Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  Milne could also speak out clearly on the golf course. One of his opponents, making the usual assumption that Milne would be a right-thinking supporter of the right, was grumbling about the government. ‘What we need is a Mussolini,’ he declared, and was somewhat discomfited when Milne replied coldly, ‘Oh, do you like murderers?’ Milne also showed where he stood, ‘on the side of the people against privilege’, in a review in the Nation of a collection of the cartoons of the left-wing David Low, which had a text by Rebecca West, writing under the name of Lynx. When he wrote, Milne did not know the identity of Lynx and assumed her to be a man:

  Perhaps I am prejudiced, for Lynx’s way of thought happens to be similar to mine . . . One follows behind Low with a fearful joy, knowing that the next top hat is for it, yet wondering just how; but one precedes ‘Lynx’ confidently after a little, saying over one’s shoulder, ‘Come on, there’s a man in white spats over here, absolutely made for you . . .’ To Low’s pencil Birkenhead and Thomas are equally comic, Bennett and Belloc equally worthy of deflation; but ‘Lynx’ separates the sheep from the goats and, if for the most part, his pens bear the labels which I had long given them in my own mind, I at least have no cause to complain.

  Milne even began to think that he was Lynx himself, so closely did he identify with this writer ‘from the New Statesman school’. In his review he does not mention the description of his own plays, which cannot have been at all to his taste and makes his praise of the book all the more generous and interesting. After praising his children’s books, Rebecca West went on to say:

  And when he turns to what is professedly his adult work he really does not move out of the nursery. What gives his plays their curious sense of eeriness which exists however matter-of-fact the content may be, and their unaccountably touching quality, is our feeling that somehow the limitations of age have been transcended and we are watching the British child, its fair hair beautifully brushed, its eyes clear, its skin rosy, well trained, sweet-natured, very truthful and knowing no fear at all save that there may perhaps be some form of existence which is not the nursery and will not be kind however good one is, looking at life.

  And, in the meantime, the yellow-faced Colonels and shingled hostesses clamoured to clasp him by the hand and gush over his book, misled, as Grigson would be years later, by the superficial trappings, into thinking that Milne was a contented, smug and fully paid-up member of the Establishment.

  4

  THE BEGINNINGS OF POOH

  In the midst of the acclamation for When We Were Very Young, and over the triumphant years to come, Alan Milne had to face over and over again his brother’s sadly contrasting situation. Ken was following Alan’s advice. Saving his strength in Somerset, he was trying to write. But he was intensely aware of how much he walked in his younger brother’s shadow. Writing about his dog, Pete, for Punch, he could not help remembering Alan’s pieces on another dog, Chum, years earlier. Alan tried to reassure him, before he had seen the article: ‘I am sure it derives from Pete and not from me.’ When it was published on 10 December 1924 (as the third impression of Alan’s book had already been ordered) he wrote to Ken:

  Dear boy,

  10000000000000 congratulations on Pete. It is admirable. Is it cheek if I say that I never suspected you of it? It is so damnably unforced; so leisurely; so mature; so – everything that it ought to be. The ghost of Chum salutes you: I strongly suspect him of saying sadly ‘Yes, that’s how my man ought to have done it.’

  Give Maud my congratulation. I hope she is proud of you. In point of style it is miles ahead of the ordinary Punch article. Buy another piece of blotting paper, and stick to it. And I should be inclined to say ‘Stick to Punch’. If you write about your left boot like that Seaman couldn’t refuse it.

  Your very happy

  A. A. M.

  Ken would also, thanks to Alan, eventually do some regular reading for Methuen, though they were not encouraging at first. Alan tried to cheer him. ‘There are so many available for this sort of work that other things than ability must count: proximity, for instance. Or some other case, even harder than yours, may have turned up.’ At last, they did take Ken on and Alan was able to pass on an appreciative report from E. V. Lucas: ‘You can tell your brother we regard him as a very valuable ally. He is so quick and decisive.’

  In January 1925, Milne wrote to Maud with news of ‘a new consumption cure’ in Denmark. It was undoubtedly ‘genuine: hallmarked by the Lancet and the B.M.J.’. He urged her to persuade Ken to try it, or at least to send the preliminary reports and X-rays, which would allow the Danish doctor to decide whether to take the case on for the eight-week cure, or not. Alan offered not only to cover all the expenses involved, but even to put up with the certainty of seasickness on the North Sea in winter and to cross with him. But he was determined not to badger Ken about his health or, ‘so far as I can help it, have him badgered’. He just needed Maud to know how much he wanted (and how much he wanted he seemed hardly to be able to bring himself to say) Ken to take every chance there was of a cure. He said to Maud that he realised Ken might feel, ‘Leave me alone – I’m sick of doctors’: and that was presumably how Ken did feel, for he never went to Denmark.

  Milne did not know quite what to do with himself in these early days of 1925, as the sales of When We Were Very Young continued to mount. He tried a novel, wrote the first chapter in the hope that the other chapters would write themselves, but ‘some of these novels don’t seem to try’, he told Swinnerton. There were lots of invitations. Sometimes he was forced to meet people he found even more rebarbative than the Princess Marie Louise. He loathed Michael Arlen. ‘He is in our eighth hell,’ he told Ken. ‘Above or below Gilbert Frankau?’ He couldn’t decide.

  There were lots of letters to write. Daphne seemed to be losing the interest she had had in being Alan’s secretary masquerading as ‘Celia Brice’. There usually seemed to be other things she would rather be doing. Alan himself had always been bad about clearing his desk. In March, Chatto and Windus sent him an agreement for the publication of Four Plays. When the manuscript arrived in December, Swinnerton, his editor, had to beg for the counterpart agreement. ‘Its twin, resting here, is becoming blurred with grief and yellow with age.’ Milne liked getting letters. He told one fan: ‘Letters like yours are the best part of the game’; but it wasn’t, of course, quite the same when they had to be answered.

  Probably the fan letter that moved him most was from Rudyard Kipling. He replied, ‘If you can remember what you once said to Tennyson, you will know what your letter makes me want to say to you. I am proud that you like the verses.’ Kipling had said to Tennyson: ‘When a private is praised by his General he does not presume to thank him, but fights the better afterwards.’ Only to Kipling himself would Milne have repeated such an analogy.

  He was watching a certain amount of sport – rugger at Twickenham, the Boat Race – and playing a great deal of golf. His handicap was ‘now officially 9, fortunately for our domestic happiness’. As long as Alan’s handicap was in double figures, ‘Daff hardly dared to mention it in polite society’. Daphne’s feelings really did matter to Alan – on all things, great and small. She was very powerful. In this same letter, Milne joked, referring to himself and the four-year-old Billy, ‘We men are in a minority.’ Daff and he were laughing together over P. G. Wodehouse’s lament in John o’ London’s Weekly over the decline of the old English sport of hawking. It was all golf nowadays.

  Golf and the world golfs with you;

  Hawk and you hawk alone.

  Alan Milne boasted to Ken (who was still able to play a gentle game himself) of going round Addington in 84, including an 8 at the last, where he lost a ball. He went round Walton Heath in a satisfactory 85, though it was

  about the most difficult course in London, with heather a foot high on each side of a narrow fairway, and a perpetual wind. I play a terrible lot of golf now – always twice and often 3 times a week, and it’s really time I settled down to wor
k again. But I don’t know what. There is a perpetual murmur of ‘Detective Story’ going on in everybody’s brain but mine: Daff’s, Curtis Brown’s, Methuen’s, Dutton’s (my American publisher), Hearst’s (who want the serial rights), Mr A’s (probably) and the Lord Mayor’s.

  Ken sat at home in Somerset listening to an actress called Rita Ricardo reading ‘The Three Little Foxes’, ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’ and ‘The Christening’ over 2LO, on the ‘wireless installation’ that Alan had given him. And he read Alan’s long letters. Alan told him Billy was learning to count. When his father, hearing ‘One – Two – Three’, asked him how far he could go, he said with surprise, ‘Up to the end.’ It was an answer that appealed to the latent mathematician in Milne. The boy was also learning to read and write:

  He autographed a copy of his book for somebody yesterday. Entirely by himself – except that he had to be told what letter came next . . . The silly woman had written asking for his ‘mark’ – for a X – Bah! We Moons are a cut above that at 4¼.

  Milne discussed the child’s feelings about the book in a letter to Lady Desborough, whom he had met a few times and who had written him a fan letter:

  At the moment (4¼) Christopher Robin is a man of action rather than a man of letters, and I doubt if the book makes the appeal to him which it does to more studious natures . . . But he quotes from it sometimes; and, indeed, just to hear him call it ‘My book’ is happiness enough.

  ‘Just now he has the Meccano craze (and so have I as far as I am allowed),’ Milne wrote to Ken. The boy also had a passion for drawing and painting. In February of 1925 he produced his masterpiece, which he told his father was ‘St. George and the Dragon’. Milne wrote, ‘It is of the Impressionist School. Daff and I were admiring it publicly and privately indulging in a little discussion as to some of the details. Billy meanwhile was finishing his lunch at the other end of the table, and, having finished it, said his grace to himself. This was it: “Thank God for my good lunch – and let those people understand the dragon.” How well I know his feeling!’

  Milne was not yet wary of allowing the child to become involved in the public reaction to the book. There was some discussion over whether to take him to the private view of an exhibition of Shepard’s illustrations to When We Were Very Young, but that was probably because he might not enjoy the occasion. At this stage Milne’s son had barely heard the words ‘Christopher Robin’ and most of the boys in Shepard’s illustrations were certainly not him. Their hair was much shorter for one thing, though you couldn’t always see it because of the hats. It was because of the dedication that it was his book; it was written for him. He was there, of course, in ‘Hoppity’, in ‘Buckingham Palace’, in ‘Vespers’ and in ‘Sand-between-the-toes’, and he felt he was there in some of the others. But he was not, like Tootles in Peter Pan, dazzled by being in a story. It all seemed perfectly natural. Daphne suggested it seemed no more extraordinary than it did to other children to find their pictures in the family photograph album. None of Milne’s stories of Billy at this time suggest the shy creature of Christopher Milne’s memories. It is impossible not to think that he was made shy, and his natural confidence eroded, by the attention he received in the following years. If Christopher Robin had played a minor part in When We Were Very Young, in the next book he would take a starring role.

  The child’s passion for St George and the Dragon determined one of his fifth birthday presents that summer: a shining suit of armour. It is interesting that Christopher Milne’s own story in The Enchanted Places, written nearly fifty years later, tallies exactly with the story Milne told at the time in a letter to Ken, a letter which Christopher never saw. Did he really remember so accurately or was it, more likely, a story his father often repeated?

  As you know, he is very keen on dressing up, particularly as St. George v. Dragon. I was trying to teach him to catch last weekend, and he wasn’t very good at it. I said, ‘You must learn to catch, or you will never be any good at cricket. And you know when you’re nine or ten, you’ll think of nothing but cricket.’ And he opened his eyes very wide and said ‘Nothing but cricket? Not armour?’ A dreary prospect opening up before him.

  The catching practice was going on at Cotchford, the farmhouse in Sussex, where the Milnes would now spend most weekends, as well as the Easter and summer holidays. Nanny would, of course, always go down with them. She would come in useful for fielding when it came to cricket, but it is remarkable how seldom Milne mentions her in his letters. She came between him and his son – there was no doubt about that – and he was jealous. Christopher Milne would say that jealousy was his father’s besetting sin. ‘Jealous by nature – as I was too – more than anything he hated rivalry.’ And Nanny – not Daphne – was his true rival for the love he longed for from his son.

  Milne bumped his head happily on the low beams as he learned to live in the old house. He had a small, rather dark study with a window looking out across the front courtyard to the kitchen wing. Daphne had lavished a good deal of attention on the rest of the house, getting it just the way she wanted it, but it was in the garden that she really came into her own. There was something, it seemed, that she had always been wanting to do and that was to make a garden. She had a full-time gardener to help, but it was her garden and the picture we have of her in the country is very different from the image of her in London, with her hats and hairdressers and leisurely luncheons. ‘She responded to the beauty, the peace and the solitude’ that the country offered. ‘She found this in the garden and she found it too in the countryside beyond. Solitude. She was happiest alone.’ But their son would see Milne as ‘a Londoner, a real Londoner with a deep love of London in his bones. For him the country had always been, not where you lived, but where you went. Where you went on holiday. Where you went to do something – to ride a bicycle, to climb a hill, to look for birds’ nests, to play golf. Like a dog, he couldn’t just be in the country, sitting or strolling aimlessly.’ So Christopher would say, but once, in a novel, Milne himself would write that the good thing about the country is that you can do nothing there, because that means ‘doing everything: thinking, seeing, listening, feeling, living’. But it was true enough that, like a dog, he was never happier than when chasing a ball. He needed someone to play with and Daphne hated all games.

  So there was tiny Christopher Robin, still called Billy, being trained to throw and catch, an ancillary of his father. And there was Daphne, absorbed in planting and planning her garden. Their pleasure in their first ‘picnic weekend’ was rather spoilt when they returned to find there had been burglars in Mallord Street. Alan wrote to Ken:

  Fortunately they were only out for the jewellery, and ignored all the silver spoons and forks. Still more luckily they searched every drawer in the house for Daff’s jewel-case, and the actual case (which they probably thought was a tea-caddy) looked on and laughed at them. All they got was

  Two silver boxes

  Ciro-pearl necklace (which I hope they thought was genuine)

  Jade and diamond brooch

  Ear-rings

  My gold wrist watch

  My gold ‘albert’ (which I haven’t worn since 1914)

  and

  Two pairs of cami-knickers and two chemises of Daff’s! (You ought to have heard me describing the cami-knickers to two stolid policemen.) About £70 worth. Insured, of course. The visitors came in politely by the front door which they burst open with a jemmy. They did no damage whatever inside, owing to the lucky fact that not a single drawer, cupboard or desk is ever locked in this house. But bills, letters and clothes were scattered all over the rooms. Holmes (or Gillingham) would undoubtedly have said that they were really searching for the secret will or the compromising photograph.

  Gillingham was Milne’s own amateur detective in The Red House Mystery.

  I have been interviewed by detectives, insurance people, bloodhounds and what else, and have reconstructed the scene of the crime a dozen times. There is no doubt we shall get our m
oney back all right.

  The bulbs Daphne had planted on day trips from Chelsea with sandwiches and a Thermos flask, when they had first got possession in the autumn, were coming into flower – hundreds of Darwin tulips that May. Just as Daphne’s role in Milne’s writing was simply admiration and praise, so was Milne’s role, officially, in relation to Daphne’s garden. He admired very much what she and the gardener were doing, but perversely took even more pleasure in the self-sown things, the flowers that sprang up of their own accord – eschscholtzia, coreopsis, sidalcea and aubretia. ‘A cynic might say that my love is no more than delight in an unearned, unexpected bonus. This is entirely to misjudge me. It comes from a feeling that . . . this unclaimed, unworked-for bounty is in some mysterious way the product of my own idleness.’ He did pull up an occasional weed, priding himself on the length of its root, and he wondered at the miracles of nature. ‘That a nasturtium seed should take any further interest in life is the most optimistic thing that happens in the world.’