by Ann Thwaite
3
WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG
There was a house party in north Wales in the summer of 1923. Milne had agreed to share with Nigel Playfair the cost of the lease of a house belonging to Clough Williams-Ellis, who would soon develop Portmeirion nearby. It was Plas Brondanw at Llanfrothen near Portmadoc. It is in a peculiarly beautiful part of Britain. The Londoners looked forward to walking up Cnicht and Snowdon, to exploring Harlech Castle and to bathing in Cardigan Bay.
Playfair was feeling rich and generous as a result of his production of The Beggar’s Opera and issued lots of invitations. Frederic Austin, who had adapted the music for Gay’s entertainment, was there, and Grace Lovat Fraser, the wife of the designer, and Joan Pitt-Chapman, aged sixteen, whose father had played Macheath but had died during the run. There was also a woman called Mrs Malcolm, whose husband had recently been accused and acquitted of murder. There were others, too, coming and going. The novelist Richard Hughes and his mother came to supper one evening and found themselves warmly welcomed by Mrs Playfair – ‘Oh do come in, Mrs Beard and Mr Beard.’ It was the way the family were accustomed to refer to them, for no better reason than that Richard Hughes had a beard at that time. The rest of the evening was a little sticky. Everyone had heard the welcome.
It was a strange house party. All might have been well if the weather had been good and the planned expeditions had been able to take place. But ‘it rains all day in Wales’, Milne wrote gloomily to Swinnerton. All day and almost every day. Giles Playfair, aged thirteen, took some photographs with his Kodak Brownie on one of the three fine days and glowered at the assembled company. ‘I disliked everyone who neglected to take the trouble to interest themselves in me. Very few people did. Certainly the house-party in Wales (the Milnes included) found me a silent, sulky, dull and stupid boy.’ His brother Lyon shone in comparison, writing a play about Perkin Warbeck and reading it aloud one wet afternoon to his audience’s amusement. Milne sat down there and then to write a preface.
Nigel Playfair made tremendous efforts to keep everyone’s spirits up as wet day followed wet day. He was determined people should enjoy themselves. His son Giles remembered:
While he was about, everyone was laughing despite their depression at the persistent climatic gloom. He always came down last to breakfast. Before he arrived, no noise emerged from the dining room save the desultory clatter of knife and fork on plate. But his entry was invariably a signal for an outburst of wild merriment which continued unabated until the meal was finished.
He made us all play an absurd game called ‘I met a sheep’. The rules of this game were simple. You said to your next-door neighbour ‘I met a sheep’, who replied, ‘What did it do?’ You then waved both hands and explained, ‘It went, “ba, ba, ba”.’ The game continued until everyone round the table was intoning, ‘ba, ba, ba’ and waving both hands. The sight of young and old, diffident and superior, famous and obscure, all indulging in this curious ritual was irresistible.
The game, in fact, did little to dispel Milne’s gloom. Moreover, there was a depressing butler called Griffiths (who had come with the house), who seemed to have taken a particular dislike to Milne, always serving him last, when the food was lukewarm. And Billy, aged three that month, had been whisked away to the nursery wing with his nanny to join the youngest Playfair, four-year-old Andrew, and was rarely seen. Indeed, Joan, the then sixteen-year-old, looking back, could not even remember the infant, absorbed as she was in her grief at the death of her father and trying to concentrate on a black-and-white check dress she was making – but she did remember Alan and Daphne Milne. In her memory, the holiday seemed a sort of background ‘out of which that couple protruded’. She was particularly interested in A. A. Milne because she had had a small part as one of the children in his play Make-Believe at Hammersmith, five years earlier. She had never met Daphne before, and now she found them, ten years married, ‘honey-mooney, as they were always together and speaking very little to anyone else’. She thought them ‘a nice and attractive couple, both tall and he ascetic-looking and serious, not laughy’, as one might have expected.
Giles Playfair confirmed her memory, saying, ‘They adored each other.’ He found Milne himself ‘prudish, very, very proper’, disliking anything vulgar. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘my father and he liked each other very much.’ But obviously, to the thirteen-year-old, the well-known playwright was not at all as he felt a writer should be. When one lists the things Milne disliked one can easily see how priggish he could have appeared to young Giles Playfair. He disliked not only beer, but gin and whisky too. (‘Why are you the devil of a fellow if you like drinking whisky, and the devil of a prig if you don’t?’ as a boy in one of Milne’s plays would ask.) He disliked professional football and hated all blood sports (‘the taste for killing small animals’). He had no interest in racing and disliked all gambling – the whole business of getting something for nothing, whether the gambling was on sport, on the stock exchange or on a state lottery (the possibility of one was being discussed at this time). Milne had no time for jazz; he was not particularly interested, in fact, in any kind of music – though he once enjoyed a cello recital, by one of his cousins, rather more than he expected. Above all, Milne loathed, and made clear that he loathed, all forms of aggression, all unthinking talk of the glories of war. It was rather a rebarbative collection of feelings for a thirteen-year-old to stomach.
Milne became increasingly irritated by the proximity of his fellow guests. ‘In a week,’ he wrote later, ‘I was screaming with agoraphobia’ – not claustrophobia, but the dislike of public places, dislike of the drawing-room. He needed to get away. The post one day brought him, forwarded from Chelsea, the proof of a poem he had written for Rose Fyleman for a new children’s magazine she was starting, called The Merry-Go-Round. Milne retreated gladly to a summer house to correct the proof.
Rose Fyleman was the author of numerous books for children, with such titles as Fairies and Chimneys and The Fairy Flute. Fairies were fashionable in the early 1920s. Children, if not just an attractive form of interior decoration, were seen as imaginative little creatures whose fancies must be allowed to flourish and not be quashed by sceptical adults. There was some feeling that children should be sealed off in pretty nurseries from the painful realities of the outside world and there was a tremendous suspicion of ‘progressive’ parents who, like some of their Victorian predecessors, but for very different reasons, distrusted fairy tales and those who offered sails to minds that rather required ballast. Compton Mackenzie would satirise parents who surrounded their children with nothing but Meccano and clever mechanical toys and who offered them The Wonder Book of Why and What, concentrating on pictures of steam engines and aeroplanes, and banning ‘stupid stories about fairies, or ghosts, or the heroes of the past’. There was a revulsion from their tendency to explain that the rings in the grass are actually caused by fungi or that Cinderella’s glass slipper, through an error in translation, was actually made of fur.
Rose Fyleman was also editing the annual Joy Street, which was published for the first time that year, just a month after the first issue of Merry-Go-Round. Joy Street was promoted as ‘a meeting place for literally all the best writing for children’, but Rose Fyleman was definitely on the side of the fairies. Her famous, banal ‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!’ was only one of scores of verses she contributed to Punch in the 1920s, verses that were certainly not intended to be funny. It was only a year since Arthur Conan Doyle in The Coming of the Fairies had examined the case of the Cottingley fairies, those much-publicised photographs which seem such obvious fakes, and yet on which he returned an open verdict.
‘It is too late for a modern mother,’ Milne wrote in 1925, ‘to wonder if her children ought to be brought up with a belief in fairies. Their acceptance of fairies is as natural as their acceptance of the Milkman or the Mayor . . . To say that a child has no need for fairies when there are so many beautiful birds and butterflies in t
he world, or no need for seven-league boots so long as five and five most wonderfully make ten, is like saying that a man has no need for Switzerland until he has exhausted (as none of us has) England, nor any need for Wordsworth until he has mastered every line of Shakespeare.’
The trouble was that most fairy stories and poems were feeble by any standard. Enid Blyton’s second book was published this year. It was called Real Fairies, and the Morning Post commented, ‘Children have received a new educational charter restoring their right to believe in fairies.’ The Morning Post had obviously forgotten the children’s answer to Peter Pan’s regular question each Christmas, saving the dying Tinkerbell.
In 1924 there was also, nauseatingly, The ’Normous Saturday Fairy Book, which included some verses by Marion St John Webb, the author of The Littlest One, which had first appeared in 1914 and had sold 50,000 copies by this time. It was a collection of verses told in the first person by a six-year-old boy, complete with lisp and appropriate spelling. Milne had himself, years earlier, poured scorn on the taste for baby-talk. ‘It is important,’ one of his characters had said long ago, ‘that even as a child he should always be addressed in rational English and not in that ridiculous baby-talk so common to young mothers’, and had then been challenged himself for calling the child ‘his nunkey’s ickle petsy wetsy lambkin’. There was masses of it in Punch – but also some signs of a revulsion against it, as in an A. E. Bestall cartoon in which a nurse says to her charge: ‘Look, Dickie, what a dear little bow wow!’ and the child replies coolly: ‘Do you mean the Cairn or the Sealyham?’ People often found it quite hard not to use such talk, to address a tiny child as straightforwardly as someone of their own size. And in rendering children’s own speech, many writers (even H. G. Wells) apparently did not blush to write ‘pritty f’owers’ or ‘Do it adain, Dadda’. Milne actually used the device sparingly, but would come to regret using it at all when Dorothy Parker got hold of him.
The poem, whose proof he was correcting in that Welsh summer house as the rain poured down, was the first he had written deliberately for children, but there were no children in it, no baby talk and no fairies. When Rose Fyleman first approached him, he had said no. In 1925, two years later, he said it was on the grounds that he was too busy, but that then he began to wonder what he would have written if he hadn’t been too busy. In 1939, in his autobiography, when he was so intent on denying the label of children’s writer, he gave a slightly different explanation. He said he told her he didn’t write verse for children: ‘I didn’t and couldn’t, it wasn’t in my line.’ And then, after he had posted his letter turning down the suggestion, he began to wonder what he might have written if he had not refused; and then he did write it, and it turned out to be one of the best of all Milne’s children’s poems – ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’. The misguided doctor in the original illustrations by Harry Rowntree is himself a rather large rodent, in top hat and striped trousers, prescribing milk and massage-of-the-back, and freedom-from-worry and drives-in-a-car, and above all chrysanthemums, quite oblivious of the fact that there is nothing at all wrong with the dormouse, except for a longing
to be back in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).
There was a lot wrong with poetry for children in 1923, quite apart from the prevalence of fairies. Viscountess Grey of Falloden, in her introduction to A Child’s Book of Lyrics, compiled by Philip Wayne and published by Methuen that year, wrote of the time as being ‘this age of psycho-analysis when everyone is becoming aware of the importance of first impressions’. And yet, she went on, ‘If I could buy up all the Christmas annuals and school periodicals and magazines that provide verse written specially for children and burn these things publicly in the marketplace, I would do it with both hands. The mass of sickly nonsense of this nature that appears today is a great evil. Popular carelessness allows rubbish to be given to children for no better reason than that children are young.’ ‘They don’t get any richness into their words – they don’t get any flavour. There’s no bite’, as Milne put it in a story about a poet’s daughter. (This poet’s first poem about his child, had, owing to a misunderstanding, been used to wedge the nursery window, which rattled at night. It was probably the fate the poem deserved.)
When Milne had finished correcting his proof, the work of only a few minutes, and had addressed the envelope to Rose Fyleman, he had to think of an excuse not to return to the house and his fellow guests. Obviously, he must write something. One might think of him, standing, looking out of the summer-house window at the relentless Welsh downpour and trying to cheer himself up.
Is it raining? Never mind—
Think how much the birdies love it!
See them in their dozens drawn,
Dancing, to the croquet lawn—
Could our little friends have dined
If there’d been no worms above it?
Is it murky? What of that,
If the owls are fairly perky?
Just imagine you were one—
Wouldn’t you detest the sun?
Milne had written that a couple of years earlier: not as a children’s poem, of course, but just for fun, on another wet summer’s day. Perhaps writing children’s poems wasn’t so much out of his line after all. And he certainly wasn’t too busy. He sat down and started playing with words. He had a reddish marbled quarto exercise book and a pencil with an eraser on it (‘just the thing for poetry’). He felt slightly embarrassed about what he was doing, as so many children’s writers have done over the years. Wouldn’t it sound much better if he could report progress each evening at dinner on that second detective story everyone was so keen for him to write? (He could not help remembering he had been offered a contract for £2,000 for the serial rights alone.) It was, perhaps, all right to be turning out some children’s verses on holiday – but was it really what he wanted his next book to be? Writing for children was not taken very seriously. It was something, people thought, that anyone might do in an idle moment. But Milne never underestimated the genre. He remembered The Wind in the Willows, the book he had admired for so long, and knew that ‘no one can write a book which children will like, unless he writes it for himself first.’
That the book, when written, should satisfy children must be regarded as a happy accident, just as one regards it as a happy accident if a dog or a child loves one; it is a matter of personality, and personality is the last matter about which one can take thought. But whatever fears one has, one need not fear that one is writing too well for a child . . . It is difficult enough to express oneself with all the words in the dictionary at one’s disposal. With none but simple words, the difficulty is much greater. We need not spare ourselves.
Not that Milne believed in a strictly limited vocabulary; he wanted his words to have richness, flavour and bite, and he knew the power of the occasional unfamiliar word – just as Beatrix Potter did when she commented in The Flopsy Bunnies on the report that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific’. If one hears a small child refer to someone as ‘well-intentioned’ (‘Ernest was an elephant and very well-intentioned’) or to someone else ‘wandering vaguely quite of her own accord’, one knows one is in the presence of a Milne-listener. But most of the language in A. A. Milne’s children’s poems is, without being boring to an adult, easily understood by a three- or four-year-old, and that is a remarkable achievement. Milne wanted to make his position quite clear. He said of his first collection that it ‘is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously, even though he is taking it into the nursery.’ Milne’s technical skill is admirable. It is his dextrous use of rhythm and rhyme that makes his children’s poems lodge in the head, and this was what he most wanted. He said once in a preface addressed to young readers:
Now you know of course that verses have rhymes in t
hem; but even more important than the rhymes is what is called ‘rhythm’. It is a difficult-looking word, but what it means is just ‘the time that the verse keeps’. Every piece of poetry has a music of its own which it is humming to itself as it goes along, and every line, every word, in it has to keep time to this music. This is what makes it difficult to write poetry; because you can’t use any words in any order as long as it’s sense and grammar, but you have to use particular words in a particular order, so that they keep time to the music, and rhyme when you want them to. If you can find words which keep time to the music, and which are just the words you want to say, then the verses which you write are verses which sing themselves into people’s heads, and stay there for ever, so that even when they are alone and unhappy they have this music with them for company.
Milne also made it clear that there were three sources for the poems. ‘There are three ways in which a writer knows about people: by remembering, by noticing, and by imagining.’ He was remembering his own childhood, the things he and his brother Ken had done, the things he had felt himself. ‘As a child I kept a mouse; probably it escaped – they generally do. Christopher Robin has kept almost everything except a mouse. But he did go to Buckingham Palace a good deal (which I didn’t) . . . And most children hop . . . and sometimes they sit halfway down the stairs.’ He was obviously ‘noticing’ his small son, never very far from his thoughts. Billy had a new pair of braces and was proud of them. Perhaps they were a present for that third birthday in Wales. Certainly ‘Growing Up’ was one of the poems that was written in the summer house and so was ‘Happiness’, as the small boy splashed through the puddles in his Great Big Waterproof Boots. In that poem Milne called the child John (as he had often called Ken in his writing). Although Christopher Robin comes ‘very trippingly off the tongue’, as Milne remarked, it certainly didn’t work in that poem. In fact, as Milne said, ‘Christopher Robin is definitely associated with only three sets of verses’. He is actually named in four out of forty-four in that first collection. But even Milne, for all his remembering and observing, could not resist imagining a few fairies, though Twinkletoes (without the illustration) could easily be a butterfly.
