Father as a solution of the difficulties which a bad memory brought him. Somewhere, at some time, I suppose, she had met a Mr Hogbin, and was always expecting to hear of him again; or of some of his family; or of the village, Hogbin, from which he derived. We nearly traced him once: ‘a man with a funny moustache who used to come about the gas.’ But on going into the matter we discovered that this man’s name was Pedder, and he was clean-shaven. ‘Well, I know I used to call him Mr Hogbin,’ insisted Mother, to show that there was a good deal to be said for her side of the argument. There always was. Once, at dinner, when Father was telling us proudly, as if partly responsible for it, that Light travelled at the rate of 150,000 miles a second, our awed silence was broken by Mother’s simple announcement from the other end of the dinner-table: ‘I don’t believe it.’ What the answer to that is I don’t know, nor did Father ever discover it.
They had musical evenings at Mother’s school, and that nice, shy Mr Milne, the new master at the boys’ school, was a great addition to the parties, for not only was he religious-minded (which meant something in those days) but he played accompaniments on the flute. And when he had got over his shyness, he talked a lot of nonsense which made the ladies laugh, and you felt somehow that you could trust him. And he was brave. Because one Sunday the Headmaster had preached a sermon to the boys, in which he told them that they were all going straight to Hell, or anyhow the boys who hadn’t attended in class last week, and he described Hell in words which would terrify anybody who knew that he was going there. And that nice little Mr Milne got permission to preach to the boys on the next Sunday, and he told them that there was no such place as Hell, and no such thing as Everlasting Fire, but that they would all be very silly if they didn’t work now, when work was made easy for them, because it would mean that they would have to work much harder later on, when it wouldn’t be so interesting. And then he had offered the Headmaster his resignation, but the Headmaster wouldn’t hear of it, and said that he was sorry, and that perhaps there wasn’t Everlasting Fire after all. So that nice Mr Milne would be there next Thursday as usual, with his flute.
He was there, and when he said good-night to Mother, he left a note in her hand, asking her to marry him. For he was still very shy.
It was only after my mother’s death that I knew she had said ‘No,’ and had gone on saying ‘No’ for more than a year to Father’s insistent wooing. How hard to realize that one’s father, that elderly Olympian, may also have endured the agonies and ecstasies of love, as we have endured them! How hard to believe that one’s mother, one’s own mother, could have inspired those agonies and ecstasies and have failed to respond to them, because she too had suffered them on another man’s behalf! Father and Mother—who knew nothing of these things!
At the last she accepted him; at the last, perhaps, she fell in love with him. Did she? I don’t know. I don’t think I ever really knew her. When I was a child I neither experienced, nor felt the need of, that mother-love of which one needs so much, and over which I am supposed (so mistakenly) to have sentimentalized. I learnt no prayers at my mother’s knee, as so many children seem to have done. It was Papa who told us about God, and we who told the governess. No doubt Mama felt that Papa was so good at it that she oughtn’t to interfere. She may also have felt that Papa was so good at playing with a child, and amusing a child, and making a child love him, that she oughtn’t to interfere there either. Certainly as a child I gave my heart to my father. If he were there, all was well; if he were away, I asked Mama when he was coming back. Later on, when I formed the opinion that, even if Father knew everything, he knew most of it wrong, it was with my mother that I was happier. She didn’t argue; sh
e didn’t drive the moral home. She was simple; she was wise; she was affectionate. She was restfully aloof.
2
They married, and came to Henley House. This had been some sort of unsuccessful school before, and Father, being unexpectedly lent a hundred pounds by his unofficial godfather, Mr Vine, bought the ‘goodwill’; which amounted to a twenty or thirty inky desks, and half-a-dozen inky boys whose parents had been too lazy to find a better school for them.
No echoes of that struggle to live came down to us. Whenever I took Papa by the hand and showed him the way to the Bank, kindly men would count out for him as many golden sovereigns as he wanted, shovelling them out from an inexhaustible store. Silver they didn’t even bother to count, but gave to him in bags. And if my own income was no more than a penny a week, this was only because too many sweets were bad for children, or because Ken and I would have all the money we wanted when we grew up, if we worked at our lessons now. Meanwhile we had all the food we wanted, and all the fun we wanted, and never knew that we were poor.
We must have been very poor. Mama’s sewing-machine never stopped working. She made her own clothes, she made our clothes, she would have made Papa’s clothes if she hadn’t been so busy making the curtains. Not only did she save money by making things, but she saved it by preventing Father from spending. It was not until her death that I realized what he was like when left to himself. He never could resist a good advertisement. The discovery that he could buy a new theodolite (in leather-finished case) which definitely superseded the old theodolite which he had never bought, convinced him that a theodolite was what of all things he needed. He only started smoking because a cigar-merchant wrote to him what seemed like a personal, and was certainly a very friendly, appeal to buy a sample cabinet of twenty different cigars between the lengths of three inches and thirteen. The price was nominal, owing to the fact that it was Father’s future custom on which they were relying, and they did not rely in vain. In her heyday Mother would never have allowed this, but, even then, there would have been times when she had her eye off him; and the arrival of a first-born to Mrs Milne may have coincided with the arrival of a gymnasium to her husband. It is difficult to say which would be the more surprised to find that ‘that was what they looked like.’
With this childlike belief in the sincerity of advertisement and the value of a bargain, with a generosity as ample as his father’s, he combined the strictest integrity in money matters, and an adequate respect for the laws of addition and subtraction. He kept elaborate accounts, in a blue black ink such as was familiar to us on our fingers, and a red ink to which we might not hope to attain until we had grown up. I felt then, I still feel now, that I could write more beautifully in red ink; and I still wonder why there are so many things in the world (like red ink and toast) which are automatically denied to children. Luckily as a child one does not wonder for long. Papa says it, and he has the backing of God or Dr Morton, and in a moment we shall be wondering about something else. So Papa kept his accounts, and pursued every penny into its right column, and at the end of the year we were all still alive and he owed no man anything. And next year he would be able to afford a holiday or a new suit or perhaps even another Gymnasium. For the school was growing. And it was his own.
He was the best man I have ever known: by which I mean the most truly good, the most completely to be trusted, the most incap-able of wrong. He differed from our conception of God only because he was shy, which one imagined God not to be, and was funny, which one knew God was not. His shyness became apparent to us when we went out walking together and met an acquaintance. As soon as the acquaintance was sighted Papa would cut short his conversation, or ours, and prepare for the ordeal. The funny story, the explanation of the Force of Gravity, our answer to a catch-question had to wait. . . . He let my hand go, and put his own up to his hat. ‘Good morning, Mr Roberts, good morning to you, good morning.’ Mr Roberts had returned the greeting and passed, but Papa’s greeting went on. His hand still went up and down to his hat in nervous movements, he still muttered ‘Good morning to you.’ We waited. We turned the corner. ‘Well, now then,’ he would say, ‘what’s the answer? A goose weighs seven pounds and half its own weight. How much does it weigh? Now think.’ Coming out of church on Christmas morning must have been agony to him. A merry Christmas to you—thank you, thank you—the same to you: there was so much to say, so much to murmur to oneself afterwards, so much to make one doubt if one had said it in the right order. Or was it no agony to him, with whom it was now an unconscious trick, but only an embarrassment for his family? Poor Papa. It seemed such a funny way to be shy. We were tongue-tied and awkward before strangers, but we looked up brightly at people we knew, and waited to have our heads patted.
We ‘sat under’ Dr Monro Gibson at the Presbyterian Church in Marlborough Road. We were seated in the extreme right-hand corner, farthest from the door, and as Dr Gibson gave a hitch to his gown in readiness for the sermon, the three of us clambered out of our pew and toddled sturdily for home, the envy and admir-ation of all. ‘The darlings,’ thought all the mothers. ‘Lucky little devils,’ thought the fathers. So much feeling did we arouse that Papa was asked to change his pew for one next to the door. Even so envious heads came round for a moment. In spite of this, Papa rose to be an elder, and was recurrently to be seen (but not by us) standing at the door with the plate, as the rest of the congregation came out. Luckily he was not required to say ‘Good morning’ or ‘Thank you’ to them. He also sang what he called ‘seconds’ in a resolute way which linked him up unofficially with the mixed choir in the gallery. It seemed to me then rather an easy way of singing, Papa, particularly in the anthems, allowing himself a certain independence both of words and music. ‘The lions do lack and suffer hunger’ dropped melodiously to us from above, and Papa, in a deep voice reminiscent of a lion, lacked and suffered hunger on two notes for the rest of the anthem. He did it with such conviction that one could not doubt the need of it. Deep down inside him there was a great musical artist struggling to be free: one to whom the flute was not enough. After Mother’s death, he used to write to the B.B.C. and tell it where it went wrong–the privilege throughout the ages of the unfreed artist.
3
Papa looked proudly at his hands, on which there was no axle-grease, and told himself that he was a B.A. (Lond.) and an elder of the Church. Ken looked at him, and said a little scornfully: ‘When I’m a man, I’m going to have M.A. after my name, and put it on a brass plate for everyone to see.’ On another occasion Ken told him that he wasn’t solemn enough for a schoolmaster. ‘Oh, but I’m very solemn,’ said Father, making the appropriate face; ‘in fact, I’m Solomon.’ Ken shook his head sadly. ‘Solomon,’ he said, ‘was a wise man.’ Many years later I used to get letters at the Punch Office, beginning: ‘My little boy, aged six, said rather an amusing thing the other day, which I have been advised to send to you’; indeed, I still get letters like that, being supposed to have some special interest in the quaint things which children say. Possibly these two remarks of Ken’s, generally regarded as his masterpieces, were offered to the public; possibly not; but they were in private circulation for years. My own contributions at this tender age to the Family Bible were not so good, were, in fact, not funny at all; but they seem to have made a great impression on my father, and he never tired (as we did) of recapturing them. ‘It bored me hellishly to write the Emigrant,’ said Stevenson; ‘well, it’s going to bore others to read it: that’s only fair.’ And I think it is only fair, after listening to it so often, that I should now tell the world exactly what I said in ’84.
Barry was getting on for five, and it was time he learned to read. Ken was three, and inclined to be naughty. If the nurse-governess were teaching Barry to read, what would Ken be doing? Something bad. Hadn’t Ken better learn to read too–it would keep him out of mischief? So it came about that large sight-reading sheets were hung over a blackboard in the nursery, and Barry and Ken and
the governess got to work; while Baby Alan, good as gold, sucked his thumb in the corner and played with his toys. And one day Papa came up to the nursery to see how the young readers were getting on. Just as they were going to begin, Baby Alan, playing with a piece of string in his corner, said to anyone who was listening, ‘I can do it.’ Papa told him not to talk now, there was a darling, because they were busy. Alan tied another knot in his string, and said, ‘I can do it.’ Papa said, ‘S’sh, darling,’ picked up the pointer, pointed to a word on the sheet, and said, ‘What’s that?’ Barry and Ken frowned at it. It was on the tip of their tongues. Bat or Mat? And from Alan’s corner a complacent little voice said, ‘Cat.’ As it was.
I can see that that has the makings of a good story, when told of the right person. ‘I can do it’—said by Abraham Lincoln at the age of two. Nowadays, when I refuse to do any of the intolerable things which for some reason are expected of writers: lecture, open bazaars, make speeches, go to Hollywood: I am told, a little unfairly, I think, that I am spoilt. ‘You never do anything you don’t want to do.’ Which is true. But alas! It would not be true to say that I can do the things which I do want to do. My first recorded remark should have been ‘I won’t do it’ not ‘I can do it.’
