by Ann Thwaite
By the summer of 1921 A. A. Milne had finished two plays, The Truth about Blayds and The Dover Road, which were to become, like Mr Pim Passes By, not only successes in London and New York, but staples of amateur dramatic societies and repertory companies all over the world. The success of his plays in that heyday of amateur dramatics was such that he could tell John Drinkwater in 1924 that he was making £2,000 a year from amateur rights alone. ‘He is going ahead at a tremendous rate,’ his father said on 6 June. If one wonders what he did with the rather staggering results of his popular success, it is obvious that he realised, like any writer, that it could not last. He lived well – but most of his money he invested against an uncertain future.
On 26 June, J. V. Milne wrote again and told his friend that the child’s aunt reported Billy to be adorable, which suggests that his grandparents had not been seeing much of him, if indeed they had seen him at all. In June, Alan promised to motor down in August, but it was September before they got there, though it was hardly a difficult journey. Billy was thirteen months old. ‘So his grandmother saw him to her great happiness.’ She was already ‘deaf, too blind to read or work, and not able to cross the room without a stick.’ She died not long afterwards.
It is not unreasonable to imagine that the child’s teddy bear (a present from Harrods on his first birthday the month before) made the journey to Burgess Hill too, in September 1921. He was not yet called Winnie-the-Pooh, but he was already a palpable presence in the household as Christopher Robin tried out his first words. He managed an impressive ‘Owdyerdo’ at eighteen months, when his father said he was ‘in tremendous form now, just walking and talking and trying to do both without stopping all day’. His bear was simply Bear or Teddy or more grandly, to his elders, Edward Bear. ‘A row of teddy-bears sitting in a toy-shop, all one size, all one price. Yet how different each is from the next. Some look stand-offish, some look loveable. And one in particular, the one over there, has a specially endearing expression. Yes, that’s the one we would like, please.’ So Christopher Milne in his autobiography, imagining the purchasing of Winnie-the-Pooh. What he does not admit is that the bear we know, the bear who would become familiar to millions from E. H. Shepard’s drawings, is not really his bear at all, but another bear from an earlier nursery, of quite different shape and already with a pronounced character of his own: Graham Shepard’s Growler.
Growler was, according to Shepard, ‘a magnificent bear. I have never seen his like.’ In 1915, when Shepard had been at home and the family away, he had written to his son, seven-year-old Graham: ‘Growler and Puck have been an awful nuisance; they talk and jabber all night.’ Puck was a mere ‘cork-filled gnome’ and not part of our story, but it is obvious that Growler was a real character and would play an important part in the forming of our image of Winnie-the-Pooh.
In the same month, September 1921, the Milne family paid the first of several visits to a thatched cottage called the Decoy at Poling, near Arundel and Littlehampton in Sussex. It was at the Decoy that Christopher Robin fed the swan on the lake and called him Pooh. ‘This is a very fine name for a swan, because if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying “Pooh!” to show how little you wanted him.’ There were cows who came down to drink at this lake and Milne couldn’t help thinking: ‘Moo rhymes with Pooh! Surely there is a bit of poetry to be got out of that . . .’ And there would eventually be one poem with a swan and another with cows, but with neither a Moo nor a Pooh in either of them, because that is the way it often happens with poems.
In July 1922, they stayed for a month with a Mrs Hobbs in Woolacombe Bay in Devon. This was the place, Christopher says, where he first encountered ‘sand-between-the-toes’, though, at not yet two, he was still at the age for eating it and really too small for clutching sixpences tight. (A more likely venue for that poem would be Whitesand Bay near Plas Brondanw in Wales, where they were the following summer, when the poem was written.) Swinnerton wrote to Woolacombe: ‘If the weather where you are has been anything like the weather I have been having on Arnold Bennett’s yacht, I am sorry for you. On the other hand, if it has kept you indoors to write more plays, it has done good work, and in that case only Billy and his mother are to be sympathised with.’ Milne replied to ‘beloved Swin’: ‘We’ve had three fine days and spend most of our time changing our clothes. But we enjoy ourselves and Billy and Daff are blooming. So am I. And also very slack. When I return to London, I shall WORK; a constant stream of GREAT PLAYS and POWERFUL NOVELS will flow from my pen.’ Writing to Swinnerton, Milne was always at his most self-mockingly boastful.
The Milnes would soon be looking for a country place of their own. Kenneth Grahame offered Boham’s at Blewbury in Berkshire, which he was leaving in the anguished aftermath of his son’s death on the Oxford railway line. But Milne wanted to buy, not rent, and in the meantime the Decoy would do.
Milne had been in contact with Grahame because of Curtis Brown’s suggestion that he should dramatise The Wind in the Willows. The play was not produced until 1929 – after Milne’s own success with his children’s books – but it was as early as 1921 that Milne responded to his agent’s suggestion. Curtis Brown had been trying to get managements interested in it earlier, but had reactions to the idea very much like that of the publishers themselves when the book was first written. When they finally accepted it, Methuen had not even had enough faith in the book to pay a guaranteed advance. But in spite of the famous Times Literary Supplement review (‘As a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible’) and Arthur Ransome’s in the Bookman (‘If we judge the book by its aim, it is a failure, like a speech to Hottentots made in Chinese’), it is difficult to believe, from the list of editions that followed, that The Wind in the Willows was as much in need of Milne’s one-man crusade to publicise it as he always suggested. Already in 1921, thirteen years after its first publication, it had gone into eleven editions. Milne was always pressing it on his friends. In 1919 he wrote of The Wind in the Willows as ‘a book which should be a classic, but is not’.
Usually I speak about it at my first meeting with a stranger. It is my opening remark, just as yours is something futile about the weather. If I don’t get it in at the beginning, I squeeze it in at the end. The stranger has got to have it some time. Should I ever find myself in the dock, and one never knows, my answer to the question whether I had anything to say, would be, ‘Well, my lord, if I might just recommend a book to the jury before leaving . . .’
and much later, in an introduction to a new edition, Milne added:
One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character . . . When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself.
Some people would come to feel the same way about Winnie-the-Pooh. There is no doubt at all, though the links are subtle, that The Wind in the Willows lies behind Winnie-the-Pooh and that, without it, Milne’s book might well not have been written. Milne, like Grahame, remembered his childhood as the great, good time. ‘The queer thing is,’ said Grahame, ‘I can remember everything I felt then. The part of my brain I used from four till seven can never have altered.’ Coming back to the Thames Valley wakened every recollection for Grahame. Milne had no such clearly defined childhood playground to return to, but it was all there inside his head. E. H. Shepard would report that one of the first questions Milne asked him was indeed whether he had read The Wind in the Willows. This was long before he illustrated it (not until 1931) and made the link between Grahame and Milne seem ever closer. ‘I realised even then,’ Shepard said, ‘what a very great influence it had been on him. It all seemed to come from that, and he was quite fr
ank about it. He was an honest bloke; he had an admiration for the book.’ No wonder that when Curtis Brown wrote to him with the proposal that he should dramatise it, Milne responded like this on 15 November 1921:
The Wind in the Willows – now you’re talking! If Kenneth Grahame is willing, and if you feel pretty sure that you can find the right manager for it (as I think you should be able to), I will do it. And I shall love doing it. In fact, as soon as I got your letter, I began sketching it out, and I think I see how it can be done. I think it should be a children’s play, with a little incidental music.
* * *
Alan Milne would tell his brother Ken that he had become ‘sick of and entirely uninterested in politics’ since the war. That was certainly true of party politics but he continued to hold his strong pacifist convictions and to follow the international news closely, reading both The Times and the more left-wing Daily News at this period. As a pacifist who had experienced the Somme, Milne was even more deeply concerned than most that that should indeed have been the war to end all wars. It was bitter to realise already how unlikely that was to be so. In September 1922, Lloyd George nearly brought the country to war with Turkey. It was when, having encouraged the Greeks to invade Turkey (after the nationalist revolt which threatened to upset the allied post-war settlement), Lloyd George saw the Turks rout the Greeks and move right up to the barbed wire of the British positions at Chanak in the Neutral Zone. There was not only a threat to navigation in the Straits but, some said, a debt owed to the British war dead at Gallipoli. This chauvinistic suggestion was ridiculed by A. A. Milne in the Daily News on 4 October 1922 in an article which impressed E. M. Forster:
They have almost brought it off, the War to End Peace, for which they have been striving for three years. What an incredible joke! A war ‘to defend the freedom of the Straits and the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli’, says Punch magnificently. Of course you can think of it like that, and it sounds quite dignified and natural. But you may also think, as I do, of those five or ten or twenty men, our chosen statesmen, sitting round a table; the same old statesmen; each with his war memories thick upon him; each knowing his own utter incompetence to maintain a war or to end a war . . .
Forster, taking up Milne’s title, ‘Another Little War’, wrote five days later:
Sir, – Mr A. A. Milne’s brilliant article deserves special thanks for its scathing analysis of ‘the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli’. Our rulers knew that their policy would not be popular, and in the hope of stampeding us into it they permitted this vile appeal – the viler because the sentiment that it tries to pervert is a noble one and purifies the life of a nation when directed rightly. The bodies of the young men who are buried out there have no quarrel with one another now, no part in our quarrels or interest in our patronage, no craving for holocausts of more young men. Anyone who has himself entered, however feebly, into the life of the spirit, can realise this.
It is only the elderly ghouls of Whitehall who exhume the dead for the purpose of party propaganda and employ them as a bait to catch the living.
Forster and Milne never met, but this warm support from the distinguished writer must have returned to Milne’s mind two years later when A Passage to India was published. It is tempting to imagine that he might have felt he could really have written a powerful novel himself, if only he had had some wider experiences, if only he had been a different person.
Christopher Milne said that there were really very few things his parents enjoyed doing together. They had been married for ten years and certainly Alan had given up hope that Daphne would become a golfer. She had had lessons but she had never really taken to it. Harvey Nichols and Harrods were the playgrounds she preferred. What she enjoyed most of all was something Alan hated – having the decorators in and changing the appearance of a room. Alan would retreat to his study – a small dark room at the back of the house – and try to ignore the upheaval and the smell of paint. He would make all the right appreciative noises when it was safe to come out again. Daphne spent a great deal of time at her hairdresser’s and at Elizabeth Arden being groomed. She was not in the least beautiful but she was beautifully turned out – immaculate and untouchable. People described her as glamorous, sophisticated and elegant. She enjoyed her dressmaker and visiting her milliner; her clothes and hats were very important to her.
She wore a particularly splendid hat to the dress rehearsal of one of Milne’s plays. One hopes there was no one sitting behind her. Milne told Irene Vanbrugh a story that suggests how different they were. Apparently, the dress designer, ‘Madame Handeley Seymour’ of New Bond Street – who had been responsible for the leading lady’s clothes – told Milne that she had never seen a more lovely hat than the one his wife was wearing. Daphne was thrilled. She felt, Milne said, ‘as I would feel if Thomas Hardy patted me on the head’. There was very little chance of that happening. Though Hardy lived for another four-and-a-half years, he and Milne never met. Barrie could easily have arranged a meeting, but he must have realised that Hardy would have no interest in Milne, however much interest Milne had in Hardy. ‘How I loathe Christopher Robin,’ Florence Hardy would one day say, perhaps with a touch of sour grapes as her own children’s stories had had so little success.
There had been a long, admiring article in the Boston Transcript two years earlier by J. Brooks Atkinson, which urged Milne not to ‘stoop to pot-boilers and routine pieces of hack-work. Mr Milne’s knowledge of human nature and his bubbling sense of humor qualify him for more note-worthy achievement.’ Certainly, he didn’t want to write pot-boilers and he had no need to. He regretted having signed a contract with Curtis Brown on 15 November 1922 for three novels: the first was supposed to be published in 1923, following The Red House Mystery. An American editor had been so impressed by that novel that on his next trip to London he made his own contract with Milne, offering him no less than £2,000 for the serial rights of his next mystery story. But there never was another one. And his next novel did not appear until 1931. Perhaps it was his admiration for Jane Austen, for Samuel Butler, for Thomas Hardy, that made the novel so difficult for him. He was not sure he could write the sort of novel he would want to read.
There would be other plays, but now it seemed time for a change. During the previous winter, Milne had written a poem for Daphne (it was not a children’s poem) inspired by a glimpse of Billy, aged two, kneeling by his cot, being taught by his nanny to say the words so many children have been taught to say: ‘God bless Mummy, Daddy and Nanny and make me a good boy.’ ‘Mr Milne crept in and watched for a few moments,’ Olive Brockwell (as the nanny became) remembered many years later. ‘Then I heard him going away down the stairs chuckling as if he was very pleased about something.’ With hindsight she thought A. A. Milne was ‘chuckling’ because he had come up with a brilliant idea for a poem. ‘Such lovely words,’ she said. ‘And they were true. I did have a dressing gown hanging on the door of the nursery.’ But Milne was surely smiling first, of course, because the child looked so sweet and, secondly, because he seemed so perfectly to embody the fact that prayer meant nothing at all to a small boy. Indeed, it meant very little to Milne himself. Milne had no time at all for orthodox Christianity.
The sight of a child at prayer ‘is one over which thousands have been sentimental,’ Milne wrote in his autobiography. ‘It is indeed calculated to bring a lump to the throat. But, even so, one must tell the truth about the matter.’ And the truth is not only that prayer means nothing to a two-year-old but that, although children do have ‘an artless beauty, an innocent grace’, along with ‘this outstanding physical quality, there is a natural lack of moral quality, which expresses itself, as Nature always insists on expressing herself, in an egotism entirely ruthless.’
The critic Humphrey Carpenter pointed out that there was really no need for ‘Beachcomber’ to parody the poem, not long after it first appeared. (‘Hush, hush, nobody cares! / Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs.’) ‘Vespers’ itself is inten
ded to be an entirely ironic picture of childhood. It is interesting that in his memoir of his childhood, Christopher Milne himself disputes what he calls his father’s ‘cynical’ attitude. A. A. Milne was obviously putting it forward so strongly to counteract the general idea of ‘Vespers’ as a sentimental poem about a good little boy saying his prayers. But his son himself felt much closer to Wordsworth’s view of childhood than his father’s. He remembered ‘those first affections, those shadowy recollections’ as ‘the fountain light of all our day’. Adults, though better at disguising it, are often as heartlessly egotistic as children.
In those days of splendour and glory I certainly felt myself nearer to God – the God that Nanny was telling me about, who lived up in the sky – than I do today. And so, asked to choose between those two views of childhood, I’m bound to say that I’m for Wordsworth. Maybe he is just being sentimental. Maybe the infant William has fooled the middle-aged poet in the same way that the kneeling Christopher Robin fooled so many of his readers. Maybe my cynical father is right. But this is not how I feel about it.
Alan Milne gave the poem ‘Vespers’ to Daphne as a present. He told her that if she liked to get it published she could keep the money. She sent it to Vanity Fair in New York. It appeared in January 1923 and she received $50. Over the years, ‘Vespers’ proved the most lavish present Milne had ever given his wife. (One remembers that Walter de la Mare is supposed to have sent a son through Eton on the proceeds of ‘The Listeners’.) The following winter Milne would be invited to provide one of the tiny books in the library of Lutyens’s elaborate Queen’s Dolls’ House, which was to be shown at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley before finding a permanent home at Windsor. The whole scheme was ‘ineradicably silly’, Arthur Benson suggested, but it was in the nature of a royal command. It seems only George Bernard Shaw refused and ‘in a very rude manner’, according to Princess Marie Louise; Milne dutifully copied out ‘Vespers’. At least it was short. For many years afterwards there would be copies of ‘Vespers’ hanging in nurseries all over the world, with the words at the bottom: ‘Reprinted by permission from the Library of the Queen’s Dolls’ House’. Milne was already, though he did not yet know it, on his way to becoming some sort of poet laureate of the nursery.
