Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  A. A. Milne had an enviable confidence in his own activities. His niece, Angela, remembered Milne telling her ‘that he had a superiority complex; not boasting, or confessing, simply stating a fact. I am sure it was true,’ she said. ‘All Milnes have been brought up to believe that never mind about money . . . it’s BRAINS THAT COUNT.’ It would be poor Pooh’s lack of brain that would cause most of his problems and give Christopher Robin (and the listening child) that delightful feeling of superiority that Milne enjoyed so much of the time, even if, occasionally, it was accompanied by intolerance and impatience. Friends and acquaintances could find this very difficult, though he often managed to cloak it with a becoming, self-mocking modesty. With his strong conviction of his own worth, there went a sad inability to accept criticism. W. A. Darlington put it like this:

  Alan and I spent most of our time together on various golf courses, where we had, or soon acquired, a number of mutual friends. It was from these that I learned the disconcerting fact that, devoted to Alan as they were, they all found him on occasion very difficult to deal with. The trouble was, I was told, that he simply could not take any form of adverse criticism. ‘Say the wrong thing to him,’ I was warned, ‘and he freezes stone cold and won’t speak to you for the rest of the day.’

  It is not an uncommon trait in the creative artist to desire praise and shrink from censure, but Alan evidently had it to an abnormal degree. The violence of his reaction against even a hint of blame had in it something pathological, as if he were short of a skin.

  Was it perhaps that he had never needed in his glowing cherished childhood to grow any form of protective coating? Long ago there was the blow of a first bad Westminster report for the boy who had spent his early years as the headmaster’s beloved youngest son, the child so lapped in love and admiration that he thought he could do anything. Milne had, indeed, as many writers have, an intense need for praise. He once wrote about ‘that sense of inspiration and power that only comes upon me after violent praise’. And, on another occasion, when asked by an interviewer whether Daphne, so often at this period still involved in taking his dictation, ever criticised what he had written at the end of the day, he said, ‘No, she just praises . . . Praise is what an author really wants when he is actually writing.’ It was, in fact, what he always wanted.

  2

  THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

  In the summer of 1920 Daphne Milne gave birth to their first and only son in the house in Chelsea. It was not an easy birth. Daphne told a friend long afterwards about it. ‘It’s difficult to believe,’ the friend said to me, ‘but until she was actually giving birth, she had no idea of the mechanics of it. It came as a thoroughly traumatising shock and made her absolutely determined never to repeat the performance.’ It is not so difficult to believe. In Milne’s novel Two People, the wife says her mother had told her absolutely nothing before she was married – nothing about anything. Not many young women had yet read Married Love by Marie Stopes, published only two years earlier.

  It seems likely, from clues in his fiction, that Alan Milne was the traditional anguished husband, pacing up and down through the hours of labour, in a room not far away, pulling on his pipe. ‘Because his son had been so long in coming, he had been more than usually frightened,’ Milne wrote in a late short story. ‘He looked at his son, and felt as other husbands have felt looking at their first-born, “All that for this; so small, so ugly; and yet what a burden to have borne.”’ Another of his characters says, ‘When my boy was born, we lived in two rooms. Mary was in one; I was in the other.’ He heard the birth. ‘It was not for me to say how many children we should have.’ ‘“I can’t bear to think of your being frightened and ill and so terribly hurt,” he cried out, in sudden shame of himself, of his sex, of all that women have suffered from men.’ And in his own voice, A. A. Milne said clearly: ‘To me, the miracle of Human Birth is more worthy of awe than the miracle of Virgin Birth . . . What a piece of work is a man!’

  Christopher Robin Milne was born on 21 August 1920 and so registered, but he was to be known immediately as Billy and later Moon – from his own pronunciation of Milne. On the 22nd, his father wrote to Frank Swinnerton:

  A tremendous event has happened, unrecked of by the minor novelist. THERE IS A JUNIOR MILNE! This is a creation of my wife’s (Daff – short for Daphne or, as some say, Daffodil) and before it the trumpery creations of the aforesaid minor novelists pale their ineffectual fires. (Shakespeare, or one of those people.) Locally this creation is known as Billy.

  Sir, if you never grovelled before, grovel now in the presence of this miracle. When women can do these things, why do we go on writing, you and I? (You observe that I put us both on one level, but I am in a generous mood this evening.) Why do we continue to call ourselves lords of creation when we so obviously are not? Why – but I must not overtax your brain!

  Salute Chatto for me, slap Windus on the back. Tell them to mark August 21st in letters of blood on their calendars. And believe me to be, Sir,

  Your mental superior

  A. A. Milne

  who shines equally as Husband, Father, Citizen and Author.

  He wrote rather more soberly a few days later to Biddie Warren, a friend of his parents, in reply to her congratulations: ‘Daff and Billy (to be Christopher Robin but called Billy) are both extremely well. He weighed ten pounds or so the Nurse said, but I suspect that Nurses are rather like fishermen, and he has lots of curly brown hair, and not a bad little face for his age. We did rather want a Rosemary, but I expect we shall be just as happy with this gentleman.’ J. M. Barrie wrote: ‘All my heartiest congratulations to you both, or strictly speaking to the three of you. May Billy be an everlasting joy to you. From what you say I gather he is already a marvel, but I shall decide about this for myself when I see him, which I hope will be soon.’

  There has grown up a definite idea, encouraged by Milne’s own need to distance himself from his children’s books, that A. A. Milne was not particularly interested in children or good with them. He wrote in his autobiography in 1939, at a time when he most wanted to remind his readers that he was a writer, not just a children’s writer: ‘I am not inordinately fond of or interested in children; their appeal to me is a physical appeal such as the young of other animals make. I have 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 their minds the understanding is based on the observation, casual enough and mostly unconscious, which I give to people generally: on memories of my own childhood: and on the imagination which every writer must bring to the memory and observation.’ He had both remembered and observed, he said, ‘the uncharming part of a child’s nature: the egotism and the heartlessness’.

  The idea of the children’s writer who does not like children is a paradox that seems to lodge in people’s minds – minds that are nowadays often rather suspicious of Lewis Carroll’s delight in little girls. Peter Green gave wide circulation to the idea that Milne was uneasy with children in his biography of Kenneth Grahame, though all the evidence is that Milne did not share Grahame’s habit of ignoring them. People often say: ‘Oh, A. A. Milne? He didn’t like children, did he?’ It is the thing they think they ‘know’ about him. Christopher Milne’s own memoir of his childhood is presumably largely responsible. He wrote: ‘Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t – not with children, that is. Later on it was different, very different. But I am thinking of nursery days.’

  It is certainly difficult to dispute the evidence of the child himself. But all the letters of those nursery years suggest that Milne, if not in the simplest sense ‘good with children’, was always intensely interested in his son and not just far more observant (a natural corollary of the fact of being a writer who had always drawn on the world around him), but much more involved in his son’s life than the great majority of fathers of the period.

/>   There is hardly a letter of Milne’s surviving from his son’s childhood which does not mention the child, and very often he sent photographs as well. (‘Which one is Billy?’ asked J. M. Barrie, looking at two unidentified babies in October 1921. ‘I’ll come and find out. Don’t tell me.’) The reviews of Christopher’s autobiography all picked up the same impression as the Daily Mail: ‘The Christopher Robin of the stories scarcely knew the busy writer who was his father.’ That was what Christopher himself thought, looking back fifty years later: ‘If I cannot say that I loved my parents, it is only because, in those early days, I just didn’t know them well enough.’ Christopher may not think he knew his father, but his father certainly knew him. From the very beginning the child dominated the household. Inviting Edward Marsh to lunch to meet him (and ‘that great actress Athene Seyler’), Milne names the time as one-thirty. ‘It has to be 1.30, because Billy insists on his lunch at 1.’ He was then two months old. The following June J. V. Milne, the child’s grandfather, wrote to a friend: ‘Alan says he spends too much time with Billy, seeing all the work before him.’

  Long before Christopher was born, there is plenty of evidence that Milne, unlike Daphne, really knew about babies. There was a child-centred series in Punch called ‘The Heir’, at the time of the birth of his brother Ken’s first son, which again shows Milne in his most characteristic attitude to children: fascinated but totally unsentimental.

  Dahlia gushes about her infant. He is the living image of his father: ‘I looked closely at Archie and then at the baby. “I should always know them apart,” I said at last.’ Milne shows a confident superiority when Samuel, a godfather, who knows nothing about children, bestows an enormous teddy on his tiny godson, saying ‘I’ve been calling it Duncan on the train, but of course he will want to choose his own name for it.’ He expects a ridiculous amount from the child. ‘Is he tall for his age?’ he asks. ‘Samuel, pull yourself together. He isn’t tall at all; if he is anything he is long but how long only those can say who have seen him in his bath. You do realise that he is only a month old?’ ‘My dear old boy, of course . . . I suppose he isn’t even toddling?’ ‘No, no,’ Milne says, ‘Not actually toddling.’

  ‘We did rather want a Rosemary,’ Milne said in that early letter. One of his son’s earliest memories would be of a time when he was still small enough to be in a pram. Relaxing outside a grocer’s shop in Chelsea, he heard someone say, ‘Oh what a pretty little girl!’ Like his father before him, he would have to wait a long time for his first haircut. His long hair reminded his mother of the girl she’d wanted and his father of the boy he himself had been. Christopher Milne would remember: ‘I had long hair at a time when boys didn’t have long hair . . . I used to wear girlish clothes, too, smocks and things. And in my very earliest dreams I even used to dream I was a girl.’ The child’s image was ‘surely Daff, not Alan’, one of his cousins commented. Milne himself, looking at the long-haired child in the pretty clothes, must have remembered his own childish feelings of ‘battling against the wrong make-up’. Perhaps he thought if it hadn’t done him much harm (and indeed, as he suggested, had made him the sort of person he was, the sort of writer he was) then it would not do Billy much harm either.

  Alan had felt himself bold and brave under his girlish disguise. His son, on the other hand, suggests image and reality were more closely related in his case. There was not much battling going on. He was content to be gentle, shy and quiet. W. A. Darlington remembers ‘a nice little boy . . . being brought up on rather soft and effeminate lines’. His own daughter, Anne, eight months or so older, a tougher character, became the boy’s closest friend. They were ‘devoted and almost inseparable – Anne with a slight touch about her of the elder sister.’ And Alan and Daphne were equally devoted to Anne: ‘Anne was and remained to her death the Rosemary that I wasn’t,’ Christopher Milne would write.

  At least with a boy there is the chance to dream of him playing cricket for England. Years before, Milne had said that ‘the important thing in christening a future first-class cricketer is to get the initials right’. Christopher Robin was, in fact, never christened, but his names were undoubtedly something to do with having the right sort of initials. ‘What could be better than W. G. as a nickname for Grace? But if W. G.’s initials had been Z. Z. where would you have been?’ Years later Milne wrote:

  When Christopher Robin was born, he had to have a name. We had already decided to call him something else and later on he decided to call himself something still else, so that the two names for which we were now looking were to be no more than an excuse for giving him two initials for use in later life. I had decided on two initials rather than one or none, because I wanted him to play cricket for England, like W. G. Grace and C. B. Fry, and if he was to play as an amateur, two initials would give him a more hopeful appearance on the score-card. A father has to think of these things. So, one of us liking the name Christopher, and the other maintaining that Robin was both pleasing and unusual, we decided that as C. R. Milne he should be encouraged to make his name in the sporting world.

  There was no idea yet, of course, that it would be his father who would make his name for him, by using those names which he never used himself and which seemed to have so little to do with him – so that there would come a time when, not C. R. Milne, but Christopher Robin, could be described as one of the ‘five most famous children in the world’. Long afterwards the child himself would write of the fairy who must have pronounced over his cradle ‘one of those cryptic spells that fairies had always been good at: “And his name shall be famous throughout the world.” It was one of those spells that sound like a blessing but turn out to be more like a curse.’

  In the meantime, his father pondered on the fact that there were still four years to go before Billy could possibly have his first cricket lesson, and got on with his next play. This stage of Milne’s life would undoubtedly become tedious to the reader if all sixteen of A. A. Milne’s plays, short and long, which were produced in the 1920s, were examined in detail. But there were landmarks and highlights which cannot be ignored. There were recurrent excitements and recurrent disappointments. ‘Plays always go well on a first night,’ Milne would suggest in his novel Two People, ‘and then the critics tell you why you didn’t really enjoy it as much as you thought you did, and how much nicer it would have been if someone else had written quite a different one.’

  In 1921 they were able to leave Billy and enjoy a month in Italy without worrying, for they now had the perfect nurse for him – Olive Rand – whom her charge would always call ‘Nou’, but who would become known to the world as Alice, because of a happy rhyme with Palace. (‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace / Christopher Robin went down with Alice . . .’) ‘The English mother is fortunate,’ said Daphne Milne in an interview in New York in 1931, forgetting all the English mothers who weren’t. ‘The English mother is fortunate in being able to place such full confidence in her children’s nurse. Often the trusted and beloved “Nanny” remains in the employ of the family for years . . . She is especially trained for her work, which she regards as a real profession, worthy of her pride and deepest interest.’

  Olive Rand would remain with the Milnes until Christopher went to boarding school in 1930. The two of them lived mainly on the top floor of the house in Mallord Street, in the adjoining day and night nurseries. Christopher said: ‘So much were we together that Nanny became almost a part of me . . . Other people hovered round the edges, but they meant little. My total loyalty was to her.’ He said his father’s picture of her in ‘Buckingham Palace’ was entirely inaccurate. She was not the sort of person who would brush off a child’s question with a meaningless ‘Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea’. And writing of ‘Disobedience’, the ‘James James Morrison Morrison’ poem, Christopher Milne maintained that, although he could not be sure how he felt about anything at the age of three, ‘I can only guess that, though I might not have missed my mother, and would certainly not have
missed my father, I would have missed Nanny – most desolately.’

  Olive Rand was no ordinary nanny; she had had a far more challenging experience than most. She had been nanny to the Chilean ambassador’s children in London and had travelled widely with them. Indeed, in 1914 they had been stranded in France for a while at the beginning of the war and she had then gone with them to America and Chile. She spoke to the Sunday Times about A. A. Milne in 1965, with the air of one who had been asked the questions many times before but was still not tired of the subject: ‘He never scorned Christopher Robin’s fancies and if the boy wanted his nursery pets to be included in conversations and games, Mr Milne always entered into the spirit of the thing and spoke to the toys as if they were real people.’ Olive Rand had a fiancé who worked as a Post Office engineer after his discharge from the Army and who kept hoping Olive would leave Christopher and get married, but she could not bring herself to leave the child until he no longer had need of her.