by Dennis Butts
And so it seems churlish, not to say downright dangerous, to suggest that all is not necessarily well in the Hundred Aker Wood – and perhaps never has been. Because there was, it might be said, already a serpent in this Eden, and his name was A.A. Milne.
A.A. Milne’s relationship with his most famous creation was thoroughly ambivalent. There were many things he would have preferred to be remembered for – in the theatre, Mr Pym Passes By (1919), in detective novels, The Red House Mystery (1922), or even for his years working on the humourous magazine Punch. The publication of Christopher (Robin) Milne’s slightly bitter autobiography, The Enchanted Places, in 1974 also upset readers’ cosy image of Pooh’s world. The relationship between father and child was not what the books implied. Far from being the domestically-inspired idyll, the ‘Pooh’ books were just another job for a skilled literary craftsman.
This shows, perhaps, in the rather wobbly start to both the books. Winnie-the-Pooh begins with a chapter by a first-person narrator who is interrupted by the voices of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear; The House at Pooh Corner begins, even more confusingly, with a ‘Contradiction’: ‘An Introduction is to introduce people, but Christopher Robin and his friends, who have already been introduced to you are now going to say Good-bye.’ The authorial voice seems too much in control: can a whole book be read by inexperienced readers as a ‘goodbye’?
Once the narrator steps back, we might expect to watch the characters living uninterruptedly in their golden innocent world – and to a certain extent we do: Pooh counting his honey pots, Piglet is surrounded by water. These child-like characters have an entirely successful charm:
‘Look, Pooh!’ said Piglet suddenly. ‘There’s something in one of the Pine Trees.’
‘So there is!’ said Pooh, looking up wonderingly. ‘There’s an Animal.’
Piglet took Pooh’s arm, in case Pooh was frightened.
‘Is it one of the fiercer Animals?’ he said, looking the other way.
Pooh nodded.
‘It’s a Jagular,’ he said.
‘What do Jagulars do?’ asked Piglet, hoping that they wouldn’t.
‘They hide in the branches of trees, and drop on you as you go underneath,’ said Pooh. ‘Christopher Robin told me.’
‘Perhaps we better hadn’t go underneath, Pooh. In case he dropped and hurt himself.’
‘They don’t hurt themselves, said Pooh. ‘They’re such very good droppers.’
(‘In Which it is Shown that Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees’, The House at Pooh Corner)
However, it doesn’t take very long for the idyll to be shattered. Three pages into the second story, Pooh encounters Rabbit, whose attitude to life is rather different: ‘You know how it is in the Forest. One can’t have anybody coming into one’s house. One has to be careful.’ This is a rather more adult attitude to life; two of the subsequent stories involve Rabbit trying to get rid of new characters – first Kanga and Baby Roo, and then Tigger, and corrupting Pooh’s innocent acceptance of these strangers. In ‘Rabbit’s Busy Day’ he has a memorable encounter with another adult character, Owl.
‘Owl,’ said Rabbit shortly, ‘you and I have brains. The others have fluff . . . Read that.’
Owl took Christopher Robin’s notice from Rabbit and looked at it nervously. He could spell his own name, WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn’t Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren’t looking over his shoulder and saying “Well?” all the time, and he could –
‘Well?’ said Rabbit.
‘Yes,’ said Owl, looking Wise and Thoughtful. ‘I see what you mean. Undoubtedly.’
‘Well?’ . . .
Owl looked at him, and wondered whether to push him off the tree; but feeling that he could always do it afterwards, he tried once more to find out what they were talking about. (The House at Pooh Corner)
The question is, at this point, who is this humour for? Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Roo, the more child-like characters, are points of identification for young readers, and might also allow them to feel affectionately superior to younger children – but the Rabbit-Owl interchange seems to be of a quite different order. This is mockery of two adults, one egocentric in the extreme, the other fraudulent in the extreme: is this sardonic humour anything to do with children? If it is, it is a mockery of children themselves.
It might not come as a surprise to find that the original toys that Christopher Robin played with were Pooh and Piglet. Kanga (a male in the original manuscript), Roo, and Tigger were later additions to the nursery, chosen, as Milne admitted, partly for their ‘literary possibilities’. Only Owl and Rabbit were his ‘own unaided work’ and it shows: the ‘adult’ characters – even Kanga – are the divisive ones. Eeyore, the miserimus of children’s literature, is a rather more ambiguous character (just as when he was introduced into the Milne ménage is not clear). He may have all the characteristics of an adult depressive, but he has the vulnerability of a child, happy to be able to play with his birthday present, or be proud of his new house, or to frisk about waving his newfound tail. One suspects that a child reader might find him odd rather than funny, even if he is ultimately sympathetic.
‘Good morning, Pooh Bear,’ said Eeyore gloomily. ‘If it is a good morning,’ he said. ‘Which I doubt,’ said he.
‘Why, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Can’t all what? Said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
‘Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.’
‘Oh!’ said Pooh. He thought for a long time, and then asked, ‘What mulberry bush is that?’
‘Bon-hommy,’ went on Eeyore gloomily. ‘French word meaning bonhommy,’ he explained. ‘I’m not complaining, but There It Is.’
Pooh sat down on a large stone, and tried to think this out. It sounded to him like a riddle, and he was never much good at riddles, being a Bear of Very Little Brain. So he sang Cottleston Pie instead.
(‘Eeyore has a Birthday’, Winnie-the-Pooh)
The driving force behind most of the stories, then, is the tension between the adult and the child, and it is not entirely clear that Milne (as one might have expected) is on the child’s side. His scene-setting for his idyll, for example, does not seem to be exactly child-focussed.
By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For now it knew where it was going, it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’ But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
There was a broad track, almost as broad as a road, leading from the Outland to the Forest, but before it could come to the Forest, it had to cross this river. So where it crossed, there was a wooden bridge, almost as broad as a road, with wooden rails on each side of it . . .
Readers, both adult and child, who live in a sceptical age, may find that the intrusion of sentimentality into the books jars most strongly – the more so because it does not seem to be entirely authentic. The ‘Pooh’ books were written towards the end of a thirty-year period when the idea of the ‘perfect child’ had become something of a cult, the Christopher Robin of Milne’s poems demonstrating such sentimentalised perfection. The 1920s abounded in Christopher Robin clones. In comparison with the unstuffy episodes of Pooh and Piglet walking in the snow, or Tigger not climbing trees, the final pages of The House at Pooh Corner read like an author writing for a very adult, and very sentimental audience:
Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw . . . 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.
There are, then, five adults in the ‘Pooh’ books, all of whom have an uneasy relationship with children, and all of whom are in their different ways disruptive or even destructive: in ascending order of disruptiveness they are Kanga, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, and A.A. Milne.
16. The Strange Disappearance of Europe
Why Didn’t Children’s Books Notice the Approach of Two World Wars?
At the beginning of the Second World War, three very popular and interesting ‘mainstream’ children’s books were published which marked a generally unnoticed but significant change from the previous sixty years of publishing for children.
The first was Kitty Barne’s Visitors from London, in which a middle-class family in Sussex has seventeen young Londoners billeted on them. It is a remarkable book, not simply because it more or less avoids caricaturing the working class (‘It’s a bit of all right, the country is. I never bin before.’) but because it was one of the first children’s novels to acknowledge the social realities of the time. The Carnegie Medal was won in 1941 by another remarkable book; Mary Treadgold, a publisher despairing of ever reading intelligent ‘pony books’, produced from an air-raid shelter We Couldn’t Leave Dinah – a book set on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands. As Treadgold wrote, the book was ‘a mixture of escape and wish-fulfillment . . . If anything extra got into the book – anything in the way of pity and courage . . . it was, I think, because it was written in a time when to be a Londoner was to look gladly out from the windows of a fortress and to find that along with everybody else, one had for a little while become far-sighted.’ What did get into the book was (for its time) a remarkably well-balanced view of the invaders, and a sympathetic view of Nannerl, the German general’s granddaughter who takes over care of Dinah, the heroine’s pony. The third, and most unlikely book (given its author’s track record) was I Go by Sea, I go By Land, a novel that follows refugees to the USA. It was written by Pamela Travers, previously notable for her authorship of the mystical fantasies of Mary Poppins.
These books are not much noticed today, but they were evidence that the mainstream children’s book – the respectable children’s book as opposed to the magazines and papers of the popular press – had at last acknowledged that there was a dangerous world out there. These books broke the curious paradox of British children’s literature for critics – on the one hand it is supposed to have a symbiotic relationship with culture, reflecting and influencing social history; on the other, for eighty years it seems to have largely ignored wars and other social upheavals.
In the nineteenth century, during the height of the prosperity of the British Empire, children’s books (which were then not as distinct from adult books as they later became) were not divorced from social and political life. There were hundreds of ‘waif’ novels, such as Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1867), exhorting middle-class girls to charity; and there were thousands of empire-building, militaristic novels aimed at boys. G.A. Henty sold 25 million copies of his imperialist books between 1871 and 1906. But towards the end of the century there was a change: although the British Empire did not achieve its greatest extent until after the First World War, it seemed that it was stumbling. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is at least in part a tirade against fin de siècle decadence. Rumours of war pervaded Europe and saturated the popular press.
But what was happening to ‘mainstream’ children’s books in this period? This is, after all, the period of Andrew Lang’s Colour Fairy Books (from 1889), of Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), E. Nesbit’s Bastable children series, from The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911), not to mention Beatrix Potter. Where is the rising tide of war in these books? They seem to exist in a golden world, in fantasy or rural security, where things come right in the end, and there is no disruption.
The social situation between the wars was equally fraught. The financial crash of 1929, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the desperate partying of the Bright Young Things, the impassioned left-wing politics, and the struggle over re-armament made ‘the long weekend’ a volatile and dangerous place to be. But not, it would seem, in children’s books. This was a rich period for children’s literature (at a conservative estimate, over 25,000 children’s books were published), but not a balanced one. Consider the books that have survived in the children’s canon: Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle series (from 1920) and A.A. Milne’s ‘Pooh’ books (1926 and 1928) were written by authors mentally scarred by the First World War, and portrayed a safe, peaceful, protected world. The same is true of Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy series (from 1928), Alison Uttley’s The Squirrel, the Hare, and the Little Grey Rabbit (from 1929) or Ursula Moray Williams’s Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse (1938); the bucolic ‘Worzel Gummidge’ books by Barbara Euphan Todd (from 1936) or the ‘Ameliaranne’ books by Constance Heward and others (from 1920). Other major books were the other-worldly Mary Poppins (from 1934), Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and John Masefield’s two very English fantasies, The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935).
Most of all, the period was marked by what came to be known as the ‘camping and tramping’ novels – series by Garry Hogg and David Severn, M.E. Atkinson’s ‘Lockett’ novels, and, most famous of all, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (from 1930). Ransome’s Lake District world is generally peaceful: his child characters play safely, held in the hollow of the hills, and tacitly protected by adults. Even his young imitators, Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, in The Far Distant Oxus (1936) do not allow the outside world to intrude on their riding idyll on Exmoor. In 1939, Ransome’s publishers advised him to ‘steer clear of the war at any cost’, possibly because his idyllic world would be destroyed, but also because his books have their own internal time-scale (from ‘1929’ to ‘1935’). Writers like Severn, Atkinson, and Aubrey de Selincourt produced books throughout the war which simply ignored its existence. War was not a suitable topic for child readers. The works of Barne, Treadgold and Travers were exceptions (although Alison Uttley’s Hare did join the Home Guard in 1942).
But how did this apparent denial happen – or did it really happen? Can any books really evade their contexts?
In the years leading up to the First World War, the popular press for children compensated for the silence of the ‘mainstream’ authors. Lord Northcliff’s Amalgamated Press specialised in xenophobic propaganda, with stories of invasions by the French, the Russians, the Chinese (‘the yellow peril’) and, especially, against Germany. In 1910, one American newspaper observed that ‘it will be a marvel if relations with Germany are not strained until war becomes inevitable as a direct result of the war scare campaign inaugurated and carried on with reckless and maddening ingenuity by the Northcliffe boys’ papers.’ Sexton Blake (the boys’ Sherlock Holmes) and even Tom Merry and the chaps at Greyfriars’ School in The Gem encountered the German and Austrian enemy. Characteristic was an invasion serial, ‘In Days of Peril’ by Major J. Verney Adams in The Boys’ Best Story Paper in 1911. The author’s Foreword began:
This is a story of things that may be! If my heroes are British and my villains for the most part Prussian the reason will be sufficiently obvious to the reader. But I wish to lay stress on the fact that my aim is not to create bad blood between ourselves and a nation which we have never fought and never need fight if the diplomatists will only behave themselves. I know the German army well, and entertain great admiration for its gallantry. At the same time while I hold the view that a foreign invasion of England is highly improbable, it is by no means impossible under certain conditions, and it is the duty of every British boy to fit himself to play a man’s part in the event of such a thing happening. Let your
motto be ‘learn to live clean and shoot straight’ – the foreign boy is carefully taught to do that latter, why should we not do both. If some of the horrors of war are depicted here, they are not exaggerated, they are things which have happened before, in history, and would certainly happen again if the enemy were within our gates. I want you to think in time, my dear lads, that is why I have written this story.
An agitating cover: ‘Peril to Come’, ‘a fleet of foreign zeppelin airships hovers over London.’ (1909)
Even Baden-Powell’s supposedly non-militaristic Boy Scouts were not immune: as Baden-Powell wrote in Scouting for Boys in 1908:
Peace cannot be certain unless we show that we are always fully prepared to defend ourselves in England, and that an invader would only find himself ramming his head against bayonets and well-aimed bullets if he tried landing on our shores . . . The surest way to keep peace is to be prepared for war.
In this context, the apparent quietism of The Wind in the Willows and books like it becomes a little questionable. Could it be that the Water Rat’s rejection of the Wide World – and progress in general – is a metaphor for Grahame’s rejection of the way the world was going? Or are the inhabitants of the Wild Wood and their invasion of Toad Hall parables for the times? After all, Grahame was no pacifist – during the war he was elected Commanding Officer of the Blewbury Volunteer defence Corps, drilling them ‘in a beautiful great framed thatched barn.’ Kipling is an even more ambivalent figure. The schoolboys in Stalky and Co (1899) may be anarchic, but his heroes still end up on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Puck of Pook’s Hill may be a hymn to England and Englishness, but its two main story sequences are complex arguments against corruption and for interracial co-operation in the form of the story of the fall of the Roman empire and the birth of England.
