I doubt if I could have turned it into reality. Meanwhile there was my book to be finished.
I had spent a year not writing it, a year writing it and then eight months helping it into print. It was published in November 1974. And that, I thought, was that. My venture into authorship was at an end. Back for a while to the retail side of the trade; and then perhaps on to the carpenter’s bench.
But it didn’t happen like that.
The first part of The Enchanted Places was concerned mainly with the Sussex countryside. The second part was concerned with my parents and especially with my father. In other words I was writing about a writer. Many sons follow their fathers; but mine had never wanted this and I had wanted it only at odd moments in my life. He had feared that, whatever I wrote, comparisons would be made and one of us judged less good than the other. Jealous by nature – as I was too – more than anything he hated rivalry. Yet here I was, not just writing a book but writing one which, whether I liked it or not, was going to be put alongside the Pooh books and tested by its ability to hold its own in such company. Not only that but one of my purposes was to show the extent to which the son was a product of his parents – thus tacitly inviting the all too inevitable comparison.
Clearly if the general verdict had been that, though doubtless there were many things I had inherited from my father, an ability to write was not one of them, that would have been that. ‘I would have done what I had initially set out to do but not what I had later privately hoped to do. Sad, but not altogether surprising.
An autobiography is quite unlike any other form of literature. Not only is it a public apologia pro vita sua but during the actual writing of it each session at one’s typewriter is like a session on the analyst’s couch. Consequently its effect on the writer is considerable. In my case the writing and its reception combined to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin, and to my surprise and pleasure I found myself standing beside them in the sunshine able to look them both in the eye.
‘Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’ cried Tweedledee to Alice seeing the Red King asleep beneath a tree. That for so long and for so many people was what I had been. And now at last I could feel that I was myself. If I had any lingering sorrow over what had happened on my father’s death it was a pleasing thought that, out of the flames of the bonfire that had destroyed what was left of him, had been born something that was in another sense his too. And at that moment, whether he liked it or not – and I hoped that he would have liked it – the words ‘& Son’ had been nailed to his signboard.
I have said that a professional bookseller needs all his working hours. Happily a professional writer does not. If mornings only were all I could now manage, mornings only would be enough. So here was something I could do and here was the moment to start doing it. Here was a challenge and both the encouragement and the opportunity to accept it. The current served. The tide was at the flood. I took it.
I doubt if it leads me on to fortune and luckily it doesn’t need to; for I have accepted my namesake’s offer of help. I had to accept it for Clare’s sake, of course. But perhaps I might need to accept it for my sake and for Lesley’s as well. For although one might measure the ability of a bookseller by what he earns, this has never been the measure of a writer.
So each morning I work at the Harbour Bookshop – not on the ground floor among the books, not on the first floor in our Gift Gallery, not (thank goodness) on the second floor where the invoices are sorted and the accounts paid, but, up again, up a very narrow flight of stairs, to the attic beneath the roof.
It is still as unlovely as it was when I described it in The Enchanted Places, but at least it now has a proper light and an electric fire. Through the little window (which still lets in the rain) I can see the sky, and if it is blue and inviting, then, in the afternoon, I shall be happy to accept its invitation. Up again, up, up, up, carrying Clare this time, to the ‘Top’ that isn’t a top, to where the bluebells grow and the longhorn moths fly, to where I have planted my trees and once intended to build a hut.
Of course the hut has not yet been built. In fact I am not even sure now that I want to build it. For it will mean putting a wall between me and the rocks at my back and a roof between me and the sky overhead. And who wants that on an afternoon in late autumn when there is still a bit of heat in the sun and the wind is warm and caressing?
Here we come, Clare and I. It is a tiring climb with one set of muscles having to do the work of two, and I am grateful that she is little and light. And here we sit and dream and perhaps I do this and that among my trees. There is much to be done, but there is no hurry. I can do a bit more another day. Small and slow is our world, and luckily this is how we like it.
Just below our terrace the ground drops away steeply. Here there is a patch of gorse seedlings – over a thousand, I should guess. There is much around me that I can’t explain, but this I can. We had a fire here the summer before last – that very dry summer of 1976. It had been our last surviving area of original jungle, a tangle of furze and bramble and blackthorn. Then one evening it all went up in flames and we returned from an afternoon on the river to find a landscape transformed, to see a boundary wall we had never seen before and contours we had only been able to guess at, to see black stumps jutting out of black earth.
It is not only the wise bookseller who seizes his opportunities: it is all nature. Gorse seeds lie dormant in the soil waiting for the intense heat that is necessary for their germination. And so the flames of the fire that had destroyed what was left of their parents had brought life, phoenix-like, to a new generation. This was their moment – and mine too. For within hours the fire had done what had daunted me for years; and I set to work with mattock and spade to cut the path I had always been meaning to cut, another path to the top.
Up here we are now a little more exposed than we were: the bushes that had sheltered us from the south west are gone; and a chill puff of wind comes across the valley warning us that the afternoon is nearly over. The sun is only a fraction of an inch above the horizon. Sunset comes early to those who live in a valley, but the higher slopes remain aglow and sunlight shines on the herring gulls as they fly overhead.
Lesley will be walking home from the shop. Shall we go and meet her?
If she leaves at half past five and if the journey takes her fifty minutes (because she may stop to pick blackberries or look for mushrooms on the way) and if we want to meet her somewhere about the end of the beech avenue, what time should we leave? There’s a mathematical problem for you! I ought to be able to solve it: I was a mathematician once, or so I boast. But I’m getting rusty: I’d need pencil and paper and no interruptions; and by the time I’d worked it out we’d be too late. So perhaps it would be wise to start now; then we needn’t hurry. Which is it to be: tricycle or wheelchair?
I grip Clare round her waist and she puts her arms around my neck and I hoist her up. Comfortable? And away we go, slowly because the path is a little slippery, down through the trees.
.
Endnotes
1. The Royal Engineers prides itself on being different from the Infantry. Where the Infantry calls its troops to attention with the word ‘’Shun!’ Sappers use the word in full: ‘At . . . ten . . . shun!’ And where the Infantry divides its Companies into Platoons and its Platoons into Sections, we divided ours into Sections and Sub-sections. I say ‘divided’ because at some time during my military career – I forget exactly when – we had to surrender this particular difference. In this and the following chapters I use the word that was current at the time – in as far as I can recall which it was – I don’t think it will cause confusion. As an officer I began by commanding a Section, later commanded a Platoon. It was not promotion – merely a change of name.
2. The first three letters, pronounced ‘pie’, stood for Persia and Iraq.
3. Not to be confused with that other ‘D’ Day, which took place nearly a year later – the landing
in Northern France.
4. To you and to Lesley my warmest affection and best wishes on your engagement announced on 17 April.
5. The Ordnance Survey today spells it ‘Sprigs Holly’. I rather think that in 1948 it was spelt ‘Sprigs Alley’. However, I prefer the spelling I recorded in my diary.
6. It was not of course the famous Mont Blanc but a Petit Mont Blanc in Haute Savoie, one that we had discovered on our honeymoon.
7. John Wilson of Bumpus. If it is wondered how we were able to enlist as sponsors two of the most eminent booksellers in the country, the explanation is that my father wrote to them. These were the last two letters he was to write on my behalf. For the past twelve years he had been watching, helping where help was wanted, occasionally very gently urging, and on the whole, I think approving. And I was conscious of his presence in the background, not always willing to take him into my confidence, but grateful for his help when it came. When we left for Devon the last frail tie that bound me to him was broken. My pilot had turned back and I was on my own.
8. An explanation of the workings of the Book Trade that included every exception to every statement made would require a whole book to itself. What follows is only the briefest summary.
9. A copy where? In the window. A copy of Darwin and the ‘Beagle,’ of course.
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Christopher Milne
Christopher Robin Milne was the son of author A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne and Dorothy de Selincourt. As a young child, he was the basis of the character Christopher Robin in his father’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in two books of poems.
Christopher Milne was a shy boy and did not like the attention that he received from the public because of his father’s success with the Pooh books. In 1974, Milne decided to publish the first of three autobiographical books. The Enchanted Places gave an account of his childhood and of the problems that he had encountered because of the Pooh books.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements and thanks are due to the estate of Robert Frost for permission to reproduce The Road Not Taken from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem and published by Jonathan Cape Ltd.
First published in 1979 by Methuen
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ISBN 978-1-4472-6986-1
Copyright © Christopher Milne, 1979
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The Path Through the Trees Page 31
