Depressed by the ugliness of what he sees around him, the Christian refreshes himself with half an hour in church. I spend half an hour under a tree. The Christian is in communion with his God. I am in communion with. . . . what? With God’s work? With the Earth Goddess? Certainly I am not in communion with my fellow man, and that is something. Certainly I am, if not in communion at least in contact with the grass and the ground and that is something. Also I am in contact with such generalities as Beauty, Continuity and Renewal. These, which the Christian finds within the Church calendar, I find in the changing seasons. Then too I find what I found so memorably in Italy: that feeling of an all-pervading Benevolence that dwarfs the unpleasant things that man does to man. This is perhaps the nearest I get to the Christian’s God-the-Father. And finally perhaps I am in contact with something a little deeper. Perhaps I am, like the tree I am sitting under, just another sort of tree, a mobile tree with roots that can move from place to place, roots that are invisible but which are roots none the less, thrusting into the earth and drawing nourishment from deep down among the rocks. . . . Sometimes I feel this way. . . .
We say of the misfit that he is a square peg in a round hole. Every one of us is a peg of a certain shape. Our shape may change over the years but it is uniquely ours, determined at birth, part of our nature. And each of us occupies a hole in the world, a hole of approximately the same shape. Where the fit is good we are comfortable and happy. Where it is less good we are unhappy, ill at ease and under strain. The clothes we wear, the house we live in, the husband or wife we have married, our job, our friends: these are all part of our hole. And so too is the God we worship. If we are to be at peace within ourselves, then our religious beliefs – our philosophy of life – must fit us as comfortably as our shoes.
I would like to close this chapter by suggesting that there is no single Royal Road to this goal. Each must find his own best way as he pursues his lonely pilgrimage across the world. Others are moving forward with him, some on his path, some on parallel paths.
All are within shouting distance, and cries for help mingle with shouts of encouragement and exhortation.
What advice can one give that all may accept? Surely only the advice given by Polonius to Laertes. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true.’ This above all. Above conformity for conformity’s sake. Above forcing our foot into somebody else’s ill-fitting shoe for the sake of appearances. Above saying ‘I believe’ when in honesty we don’t.
Of the path I have found I say only that it is the right path for me and I ask of others only that they should understand this and accept it.
Epilogue. The New Path
In 1956 my father died. In a sense, however, he was already dead; for the operation that had given him an extra year of life had made him a different person. It had made my mother a different person too. And it had made Cotchford a different place. Yes indeed, if it is sad to go too soon, it is worse to stay too long.
Selfishly I was glad that I lived in Devon and had a bookshop that I could not easily leave. Children drift away from their parents as they grow up, and it is right that they should. I had been very close to mine, especially to my father, for rather longer than is usual, and so the drifting when it came was perhaps a little further than is usual. I saw my father on two occasions during his illness, my mother and Cotchford on three. On his death I never saw Cotchford again. And although my mother survived him by fifteen years I saw her only once.
On my father’s death my mother had taken over responsibility for his estate. If any decisions were to be made they were hers to make. I was two hundred miles away and only too relieved to be able to say to enquirers ‘I am afraid it is nothing to do with me.’
In 1971 my mother died. My reaction was not typically that of a child who has lost a parent. There was little sadness, little sense of bereavement. How could there be? I had last seen her at my father’s memorial service and we had scarcely written to each other since. When Cotchford was sold I knew only when her next letter came from a London address. No, my chief concern was that a part of my father’s royalties would now be mine – and I didn’t want it.
To write about one’s attitude to money is almost as dangerous as to write about one’s religious beliefs. Having dared the one, I must now dare the other.
It is easy to give. It is extremely hard to receive. I am bad at receiving, bad at having to be grateful. I like to be able to boast to myself that what I have done I have done without help. Hence my insistence that I was a professional bookseller and that the bookshop was the sole source of our income. Hence my anger when anyone implied that they thought I was only a dilettante, not really having to make the business pay, happily able to rely on a private income.
But in spite of my determination to earn my own living, I looked upon what I earned more as a measure of my ability to sell books than anything else. I didn’t particularly welcome the money for its own sake or for the sake of what it would buy. My ambition was to be a good rather than a rich bookseller: there was something not quite nice about being rich.
Whether or not this attitude is understandable, it does, I hope, explain why a sudden, relatively large and unearned addition to our income was not at all what I wanted. Many dream of winning the football pools. For me this would be nightmare. To travel hopefully being a better thing than to arrive, I didn’t welcome the offer of a lift. No, thank you, I prefer to walk. How often have I said this!
To be offered a lift by anybody would therefore have been bad enough and I would have been tempted to decline it. But to be offered a lift by, of all people, my fictional namesake, to have to travel the rest of my way in his company – this was the final insult to my injured pride.
Yet however much I might wish to be independent, standing on my own feet, I was very much aware that this, both figuratively and literally, was something Clare would never be able to do. So here was a dilemma. Fortunately it was not one that called for an immediate decision.
It would be a long while before probate had been settled, leaving my emotions plenty of time to sort themselves out inside me. Meanwhile Clare was still at school, Lesley and I were still full-time booksellers, and things could continue much as before.
And meanwhile I had another series of emotions to battle with. These arose from the discovery that of my father’s personal possessions nothing had survived. All had been destroyed.
Looking back on it now I can understand why my mother did what she did. Indeed I am utterly convinced that she did the right thing and precisely what my father would have wished.
What did his possessions amount to anyway? I have already described Cotchford in The Enchanted Places. The house and its furnishings, the garden with its flowers, everything that the visitor was so proudly shown, all these, though bought with my father’s money, in every other sense belonged to my mother. The things he needed for himself, a chair to sit on, a table to write at, a bed to sleep in and a chest of drawers for his clothes and his belongings, were just bits of furniture, not particularly his, not particularly anybody’s. His golf clubs, his pipes and his books: these were more personal of course, and much loved by him. But they were never particularly loved by my mother, indeed rather the reverse. For she had never shared with him those things that were closest to his heart. So what were they to her now, when all that she had loved was gone? If you have memories, you don’t need mementos.
But of course an author leaves more than his table and his pen. He leaves his unfinished manuscripts. This surely is another matter – of public rather than private concern.
Or is it?
To his many friends my father had been ‘Alan’ or ‘Blue’, the man they had talked to at the Garrick Club, the man they had played golf with at Addington or Ashdown Forest; and as they had known him so they would remember him. To many others he was known only through what he had written. He was articles in Punch. He was plays. He was Pooh. We never give all of ourselves to anybody. Even from those who are nearest to u
s there is a part of ourselves that we withhold. My father was a private person. He gave sparingly; and to the public at large during his lifetime he gave little more than his published words. Why should we expect more on his death and assume that because he is no longer there to say ‘No’ we may rummage without his permission through all he left behind? His feelings for his unfinished writings were precisely those of a mother for her unborn child. If the mother dies it may be kinder to let the child die with her.
This is how I feel now. But it was not how I felt at the time.
When I first learned what my mother had done I felt only a sudden surge of anger and a stab of sorrow. My poor father that she should have treated him like this! And so started the train of emotions that led in the end to my writing The Enchanted Places.
It was I suppose a feeling of guilt, a guilt which my mother and I had shared. We had both in our different ways failed him. And I owed it to him to make amends. Yes, if nothing had been left, I would provide something. I would write something and I would write it for his sake. This was my first thought. Later a rather more selfish reason occurred to me. I needed to write something for my own sake too.
For if I did nothing, then sooner or later someone would come to me and propose himself as my father’s biographer. And of course he would hope to see what in fact didn’t exist and hear what I didn’t wish to tell. Could I refuse to have anything to do with him? Or could I agree to answer certain questions but not others? To say ‘No’ would be hard enough; but to say anything but ‘No’ would be in the end to open my private world to a complete stranger and allow him to trample all over it, picking from it what he pleased and interpreting it how he wished. There was only one way out. ‘Yes, I will write my own account in my own time and in my own words.’ I had only to say this, first to myself, then to Lesley, to become immediately and utterly safe. For here was my reply, my impregnable defence. And twice in the course of the next two years I was to shelter behind it.
It has been said that the difference between the professional and the amateur writer is that the professional writes even when he is not in the mood. I was an amateur. I knew that duty and self defence were not enough and that I was surrounded by excuses for saying ‘Not today’. And I was going to need many todays before I had finished. Day after day I would have to ignore all the other things I ought to be doing. Day after day I would have to sit alone at my typewriter. Only the most intense pleasure could hold me to such a task: and at first contemplation I was filled with nothing but intense repugnance.
What exactly was I going to write? At first I visualized it as no more than an introduction to a new edition of the Pooh books, scarcely even deserving its own covers. I could say something about the real toys and the real places. But there were other questions that people would want to ask. Should I just ignore them? Perhaps I could make my essay take the form of an imaginary interview in which all the questions were asked but only the easy ones were answered, the others being warded off in the manner of the skilled politician. This seemed quite an ingenious idea and I began to contemplate it, letting my mind float back among its memories. I had now stopped saying to myself, ‘This is something I must do,’ and I had begun to consider how I might do it.
It was at this point that I began to see, not the Christopher Robin I had intended to write about, but another small boy. And as I looked at him he grew clearer and I saw to my surprise that he was beckoning to me. I took a few hesitant steps towards him and he came to meet me. He took me by the hand and he led me back. . . .
This was how in the end the book came to be written, and when I had finished it I added an introduction. ‘If I have imagined an audience,’ I said, ‘it has been a gathering of Pooh’s friends and admirers.’ It seemed the polite thing to say, but of course it wasn’t true. Having spent my entire adult life running away from Pooh and his friends, was it likely that I should now want them sitting round my table as I worked? No, I wasn’t writing for them at all. I was writing for myself. I was back in the place that I had loved. Hand in hand with my small companion I was re-exploring the rambling old farmhouse, the garden, the meadows, the woods, the river, the lane, the forest – the enchanted places of my childhood. Day after day I returned, happily writing. And since I couldn’t altogether forget my reason for writing, now and again I made myself throw in a bit about Christopher Robin so as not to disappoint the reader.
So it was a book that took me a year to think about and then another year to write. The first half of it was written in the afternoons at Embridge. Clare was at school. Lesley was at the bookshop. I was alone – except for a coming and going of cats. At the half way point I paused, partly to see if what I had written was publishable, partly because term had ended and Clare was home.
She was home not just for the holidays. She was home for good. She was seventeen and had been at her boarding school since she was six. During that time Lesley and I had both of us been full-time booksellers for three-quarters of the year. For the other quarter, the school holidays, I had worked in the mornings, she in the afternoons. What was going to happen now?
For the time being at any rate Clare would be living at home: this was what we all three wanted. She had spent little enough of her life at home and we had spent little enough of ours with her; and now we would make up for it. In any case there wasn’t any very acceptable alternative.
This meant that Lesley would have to remain a permanent part-time bookseller. As for me, I still had half a book to finish; and if it had been hard enough before – hard on the others, I mean – it was going to be very much harder now. Could I for the next few months abandon the bookshop altogether? Luckily for my conscience I had no option. For I had now got what I now needed, a contract with Eyre Methuen to deliver the completed manuscript by the end of March.
So we would struggle on – but not indefinitely. Eventually we would have to reorganize our lives, and eventually we would have to decide how.
As I said in an earlier chapter, to be a good bookseller you need three things: a goal to aim for; the spur of necessity; and all your working hours. If I had been deprived of any one of these I might well have questioned whether I wanted to continue. Very happily I was deprived almost simultaneously of all three. There was no question about it: once again something had come to an end and it was time to go.
But if my personal decision that I wanted to stop being a bookseller was an inevitable one, it still left two questions unanswered. What should we do with the shop and what should I then do with myself?
The first question was the easier. Lesley wanted to go on working there. If half of every day was now to be spent at Embridge with Clare, she wanted to spend the other half in Dartmouth – and what pleasanter place than the Harbour Bookshop? So, although we did consider the idea of selling up, it was an idea we quickly abandoned. In any case we wanted the shop to continue as a small private bookshop. We wanted its customers to continue being its customers, finding the sort of books they had been accustomed to find. In other words we wanted it to remain the same shop. Of course there would be changes. In bookselling there are always changes and this is what gives it its fascination. No two years are alike and you must be for ever on the alert to seize opportunities as they come by. But in spite of change, something remains constant, the shop’s identity, its personality. It was this we wanted to continue. And we knew from observation of the book trade, from seeing what had happened to so many small private bookshops when their proprietors had retired and newcomers had taken over, that the chances of this happening were not large.
Ideally therefore we wanted someone – or perhaps a married couple – a little like us as we had been when we started, someone who would work with us for a short while and then gradually take over. The proudest and happiest moment in a shopkeeper’s life is when he adds the words ‘& Son’ to his signboard. If we could never do this, let us at least aim for the next best thing.
Thus we planned the future of the shop. As for me, I woul
d remain a bookseller until we had found someone to whom I could hand over. I would enjoy this: setting the shop on its course for what I could hope might be the next twenty years of its life, passing on what I had learned. This would make a good and satisfying end to my bookselling life.
But after that, what?
This, as I have said, is the story of someone who at birth was blessed – or was it cursed? – with two talents, his father’s head and his mother’s hands. To ‘succeed in life’ – if that is what you want to do – you need a single talent to command your undivided energies and steer you, dedicated and determined, to the mountain top. To have two talents is like trying to ride two horses: you don’t get there any quicker. In fact you are lucky to get anywhere at all. On the other hand you may be a great deal happier, for mountain tops can be cold and lonely.
It was my mother’s skill with her hands that had qualified me as a Carpenter and Joiner in the Royal Engineers, and it was my father’s aptitude for mathematics that had subsequently qualified me for a commission. My mother had got me into John Lewis and – assuming one or other of my parents must take the blame – it was my father who had got me the sack. As a bookseller I could be grateful to both of them, since not only did I have to choose books for our shelves, but I first had to make shelves for our books. And all the while at odd moments I had been making things for the house.
I have already mentioned the satisfaction I had found in designing and making furniture and equipment for Clare. And it did seem to me that, financed perhaps by those royalties I was so reluctant to accept for myself, this was something I might do for others. I might almost convince myself that it was something Clare and I might do together. ‘C. R. Milne & Daughter – Makers of Furniture for the Disabled.’ The idea appealed to me: a pleasant dream. But it was never more than a dream.
The Path Through the Trees Page 30
