by Ann Thwaite
It was there in the winter of 1915–16 that Milne wrote the first play of his that was actually performed – written partly to give the five children of his Colonel something to do and partly to amuse himself and Daphne (who took it down from his dictation and appeared in it as the Wicked Countess) ‘at a time when life was not very amusing’. The script has not survived, but it was the germ of Milne’s first children’s book, Once on a Time. That was first published in 1917, with a later edition, illustrated by Charles Robinson, appearing five years later, not long before When We Were Very Young.
Daily expecting to be sent to France to replace a Signals officer who had been killed, Milne just had time, in the evenings of his days training new recruits, to write another play. It had to be a comedy, with nothing whatsoever to do with the war. This was the strangely named Wurzel Flummery. Reduced to two acts, it would eventually be his first West End production in a bill with two short plays by his friend J. M. Barrie.
Alan Milne arrived on the Somme in the summer of 1916, at a time when, after the initial slaughter (nearly 20,000 British soldiers killed and 40,000 wounded on the first day alone), 10,000 more were killed or wounded every day that passed. The young subaltern with whom Milne had travelled out was killed within a week. It was horrific. Even in July they were fighting in a field of mud, among smashed and leafless trees and half-buried bodies. The stench and the flies were appalling. Milne ran out his first wire on 11 August. It was dangerous work trying to keep the lines of communication open.
There were few breaks in the horror. Milne longed for ‘a nice cushy wound’ to take him away from it. In the end, it was a serious case of trench fever, with a temperature soaring to 105°F, that took him back to England, to a hospital in Oxford and eventually to a convalescent home at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. It has been said that Milne had a quiet war. No one who spent any time on the Somme had a quiet war. On the Somme it was only quiet if you were dead. The bombardment and the buzzing flies, feeding on the dead, sounded in his ears for years. But he knew how lucky he was to be alive and, having been in it, have a greater right to speak out against the lunacy of war.
A medical board recommended sedentary work. Milne was still not well when he started in Intelligence, based at the War Office. The work was secret and included in 1918 a mysterious visit to France, but most of the time he was in London, living with Daphne again. Every moment now that the Army left him alone, Milne was writing plays. After Wurzel Flummery came Belinda, The Boy Comes Home, Make-Believe (for children), The Camberley Triangle and The Lucky One. These are plays that are now forgotten, though they attracted much attention and gave a good deal of pleasure at the time. All were written, astonishingly, while Milne was still in the Army.
Belinda opened on 8 April 1918. On the day it was reviewed in The Times, a leader reported the renewal of the German offensive. Four hundred thousand more men died in three weeks. Belinda survived London’s worst air raid of the war and was taken off after nine weeks. ‘It was difficult,’ Milne said, ‘to regard its ill fortune as a matter of much importance.’
Milne was finally demobilised on Valentine’s Day in 1919. He had always expected to return to Punch after the war. Daphne had dreamed that Alan would succeed Sir Owen Seaman, her godfather, as editor and be knighted like him. It was a shock that he was not wanted back as assistant editor. It was presumed he would much prefer to write plays. The fact was that to Sir Owen, Milne was, as he had always been, too liberal, too ‘radical’. Milne found it hard, some hurt would remain, but he was getting tired of London and he was optimistic that the play he was writing would be the one to make his fortune.
NOW READ ON . . .
1
PLAYWRIGHT
In 1922, the year A. A. Milne was forty and two years before the first of the famous children’s books was published, a caption to his photograph in a London newspaper carried the words: ‘Milne came to Fleet Street years ago in search of a fortune. As a dramatist, his income at times ranges from £200 to £500 a week.’ This really was a fortune in 1922; it was more in a week than most people earned in a year. That joking boast, ‘England’s premier playwright’, which Alan Milne had used when signing a letter to his brother Ken in 1917, was never exactly justified. But he was certainly one of England’s most successful, prolific and best-known playwrights for a brief period, a fact that now seems almost incredible, when so many people who know his name and love his books have no idea that he ever wrote plays.
It was in 1919 that A. A. Milne had joined the Garrick Club. The club was to give him a great deal of pleasure (a refuge, another home, particularly in the thirties) – pleasure he would reward on his death with a share of the Pooh royalties. The Garrick was the appropriate club for a playwright. The Garrick was full of actors; it was full of writers too.
Milne in 1919 was ambitious, and not just to make a lot of money. Towards the end of his life, he summed up his feelings like this:
Of all the foolish things which Dr Johnson said, the most foolish was: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ What he should have said was that a writer, having written what pleased him, was a blockhead if he did not sell it in the best market. But a writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence . . . He yearns for the immortality, even if only in the British Museum, of stiff covers.
Milne made sure that most of his plays were published in an attractive uniform edition from Chatto and Windus, in a stylish brown cloth with a well-designed label on the spine. ‘It is very jolly indeed,’ he told his novelist friend and editor Frank Swinnerton, when he saw the proofs of First Plays. Twenty of Milne’s plays survive in this form, and not only in the British Museum. But the true immortality was to come, of course, from the children’s books, a fact he would live to realise and regret.
The play that was Milne’s first real success was Mr Pim Passes By, which opened at the New Theatre in London on 5 January 1920. It was a hard audience to woo. The great successes of the 1920s were Chu Chin Chow and Hassan, glamorous and specifically exotic musical shows, which fulfilled to perfection people’s need for a good night out. In the straight theatre, the playwright’s best hope was to make people laugh. He also had to remember all sorts of practical things. Theatres were less well-disciplined places than they usually are today. ‘If yours is an 8.15 play, you may be sure that the stalls will not fill up till 8.30 and you should therefore let loose the lesser-paid members of the cast in the opening scene.’ You should be careful not to waste your jokes ‘on the first five pages of dialogue’. There would be a crackle of stiff white shirtfronts, a jingle of beaded evening bags, a shuffle of programmes as the audience settled themselves into their seats. And at the end of the evening the playwright had to remember that many people, living for instance in Chislehurst, would be catching last trains and missing the final five minutes of every play they ever saw, together, of course, with countless renderings of the national anthem.
There was a more personal problem. The Milnes were becoming worried at Daphne’s failure to conceive. They both wanted children. They had now been married for nearly six years; the war had not kept them apart for any great periods of time. There were consultations with a gynaecologist. In May 1919, Daphne went into a nursing home. ‘I fly there in all my spare minutes,’ Milne wrote to Swinnerton, adding that he was trying to write a novel called Nocturne, but kept putting it aside. The operation Daphne underwent was ‘officially’ for the removal of her appendix, but it seems likely that something else was done at the same time; perhaps the fallopian tubes were insufflated. Whatever happened, in April 1920 J. M. Barrie would be able to congratulate Milne: ‘By far the choicest lines (the best you have ever written) are about your wife and I rejoice with exceeding joy over that news.’ Daphne was expecting a child in August.
The nursery was ready. They had moved into ‘the prettiest little house in London’, Milne wrote to Frank Swinnerton in August 1919, describing 11 Mallord Street, Chelsea, SW3. It is a shor
t, quiet street just a few minutes’ walk from the King’s Road.
The house is narrow, in a terrace, and had been built not long before the war. It has three storeys and a basement and is much bigger than it looks from outside, having been designed rather cleverly round a well for light. The house was much described in the late 1920s, when hordes of journalists traipsed through it on their way to Christopher Robin’s nursery. ‘Originally Mallord Street had been done in colours influenced by the Russian Ballet, black carpets, bright cushions, very impractical as the carpets showed every bit of cigarette ash,’ a friend of Daphne’s remembered her saying. ‘She told me that the thing to be at that time was – different.’ The house had to be ‘an artistic whole, a showplace’.
Some of Milne’s own exuberant pleasure in his new house comes across in a piece he published in the Sphere on 9 August 1919, soon after they moved in. It was the first time, he said, that he had had the chance to go upstairs to bed and come downstairs to breakfast for nineteen years – in other words since he had left home for Cambridge.
Of course I have done these things in other people’s houses from time to time, but what we do in other people’s houses does not count . . . Now, however, for the first time in nineteen years, I am actually living in a house. I have (imagine my excitement) a staircase of my own.
Flats may be convenient (I thought so myself when I lived in one some days ago), but they have their disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that you are never in complete possession of the flat. You may think that the drawing-room floor (to take a case) is your very own, but it isn’t; you share it with a man below who uses it as a ceiling. If you want to dance a step-dance, you have to consider his plaster. I was always ready enough to accommodate myself in this matter to his prejudices, but I could not put up with his old-fashioned ideas about bathroom ceilings. It is very cramping to one’s style in the bath to reflect that the slightest splash may call attention to itself on the ceiling of the gentleman below. This is to share a bathroom with a stranger – an intolerable position for a proud man. Today I have a bathroom of my own for the first time in my life.
I can see already that living in a house is going to be extraordinarily healthy both for mind and body. At present I go upstairs to my bedroom (and downstairs again) about once in every half-hour. No such exercise as this was possible in a flat, and even after two or three days I feel the better for it.
But the best of a house is that it has an outside personality as well as an inside one. Any of you may find himself some day in our quiet street, and stop a moment to look at our house; at the blue door with its jolly knocker, at the little trees in their blue tubs standing within a ring of blue posts linked by chains, at the bright-coloured curtains. We have the pleasure of feeling that we are contributing something to London. We are part of a street now, and can take pride in that street.
That being ‘part of a street’ was not quite as community-minded a remark as it suggests, although Milne would become friends with some people who lived nearby. Harold Fraser-Simson, the composer, had a house across the street and belonged to the Garrick Club. W. A. Darlington and his family lived only a few minutes’ walk away. They would all see each other from time to time. Darlington described his first visit:
As I rang the bell of his house in Mallord Street I was attacked by a fit of shyness. I had admired his work so deeply and for so long that I had a sudden absurd feeling that I was a fag in the lower fourth who had been sent for by a member of the upper sixth. This vanished the moment I met him. Milne in the flesh was all I had hoped to find him, warm, friendly and amusing.
Milne had invited Darlington to call. Darlington’s review of Mr Pim Passes By was written on the night of the confirmation of his appointment as drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, a job he was to hold for the rest of his career. The Milnes were not callers. ‘We don’t call very well,’ Milne said. ‘My fault, I suppose. I hate knowing people for geographical reasons.’ Their neighbours felt the same. When the Milnes were burgled, the people next door sent a note of sympathy. Even then they did not speak to each other. ‘Suburban chumminess’ never appealed to Milne. Already he felt it necessary to protect his privacy. But he was not always consistent. Milne once said to Swinnerton: ‘Does any person think so consecutively and business-likely as novelists make them think?’ Real people are never as consistent as the characters in fiction. Milne could be said, at some points, to have been someone who kept himself to himself. On other days, in other moods, he would welcome the warm curiosity, the genuine interest of a fellow human being.
The one generalisation which always does seem to be true of Milne – unfashionable and indeed repugnant as some people find it – can best be left in Frank Swinnerton’s own words, the words of someone who knew him really well. ‘He loves goodness . . . He stands for virtue.’ He had been brought up to believe that, without virtue, nothing is worth anything. This does not mean, of course, that he always himself did the right thing but rather that he had a strong moral sense. Swinnerton saw this as a problem for Milne professionally. ‘He combined with a gift for persiflage the sternness of a Covenanter, which I think restricted the range of his dramatic performance. Any writer of imaginative work who cannot give the Devil his due . . . becomes moral-bound. He dare not let sinners have a flutter.’ ‘Rectitude is fatal to humour,’ Graham Greene would say, hitting Milne when he was already down, in the 1930s. The redeeming fact was that Milne’s admiration was for real goodness, not for those Victorian virtues, or indeed ‘the prevailing social codes’ which so often pass as such. But it would, as we shall see, earn him some dislike. Those who stand for goodness risk being called prudish, priggish and proud. ‘I felt uncomfortable in his company,’ one of his publishers told me. ‘Those who disagree with him complain of his rigidity in argument and severity in outlook,’ Swinnerton said, adding, ‘That is not my experience. I have always found him overflowing with good spirits.’
Alan Milne’s parents, who had now sold their school and retired, were living in the war years and just after in a house called St Andrews at Burgess Hill in Sussex. One of Alan’s nieces, Angela, remembered: ‘To a child from suburbia, St Andrews was heaven.’ It was ‘a compact Victorian country house, brick, gabled, with a squat tower’, standing in its own grounds. There was Pears’ soap in the bathroom, a grandfather clock in the hall, stone lions and passion-flowers at the front door. Maria by now was ailing, moving only slowly round the house, with a stick, a shawl and a lace cap. She taught her grandchildren a moral verse, as she must have taught her own children, thirty years before.
For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy or there is none.
If there is one, try and find it;
If there isn’t one, never mind it.
‘J. V. Milne was more sprightly, a small man (he got smaller with age) with a neat white beard and a panama hat. He wore pince-nez and showed his Scottishness by pronouncing “grass” with a short “a” . . . He would stroll round the garden (hands behind back) with us, telling us useful and funny things.’ The garden was full of frogs and apples. The house often resounded to ‘Trumpeter, what are you trumpeting now?’ on the gramophone and to Harry Lauder singing ‘I Love a Lassie’.
The elderly Milnes’ great source of pride and pleasure was, of course, A. A. Milne’s rise to fame and fortune. Alan had given his father a subscription to the General Press Cutting Association Ltd, as early as 1910, and J. V. stuck the cuttings neatly into a stout black notebook. Before long there would be productions of Milne plays all over the place in little theatres and community playhouses. In the west of England, two boys who would grow up to be Charles Causley, the poet, and J. C. Trewin, the drama critic, would both remember Mr Pim Passes By as their first happy experience of the theatre.
It ran in London for 246 performances and opened in New York for another successful run on 28 February 1921. For the rest of Milne’s life it would continue to make him money. Milne had had a sort of fame for
years as a Punch humorist. Now the morning post increased dramatically. He was much in demand. Photographers wrote wanting to photograph him. ‘Very handsome, long-headed, keen-faced’, as Swinnerton described him, he looks out from dozens of photographs taken in the 1920s.
Milne himself was writing his novel based on the play. ‘I know very little about the writing of novels – or the writing of plays for that matter – but I hope I am learning. And, anyway, it is much more fun trying to do things which you can’t quite do than doing them when you can.’ The novel, Mr Pim, included most of the dialogue from the play, but it was ‘a real book’, Milne said, ‘and not just the dialogue with “he said” or “she said” tacked on.’ The idea had not been Milne’s own, but it worked extremely well.
Milne had already finished another novel, a detective story, The Red House Mystery, though it would not be published until 1922, after Mr Pim. He said, modestly, much later: ‘The result would have passed unnoticed in these days when so many good writers are writing so many good detective stories, but in those days there was not so much competition.’ It was actually written just before the publication of Agatha Christie’s first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles (a book which, thirty years later, he would call ‘the model detective story’) and published a year before Dorothy Sayers’s first novel. In an introduction to a later edition of The Red House Mystery Milne comments on his agents’ lack of enthusiasm for the new project. He was, after all, typecast as a humorist. But it was in Milne’s nature, and demonstrated throughout his career, to refuse to be typecast. It was always more interesting to try something new. ‘It has been my good fortune as a writer that what I have wanted to write has for the most part proved to be saleable. It has been my misfortune as a businessman that, when it has proved to be extremely saleable, then I have not wanted to write it any more.’ This would be true in turn of humorous essays, detective stories and children’s books.
