Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Not that I ever identified with Pooh, or anyone else in particular (perhaps Piglet, but you can’t always bring yourself to identify with a very timid creature when you are a bit timid yourself). So there, I’ve already blown my first hypothesis: that I needed to identify with the main character. This was a need that never surfaced in the Pooh books. I dropped in and out of their heads in turn and I loved them all with a passion, this improbable collection of stuffed animals, real animals and a real boy, all walking and talking and living in this perfect wonderland, this slice of English countryside that I as an urban child was always yearning to get to. Just the words ‘copse’, ‘spinney’ and ‘meadow’ sent a shiver through me.

  “Just the words ‘copse’, ‘spinney’ and ‘meadow’ sent a shiver through me.”

  I don’t think any scene in a book, however brilliant and witty, has ever made me laugh more than the capture of the Heffalump. And all the animals made me laugh, because they were all a little bit sillier than I was. The Bear of Very Little Brain was supposed to be the dumbest – actually he was quite resourceful, just humble about what he didn’t know – but they were all dumb, even Owl, who was supposed to be wise.

  Especially Owl. I laughed my head off at his long words and his terrible spelling. With all the superiority of a child who has just learned to read and write, I mocked his Happy Birthday greeting, which as I remember went HIPY PAPY BTHUTH THUTHDA THUTHDY. (Almost right: for the pedants among you, it was actually HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY.) There was nothing funnier in the universe – except the hunt for the Heffalump, which again mangled the English language, this time through Piglet’s sheer terror: ‘Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump!’

  This all feels slightly disturbing now, when I know not to laugh at people who are mentally deficient, or dyslexic, or uneducated, or traumatised, or overweight. But such scruples never clouded my feelings about Pooh and friends. I must have first encountered them, along with A. A. Milne’s books of verse, at a very young age; and when I was old enough to read, I returned to them again and again. Much later, I read Winnie-the-Pooh to my son, and we both enjoyed the story of Pooh floating under a big balloon, pretending to be a cloud so he could raid a beehive. The bees were not fooled.

  “Much later, I read Winnie-the-Pooh to my son, and we both enjoyed the story of Pooh floating under a big balloon, pretending to be a cloud so he could raid a beehive. The bees were not fooled.”

  The most intriguing character, if not the most lovable, was Eeyore. The donkey was the only person not satisfied with his existence and his station in life. He seemed to bear a grudge against somebody or something, but the whys and wherefores were never explained. It’s odd how I instantly recognised him as real – the gloom, the ostentatious martyrdom, the heavy sarcasm, the passive-aggressive resistance to well-meaning attempts to cheer him up. In retrospect he seems like an adult forced to live among children. Perhaps I recognised him because children see and note these flashes of resistance in even the kindest adult: this boredom, this refusal to be charmed or to believe that all is right with the world. My mother, loving as she was, had her Eeyore moments. So should Eeyore have been disturbing to me? He wasn’t. He was just as silly and funny as everyone else, in his own way. And of course I knew they were silly and funny because I’d been there myself. Every child knows what it’s like to be laughed at, even in the nicest and kindest way.

  “Christopher Robin was the undoubted authority figure. I wonder now why I invested such belief and awe in a little boy in a smock with a girly haircut.”

  There was, however, one exception. Christopher Robin was the undoubted authority figure. I wonder now why I invested such belief and awe in a little boy in a smock with a girly haircut. He didn’t seem like a boy. He was truly wise, benign, almost godlike. He said things ‘carelessly’, and the adjective gave him a magnificent swashbuckling aura. He lived in a tree, he remained unshackled by parents or guardians of any kind, he came and went as he pleased. He was very loving to Pooh. He was just that little bit bigger than the animals and he always knew what to do. But unlike an adult, he also liked to have fun and play games.

  “As it happens, I have met the real Christopher Robin, I have his signature to prove it, and I recall the meeting with a mix of pride and shame.”

  As it happens, I have met the real Christopher Robin, I have his signature to prove it, and I recall the meeting with a mix of pride and shame. He was polite, he did what was expected of him, but he really didn’t want to be there. Something was wrong, either with him or with the occasion.

  In 1979 I was working as a reporter for the Brighton Evening Argus and was assigned a story about saving Pooh Bridge. This was the bridge in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex where Christopher Robin and Pooh had often played Pooh sticks: you each dropped a stick in the water on one side of the bridge, then rushed to the other side, and the person whose stick came out first was the winner. The bridge had fallen into disrepair but had been rebuilt, and Christopher Milne, who had played Pooh sticks there when he was a boy, who now ran a bookshop and for the most part kept himself to himself, was due to reopen it.

  “I could see no trace of the swashbuckling boy in this tall, lean figure, with black-framed glasses and thinning white hair, and I felt sorry for him, but also a bit annoyed that he was being such an Eeyore.”

  I was quite excited at the thought of visiting Pooh Bridge, and disappointed to find it nothing like I had imagined. How very small it was! It spanned a river that was just a little stream, all enclosed in a tangle of trees and shrubs, so there was no view beyond the bridge itself. Still, this was real Pooh country at last, the mythical Hundred Aker Wood, or what was left of it. A big crowd of press people took photographs of Mr Milne dropping sticks into the water, which he seemed most unwilling to do. I could see no trace of the swashbuckling boy in this tall, lean figure, with black-framed glasses and thinning white hair, and I felt sorry for him, but also a bit annoyed that he was being such an Eeyore. Of course I dropped a stick myself. Later I got Mr Milne to sign my copy of The House at Pooh Corner, and he was very shy and uncomfortable, which in turn made me shy and uncomfortable, and there it is still, his upside-down signature on the last page, for in my nervousness I had handed the book to him back to front. I’m not sure he said a single word to me, and it was infectious: I found myself tonguetied, unable to tell him how much I had enjoyed his father’s books, let alone ask him for an interview.

  Today, tourists come to the bridge to play Pooh sticks, but they are told to bring their own sticks to avoid damaging the trees. And there are World Pooh Sticks Championships. It’s all part of the ever-bur-geoning Pooh story. Even when the books first came out, they were instant bestsellers; today, they have been translated into forty-six languages, including Latin, and together with the Disney franchises, they generate billions of dollars a year. In 2018, Ernest Shepard’s map of the Hundred Acre Wood, drawn for the endpapers of Winnie-the-Pooh, fetched the highest price ever for a book illustration sold at auction (£430,000). And Forbes magazine has rated Pooh as the most valuable fictional character ever. Not bad going for a battered old bear.

  Tichi, the teddy bear my grandfather gave me when I was four, sits on my bed. The yellow stuffed toy I have always loved is still nimble enough to stand on his head while doing the splits in the air. Tichi was one of my greatest comforts, travelling alongside me wherever I went. He was also best friends with Winnie the Pooh, who my book insisted was a ‘Bear of Little Brain’. But I knew both my furry companions were wiser and funnier than many of the adults I encountered.

  Tichi and Pooh allowed me to escape from a rather lonely childhood into a magical world of story and imagination. Maybe it’s no coincidence that a stuffed panda became a character in my latest novel. Like the sad closing chapter of A. A. Milne’s series, I know that ‘in that enchanted place … a little (girl) and (her) Bear will always be playing.’

  Leah Kaminsky

  For my re-reading, I was lucky or shrewd enoug
h to have kept both Methuen editions from my childhood: Winnie-The-Pooh bound in red, The House at Pooh Corner bound in blue, both attractively faded, with Ernest Shepard drawings of Christopher Robin and Pooh inscribed on the front covers. Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926 and my edition dated from 1957, when I was seven. The House at Pooh Corner was first published in 1928 and this edition dated from 1936, with a sticker inside from the Sydney bookshop Angus & Robertson, so either my mother or my father must have bought it before they came to England and married. In each book I have coloured in the first few illustrations, and then I must have run out of enthusiasm, or pencils.

  When I opened the first book, I was nervous I would find everything too twee. Dorothy Parker certainly thought so. In her guise as the book reviewer Constant Reader, she slaughtered The House at Pooh Corner with the infamous verdict: ‘And it is that word “hummy”, my darlings, that marks the first place… at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.’ I think it depends how you read, or how you imagine the voice telling the story. If it’s a twinkly, nudgy voice, you are lost, and the entire enterprise is a disaster. But if it’s a deadpan voice, you are saved. This was apparently how Mr Milne read out loud, writes his son: ‘He had a dry, monotonous voice. No ups and downs. If you had commented on this he would have said that the words spoke for themselves.’

  This is why, I think, I so dislike the Disney version of the Pooh stories, though in general I have no great objection to the great twentieth-century genius of popular culture. The voices and the animated figures are all cutesified and jollified: even Eeyore has a smile. I can’t be too much of a grouch, because Disney won the rights fair and square, the company donated money for further repairs to Pooh Bridge, and perhaps most importantly, countless children have been introduced to Pooh and his friends through Disney books, films, TV shows and computer games. I only wish they had found out about the original Pooh books first; indeed, some kids never come across the Milne-Shepard versions. But I digress… I was just opening the first book…

  I find I’ve remembered the stories pretty much as they are, and most of the details come back to me as I read. I hadn’t been quite aware that they were framed stories: each book has an Introduction, and in the first we learn where the name Winnie-the-Pooh comes from, though it’s quite a muddled explanation (there was a swan that Christopher Robin called Pooh, and then there was a real black bear he used to visit in the zoo, and its name was Winnie). Winnie-the-Pooh begins as a story Milne is telling to his son and to his toy bear, so Christopher Robin is ‘you’ in the first story, which is told as if it really happened – ‘do you remember?’ Milne asks his son, who says he does, but adds that Pooh likes to have the story told to him ‘because then it’s a real story and not just remembering.’ Father, son and bear all sound very close and cosy. It’s a clever sleight of hand, this make-believe about make-believe, and gradually it morphs into stories in their own right, with no sign of the adult telling them, and I feel like Pooh, who remembers a bit, but still needs to have the story told.

  Fortunately there is not the least inducement anywhere for me to fwow up. I’m in love with everyone all over again, I love the forest, and although I don’t laugh quite so much as the first time, and Pooh’s poetry doesn’t enchant me quite so much, and the Constant Use of Capitals irritates me, I still find the stories delightfully warm and funny. Eeyore’s gloom and Owl’s pomposity are even more elaborate and baroque than I remember. What strikes me most are the little failures and foibles of each creature, that make them human, if you can use such a term about stuffed toys and animals.

  “What strikes me most are the little failures and foibles of each creature, that make them human, if you can use such a term about stuffed toys and animals.”

  I hadn’t remembered the competition. Although they are sociable, affectionate and sometimes generous, and get along quite well, the characters are constantly jostling for position, to try and get into Christopher Robin’s good books. They are bad at listening to each other. Some of them are convinced they are far smarter than the others, and are always eager to show it. ‘They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that is blown into their heads by mistake’ (Eeyore). Or Rabbit to Owl: ‘You and I have brains. The others have fluff.’ Education and the ability to read and write, even badly, are greatly prized and admired. Appearances are everything: everyone is constantly making up stories and excuses to save face, to demonstrate abilities, wisdom and courage they don’t really possess. Christopher Robin is the least trammelled: he enjoys doing Nothing and says things ‘carelessly’, and carelessness seems a great state to aspire to, but nobody else ever quite gets there. They all care too much about something. Indeed, all this caring means the forest is not the idyllic place I’d remembered. A couple of years ago, an article by the Canadian Medical Association claimed that all the characters in the stories suffered from some kind of mental disorder. It was tongue in cheek, but it did have a point.

  “A couple of years ago, an article by the Canadian Medical Association claimed that all the characters in the stories suffered from some kind of mental disorder. It was tongue in cheek, but it did have a point.”

  The most recognisable creature this time round is Rabbit. Everyone who has ever worked in an office has run into Rabbits. They are exciting and galvanising: they run around organising things, making lists, telling everyone what to do, but they don’t seem to achieve much, and they never hang around anyone for long. When Pooh, a classic creative and intuitive, tries to explain that songs just ‘come to him’, Rabbit doesn’t get it, because he ‘never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.’

  The quintessential Rabbit moment comes at the end of a passage I fall on with joyful memory. Most of Milne’s brief descriptions of nature are a bit arch, but this one is superb. Rabbit has gone to see Christopher Robin at his tree house, ‘feeling more important by the minute’. He knocks at the door and calls out, but there is no reply. ‘Then he stopped and listened, and everything stopped and listened with him, and the Forest was very lone and still and peaceful in the sunshine, until suddenly a hundred miles above him a lark began to sing.’ And what does Rabbit do with this wonderful moment, that left this city child with a wild desire to hear a lark sing?

  ‘Bother!’ said Rabbit. ‘He’s gone out.’

  You’re meant to love Pooh and Piglet most, I think, and I do, although Piglet is a bit of a wimp: still, he is very small, and he redeems himself by trying very hard to be courageous, and his imaginary conversation with a Heffalump is the funniest thing in all the stories. We all know how it is: you plan in advance the dreaded conversation with the most feared person in your life so you will come out on top, but it never works out the way you expect, and you are left with your humiliation and your relief. Pooh is not as sweet as I remembered: he’s driven by an insatiable greed for sweetness, for a ‘little something’, but he tries to disguise it to himself and to others as better qualities. His excuses would do an addict proud. But his saving grace is his honesty and modesty: unlike most of the other creatures, he knows he’s not clever, and if anything, he underestimates his talents. I love his ponderous logic: ‘Pooh, who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got up slowly and began to look for himself.’

  “We all know how it is: you plan in advance the dreaded conversation with the most feared person in your life so you will come out on top, but it never works out the way you expect, and you are left with your humiliation and your relief … ”

  So now I will try for a new hypothesis: I needed a well-written story about beautifully observed characters.

  After finishing the stories, I feel I have to get up and do some looking too. Something still niggles. I can’t reconcile the godlike boy with the nervous man who signed my book. So I read his own book, The Enchanted Places, a memoir first published in 1974, when Christopher Milne was fifty-four and his father had been dead for eighteen years. The author won’t call himself a writer – that’s his father’
s title – but I think he’s too modest. He shows us how the characters in the books developed gradually out of his own games with his toys and his mother’s contributions to those games; only Owl and Rabbit were Milne’s own inventions.

  It’s a kind of confession, but a cautious one: he will only go so far and then, he tells us, he must hold back. He is trying so hard to be fair, to be kind. And much of this little book is devoted to the joys of the past, to scenes of a childhood that parents and grandparents sigh for, some lost Elysium where children went out and played all day in the countryside, with or without their toys. The real Christopher Robin was not as alone as I had thought – he had a couple of little girl playmates – but he seemed very happy on his own anyway, doing Nothing. Home at first was a house in Chelsea, and later Cotchford Farm in East Sussex. On his doorstep were places familiar from the Pooh books: Ashdown Forest, Five Hundred Acre (not One Hundred Aker) Wood, Pooh Bridge, the North Pole, Gill’s Lap (not Galleon’s Lap).

  But woven through this golden tapestry of nostalgia are darker threads. Nanny had me, he writes: ‘I was all hers and remained all hers until the age of nine.’ Olive Brockwell sounds like a good and loving nanny. Every now and then, Christopher was allowed to visit his parents. His mother ‘couldn’t have coped alone with a tiny child’ but enjoyed playing games with him ‘provided Nanny was at hand in case of difficulty.’ His father was a different matter. Warm, yet with a thin lip and an ice cold eye. He didn’t have a gift with children, Christopher writes. ‘My father’s heart remained buttoned up all his life.’