by Ann Thwaite
Milne had written about a quarter of the book by the time they left Wales. Giles Playfair suggests the Milnes left early:
They decided to cut their holiday short and leave before the proper time. They were at no pains to conceal their pleasure at going and I shall never forget their happiness on the morning of departure.
My father, however, refused to be outdone. He made his family and house-party see the Milnes off. We were instructed to form a circle round their car and sing in lusty voices, ‘The Milnes are going, hurray, hurray,’ to the tune of ‘The Campbells are coming . . .’ The Milnes drove away with the song ringing in their ears.
Milne now had to break the news to his agent and publishers that his next book was to be not the detective story or straight novel they were hoping for, but a collection of children’s verse. John Macrae of Dutton’s was over in London that autumn. He had published both The Red House Mystery and a collection of Punch pieces, The Sunny Side, in New York the year before. Milne took him to lunch at the Garrick. There was talk of Milne making his first visit to America in the winter. ‘So far it is mostly talk. But I have promised to so often that I must. We feel it would be good for trade.’ It would be another eight years before he got there. His American publisher remembered:
During the halting conversation, which is likely to take place between author and publisher, Mr Milne genially informed me that he was about to send me his new manuscript – a volume of poetry for children. We are all aware that probably the most hopeless kind of manuscript a publisher expects to receive from his favourite author is that of poetry for children.
I have no complaint about children’s poetry by a genius. However, Milne had not yet demonstrated that he could write poetry. You can imagine my chagrin and disappointment. However, I covered up my feelings and held them in harness until the manuscript arrived.
Milne was aware of Macrae’s lack of enthusiasm for the project and he realised himself, as he indicated in a letter to Irene Vanbrugh in late September, what a mixed collection the poems were.
I am writing a book of children’s verses. Like Stevenson, only better. No, not a bit like Stevenson really. More like Milne. But they are a curious collection; some for children, some about children, some by, with or from children.
In this same letter, we get a glimpse of the daily life of father and son. They went for a walk after breakfast every morning in their indoor shoes and without hats (‘quite informal, not party at all’). They walked each day as far as the Fulham Road and then home again by a different route. Every day they passed the same middle-aged postman. One day Milne said, ‘Say good morning to the postman.’ Three-year-old Billy obediently said, ‘Good morning.’ When the postman took no notice whatsoever, the child sensibly suggested, ‘He doesn’t know me’, which seemed to his father ‘a dignified way of concluding the episode’. Only too soon a great many people would know the child and murmurs of ‘That’s Christopher Robin!’ would accompany his walks.
In October, E. V. Lucas seems to have been worried that Milne was playing too much golf. He thought Milne would be the better for a little more structure in his life and suggested that he should start writing regular prose again for Punch. Milne did not resent Lucas’s advice about his ‘literary career’. ‘I have always been grateful to you for your interest in it’, but he rejected the suggestion that he was idle – though he hesitated to mention that, for the moment, he really had no need to work, with money constantly flowing in from performances of the plays all over the place. A production of The Truth about Blayds by Liverpool Rep had been a particular success and earned Milne the best review (in the Manchester Guardian from C. E. Montague) that he said he had ever had in his life. Mr Pim Passes By even ran for three months in Berlin in a German translation and accumulated ‘a trifle of two thousand billion marks or so’ at that time of runaway inflation in Germany. Mr Pim was also put on in Vienna that year. Milne wrote to Lucas:
I think my indolence is more apparent than real; or perhaps I should say that it is real, but I overcome it pretty well. I have written in the last five years: six full-length plays, four short plays, two novels, about a book and a half of essays and sketches, a book of verses, three short stories and various oddments: in addition, of course, to the more mechanical labour of seeing 9 books through the press, and rehearsing seven full-length plays, which is not too bad.
Quite frankly I could not bear to write regularly for Punch again. I’m sorry, but there it is. It would make me miserable. And I suspect that what you really want is that ‘Billy Book’ you have been urging me to write; and you feel that, if I began a few chapters for Punch, I should be more likely to pull it off. Fear not. I will do it yet. I like writing; the sort of writing which doesn’t come into plays; and I will do that book, or some other book, directly, which will make you say ‘I always said he could write.’
I will send you 20 or 30 of the poems next week, if you would like to see them – officially as Methuen’s friend, or unofficially as mine. A mixed lot. So mixed that I think (hooray!) that they will require a prose introduction.
The poems duly arrived in Lucas’s office at Methuen. E. V. Lucas was extremely influential at both Methuen and Punch at this time. He was just about to become chairman of Methuen and he had been the editor Owen Seaman’s deputy at Punch from the days when Milne had first worked there. Although in his memoir Reading, Writing and Remembering Lucas praises both Milne and ‘his collaborator with the pencil, Ernest Shepard’, he does not himself claim responsibility for that remarkable partnership, which was to seem as apt and inevitable as Gilbert and Sullivan. But there seems no question that it was his idea.
As soon as Lucas saw the children’s poems, he realised that they would make a splendid book when there were enough of them, and that, in the meantime, some of them should appear in Punch. It was obviously important to find the right illustrator. ‘Vespers’ had not been illustrated when it first appeared and Harry Rowntree, who drew the pictures for ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’, was extremely good at animals (he spent days at the London Zoo), but not so much at home in the nursery. Lucas was sitting next to Shepard at the Punch Table, a sociable editorial meeting, when he suggested (so Shepard remembered) doing some drawings and seeing what Milne thought of them.
Milne knew Shepard’s work well, though Shepard had not actually joined the Table until 1921, after Milne had left Punch. Before the war, when Shepard was contributing his first cartoons, Milne had actually said more than once to the art editor, F. H. Townsend, ‘What on earth do you see in this man? He’s perfectly hopeless.’ And Townsend had replied complacently, ‘You wait.’ Shepard had always had difficulty with the jokes.
The Shepard who illustrated Milne’s first collection of children’s poems, and who would go on to illustrate the other children’s books, was the one for whom Milne had waited. As men, they had very little in common – despite some odd links. For instance, there was the fact that they had lived as small children only a few streets apart, and Shepard had actually been at the same kindergarten in Upper Baker Street as Milne’s friend Nigel Playfair. Later, Shepard’s sister Ethel had been bridesmaid at the wedding of John Vine Milne’s most famous ex-pupil, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe and eventually owner of The Times. Harmsworth, who had showered pennies on small Alan Milne, had taught young Ernest Shepard how to bowl overarm. That was not much of a basis for friendship, and they were of very different temperament. Milne found Shepard’s attitude to the war particularly hard to take. They had both experienced the horror of the Somme in 1916 – and Shepard had gone on to win the Military Cross at Passchendaele. ‘For him,’ Rawle Knox would write, ‘“The Great War” was a natural extension of his life, practically all activity interested him and this was more exciting than most . . . He had always been fascinated with guns.’ Shepard ended up ‘a pillar of Sussex society’, as Milne would never be.
There were plenty of other candidates for the job of illustrating Milne’s children’s poem
s. Looking at Punch for the year before the book came out, one sees E. H. Shepard’s drawings of children as no better and sometimes rather worse than those of several other artists. The choice might easily have fallen on A. E. Bestall (who would become less famous for another bear, Rupert, when he took over Mary Tourtel’s creation) or D. L. Ghilchik or G. L. Stampa. But Shepard turned out to be perfect in most people’s eyes, though R. G. G. Price would speak of his bourgeois ‘prettification’ and Geoffrey Grigson (notoriously hard to please) of his ‘splendid insipidity’. Milne himself was delighted from the moment he saw the first drawings Shepard did – the ones for ‘Puppy and I’, the poem that recalls a long-ago Gordon Setter, Brownie, who appeared out of nowhere just as the puppy does in the poem. The child and the puppy demonstrate admirably Shepard’s particular pleasure in what Penelope Fitzgerald has called ‘the characteristic movement of the design from right to left’. It was the feeling of life, ‘the tension of suspended movement’, in Shepard’s drawings that made him so outstanding when he was doing his best work.
One critic would say that Shepard’s illustrations belong to the verses ‘as intimately as the echo does to the voice’. Certainly, the extraordinary success Milne would enjoy owed a good deal to Shepard, but any suggestion that it was because of Shepard can be easily dismissed when one looks at the long-forgotten books of children’s verse Shepard would also illustrate delightfully in the next few years, such as Georgette Agnew’s Let’s Pretend and Jan Struther’s Sycamore Square. A lot of people would try to jump on the merry-go-round. One can’t help wondering what Milne felt as he read E. V. Lucas’s own contribution Playtime and Company (published a year after Milne’s first poems), complete with Shepard’s Pooh-like bear on a bed, a Christopher Robin lookalike and even a poem about rice pudding, with these strange lines addressed to the reluctant nursery eater:
When you next the pudding view,
Suppress the customary ‘Pooh!’
And imitate the mild Hindu.
Milne with Bestall or Ghilchik might easily have had the same impact as Milne and Shepard. Shepard without Milne nearly always sank without trace, unless he were illustrating, as he would, books that were already established, such as (to Milne’s great pleasure) new editions of The Wind in the Willows and Bevis.
Milne came to acknowledge fully how much he owed to Shepard, but, at the end of 1923, he was worrying mainly about a title for the series of poems that were to appear in Punch. He wrote to Owen Seaman: ‘They want a general title and I can think of none better than When We Were Very Young, but I am ready to be persuaded if you, or anybody, can suggest something. Children Calling was my only other idea, but Uncle 2LO has made that vulgar.’ Seaman was obviously not quite happy about When We Were Very Young because Milne, a few days later, sent a list of further suggestions:
Alternative titles:
A Nursery Window Box
From a Nursery Window (or Through the NW)
Pinafore Days
Swings and Roundabouts (probably been used before)
Buttercups and Daisies
I think the first of these is the best, but I am not sure that it is better than WWWVY.
My brain has given out, and I can think of no more.
It was Milne’s own idea that the series should start off with three short poems, and they duly appeared, under the title When We Were Very Young, in Punch on 9 January 1924. They did not look very impressive. Unillustrated, they were rather squashed up together. First, ‘Brownie’, the one about the creature behind the curtain; then ‘In the Fashion’, the poem about tails; and finally ‘Before Tea’, where Emmeline has not been seen for more than a week, having gone off in a huff when someone told her her hands weren’t clean. A week later ‘Puppy and I’ appeared as a full-page spread with E. H. Shepard’s drawings, much larger than they would be in the book, surrounding the five stanzas. Milne would at one stage identify it as his own favourite of all the poems.
The other poems that would appear in this way were ‘The King’s Breakfast’, ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘Nursery Chairs’, ‘Lines and Squares’ (including two pictures – one of a replete bear who has just finished tucking into a passerby – which would not get into the book), ‘Market Square’ and ‘Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue’. There were others that appeared unillustrated – and then the whole series of twenty-five ended with another four full pages: ‘The Three Foxes’, ‘Jonathan Jo’, ‘Missing’ and ‘Happiness’ – the last again with extra pictures: John putting his boots on. Four more would appear in the American children’s magazine St Nicholas during the summer and autumn. These were illustrated by Reginald Birch, who had become famous nearly forty years earlier for his drawings for a book which had made publishing history: Little Lord Fauntleroy. Before we look at the similar extravagant reactions to the publication of When We Were Very Young the following winter, we should see what else had been affecting Milne in 1924.
The health of Ken, his brother, had been causing worry for some time. Ken’s doctor had diagnosed tuberculosis (usually then called consumption), and in the spring of 1924 it was decided that he must resign from the Ministry of Pensions and leave Croydon for the country. At that time, when there were no effective drugs to fight the disease, there was great belief in the restorative power of fresh country air. Milne was in the middle of rehearsals of his new play To Have the Honour (written some time earlier) when he heard the news from his father that Ken was having to leave the Civil Service. He wrote immediately to propose they have lunch at the National Liberal Club, which he still used rather than the Garrick from time to time when he did not want to be sociable. He suggested that they should discuss ways and means. There would obviously be problems, with Ken’s pension – only a third of his salary – entirely inadequate to support his four ‘good and clever’ children, all still in full-time education. In 1922, when Ken had been in Pretoria on a government mission, J. V. Milne had sent one of his friends a family photograph and commented affectionately: ‘Look at happy Maud – always the same.’ Things would no longer be the same; Alan Milne would be a necessary tower of strength to his sister-in-law Maud for the rest of his life. In 1924 he wrote to his brother:
As a throw-out I suggest that you let me pay £100 a year each for the education of your children; i.e. £400 a year now, £300 when Margery is settled, and so on. But more important than this is yourself. You’ll have to write now, and really to stick at it, whatever the disappointments. As a start. I think I could get O.S. to let you try your hand at reviewing books for Punch. Turley made over £200 last year from this. If you got on all right at this, then I think there might be other openings. The Editor of the Nation is rather well-disposed towards me at the moment, but I fancy that we should have to be able to quote Punch to him first. Of course one feels that ‘any fool can review a book’, which may or may not be true, but the mere feeling creates an enormous amount of competition – which is why I am butting in. For God’s sake don’t think I mean by all this: ‘You’ve jolly well got to set to, and earn some money’ – You know I don’t; but I do mean, old boy, that you’re only 43, and that it’s no good regretting the brilliant service career which has been denied you, when there’s another sort of career still open and waiting for you. There are dozens of good novels and plays waiting to be written, and hundreds of articles; but a little regular reviewing would be a great help meanwhile, not only financially, but artistically. And you know that if I can help in any way, I will. My love to dear Maud. In a sneaking sort of way I envy you both going to live in the country!
Yours ever affectionately,
Alan
By the summer, Ken and Maud were settled at Shepton Mallet in Somerset. ‘He is very brave about it all,’ his father commented, describing how Ken sleeps ‘out of doors, in one of those revolving shelters and at 7.30 Maud comes in her dressing-gown with their early tea,’ across the damp grass. There had been some talk that J. V. Milne might join them in Somerset – he would miss them sorely in south London
– but ‘Maud will have all her work looking after Ken.’ There was no suggestion that Daphne would tolerate her father-in-law.
From now on, until Ken’s death, there are regular letters from Alan, seeking to cheer and entertain his brother in his rural isolation, so that we know far more than we would otherwise have done, if Ken had remained in London, about Alan’s activities during the years of publication of the four children’s books. Several times Milne invited Ken to visit them in the country. Whether he went or not we do not know. Christopher could not remember meeting his uncle. Occasionally Alan would go down to Somerset (never with Daphne), occasionally at the beginning Ken would come to London (sometimes with Maud); sometimes there would be telephone calls (‘Maud’s voice on the telephone did me a lot of good, and made me feel much nearer to you both’); sometimes Alan would meet the children off trains. But for the most part there were just the letters, often long.
