Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  The garden was Daphne’s kingdom and Milne never considered himself more than an under-gardener. In 1929 he would inscribe The Secret ‘For Daffodil Milne’ with ‘the homage of the under-gardener’. But already in the summer of 1926 he would write, ‘I am getting wildly keen on the garden, and slightly less unintelligent about it.’ His own territory was the putting lawn and he was allowed to worry about the water. Water is always a worry as well as a pleasure. Its habits are quite unpredictable. There was a sort of ditch at the bottom of the garden, which tended to dry up in the summer. Later Milne would discover a spring and form a pond, which caused endless problems. It was perhaps something to do with chalybeate, the iron in the soil, or perhaps it was oil. Milne lived long enough to worry about the first explorations in the area by Sir Henri Deterding of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company.

  Across the ditch there was a meadow and beyond the meadow the river, a tributary of the Medway. They called it a river, though it was really only a stream, to distinguish it from the stream which was really a sort of ditch. The river was deep in a channel lined with alders. ‘It was just the right width: too wide to jump, but where a kindly tree reached out a branch to another kindly tree on the opposite shore, it was possible to swing yourself over. It was just the right depth: too deep to paddle across but often shallow enough to paddle in and in places deep enough to swim.’ It is of course the river, only Milne calls it a stream, in which Roo will squeak ‘Look at me swimming!’ and be rescued with the North Pole. Upstream, a short walk south-west of Cotchford, was the bridge, the scene of games of what would be called Poohsticks, and beyond the bridge was the forest.

  ‘It is difficult to be sure which came first,’ Christopher would write. Did they play the game Poohsticks before the story or only afterwards? It’s such a natural sort of game, throwing sticks into a river and watching them come out on the other side of the bridge, seeing which one had won, that no one really needed to invent it. Probably there were already people playing it all over the world. But there would soon be many more.

  And what was Winnie-the-Pooh, the teddy bear himself, doing all this time? He was certainly travelling the hour and a quarter each way, down with the others from Mallord Street to Cotchford and back in the new car driven by Burnside, the chauffeur. (Milne himself would drive, but on the whole he preferred to be driven. He drove ‘terribly slowly and terribly badly’, one of his nieces said, and he would later claim to be ‘the only man in Sussex for whom cars did not start’.) And sometime about now – it is difficult to fix the exact moment – the bear acquired his highly individual name. He had already acquired a voice – ‘Pooh’s gruff voice as inspired by Moon’, as Milne described it to Ken in 1928 when Billy had become Moon. Ten years or so later Milne said it was Daphne who had given the animals their voices. It was probably a bit of both. ‘He and his mother gave them life,’ Milne said. The child and his toy bear ‘indulged in lengthy conversations’, according to Daphne, ‘Christopher interpolating fierce growls for the bear, feeling thoroughly convinced about it’. There was also some suggestion that the child would say things in a gruff Pooh voice which he knew would hardly be acceptable if he said them in his own.

  The teddy bear himself played a very small part in the first book. Apart from his leading role in ‘Teddy Bear’, he makes only two very minor appearances in the illustrations. He had certainly not yet come into his own. If in physical form he was based on Graham Shepard’s bear, in habits and domicile Teddy Bear (or more formally Mr Edward Bear) was certainly the Milne bear:

  He gets what exercise he can

  By falling off the ottoman,

  But generally seems to lack

  The energy to clamber back.

  The ottoman was in Billy Moon’s nursery on the top floor at Mallord Street, and the toys slept in there at night. The bear was the absolute favourite, the child’s inseparable companion. Eeyore was already around (a present for Christmas 1921); he was a donkey with a drooping neck which naturally gave him a gloomy disposition. (Soon there would be a real donkey called Jessica in the thistly field beyond the Cotchford garden where later, after the animal’s death, they planted a wood.) There was Piglet too, a present from a neighbour in Chelsea.

  There have been many explanations of Winnie-the-Pooh’s name, so many that it is a wonder Milne did not make a story out of them, in the manner of the Just So Stories. There is no question that the Winnie part came from a female Black Bear called Winnie (after Winnipeg), who was one of the most popular animals in the London Zoo during this period. (If you go to the Zoo now you can see a sculpture of a bear cub, which celebrates the link between them.) The real bear had crossed the Atlantic as the mascot of a Canadian regiment, the Princess Pat’s, and had been left on Mappin Terrace in the safekeeping of the Royal Zoological Society in 1914, when the regiment went to France. She lived there until her death in 1934.

  Christopher Milne certainly met this bear on more than one occasion. There are various accounts of how he reacted. His father, as reported by Enid Blyton, would say ‘the bear hugged Christopher Robin and they had a glorious time together, rolling about and pulling ears and all sorts of things.’ It sounds rather hazardous. E. V. Lucas was a member of the Society and knew many of the keepers. Through him it was possible to open doors and gates not normally opened to the general public. Laurence Irving, Henry’s grandson, told a story – which had wide circulation in a letter to The Times in 1981 – of a visit to Winnie, when he invited the children of two of his Garrick friends, A. A. Milne and John Hastings Turner, to join his daughter Pamela on her fifth birthday. Mrs Irving’s version was that Pamela, who had a keen sense of smell, had exclaimed ‘Oh pooh!’ on meeting the docile beast; Daphne certainly told the story that Christopher had said the same, but with pleasure rather than distaste, having decided he liked the bear after some natural initial trepidation on meeting the huge if friendly beast. (‘The girls held their ground, Billy wavered, retreated a step or two, then overcame his awe.’) However, the date of the expedition, so firmly fixed by Irving on his daughter’s fifth birthday, makes it impossible that saying ‘pooh!’ to Winnie the bear at the Zoo can have had anything to do with the naming of Christopher Robin’s teddy. Pamela was five on 22 March 1926, certainly seven months before the book was published, but three months after the first Pooh story had appeared in print.

  Irving, writing to the paper so long afterwards, might well have confused the birthday. But the expedition cannot have taken place in March 1925, because it is also linked firmly with Vaudeville Vanities, a revue in which all three men – Irving, Milne and Hastings Turner – were involved. Irving had designed the sets for a rendering of ‘The King’s Breakfast’, set to music by Fraser-Simson. It was an item which caused problems, as the producer felt sure that the Lord Chamberlain would object to the life-size cow’s pale terracotta udders. Milne and Irving were both on the side of the udders – ‘the source of the butter on which the plot depended’. Vaudeville Vanities opened late in 1926, after the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. Indeed, if the visit to Winnie took place, as Irving says, ‘during the long run of the revue’, it must have been to celebrate Pamela’s sixth birthday, in March 1927.

  If I seem to have laboured this point it is because Irving’s story has been much repeated. ‘How did Winnie-the-Pooh get his name?’ is a common question; it is such an odd name. Christopher Milne says ‘I gave it to him’ but nearly always uses just ‘Pooh’ and it is that part of the name that causes most problems. I have heard children, sadly, refuse to take the book off the library shelf ‘because of its silly name’. A child psychotherapist was much taken with the fact that it was a swan that was first called ‘Pooh’ – a swan, in its pure whiteness, being the antithesis of the current association, in nursery language, with faeces. This association written without an ‘h’ – supposedly from the exclamation at anything smelly or disgusting – did not come into the language until the 1930s (according to Eric Partridge) and whether it has anything to do wit
h Pooh Bear it is impossible to say. There is nothing smelly or disgusting about Pooh.

  Really, it seems best to leave most of the explanation to A. A. Milne himself. He says that when they said goodbye to the swan at Arundel, ‘we took the name with us, as we didn’t think the swan would want it any more’. And when Edward Bear wanted ‘an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was.’ Milne could not remember whether Winnie at the zoo was called after Pooh or Pooh after Winnie, but we know that that large Canadian bear was Winnie long before Christopher was born. Then there is the complication of the bear’s sex and of the mysterious ‘the’ in the middle of the name. Milne again:

  When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’

  ‘So did I,’ said Christopher Robin.

  ‘Then you can’t call him Winnie?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?’

  ‘Ah yes, now I do,’ I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.

  It only remains to remember that Pooh had such stiff arms, ‘from holding on to the string of the balloon all that time that they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think – but I am not sure – that that is why he was always called Pooh.’ Well, it’s possible.

  And as for it not being possible for a male creature to be called Winnie, it is just worth wondering whether Pooh helped Churchill’s nickname during the war and reinforced his tubby reassuring image when Britain stood alone.

  In the spring of 1925 Winnie-the-Pooh was still a toy bear and not a book. He was not even in a story. But after the success of the poems, everyone forgot about the detective story and started pressing Milne to produce another children’s book. When We Were Very Young was already firmly established as ‘the greatest children’s book since Alice’. Indeed, its rare status had been acclaimed immediately on publication: ‘It is a book that all children will adore. It is a book that mothers and nurses will laugh and cry over. It is a – classic!’

  Carl Pforzheimer, an extremely rich book collector, began as early as 1925 to build up the collection of manuscripts, typescripts and Shepard pencil sketches which would eventually, after his death, sell at Sotheby’s in London in 1986 for £120,000 ($180,000). Milne obviously thought at this stage that his success might not last and he should cash in on it while he had the chance. Later he regretted very much that he had let the material go; he would be more careful in future.

  Milne had always prided himself on his financial astuteness, but he made another mistake in 1925. An American publisher, David McKay Co. of Philadelphia, wanted him to write some stories to go with some paintings by an artist called H. Willebeek Le Mair. On 29 March, Milne wrote to Curtis Brown, ‘At present am still wrestling with the McKay pictures. As soon as any sort of book begins to heave in sight, of course I will let you know.’ As he was merely adding some words to a set of existing pictures, he foolishly agreed to a lump payment with no royalty. The Bookman said, ‘If you like Mr Milne’s verses, you will like his stories . . . They all come from the same mint.’ But posterity (and Milne himself) distinguished the wheat from the chaff. A recent critic said A Gallery of Children ‘intrudes like a pale white slug between two butterflies’ – but it sold on the strength of Milne’s name. He wrote to a friend in November: ‘For God’s sake don’t buy it. I sold the thing outright to an American publisher – in a moment of madness – for £200. He has already sold 50,000 copies at 3½ dollars. Take 10% on that and you perceive that I have thrown away thousands.’ He told Ken that ‘McKay had the nerve to write and say that he looked forward to doing another book with me – verses with Shepard illustrations he airily suggested – on which he would “be willing to pay a royalty”. I told him to go to San Francisco and chew gum.’

  Milne was working on more verses. He wrote to Curtis Brown in April 1925: ‘Yes, I am prepared to do a dozen more verses of the When We Were Very Young kind for serial use in the next year if you can make a deal with the Hearst people.’ Harper’s offered ‘up to £100 for 12 verses’ but Milne argued for fifteen guineas each, and got that. He had actually had twenty guineas at Easter for a poem in the Star, ‘and America is supposed to pay so much better than England’. He wrote to Ken:

  Cassells are paying 200 guineas for the English rights of the twelve, provided that they average 30 lines each.

  ‘The King asked –

  The Queen and – ’

  Now you see the point of putting it out like this.

  He was encouraging Curtis Brown to insist on 25 per cent ‘all through’ when it came to his next children’s book. What this would be he was still not at all sure. Certainly, he wanted to work with Shepard again, and indeed he had written to him early in 1925 to ask him if he would be interested in illustrating a new edition of Once on a Time, which had made so little impact when it was first published during the war.

  My dear Shepard,

  Did you ever read a book of mine called ‘Once on a Time’? No. However, I forgive you, as nobody else has. It was published – Hodder & Stoughton – in 1917, and died at birth. But until W.W.W.V.Y. I always thought it my best book.

  And now, spurred on by our joint success, H. & S. want to bring out a new edition, illustrated by you. It is a long fairy story, and cries aloud for my one and only collaborator. Will you do it? H. M. Brock did it last time – 4 full pages, bad; and 20 chapter headings, not bad. If you would do it, it really might have a very big sale next Christmas. Hodder & Stoughton are writing to you. Methuens were very keen to get it away from them and publish it (with your illustrations, of course), but H. & S. weren’t having any.

  I should like you to do it in the verse manner – with decorations all over the place – but I don’t know what the publishers’ idea is. Anyhow, it is a book on which I have always been very keen, and which I have always felt has never had a chance, so you can understand how keen I am that you should do it. It is full of Kings & Princesses and dragons & other strange animals – and, in fact, shouts for you. So come.

  But Shepard was presumably too busy. Everyone was wanting him to do things. Milne hoped he might illustrate a gift edition of his old children’s play Make-Believe for Chatto and Windus (cashing in on his new fame as a children’s writer), but Shepard did not do that either. In 1925 Hodder and Stoughton brought out another edition of Once on a Time with delightful illustrations by Charles Robinson, Heath Robinson’s elder brother, most famous for his illustrations of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. When he was very young, he had decorated the first edition of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and it seems quite natural that someone would think of him now in connection with Milne, but in fact the Robinson illustrations for Once on a Time had appeared in America three years earlier. In spite of Milne’s efforts, for he was immensely fond of it, no one ever took a great deal of notice of it.

  For the next two years, for the first time for many years, there were no Milne plays on in London or New York. But the book which was to make far more impact than any play and even than the children’s poems, was – though it seemed impossible at the time – not far off. Christopher’s bedtime stories consisted largely of the stuff of fairy tales – dragons and knights, giants and princesses and so on. Milne knew, as most parents do, that it is no good making things too exciting at bedtime. In fact, the more boring the story is, the more quickly the child goes to sleep. Nameless knights and indistinguishable princesses did the usual sort of things – ‘a completely contemptible mix-up’ Milne called it. But occasionally there was one story that was a little different. It was a story about the child’s bear and a balloon and some bees. And the bear, as we have seen, had recently acquired his very unusual name – Winnie-the-Pooh,
that good name for a bear who had to blow flies off the end of his nose because his arms were too stiff to be useful.

  Milne was much in the public eye at the end of 1925, as a result of the continually bestselling, continually reprinting When We Were Very Young. There was a large supplement to the Christmas Bookman – eight pages entirely devoted to Milne’s life, his family and his work, with lots of compliments and lots of photographs. The writer concluded: ‘If you look back at his early sketches, and over the lengthening line of his plays, you will feel that from the first to the latest, they are linked up and related to each other by a charm of personality which gives colour to them all . . . The dominant note in everything he has written, for mature people or little folk, is a joy in all life and a spirit of youth that never survives in the foolish.’ There was a photograph of Milne offering a toy penguin to a dubious three-year-old with the teddy bear standing on the sidelines; there was one by Marcus Adams of a rather cool five-year-old, ‘Christopher Robin Milne, to whom When We Were Very Young is dedicated’; one of Shepard’s illustrations to ‘Little Bo-Peep and the Little Boy Blue’ ‘from the original drawing which now hangs in the nursery of Christopher Robin’ – and an extremely striking portrait of ‘Mrs Milne’ in profile, by E. O. Hoppé.

  Milne wrote to Ken on the day that Daphne had been to the studio. She had been there with him once or twice before, and on her return said:

  D: I didn’t know he was so French. He used not to be.

  ME: Well, of course he has got an accent on the ‘e’.

  D: Yes – well, it was very acute this morning.

  Daphne was actually revelling in all the fuss. She wrote at the end of one of Alan’s letters to Irene Vanbrugh: ‘We are all very well and happy and pleased with each other and everything else!’ Alan wrote to Ken: