It's Too Late Now

by A. A. Milne

  I must record again that Ken, once more outdistanced through no fault of his own, or merit of mine, remained sweet-tempered about it. All the rivalry between us came from me. As soon as we became competitors on anything like equal terms, I had to prove myself the better man of the two. Being given the chance at cricket, I took it. And when, in Junior House matches that year, I had gone in first and got out for twenty or thirty, and Ken, going in later, was approaching the twenties, I could bear to watch him no longer, but had to look away until he got out. He never knew this, he would never have suspected it of me, he could never show any such ungenerous feeling himself. He was, after all, ‘the better man of the two.’ I like to think now that one Wednesday afternoon in his last term, when I was playing in Big Game, and telling myself that this was something which Ken had never done, he, in a Form Match, was doing something which Alan had never done, nor was ever to do; he was making a century. Doubtless the opposition was not strong, but it was a hundred, and the only hundred the Milnes of Kilburn have ever made.

  3

  Ken, however, remained the writer of the family.

  It is time that something was said about this business of writing. When I read other people’s autobiographies, and learn that Miss Sylvia Marchpane has been scribbling since she was six, and had written half-a-dozen novels, mostly in exercise-books, before she left school: when I read that the thoughts of Mr John Merryweather were turned to the stage by the present of a toy-theatre on his fourth birthday, and that before he left school, he had written half-a-dozen plays, mostly on the backs of envelopes: then it is brought home to me, that whatever other sort of writer I am, I am not (alas!) a ‘born writer.’ It is comforting, but not conclusively so, to remember that probably Shakespeare wasn’t either.

  We did no English at Westminster. In my seven years there I never wrote so much as one essay for authority. There was a Literary Society in College to which I was admitted in my sixth year. It read the plays of Shakespeare on Friday evenings in the company of the Master of the Queen’s Scholars and his wife. Owing to the presence of Mrs Raynor (who must have known much more about these things than we did) it was the custom of each reader to omit the more outspoken passages and elide the grosser words, a practice somewhat embarrassing, since the house-master was following the text in his book to see what one did elide. Well, not following it for that purpose, of course, but sufficiently up with the field to wonder, at some surprising hiatus, whether Shakespeare could possibly have meant what Jenkins apparently thought he did. Othello offered the most difficult problem to our chivalry, and I doubt if we ever quite deceived Mrs Raynor as to what was going on.

  My other official contact with the Dramatic world was through the medium of the Latin Play. It is unlikely that a performance by schoolboys of Terence’s Adelphi or Andria, from whichever side of the footlights seen, is going to give anybody a passion for the theatre. It certainly aroused no passion in me. I have described my first appearance on the stage. My second was in the topical Epilogue to the Latin Play. One of the affairs current in 1893 was an attempt by some French explorer to teach equatorial monkeys the French language. Ken and I represented two backward equatorial monkeys who had got no further on than small French noises. This could not properly be called a speaking part. The following year I came on (without Ken) as a paper-boy, calling ‘Omnes victores.’ This part demanded the smallness of stature which I could provide rather than the histrionic ability which I could not. I then left the stage until 1899 when I got my first, and only, part in the Play itself. I was Geta, a slave. I rushed down to the footlights, pushing past the old gentleman who was to astonish me so much by his presence when I had finished soliloquizing, and burst out with the unforgettable words (for I am still unable to forget them): ‘Nunc illud est, cum si omnia omnes sua consilia conferant, atque huic malo salutem quaerant, auxili nil adferant.’ I went on in this way for quite a time, pacing up and down in front of the footlights as if hungry and keeping my eyes firmly on the audience so as to build up to my start of surprise when it was time to see the old gentleman behind me; and the old gentleman, in my intervals for breath, called attention to his hiding-place in the middle of the stage by interpolating ‘Hem!’ and ‘Heus!’ until the great moment arrived. At last, with the Latin equivalent for ‘Well, I suppose I had better be getting back,’ I turned round. . . . It was what is so well called a ‘dramatic’ moment. ‘Henry!’ I cried, ‘you here?’ —no, this was Latin, his name may have been Sosia or Micio, and I was only a slave at that—I probably said, ‘Hem, perii!’ meaning roughly ‘We’re sunk!’—it is odd that I remember my entrance speech so clearly, but forget the details of the big scene; is this, I wonder, a common experience among actors? Well, there we were. While I stood by exhibiting horror, Micio (or Demea) indicated to the audience that, having accidentally overheard my private thoughts, he now had enough new material to keep the next act going. He walked off with dignity, and I followed him. I don’t think I came on again. There was no reason why I should. I had made the play.

  There was nothing in all this to arouse one’s dramatic instincts; nor were our contacts with the English theatre numerous enough to give its glamour a firm setting. The first play I saw was an Adelphi melodrama (William Terriss and Jessie Milward) called Boys Together. Our very own Dr Morton was putting up with us for the week-end, and nobody could do it so understandingly as he. His habit was to tell us the times of meals, to call attention to the bathroom, and then to leave us entirely to ourselves in a room at the top of the house well provided with books. On this occasion it was suggested that we should also join the family in a visit to the theatre. We had to confess that, at the ages of sixteen and fifteen, we had never been to a theatre. Dr Morton was surprised and doubtful. Would our father mind—it was quite a nice play? We were sure he wouldn’t mind. But writing home on Sunday to break the news, Ken made it perfectly clear that though we had been extremely excited by this play it had left no permanent mark upon our characters. We were unsullied.

  I went to the theatre three more times while I was at Westminster. I saw Florodora, The Greek Slave (with Marie Tempest and Letty Lind) and The Rose of Persia. To the first two I was taken; to the last I went with another boy on a wet Wednesday afternoon. To avoid misunderstanding we had asked for leave to go to an illustrated lecture at the Polytechnic Institute. When we got back from The Rose of Persia, our housemaster asked us what the lecture was about. We told him that it was called (and it seems to me a very good title for a lecture) ‘Our Navy To-day and Every Day.’ Actually it was just called ‘Our Navy,’ but the advertisement in the papers had misled us.

  4

  No compulsory prose was extracted from us at school, but an annual excursion into verse was demanded from Under Elections. On the last Saturday of the summer-term there was an entertainment (for Upper Elections) known as ‘D-clams’—I write it thus to ensure the correct pronunciation. This took the form of a recitation of declamatory verse on the leaving Seniors by those who had suffered under them for the last year. Lolling repletely at tables covered with the fruits (and fruit-drinks) of the season, the Upper Elections take their ease on the floor of Seniors’ Room; high up beneath the ceiling on a specially-constructed rostrum (table on table, chair on chair) stands a trembling Junior. In his left hand is a large candle, or tolley, in his right a packet of verses. There is no other light in the room. Ready to the hand of every boy beneath him is a plate of small, hard ginger-nuts. To a Junior with a genius for invective this would seem to offer the opportunity for revenge for which he had been waiting all the year; but actually it turned out to be a better opportunity for the Senior with a genius for throwing ginger-nuts. After one’s first experience of declamming a monitor more popular with his contemporaries than one had supposed, one realised that authorship had no further perils to offer. Professional critics might throw mud, amateur critics might throw eggs, but nobody would throw ginger-nuts again. It may have been this which decided
me, sub-consciously, to be a dramatist.

  D-clams have now been abolished. Somebody fell off the rostrum (and I wouldn’t blame him), or had his eye put out with a ginger-nut, or set light to himself with the candle–I did hear, but have forgotten. Mothers will breathe more freely, and fathers will say that the world is getting soft. But I doubt if satiric poetry has suffered. The standards were the standards of scholarship Latin verse. Scansion was almost enough.

  5

  We wrote home every Sunday. As most of our experiences during the week had been shared, we made some sort of division of the available material, Ken, as it might be, taking the weather and I the Saturday match; but as we grew older, we became more literary, sacrificing facts to the exploitation of our personalities and enlivening our letters with such scraps of quotable poetry as had lately come our way. I warned Father one Sunday, but in what connection I cannot remember, that there were more things in Heaven and earth than were dreamed of in his philosophy; and he cannot have been more surprised than Mother was next Sunday, when I assured her that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. If Ken was doing this too, he was doing it more allusively and more gracefully. Gradually it became accepted in the family that his letters, if not ‘good enough for Punch,’ were good enough for a boy very much older, and that in the words of Father, ‘he might make something of it one day.’ Not for a moment did Father suppose that any son of his could make a living by it; as he said to me when the appropriate moment arrived, ‘We can’t all be Dickenses, you know;’ but it was within his vision that a Ken, securely settled in the Civil Service or some­where, ‘might pick up an occasional guinea’ with an essay in The Spectator to which casual reference could be made when showing a ‘parent’ the gymnasium.

  Meanwhile it was time to find a real profession for Ken. It was now clear to Father that he would get no sort of scholarship at the University, and, more important, it was clear to Ken that in his last year at Westminster he would not be a monitor. This was too great a strain even on his humility. He would be the senior boy in College, in his seventh year, and still without authority. It was time he left.

  But what to do? He had no ideas, no ambitions, and little more than average public-school qualifications. Barry was articled to a solicitor, and would be admitted next year. It took four years to become a solicitor; four long years in which you need not wonder what you were going to be, four long years before you had need to prove yourself. We were neither of us go-getters; we had discovered a talent for idleness; but I had a sort of jealous obstinacy, heritage of that childish ‘I can do it’ spirit, which he lacked. To him the four years’ respite was attractive. Since he didn’t mind what he was, he would be—what was it?—a solicitor.

  6

  Father and I took what he thought was going to be a pleasure-cruise to Norway that summer. I was sixteen, and just beginning to fancy myself at cricket. I was also just beginning to grow up. I was, in fact, unbearable. There was a very attractive young woman on board who had all the men round her. I was on the outskirts of the crowd, hoping for, and sometimes getting, a smile. In my pink-and-white tie (second XI) and green and blue cap (College colours) I could probably have got a smile from anybody. When she sat swinging her legs on the deck rail, gaily holding her own against all our compliments, mine wordless but by far the most sincere; when at moments she caught my eye, or her eye caught my tie, and she gave me that warm, sudden smile which meant that we two had some secret which the others did not share; then I felt that I could have died for her, or thrown my cap overboard (though I was more doubtful about this) if she had so desired it. Was I in love for the first time? I don’t know. The sea moderated, her ladyship emerged from the cabin in which, solitary, she had been praying for death, and her ladyship’s maid, that adorable creature, returned demurely to her duties. It was a great shock to all the men. They went about pretending that they had always known it, but had wanted the little thing to have a good time while she could. My distant adoration left me less compromised. Without any embarrassment I transferred my affections to the charms of deck-cricket and a girl called Ellen. Ellen was my own age. I remember her surname, but shall not mention it here in case she is no longer my own age; I also remember her face. Do you suppose she remembers my name or my face? Of course not. O faithless Ellen! I haven’t given you a thought since 1898, but it seems that I can never quite forget.

  At the end of the holidays I returned to Westminster alone. I discovered now what delightful letters Ken wrote, but they did not make up for his absence. Without him there seemed to be nothing to do but work and play games. I did both. I was never within a hundred miles of being the hero of a school-story (or even of a single schoolboy), but I got as near to it at the end of the next summer-term as I could ever hope to get. I had just been given my ‘pinks.’ In the Town-boy match on the last day but one of term, I dislocated my thumb when fielding. Batting as near one-handed as might be, I then made top score of 39; and on the next day, left hand picturesquely in a sling, I collected with the other hand all the mathematical prizes which were available, and was installed as head monitor (under the Captain) for the coming year. I felt grand.

  I felt less grand next term when I went in for an open scholarship at Trinity (Cambridge) and was completely unsuccessful. Not that it mattered very much. Westminster gave three scholarships to Christ Church, Oxford, every year, and I could be certain of one of these. The important thing now was to get my colours at football.

  7

  It was in the Christmas holidays of 1899 that I discovered the itch for writing which has never quite left me. I know how I discovered it, but I know not how it came to be there. The discovery was odd and accidental. It may not deserve, but it shall certainly be given, a new chapter.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  In September 1899, the Boer War just about to begin, an Anglo-Indian brought his wife and family to Westgate. The two boys (twelve and eight) were sent to Streete Court, the two girls (fourteen and ten) to a neighbouring school; and it was arranged that Father should have the care of all the four children in holiday time. The parents then returned to India.

  I knew nothing of this until the moment of my arrival home in December, when Mother happened to mention Geta—with a hard ‘g.’ I explained, being still full of it, that it was pronounced Geta, with a soft ‘g;’ nunc illud est, cum si omnia omnes—Mother interrupted me to say that she was talking about Ghita, the elder girl; the younger one was Irma. A few minutes later we were introduced. They were nice children. Ken, articled to a Weymouth solicitor, came home for Christmas, and a good time was had by all. One day, after he had gone back to work, I came upon Ghita in the throes of composition. I supposed that she was doing some sort of holiday-task, probably in German, but it appeared that she was writing a letter to Ken. ‘It isn’t as difficult as that,’ I said. ‘What can’t you spell?’ She wiped some of the ink off her fingers, put her tongue back, and said that it was poetry. ‘And oh, do help me, Alan, I can’t get it right, it just won’t rhyme when I want it to.’

  I looked at what she had written. The theme, one of cheerful insult, was good, but the execution was poor. I took some of the bones out, moderated the scansion and arranged for a few rhymes. The result was copied out by Ghita and sent to Ken. In a few days he replied to her with a set of verses which surprised me: verses in the real Calverley tradition. I had had no idea that he could do it. At the end of them he had written: ‘All my own unaided work–and I bet yours wasn’t.’

  So I wrote back to him and confessed that Ghita had called me into collaboration. And just to show what I could do on my own, I enclosed a set of disparaging odes to all the four children.

  Of these, my first attempt at light verse, I remember only four lines. They were part of the ode to Irma, a placidly grubby child whom we all loved.

  They say the Dutch prefer their ladies short

  And fat as fa
t can be, but not as clean as

  Is usual here. Out there, dear, you’d be thought

  A Venus.

  Quite in the tradition, save for the Cockney rhyme. But in those early days I was as little shocked by the Cockney rhyme as our modern poets seem to be to-day.

  Ken wrote back, in surprise equal to mine, ‘Good Heavens, you can do it too;’ to which came the obvious corollary, ‘Let’s bofe.’ So for two years we wrote light verse together.

  2

  Writing light verse in collaboration is easier than one would think. I don’t mean by ‘easy’ what our fellow Westminster, Cowper, meant when he boasted of the ease with which he wrote John Gilpin. To Cowper, who knew nothing about it, light verse was merely verse which was not serious, and which demanded, therefore, no application. What I mean is that light verse offers more scope for collaboration than at first thought seems possible. For a set of light verses, like a scene of stage dialogue, is never finished. One can go on and on and on, searching for the better word, the more natural phrase. There comes a time when one is in danger of losing all sense of values, and then one’s collaborator steps in suddenly with what one sees at once is the perfect word.

  Naturally I cannot remember now the details of all our collaborations, nor say which of any poem was Ken’s inspiration or my last word, but I can give two instances of the way in which we supplemented each other. Even if they have no technical interest for the reader, they will show the sort of thing which we were writing.

  The first is from a contribution to the Limpsfield uncle’s school magazine. It began like this: