Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  Alan treads a delicate tightrope, knowing how interested his brother is in what is going on, wanting him to know how much money is coming in, so that he can realise how easily Alan can afford to help him (this year Tony had considerable medical expenses, which Alan cheerfully paid, when the boy’s appendix flared up) – but not wanting to seem to boast or to make it difficult for Ken to accept. It is always harder to receive than to give, as Christopher Milne too would find. (‘I am bad at receiving, bad at having to be grateful.’) It seemed particularly hard for Ken that the bitter end of his own career should have come just before the time of Alan’s greatest triumphs.

  But in April 1924 Milne was having a terrible time with Gerald du Maurier during rehearsals at Wyndham’s of To Have the Honour, struggling to get him to produce it ‘in the proper fantastic-comedy spirit’. How Du Maurier must have loathed the interfering author. Milne was relieved to get down to the rented cottage at Poling in May. At least the reviews were reasonable. It was, The Times decided, ‘Mr Milne at his lightest. The fun is in the details and you don’t trouble yourself over much about the story.’ It would have its 150th performance in September.

  But, as usual, there were people longing for Milne to do something bigger. The Illustrated London News critic begged him to ‘drop his masquerade and forget to be polite’. It was all very well for him to poke gentle fun at the British love of rank and titles, but, the critic suggested, he should ‘use his splendid gifts in serious satire, to be less gracious and more in earnest, for we have sore need of his talents.’

  On the same page as the review of ‘The New Milne Comedy’ the magazine carried a picture of ‘The First Labour Premier and his daughter as guests of the King and Queen at Windsor’. Milne started at about this time a habit he would continue for the rest of his life of writing letters to The Times. A few months earlier the General Election had ended in a stalemate – the Tories with 258, Labour with 191 and the Liberals with 159. When the final outcome was still in the balance, Lord Hawke, well known as a cricketer (captain of Yorkshire for many years) had written to The Times appealing to the Tories and the Liberals to form a coalition to keep Ramsay MacDonald out. Milne could not resist drawing Hawke’s attention to an interesting precedent:

  Lord Hawke, horrified at the political prospect, makes a despairing appeal ‘from a sportsman’s point of view’ to Messrs Baldwin and Asquith. From the same point of view, I make an appeal to him. I remind him, in short, that not only was Australia ruled by Labour for many years without detriment to the Empire, but that it was actually under a Labour government that she won the last Test Matches, and under a Coalition Government that we lost them. I would ask him, therefore, to consider, before he commits himself to a new coalition, whether the prospects for 1924–1925 are really as desperate as he imagines.

  This rather teasing letter is indexed solemnly by The Times as ‘on possible Labour ministry’; and the possibility, as we know, became an actuality. Ramsay MacDonald, with the support of the Liberals (determined to keep the Tories out of office) formed the first Labour government. There was a generally jumpy attitude to the new government. Milne must have smiled wryly at one particular cartoon in Punch, where a golfer groans ‘I’m dead tired tonight’ and his wife tries to cheer him up with ‘Never mind, dear, perhaps the Labour government will abolish golf.’

  Late in the year, just at the time of the publication of When We Were Very Young, Milne was enraged by a letter from the Bishop of Gloucester in The Times, written on board the Cunard liner RMS Berengaria, complaining because he could no longer afford to keep three gardeners. No wonder, he said, that there is so much unemployment when everyone is pricing themselves out of the market. The Bishop also bewailed the way the lower classes wasted their money. Milne adopted a highly satirical tone in his reply:

  It is refreshing to find that the higher clergy are as human as ourselves, and one sympathises with the Bishop of Gloucester’s feeling that if his income tax were lower, and if he could employ three gardeners for the price of two . . . not only would he himself be happier, but that a reflected glow of happiness would probably spread itself over the rest of the community. We have all felt like this from time to time.

  But upon one point in his letter I ask for further enlightenment. He writes of the wealth which, by the lower classes, is squandered on ‘the pictures’ and charabancs as ‘economically an unprofitable employment of labour’. From one of our spiritual instructors this is a little surprising. What does he hold to be the reason of our existence – the provision for each other of bread and boots, or the development of our souls? Agriculture, he insists, is a ‘profitable’ employment of labour, presumably because the product of it is not ‘wasted’ – it helps to keep us alive? But why are we keeping alive? Apparently in order to make boots and build houses for each other – good, profitable employment. Profitable employment in short, is employment which benefits the body; unprofitable employment, squandered money, is that which is devoted to the soul. Strange teaching for a Bishop! The pictures and charabancs, poetry and painting, the view from Richmond Hill, and the silence of a Cathedral, a concert and a day in April, these things, like education, were admirable when the country was wealthy; but now, with the wages of gardeners what they are, money spent on them is money wasted. Is this indeed what the Bishop wishes us to believe? and are there never moments when he understands that ‘pictures and charabancs’ are not merely profitable, but the only profitable things in life? I seem to remember a text . . .

  ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ It was the same argument Milne had used years before to justify the life of the writer, the artist. But did he ever have a sneaking feeling that plays like The Dover Road and To Have the Honour (good entertainment, certainly; enjoyable, apparently) were not exactly developing anyone’s soul? Did he read The Waste Land, which had just been published, and admire it? Probably not. But he went to see Sybil Thorndike in Saint Joan that year and perhaps felt a pang of envy. He certainly admired Shaw. In a letter to The Times Milne would say:

  Let us curse the present state of the theatre (or whatever we call the managers who refuse our plays) as heartily as we like, but don’t let us wash our hands of it with a superior air, and then look around for sympathy. That was not how Saint Joan came into the lives of the half-crown public.

  At Poling that summer (just about the worst summer on record; it was even wetter than Wales the year before) Milne wrote yet another light comedy: Ariadne. He described it in a letter to Ken: ‘It is about a solicitor’; he knew about solicitors. He was still seeing something of his eldest brother Barry, who was one. J. M. Barrie was always saying how one should write about things one knows. But when it was produced in the spring of 1925, the reviews were very mixed and Milne was swearing once again never to write another play.

  At Poling, between the acts and showers, Milne took photographs, and sent them to Ken. The captions included:

  1) Child in pursuit of elusive cabbage-white. Nurse saying ‘He’ll never catch it’; Mother saying, ‘Surely those are the Parkinson-Smiths over there.’

  2) Child examining captured butterfly. Observe the latter’s antennae.

  Milne sent that snapshot to Irene Vanbrugh, as well, boasting about the antennae and about the beauty of the child. It would seem to be the photograph so familiar from the cover of the Penguin edition of Christopher Milne’s own memoirs, but it is impossible to see the antennae. Milne wrote to Irene:

  I bore all the Garrick with it and it is, by general consent, the most perfect photograph ever taken. You might think I was become rather an expert with the camera but I have to confess, Madam, that these things are largely a matter of luck.

  3) Child preparing Father’s bran-mash for breakfast.

  In the absence of this actual photograph, we cannot be sure that this was really what the child was doing, mixing some ancestor of muesli, but it’s a nice thought.

  There were more than cabbage whites at Poling. Alan wrote about butterflies to
Ken, remembering the far-off golden summer of 1892, when Ken had had British Butterflies as a birthday present. There were plenty of Red Admirals and Peacocks in Sussex in 1924, ‘but the Painted Lady seems to have died out since our day and we’ve only had one Brimstone.’

  The best thing in the summer of 1924 was that, after a considerable search, the Milnes found the country cottage they had been looking for. Irene Vanbrugh was in New Zealand when Milne wrote to tell her about it. ‘New Zealand is the one country in the world I envy you.’ He would say something similar in a reply to a fan letter years later, ‘I always suspect the others of being full of the worst kind of insect, Kangaroos that kick you, and other unpleasant beasts . . . We get possession (delightful word) in October’, but it was ‘more or less derelict before we came’. There was so much to be done it would be well into the spring of 1925 before they would be able to use it. Milne called it a cottage, but it was actually an old farmhouse – sixteenth-century perhaps, parts of it even older. It was known as Cotchford Farm and was near Hartfield in Sussex, halfway between Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead, on the borders of Ashdown Forest.

  This is the Forest where, not long afterwards, Winnie-the-Pooh would take up residence ‘under the name of Sanders’ and E. H. Shepard, drawing the actual places, would add a new landscape to the imaginations of readers all over the world who had never set foot in the forest. Shepard’s impression of Cotchford Farm itself is in the background of ‘Buttercup Days’ in Now We Are Six, with Christopher and his friend Anne Darlington, to whom the book is dedicated, in the foreground.

  In October, Alan sent Ken a photograph of the house, with a detailed description of the alterations. They were building on a servants’ hall adjoining the kitchen with, over it, ‘a dressing-room for me next to Daff’s bedroom’. They were converting attic rooms into servants’ bedrooms and making ‘a sort of ping-pong playroom for him and us’. The chief sitting room was a splendid room. Milne called it ‘the most lovely room in the whole world’, with a huge fireplace in the middle of it and French windows out on to a lawn – then overgrown – running down to a stream. They were converting a barn into a garage with a flat over it. Alan was taking his father down to see it the following week, but, for the most part, it felt, as the builders worked on it, tantalisingly out of reach. The Milnes were merely poring over seed catalogues and dreaming of a time when there would be a resident gardener with a wife who, in their happy imaginations, would have a delicious meal waiting for them on Friday evenings, when they arrived for the weekend.

  When We Were Very Young was published in London on 6 November 1924 and in New York on 20 November. Methuen placed an order with the printers, Jarrold of Norwich, on 17 September for a special edition of 110 large copies on hand-made paper and for 5,140 regular trade copies. On 18 November they ordered the printed endpapers (with nine of Shepard’s small boys – called variously Percy, John and Christopher Robin – and one little girl, Emmeline) and these were first used in the second impression, which followed hot on the heels of the first, as that sold out on publication day. Milne had a royalty, of course, but Shepard had apparently accepted a lump sum of £50 for the illustrations, on top of what he had had from Punch. ‘The next day Methuen decided to give me a cheque for £100 as a bonus,’ Shepard remembered. They could well afford to do so. By the end of the year, less than eight weeks after publication, Methuen already had 43,843 copies in print. And John Macrae of Dutton’s, who had published a fortnight later, was able to cable Milne for Christmas, saying he had already sold 10,000 in America. ‘Not so bad,’ Milne commented. He already had some confidence in the extraordinary potential of this slim children’s book.

  The cream paper jacket (which carried four more small boys, Little Bo Peep and the bear we now think of as Pooh) made much of the fact that this was a novelty from an already distinguished author:

  Here is a departure from this popular author and dramatist’s usual lines. He has always amused and delighted grown-up readers and playgoers; in this gay and frolicsome book he will enchant the nursery too. Mr Shephard’s drawings are in keeping with Mr Milne’s irresistible fun and fancy.

  Milne had first dedicated the book simply,

  TO THE LITTLE BOY

  WHO CALLS HIMSELF

  BILLY MOON

  but the final version (perhaps encouraged by Daphne) identified the child clearly not only as Milne’s own son, but as the character in some of the poems. It reads:

  TO

  CHRISTOPHER ROBIN MILNE

  OR AS HE PREFERS TO CALL HIMSELF

  BILLY MOON

  THIS BOOK

  WHICH OWES SO MUCH TO HIM

  IS NOW

  HUMBLY OFFERED

  Many adults undoubtedly bought the book for their own pleasure, but the papers invariably reviewed it as a children’s book as the publishers intended. Most of them gave it a good deal of space, though the Star gave it only two lines ‘between the Chatterbox Annual and The Girls of St Monica’s’ and the Morning Post headed its review ‘Jingles for the Nursery’ and continued in that vein ‘to our utter disgust’, Milne said. John Drinkwater’s review in the Sunday Times was one of the most interesting. He told Milne beforehand that it would sell ‘thousands of copies’ – but ‘whether of his books or mine’ Milne wasn’t sure before he read it.

  Drinkwater made a strong distinction between ‘the inventive fun’ of the rhymes written ‘for a young fellow called Christopher Robin’ and the stuff which seems to have strayed in from any book of bad poetry for children ‘into an extremely good one’. Drinkwater particularly disliked ‘Twinkletoes’ which ‘had reduced even Mr Shepard to a level of ordinary fairy inanity’. Dismissing such poems as ‘Water Lilies’ and ‘Spring Morning’ and ‘There’s a cavern in the mountain where the old men meet’ (all the ones that nobody remembers), Drinkwater spoke out for the arrival of ‘a new prophet’, someone fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Lewis Carroll.

  Mr Milne’s deftness is not to be questioned, but the fortunate thing is that it is, apart from the few lapses, always at work, as Lewis Carroll’s was, on a sound common sense foundation . . . Mr Milne treats his small companion as a sensible being who, indeed, wants to make up things, as is proper, but wants to make them up about real life and not about fairy doodleum. These two go about in the gayest and most whimsical of tempers, but the things that engage their attention are the soldiers at Buckingham Palace, the three little foxes who didn’t wear stockings and didn’t wear sockses, the gardener, the king who asked for no more than a little butter for the royal slice of bread . . . It is all great larks, but I wonder whether the Sterner Critics will realise that it also is a very wholesome contribution to serious literature.

  Milne would fortunately not live long enough to read the sternest critic of all, Geoffrey Grigson, fulminating about the book even while realising that ‘few other poems have sold so enormously’, not since Byron and Tennyson, anyway. Grigson would see Betjeman’s debt to Milne. ‘How is it that no one is asked, in Advanced Level English or even in the Tripos to estimate the influence’ of Milne on ‘Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn’, for instance. But Grigson thought Milne’s poems smug poems, poems for Us, marking us off from Other People – from titled people as well as the plebs, he observes, remembering Bad Sir Brian Botany, who has to be cured of his arrogant ways and become one of Us as B. Botany Esquire. The children in the poems, he says, live in the right London squares and, if male,

  are earmarked for the better schools, then the better colleges, high on the river (mens mediocris in corpore sano), at one of the ‘two’ universities; and that male and female they come of families comfortable, secure, self-certain, somewhat above the middle of the middle class.

  Are the poems for other children of such homes? No, rather than yes. Children, in my experience, of every generation since and including the Twenties, have found the poems nauseating, and fascinating. In fact, they were poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies – for parents
with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover. When We – We – Were Very Young the book is named, after all, indicating its aim; which, like the aim of all natural bestsellers, was not entirely explicit, one may assume, in the author’s consciousness.

  Here mamas of the middle way, and fathers, and nannies, those distorting reflectors of the parental ethos, could be sure of finding Innocence Up to Date. Little Lord Fauntleroy – here he was, stripped of frills and velvet (as we can tell by the splendid insipidity of the accompanying drawings) for modern, sensible clothes; heir, after all, to no peerage, but still the Eternal Child. No hint in these poems of children nasty, brutish and short, as Struwelpeter or Hilaire Belloc made them.

  Are there ever tantrums, as these nice children say ‘cos’, and ‘most’, and ‘nuffin’, and ‘purfickly’, and ‘woffelly’, in their nice accent?

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain.

  If there were tantrums, it is rice pudding again; but not the child psyche, not infant sexuality, not Freud, who had now entered the pure English world.

  The innocence of When We Were Very Young – of course it chimes with the last tinkle of a romantic innocence which by the Twenties had devolved to whimsy. Christopher Robin comes trailing the tattiest of wisps of a glory soiled by expectation and acceptance. The clouds have gone grey. The Child, in spite of Westminster and Trinity, is all too much at last the Father of the Man. And whenever the Child’s impresario allowed an entr’acte, it came in parallel modes of the expected and decayed – daffodowndillies and the last fairies (inherited from the more fanciful – and sinister – inventor of Peter Pan), Twinkle toes upon the apple leaves, the Lake King’s daughter on the water-lilies, cave ancients tapping at golden slippers for dainty feet, bluebells, and blackbirds’ yellow bills . . .