Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  When Sarah Simple was produced in 1940 in America, one critic would reflect that the man who had written such excellent plays as Mr Pim Passes By, The Truth about Blayds and The Dover Road, ‘now writes with about as much maturity as Christopher Robin’. It was a hard time, of course, a time when theatre reviews seemed particularly irrelevant. But he now knew it would not be as a playwright that he would be remembered.

  A. A. Milne was now richer than he would ever have believed possible. It seemed churlish to grumble. Pooh had already become an industry in the thirties. Vast sales of all four of the books, with translations all over the world, had stimulated the sales of ‘hygienic plush toys’, board games, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, writing paper and nursery china. There were endless spin-offs from the books: Hums, Songs, the Christopher Robin Story Book, the Christopher Robin Reader, the Christopher Robin Verses (with twelve colour plates) and so on. In America, the total sales of the four central books had already reached a million copies. Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and the rest were on their way to becoming lodged permanently in what could be called the folk-memories of the English-speaking people, part of our common language and frame of reference.

  The most important thing for Alan Milne in the 1930s was his relationship with his son. As Christopher himself put it in The Enchanted Places: ‘My father, who had derived such happiness from his childhood, found in me the companion with whom he could return there.’ Not long after Ken’s death, the time had come for Olive Rand, to whom Christopher had been so devoted, to leave. At last she felt free to marry; Milne furnished her cottage, which she called Vespers, as a wedding present. At nine, Christopher was off to a boarding prep school, but in the holidays there would be no one to come between father and son, as there always had been when the boy’s first love was his nanny.

  For Milne, Christopher could be, as he grew up, what his brother Ken had been in their boyhood. After Ken’s death, the letters to the invalid Ken in Somerset became letters to Christopher at school. In the holidays, at Cotchford, in London and in Dorset, they did things together more and more. For the next ten years the boy was his father’s closest friend. It even seemed, at this early stage, that he might become a first-class cricketer. Milne wrote to an old friend: ‘He is always the youngest boy in any form he is in and generally top. Forgive a proud parent; he is a duck.’ Christopher had a passion for knowledge, for algebra, for learning the Greek alphabet. They shared ball games, crosswords, Euclid, morse.

  In the summer of 1934, Milne described his son as he turned fourteen. ‘Moon left his prep school in July, being then top of the school, leader of the choir, captain of cricket and in the football XI.’ He had won a scholarship to Stowe, his father’s choice. Milne was still happily unaware how much his son was coming to resent his celebrity. The boy did not blame his father at this stage, but ‘Christopher Robin’, as he himself put it, ‘was beginning to be, what he was later to become, a sore place that looked as if it would never heal.’

  In 1936, Milne reported to a friend that the boy ‘is the most completely modest, unspoilt, enthusiastic happy darling in the world. In short, I adore him.’ Christopher, who had described his father as ‘buttoned up all through his life’, did not of course read this letter until he came across it in my biography. It was at this point that boys in the next study at Stowe were playing the record of ‘Vespers’ over and over again on their wind-up gramophone and driving the ‘happy darling’ into despair. He was very vulnerable, but most of the time he could forget the books and the bear and get on with his work. He was an even better mathematician than his father, but his cricket, which might have helped him, did not fulfil his father’s hopes; he got no further than the Third Eleven.

  Four years running in the mid-thirties, father and son had holidays in rented houses on the Dorset coast with Ken’s widow and three of his children, Christopher’s cousins. Maud, aged fifty, organised the meals. The other five played and swam. Christopher recalled, ‘For us, to whom our childhood had meant so much, the journey back is short, the coming and going easy.’ Sometimes there were boats, sometimes tennis courts. Always there was the sea and crosswords and endless paper games.

  More and more, Milne found himself looking back, not ahead. In 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, this was understandable. He was writing his Autobiography, published under that title in America and as It’s Too Late Now in Britain. In it, Milne devoted more than half to his own beginnings – child, schoolboy, undergraduate – and only a few pages to the four famous children’s books, though he must have realised that that was the section that would most interest people. Of Christopher, he said little beyond the fact that they had intended to call their child Rosemary, but decided later that Billy would be more suitable. In the end, he was registered as Christopher Robin, ‘names wasted on him who called himself Billy Moon as soon as he could talk, and has been Moon to his family and friends ever since. I mention this because it explains why the publicity attached to “Christopher Robin” never seemed to affect us personally, but rather to concern a character in a book.’

  The boy had certainly shown no signs of any normal adolescent rebellion. What he had begun to show were the signs of nervous tension, of an increasing shyness, the outward expression, presumably, of a subconscious worry that he could never fulfil his father’s deepest ambitions for him, that he could never be the sort of debonair young man readers expected that charming, competent child, Christopher Robin, to become – if, indeed, they imagined him growing up at all. The schoolboy Christopher Milne both trembled and stammered and remained anxious in all he did to please his father.

  In 1939, in that last beautiful summer before war was declared, on holiday together on Dartmoor, father and son were still extremely close and would remain so throughout the war. This was in spite of the fact that for much of that time they were separated by many hundreds of miles. Christopher went up to Milne’s old college, Trinity, Cambridge, in the autumn that year.

  Milne found solace in practising his long-neglected talent for light verse in a sort of rhyming war diary that appeared in Punch in the first year of the war. When it was published in October 1940 as Behind the Lines, the book was dedicated:

  To my affinity:

  C. R. Milne: Mathematical scholar of Trinity:

  And: By the time this appears:

  With any luck Private in the Royal Engineers.

  Christopher had failed his first medical through trembling with nervous excitement, but his father’s intervention had given him another chance. The boy was keen to go and managed to pass a trade test and in July 1942 he was finally commissioned and sailed for the Middle East with a battalion of the Royal Engineers.

  It was the war that would eventually allow him to make the necessary escape from his father, to be himself, to put his childhood finally behind him. Those five years, he would say, ‘provided me with a foundation stone, strong and lasting, on which to build my adult life.’

  Milne was writing letters to destinations all over the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. Christopher was in Lombardy when, on 7 October 1944, the dreaded telegram arrived in Cotchford. It was not that the boy was missing, but rather, and equally frightening, that he had suffered ‘a penetrating shell wound in the right occipital region and was seriously ill.’ In fact the head wound, it turned out, was not very serious. Milne wrote a letter to The Times, objecting to the way the War Office had alarmed them.

  There was no further occasion for similar suffering. But there would be other suffering to come for which Milne was hardly prepared. There was a girl in Trieste who ‘helped to loosen the bond that tied’ the boy to his father. Milne had often said he wanted his son to stand on his own two feet and make his own name for himself. But when Christopher at last started out on that path, his father found it extremely difficult.

  It was the period after the war that caused the final rift. The young man, like so many returned soldiers, found it difficult to get work. He had gone back to Cambridge to finis
h his degree, had switched to English and finished with a mere Third:

  In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

  Now it seems they had only one thing in common: ‘If I wanted to escape from Christopher Robin, so, too, did he.’

  The strength of the bond that there had been between father and son made the breaking of it all the more painful. Almost the last time they were in the same room was when Christopher married his cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt. They had been introduced by their shared step-grandmother, sorry that they did not know each other. Lesley’s father, Aubrey, had been estranged from Christopher’s mother, Daphne, for many years. The marriage would not ‘bury their parents’ strife’. Christopher was joining Lesley in the opposing camp. Lesley had no time at all for Winnie-the-Pooh.

  In 1951, Christopher and Lesley set up their own bookshop in Dartmouth in Devon. Their story together went on for nearly fifty years and enabled Christopher to say in the preface to his second memoir The Path Through the Trees that he had had a happy life. He never completely got over his dislike of being the real live Christopher Robin, but when he looked at the four famous books in his shop, he admitted finally he could not help being proud of his father. He was proud himself of the fact that he and his wife were self-supporting at the Harbour Bookshop. His share of his father’s fortune went into a Trust for his disabled daughter, a Trust that continues after Clare’s death in 2012, to support disabled people in south-west England.

  A. A. Milne’s last years were not happy, though he and Daphne lived amicably in their home on the edge of Ashdown Forest and he had come to terms at last with his claim to immortality, and his most famous creation, Winnie-the-Pooh. He wrote to a young fan: ‘There was a period when any reference to him was infuriating, but now such a “nice comfortable feeling” envelops him that I can almost regard him impersonally as the creation of one of my own favourite authors.’

  It was an odd remark. Perhaps at last he was seeing that his four books deserved to be on the same special shelf as The Wind in the Willows.

  In 1926, just after Winnie-the-Pooh was published, A. A. Milne had written: ‘I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live for ever in this world, whatever he may be doing himself in the next.’ There is no doubt that he had achieved – though not in the way he had wished – that certain immortality.

  A. A. Milne died after a long illness in 1956. Christopher Robin Milne died forty years later.

  PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  All photographs are from the author’s own collection with the exception of the following:

  Pagelink and pagelink: Line illustrations copyright © E. H. Shepard. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd on behalf of The Shepard Trust

  Pagelink: © E. O. Hoppé / Corbis

  Pagelink and pagelink: © Bettmann

  Pagelink and pagelink: © Brian Sibley

  Pagelink: Text by A. A. Milne copyright © Trustees of the Pooh Properties, reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd

  Pagelink: © The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Christopher Robin, as seen by E. H. Shepard in the last chapter of The House at Pooh Comer and as photographed by his father in 1924, apparently ‘examining a butterfly’.

  2. A. A. Milne in uniform before leaving for the Somme in July 1916. He wrote afterwards about ‘a nightmare of mental and moral degradation’.

  3. Father and son: A. A. and C. R. Milne. The child was always known as Billy.

  4. Christopher Robin and Pooh.

  5. Christopher Robin with his mother, Daphne.

  6. Christopher Robin with his nanny, Olive Rand, known to him as ‘Nou’. She holds Pooh; a larger Piglet is by the fence.

  7. At London Zoo with Winnie the Canadian bear, who gave Pooh his name, March 1927.

  8. Poohsticks Bridge, as seen by E. H. Shepard in 1926 and more recently.

  9. A page of the manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh, given by Milne to his old college, Trinity, Cambridge.

  10. Christopher Robin and Pooh by Marcus Adams, March 1928.

  11. The toys in their home in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, looking their age. They have recently been tenderly repaired.

  12. The front of Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, thirty-five miles from London, bought by Milne in 1925.

  13. The back lawn at Cotchford, with Daphne, Christopher Robin, Pooh and Alan Milne looking distinctly uneasy.

  1. Christopher Robin, as seen by E. H. Shepard in the last chapter of The House at Pooh Comer and as photographed by his father in 1924, apparently ‘examining a butterfly’.

  2. A. A. Milne in uniform before leaving for the Somme in July 1916. He wrote afterwards about ‘a nightmare of mental and moral degradation’.

  3. Father and son: A. A. and C. R. Milne. The child was always known as Billy.

  4. Christopher Robin and Pooh.

  5. Christopher Robin with his mother, Daphne.

  6. Christopher Robin with his nanny, Olive Rand, known to him as ‘Nou’. She holds Pooh; a larger Piglet is by the fence.

  7. At London Zoo with Winnie the Canadian bear, who gave Pooh his name, March 1927.

  8. Poohsticks Bridge, as seen by E. H. Shepard in 1926 and more recently.

  9. A page of the manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh, given by Milne to his old college, Trinity, Cambridge.

  10. Christopher Robin and Pooh by Marcus Adams, March 1928.

  11. The toys in their home in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, looking their age. They have recently been tenderly repaired.

  12. The front of Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, thirty-five miles from London, bought by Milne in 1925.

  13. The back lawn at Cotchford, with Daphne, Christopher Robin, Pooh and Alan Milne looking distinctly uneasy.

  GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

  Ann Thwaite is an award-winning biographer and children’s writer. She has written five major biographies. The first – Waiting for the Party (later reissued as Beyond the Secret Garden) – of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden, was published in 1974. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape won the 1985 Duff Cooper Prize and was described by John Carey as ‘one of the finest literary biographies of our time’. Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (1996) is widely regarded as the most interesting biography of Tennyson himself. Glimpses of the Wonderful (2002), a life of Edmund’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D. J. Taylor in the Independent as one of the ‘Ten Best Biographies ever’. A. A. Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 1990, and The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh, a scrapbook offshoot of her Milne biography, was published in 1992.

  Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University, the National Centre for Research into Children’s Literature. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D.Litt from Oxford. She lives in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite.

  ALSO BY ANN THWAITE

  The Young Traveller in Japan (1958)

  The House in Turner Square (1960)

  Home and Away (1967)

  The Travelling Tooth (1968)

  The Day with the Duke (1969)

  The Camelthorn Papers (1969)

  The Only Treasure (1970)

  Tracks (1978)

  The Chatterbox (1978)

  Pennies for the Dog (1985)

  Gilbert and the Birthday Cake (1986)

  Amy and the Night-time Visit (1987)

  The Ashton Affair (1995)

  The Horse at Hilly Fields (1996)

  Passageways: The St
ory of a New Zealand Family (2009)

  Running in the Corridors (2014)

  First published 1990 by Faber & Faber as A. A. Milne: His Life

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Pan Books

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  ISBN 978-1-5098-5201-7

  Copyright © Ann Thwaite 1990, 2017

  Preface © Frank Cottrell-Boyce 2017

  GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN cover art © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  The right of Ann Thwaite to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The right of Frank Cottrell-Boyce to be identified as the author of the preface to this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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