Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Before we get too indignant on poor little Christopher’s behalf, we should remember that this was a pretty common experience for an English middle-class boy in the 1920s. Such a boy often went straight from nanny to boarding school, his parents remaining comparatively remote. Even so, there is something especially poignant about Alan Alexander Milne’s remoteness from his son in the boy’s early years. He was not ‘inordinately fond’ of children, he said, ‘and I have certainly never felt in the least sentimental about them – or no more sentimental than one becomes for a moment over a puppy or a kitten. In as far as I understand them, this understanding is based on observation, on imagination and on memories of my own childhood.’

  He wrote the books firstly for himself; then for his wife Dorothy, for he depended very much on her encouragement and praise; and lastly for Christopher.

  Now I see that the first Winnie-the-Pooh story, where father, son and bear sit so close while father talks about the bees and the balloon, is itself a fiction. For the first nine years, the father and son relationship was one of mutual awkwardness. It is excruciating to read about it. Father would come up to the nursery and sit and smoke his pipe and think at one end of the table, and Christopher would sit and draw his father’s profile at the other end of the table. They both sat in silence. Even when Christopher was of an age to go to boarding school and his father went with him in the chauffeured car, ‘We did The Times crossword, then sat silent… we said our goodbyes while still in the car and while there was still a mile or two to go. We said them looking straight ahead. It was easier that way.’

  “Now I see that the first Winnie-the-Pooh story, where father, son and bear sit so close while father talks about the bees and the balloon, is itself a fiction.”

  A shy person needs someone to cling to, Christopher writes; so he clung to Nanny. She left when he was nine, and after that he clung to his father, for nearly ten more years. During those years they became ‘very, very close’ (I breathed a sigh of relief), but Christopher was still easily wounded, which could create ‘a barrier of silence’. They did things together: algebra, Euclid, fishing, cricket and golf. ‘We had to be on the same level, but we both had to be standing, for my father couldn’t bend, couldn’t pretend to be what he wasn’t.’ His father knew he was lucky, had got perhaps more than he deserved, and was grateful. ‘And once, a little shyly, he thanked me.’

  Christopher’s own very plausible theory is that there are two sorts of writer: one draws on his experiences, the other on his dreams. ‘My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead.’ Somewhat less plausibly, he depicts his father waiting patiently for ten years until he could finally relive his own boyhood with his son, when ‘Nanny was out of the way.’ Here I can’t help thinking that something much bigger than Nanny was in the way.

  “Father and son experienced the Pooh books as both a blessing and a curse on their lives.”

  Father and son experienced the Pooh books as both a blessing and a curse on their lives. A. A. Milne was a prolific writer for adults in many genres, and an editor at Punch magazine; among other things, he published eighteen plays, three novels, and many poems and short stories, and he wrote screenplays for films. But the Pooh stories and the books of children’s verse (When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six), published when he was in his forties, were so hugely popular that they eclipsed everything else he had done and everything he was to do after them. We know he resented this, and Christopher depicts him as jealous of his younger self. He thought his other work mattered much more than a total of 70,000 words for children. Even his description of writing his first children’s verses in his 1939 autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, has an air of something being tossed off while holed up in a holiday house in the rain. He escaped to the summer house with an exercise book and pencil, desperate for solitude, ‘and there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years … and here within me were unforgettable memories of my own childhood … what was I writing? A child’s book of verses obviously. Not a whole book, of course; but to write a few would be fun – until I was tired of it.’

  Meanwhile, though his son had his moments of pride at being ‘Christopher Robin’, he had many more moments of exquisite embarrassment. His schoolmates teased him by playing a gramophone recording of the Pooh stories over and over again. The author of The Enchanted Places passes hastily over the pain that this and other bullying must have caused. I understood why he had been so silent and unreceptive to me and other journalists at Pooh Bridge when I read of an early encounter with a reporter who had crossed his path at Cotchford Farm. She had shown the boy an old watch and asked if it was his. Later, he was horrified to read his completely fabricated reply in her report, and that was the moment when he lost all trust in the media. But the pain of Pooh ran deeper than schoolboy bullies and lying journalists. The lowest point came after the Second World War, when this highly educated and intelligent young man was looking in vain for a job: ‘It seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’

  It’s an anguished, ferocious indictment. And yet Christopher makes clear it was something he felt only at his darkest moments. I hope that by his death in 1996, he was more reconciled to the fairy who at his birth had decreed ‘His name shall be famous throughout the world.’

  What, I wondered constantly, did his father feel? There are so few giveaways from that buttoned-up heart. The 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin made some attempt to explain him. It portrayed Milne as a man suffering from intermittent shell shock after his experiences at the Somme, trying to write an anti-war book, reluctantly getting caught up in his little son’s adventures, turning them into the literary goldmine they became, and managing to both neglect and exploit his son in the process. I thought it was a decent enough film, well acted, with more prominent roles for the women (Milne’s wife Daphne and Christopher Robin’s nanny Olive) than histories usually give them. But the film seemed to me too much weighted towards the golden glowing weepy end of the business, and suggested a reconciliation between father and son that never quite happened. I haven’t seen the Disney film Christopher Robin, which came out the following year. The prospect of a live-action Pooh re-storing imagination to the adult Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) didn’t tempt me one little bit.

  “Nostalgia is what powers my return to children’s books. But it’s a tricky thing. Like Pisk’s Cupid, it disappears when you look at it directly.”

  Christopher Milne says that nostalgia is the only emotion his father seemed to delight in both feeling and showing. Nostalgia is what powers my return to children’s books. But it’s a tricky thing. Like Pisk’s Cupid, it disappears when you look at it directly. Even Pooh disappears. The real Pooh, together with Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and Kanga (Roo got lost long ago, in one of those enchanted places), sits quietly these days behind bulletproof glass in the Children’s Center at the New York Public Library, having made his way there via Pooh’s US publisher, E. P. Dutton, and he has about 750,000 visitors every year. But when I look at him in the online photographs, he doesn’t look anything like the Pooh in the books.

  The reason for that is that he isn’t the Pooh in the books. Ernest Shepard took as his model another teddy bear called Growler that belonged to his own son. Christopher captures beautifully the reason why, as Shepard’s drawings developed, this Pooh becomes so memorable and has his particular Poohish look: ‘The eye that starts as quite an elaborate affair level with the top of Pooh’s nose, gradually moves down-wards and ends up as a mere dot level with his mouth. And in this dot the whole of Pooh’s character can be read.’

  The stories feel outside of time: they could go on forever. But Milne chooses to bring them to an end with a
final chapter that I never quite understood when I read it the first time. Christopher Robin is going away, and no-one knows why or where. But after a damp squib of a farewell ceremony, Christopher Robin and Pooh climb up to Galleon’s Lap, an enchanted place at the top of the forest (it’s enchanted because nobody has ever been able to count whether there are sixty-three or sixty-four trees growing there). Suddenly Christopher Robin begins to tell Pooh about Kings and Queens and Factors and Knights and Suction Pumps. At the time I first read it, this made little more sense to me than it did to Pooh, but I realise now these were things he was learning about in school, and obviously he’s about to go away to boarding school. For once, the godlike boy is hesitant, inarticulate. He’s not going to do Nothing any more: ‘They don’t let you.’ It’s a farewell that is never quite spoken. He promises Pooh he will be at Galleon's Lap if Pooh comes up there again, and he gets Pooh to promise he will never forget about him.

  What’s happening to my hypothesis? It’s still true, but it’s not quite enough. It feels a bit too comfortable. Was it just the effects of reading a well-written story about beautifully observed characters that I felt when I came to the end of The House at Pooh Corner? I don’t remember. But this time I am feeling something I’m sure I never felt when I first read it. I am in tears.

  “this time I am feeling something I’m sure I never felt when I first read it. I am in tears.”

  Here is how Milne ends The House at Pooh Corner: ‘So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.’ Yes, it is sentimental; and yes, by golly, it works its bittersweet devastation on me. I suspect it made Alan Alexander Milne cry too. On the inside, maybe, while he stayed calm and silent on the outside, smoking his pipe and thinking.

  THINGS BEGIN TO HAPPEN

  The Castle of Adventure

  by Enid Blyton

  Allow me to brag a bit. One of Enid Blyton’s Adventure books – I think it was The Castle of Adventure – was my first writing prize. Actually so far it’s my only fiction writing prize, though I’ve been shortlisted for a few, and I suspect that even if I win others, it may still turn out to be the most treasured. The prize was in a short story competition run by the BBC television children’s show, Blue Peter. The story I wrote was about a unicorn that turned up in someone’s garden and outraged a bossy Mrs Somebody with artificial cherries on her hat. I had never seen either a unicorn or a hat with artificial cherries on it, but I sensed these were things that ought to be in stories, so no doubt my story was drawn from reading, not from life. I didn’t see the show where they announced the names of the winners, so I was denied that thrill, but a girl at school told me I’d won. I found it hard to believe until the postman brought me physical evidence: a certificate and a book token.

  There was never any question that I would spend the token on an Enid Blyton book. At that time, she was my goddess. Like most English children of the 1950s and ’60s, I grew up with Blyton. The earliest books I saw, before I could read, were probably the adventures of Noddy. That distinctive signature with its fat letters dominated every genre and category of children’s fiction, from picture books for the tinies to action and fantasy adventures for the pre-teens. We all borrowed them week after week from the local public library, when they weren’t already out on loan – they were enormously popular. The best known were the Famous Five books, but there were many more, and the glory of Blyton was that you knew that however many of her books you read, there would always be others.

  “Like most English children of the 1950s and ’60s, I grew up with Blyton. The earliest books I saw, before I could read, were probably the adventures of Noddy.”

  I devoured them like a drug. At the time I won the competition, I’d just read my first Adventure book (the first in the series, The Island of Adventure) and was desperate for my next fix. The idea of actually being able to go into a bookshop and exchange my token for a brand new book, as opposed to hunting through the library shelves for a dog-eared copy that a librarian had just put back (for those books never stayed there for long) was intoxicating. And so was the book when I got it home. It was a hardback, with a loose jacket, and underneath the jacket a grey cover with a picture etched into the front and a cockatoo’s head on the spine. Inside were the original Stuart Tresilian illustrations. No doubt I breathed in the delicious odour of new book before I turned to the first page and stuck down my certificate announcing me as a winner of the Blue Peter short story competition. Now for the adventure!

  But what was the adventure? Here my memory gets infuriatingly vague. There were four, or was it five, children? Boys and girls, and one girl was called… yes, Lucy-Ann. I imagined her as fat with red hair, like a girl I knew at school. (Every young person in literature had to be imagined like a girl at school, however inappropriate my model; even Frodo in The Lord of the Rings was like a girl I knew called Virginia.) Far more vivid than my memory of the children was their parrot, Kiki (I pronounced it Keyekie, though it was probably meant to be Kickie). Kiki was a tremendous presence. He sat on any available shoulder, like a pirate’s parrot, raised his crest, shrieked a lot and talked constantly. How passionately I longed to have my own Kiki. The nearest I got to it was looking after a friend’s sulky budgerigar while she was away on holiday: sadly the budgie wouldn’t sit on my shoulder, didn’t talk, and died on my watch, for which I will forever feel guilty.

  “Kiki was a tremendous presence. He sat on any available shoulder, like a pirate’s parrot, raised his crest, shrieked a lot and talked constantly. How passionately I longed to have my own Kiki.”

  So Kiki and the children went off and had adventures in various places that gave their titles to the stories: The Castle, the Valley, the Island, the Mountain, the Sea and… I don’t remember any others. I don’t know what they did exactly. Foiled villains, I suppose. Little disjointed scenes come back to me and I have no idea which book they were in, or what the adventurers were up to. One scene shows Kiki and the children in a boat travelling down a river that ran into a deep gorge, and then narrowed into a cavern – I’d never dreamed of such a place, and it was so exciting and menacing. In another scene they are flying with mechanical wings. That felt wrong and creepy. The ‘adventures’ as I recall them had to be natural and possible, and for once I thought Blyton had broken her unspoken contract with me.

  But that was a rare moment. My clearest memory of the Adventure books was the glow of holding a new one in my hands, and knowing for certain that I was going to meet old friends again who would take me on a thrilling ride away from stodgy old school, problems with long division or making real friends, empty weekends where there was nothing to do but watch the rain on the window; above all, away from the world I was in, where everything plodded drearily along, where it was impossible to have any kind of adventure. How we forget the great yawning boredoms of childhood, and the frantic need to fill them. The only thing I hadn’t worked out was how to make the books last longer – I couldn’t savour them, I had to dash through and get to the end and find out what happened. What a hold they had on me. What a mystery that I can’t actually remember the stories the way I can remember the escapades of Alice, or Pooh, or the denizens of Narnia. But what excitement I feel that now I’m going to rediscover my prize. Will I be disappointed, or thrilled all over again?

  My re-reading copy is second-hand, ordered through Abebooks. A bargain buy, the shipping costs far more than the actual book. It’s a 1988 Piper paperback,a ‘revised edition’, whatever that means. I don’t know exactly what was revised, I note the children still use exclamations such as ‘Golly’, ‘Dash’, ‘Jolly good’ and ‘Blow’. This edition ties in with a British television series ‘starring Susan George, Brian Blessed and Gareth Hunt’ and although there are no illustrations, I’m greeted with photographs on the front and back of the five actors playing the children, rugged up for what looks like a cool summer holiday, with
a vague castle shape in the background. They are crouching around a log. One cradles a fox cub and another has a cockatoo on his shoulder. Hello Kiki! Inside, the yellowing pages are dense with small type. I have a good feeling that at least one child has enjoyed this book before me.

  Even all these years later, it’s unclear to me which came first: the being in my room, alone, in the quiet; or the reading – which of these two great joys of my childhood was the cause and which, the effect. Whichever came first, I remember reading The Enchanted Wood, the first book in Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, flat across my pink chenille bedspread in a ferocious Brisbane summer, lost with Jo, Fanny and Bessie as they packed their sandwiches and lemonade and headed off to climb the Faraway Tree.

  My grandmother would call me to ride my bike down to the shops or for dinner; I didn’t hear. I seemed physically there, with Dame Washalot and the Saucepan Man and Moon-Face. I’d never seen or heard of acorns or oaks or toffee shocks, and I remember thinking that, fond as I was of mangos and mulberries and chico lollies, they were not the kind of things that would ever appear in a book.

  Toni Jordan

  I see that this book is the second in the series of eight (the titles I couldn’t remember are The Ship, The Circus and The River of Adventure). There’s a brief biography that tells me Enid Blyton died in 1968, wrote more than 700 books (a short pause for my jaw to drop) and also ‘found time to write numerous songs, poems and plays, and ran magazines and clubs. She was always very concerned for the welfare of children in need, and the Enid Blyton Trust, set up after her death, is very active in raising funds for sick and handicapped children.’ So she is established as a fearsomely prolific writer and as a person who is kind to children.

  There are thirty-one chapters, each one quite short, with no-nonsense titles. I particularly like one called ‘Things begin to happen’ and its successor, ‘Things go on happening’. Very quickly, I discover the set-up. There are four children: Lucy-Ann (a redhead, but no mention of whether she’s fat) and her brother Jack (also a redhead), Dinah and her brother Philip (who both have dark ‘tufty’ hair). The two girls are friends at their boarding school, as are the boys at their boarding school, and they all get together in the holidays. Lucy-Ann and Jack are orphans who when not at school live with a ‘cross old uncle’. Dinah and Philip have no father; their mother works to keep them and ‘has no time’ to make a home for them, so they’ve been staying with an aunt and uncle in the holidays. But now the mother (Mrs Mannering) has put together enough money to make a home for them. It’s being decorated these summer holidays, so all four are staying in a country cottage with ‘pretty, bright-eyed’ Mrs Mannering, or Aunt Allie, as Lucy-Ann and Jack call her.