So Bear, as he was then, was wrapped in Harrods’ brown paper with its name in smart green writing, ready for Daphne to take him home after lunch. The parcel could have been delivered in one of the firm’s smart green, Walker electric vans, of course, but Daphne was impatient to get her purchase back home to Chelsea.There, husband Alan was waiting with Nanny and the small boy whose life was about to be changed for ever.
Sebastian Wormell, Harrods Archivist says, with pride: “Of all the many thousands of things that Harrods has sold over the past century and a half, none was to achieve greater worldwide fame than this simple English teddy bear”.
Chapter Three
Introducing Moon, Blue, Daff and Nou
ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE was born in 1882, the youngest of three brothers. Barry was the oldest, but Alan was always much closer to the middle brother Ken. John Vine Milne, the father whom he admired and loved dearly, was the owner and inspired headmaster of Henley House School in what is now Camden, in North London. Milne claimed that he never felt close to his mother, who was also a teacher.
He wrote a long article for the Easter 1891 edition of the school magazine My Three Days Walking Tour by Alan A. Milne aged 8 and three quarters. This told of a forty four-mile walking holiday over Ashdown Forest in Sussex. The impact of this wild open landscape on the boy was deep, for it was here that he returned, so many years later, to make his country home and here that he was to place the setting for the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends.
After Westminster School, which he and Ken experienced together, Milne went up to Cambridge university to read mathematics, but he found the pleasures of literature and writing far more enjoyable and became editor of Granta, the university magazine. To his father’s bitter disappointment, he only achieved a third and decided to abandon maths and to become a writer instead.
From the beginning, Milne moved in a circle of established literary names – H.G Wells, Lord Northcliffe, J.M Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, and Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, were among those who helped him and with whom, in some cases, he became a lifelong friend.
Then, at the age of twenty four, in 1906, Milne, a pacifist and atheist, joined the radical, anti-establishment magazine Punch, as its assistant editor and regular contributor.
One of his articles, in 1909, was about falling in love. He loved being in love, falling out of love and being free to love again. He said that he would hate to be settled. ‘It’s so much more fun like this’.
In December 1910, Alan Milne was taken by Owen Seaman, Editor of Punch, to the twenty-first birthday dance of his God-daughter Dorothy de Selincourt, known as Daphne, at her palatial home, Brooklands, near Sarisbury Green, on the River Hamble, in Hampshire. The house and forty-acre grounds were the setting, in 1985, for the television blockbuster Howard’s Way. The de Selincourts was a huge, distinguished and extremely wealthy family of mixed talents, both academic and commercial.
The Punch Table
In the beginning, staff of long standing were invited to become members of the Table for regular editorial meetings. It was probably after a good deal of brandy and port that some bright spark decided that they should carve their names or initials on the table itself. It became a tradition for editors at one end and proprietors at the other to accept this honour and later selected guests were also invited to contribute.
Visitors ranged from William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, to Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, author of Budgie the helicopter, Sir John Tenniel, Sir John Betjeman, Anthony Powell, James Thurber and Basil Boothroyd, who have all carved their names. The Duke of Edinburgh added a Greek phi. Prince Charles’ contribution surrounds a finely-drawn Prince of Wales’ feathers. The tradition was lost on some. The Prince of Wales’ detective when shown the Table, was not at all impressed. ‘My God!’ he exploded, ‘you have certainly had trouble with vandals, haven’t you!”
Since the magazine ceased publication in 2002 the Table has been looked after at the British Library.
A.A. Milne described in his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, how, rather daringly for those times, he and Daphne had ‘gone about’ together. If he needed a suit he sought her help and if she needed a partner for a dance, she sought his company. He said that she had the most perfect sense of humour in the world. Flatteringly, it seemed that she had even learned some of his articles in Punch by heart. He had a Pianola to which she was devoted. He said: ‘We might have gone on like this for ever’.
But they didn’t.
In 1913, when buying some skiing boots for a holiday in Switzerland, Alan bumped into Daphne who was, by chance, about to leave for the same fashionable resort of Diablerets. She said ‘I’ve got orange trousers’. He said ‘I will wear a red carnation so we are bound to recognise each other. I hope we will like each other’.
And they did.
One morning in a blinding snow storm, Alan proposed and Daphne said ‘yes’. He was earning about £1,000 a year. ‘We were very comfortable and very happy’, he wrote.
Christopher Milne claimed that when his father made Owl say to Rabbit in The House at Pooh Corner (1928) ‘You and I have brains. Others have fluff’, he was subconsciously thinking of Daphne. In fact he misquoted. It was Eeyore the donkey who observed wryly to Christopher Robin: ‘They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that blows into their heads by mistake’. But even if the description was true of Daphne, she laughed at her husband’s jokes and that, for the start at any rate, was a basis for marriage. He called her his ‘collaborator’. It was a marriage that, she decided, would be conducted with the appearance of elegance and style and with no scenes.
On 4 June 1913 – the day that suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse, Anmer, running in the Derby – the Milne wedding took place at St Margaret’s, Westminster. It was a fashionable event, of course, mingling Daphne’s High Society friends with Alan’s world of theatre and the arts.
Between then and the day of the future Winnie-the-Pooh’s arrival in the family there was the Great War, during which Alan Milne served very reluctantly, first in England and then in France, as a signals officer. According to Kathy Martin, he took with him a miniature toy dog, probably by Farnell, which Daphne had slipped secretly into his pocket before departure.
Like so many young men at the time he really believed that this was ‘a war to end all war’ and that being in the Signals, at least he would not have to fight. Years later he wrote: ‘It makes me almost physically sick, to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation’. He was invalided out of the War in October 1917, after suffering from trench fever and went to work instead at the War Office.
On his return to domestic life in February 1919, he assumed that, out of loyalty, he would go back to Punch and, eventually, become Editor, although he had now written his first play Belinda and rather liked the idea of being a dramatist instead. Somewhat ironically, the magazine did not want him back. He broke the news to Daphne in a taxi on the way to a dinner party and she burst into tears and cried all the way to their destination. She had so looked forward to being married to the Editor of Punch.
For some time home life revolved around the worrying absence of any babies. It didn’t help that Daphne knew nothing, and didn’t want to know anything, about sex.
Marie Stopes’ sensational book Married Love, was published in 1918. In it, she declared that the secret of a happy marriage lay in separate bedrooms. Daphne’s husband had a rather different view. He wrote to a friend that separate bedrooms meant death to marriage.
Eventually, on 21 August 1920, after a mysterious, unspecified operation, ‘a tremendous event’ happened. A baby arrived in Chelsea at 8 a.m. weighing an uncomfortable 10lbs. The father admitted that they had rather hoped for a ‘Rosemary’ but they would probably be as happy with ‘this gentleman.’
According to Mrs Penn, the Milnes’ cook-housekeeper, the new-born baby was ‘tall, like mistress’. Daphne, like
many women at that time, was horrified by the experience and reputedly vowed never to repeat it, which is probably why Christopher Robin never had any brothers or sisters to play with.
Nicknames were fashionable in the 1920s, even for adults and so Daphne had now become more often ‘Daff’ and Alan – probably because of his piercing blue eyes – was known as ‘Blue’ to all his friends and family and even to his son. The boy, who was later to achieve world-wide fame, was never known by his real bookish name at home. There, at first, he was ‘Billy’ and later ‘Moon’ because he couldn’t say Milne. Moon was the name that stuck until he went to school where he was ‘Christopher’. In the army he became ‘Chris’ and much later, running his Devon bookshop, reverted to ‘Christopher’. These names remained throughout their lives and long after his son had grown up, Milne was writing letters to him signed simply Blue. All in all, as the grown-up Christopher Milne once commented, ‘an embarrassment of names’.
During World War I Marie Stopes began writing a book about feminism and marriage. In Married Love she argued that marriage should be an equal relationship between husband and wife but publisher Walter Blackie of Blackie & Son rejected the manuscript with the words: ‘The theme does not please me. I think there is far too much talking and writing about these things already. Don’t you think you should wait publication until after the war? There will be few enough men for the girls to marry; and a book like this would frighten off the few.’
Stopes’ views were undoubtedly provocative – she believed that small boys should either wear kilts or loose, hand-knitted trousers in order not to damage their genitals.
So it was not until March 1918 that Marie Stopes found a small company willing to take the risk. The book was an immediate success, selling two thousand copies within a fortnight and by the end of the year had been reprinted six times. Married Love was also published in America but the courts declared the book was obscene and it was promptly banned.
A year before Moon’s arrival, the Milnes had moved to 11 Mallord Street (changed to 13 in 1925) which Alan had described as the ‘prettiest little house in London’ and Chelsea ‘a proper place for a writer to live’. It had been built, on three floors, just before World War I.
He was delighted when he bought the house, with its cheerful blue door and pots of flowers outside. Previously, they had lived in rented flats but now, for the first time, the Milnes were part of a street. According to Ann Thwaite in her immense biography A.A. Milne. His Life he wrote enthusiastically to his brother Ken that he had a staircase and a bathroom of his own: ‘I go upstairs and down again about once in every half hour, not simply from pride of ownership, but to make sure the bedroom is still there and the staircase is continuing to perform its functions’.
Inside, the house feels much the same today as it was described when the Milnes lived there. On the right-hand side of the hall is the rather dark, formal dining room with its huge table and book-lined walls. There is a golden drawing room and the staircase, which thrilled Blue so much and which features in When We Were Very Young, is still there, as is Daphne’s elegant bedroom on the first floor. Everyone else slept on the top floor. The day and night nurseries were at the front and Blue’s poky bedroom at the back of the house was next to the shared staff bedroom.
On the day that Daphne Milne returned from Harrods with her precious package, the staff were gathered in their smart uniforms.
There was little Mrs Penn, small, round and elderly in grey, with a large white apron. She cooked and seldom left the kitchen. Gertrude, in dark green with a black bow in her hair, was Daphne’s personal maid before she married and had been allowed to stay with her as part of the marriage settlement. She cleaned the house before breakfast, laid the fire, served at meals. She made the beds, lit the fire, polished the silver – and never laughed.
But the key member of the staff was Nanny, who joined the family a little later than the others and became the most important figure (along with his teddy bear) in young Moon’s life. She was Olive Rand, known in the family as ‘Nou’. They had been together since he was five months old. Nannies, too, wore uniform, of course, usually also purchased from Harrods. There were black-and-white nannies, grey nannies, blue nannies and even pink nannies. Some wore hats and others wore veils. Nou wore grey, with a veil when out walking and a white cap and starched cuffs indoors.
Christopher Milne, years later, admitted: ‘She had me when I was very young. I was all hers and I remained all hers until I was nine. Other people hovered round the edges but they meant little’.
Aged thirty-four, Olive Rand was a very superior nanny. She had been in charge of the Chilean Ambassador’s children in London and travelled with them in Europe, America and Chile. She had a long-suffering fiancé, Alfred Brockwell, who had been in the Royal Engineers after enlisting for short service at the outbreak of World War I. On his discharge, he joined the Territorial Army and became a Post Office electrical engineer, but he had to wait for another nine years before Olive felt able to leave her young charge and become Mrs Brockwell.
The teddy bear, still not named Pooh, was known usually as ‘Edward’. He lived, ate and played with Moon on the top floor of the house. They slept in the night nursery next to Nou’s room – a closeness of which Blue himself became quietly jealous. The day nursery was light and bright and under the window was an ottoman in which most of the toys lived. The first Piglet, known as ‘Poglet’, who was nearly as tall as Edward Bear, was given to Moon by a friendly neighbour. He was joined later by the far smaller, pocket-sized Piglet that appears in the stories. Eeyore was a present from his parents at Christmas 1921. They later returned to Harrods and chose Kanga and baby Roo to add variety to the menagerie.
But, from the moment the teddy bear arrived, to the day when Moon finally went off to boarding school at the age of nine, the pair were inseparable. They had conversations at bath time; teddy sat on his pillow, guarding his handkerchief at night, and went wherever he went in the day. Once the teddy was given a name, the Milnes became accustomed to being asked by their weekend or lunch invitation hosts, ‘do we assume Pooh is coming, too?’
Moon was a skinny boy but despite various attempts to fatten him up with Roo-style ‘strengthening medicine’, gym classes and boxing, he stayed skinny all of his life.
He was a quiet, rather shy little boy, who was afraid of the dark and dragons. He was not given to tantrums – more likely his eyes would fill with tears and then he would run to Nou.
She was always there for hugs and cuddles, comfort and reassurance. Once or twice when he was told he would be going to relatives on holiday without her, he lay on the floor and howled inconsolably.
Moon’s early relationship with his parents was quite different. He claimed, when he was an adult, that he didn’t really love them – simply because he didn’t really know them – unlike Pooh and Nou. At the age of three, he said, although he might have missed his mother if she went away, he would not have missed his father but he would have missed Nou most desolately.
In the twenty-first century this seems strange. But the world into which Moon was born, of nannies and private education, was no different from that of many English middle and upper class families.
After breakfast and tea in the nursery and again in the evening he would be taken down to spend half an hour or so with his parents. It was quite usual in their circle for children not to eat with their parents. Nursery food was not the same as grown-up food. Steak downstairs, shepherd’s pie up there. In those days when cooks reigned supreme, there was no room in the kitchen for a young wife to learn how to boil an egg or make a cup of tea, so she could go through life without ever knowing. Daphne never learned. She was not much good at anything domestic or practical because she had not been taught to be. But she did have a flair for design and colour and she was in charge of the choice of décor and furniture for their home.
Moon loved to clamber around on his father’s big arm chair in the drawing room until on one occasion h
e fell off. That was a good game he realised, to try again – and again. Daphne was especially good at playing ‘Boofy’ games with Moon, in the dark, under the dining table, getting more and more excited until Nou swept him upstairs to his bath.
At first, of course, it was Moon who talked to his teddy and made him answer back. But Moon needed help and that help came from Daphne. With Blue looking on it was she, originally, who gave the toys their voices and their characters. Gradually, they came to life and began to breathe.
Daff has not been given her fair share of the credit for the anthropomorphising of Pooh and his friends. She almost came to believe that they were alive. In her way she loved them, too. With her, teddy developed a gruffish tone, Piglet an excitable squeak and Tigger his bouncy ‘ho-ho-ishness’. Eeyore, of course, was flatly gloomy and philosophical.
Yet, strangely she is mentioned only once and never illustrated in the books. Secretly, Blue was well aware of her contribution. He once observed, with undue modesty that all he did was to put them in a book.
As they played together, he watched, his creative mind already hard at work. He has, over the years, been portrayed as aloof and not at ease with children. Rather unfairly, Christopher Milne wrote: ‘Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift – you either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t’.
This is not the whole story. Blue was not openly emotional – he was shy. The truth is that, throughout their time together – that is until Moon was demobilised at the end of World War II – their relationship had fluctuated but as he grew older Moon and his father grew closer and closer after Nou left. He describes a very different Blue, in The Enchanted Places, a father he adored, admired and accepted without question his ideas and beliefs. ‘I knew only his smiles’. That intimacy was shared by Blue who revelled in sharing with his son his love of cricket and golf and his childlike pleasure in doing muddy things.
The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh Page 3
