by A. A. Milne
Well, anyway, I could read before I was three, and I was not much older when I made my second contribution to the Family Bible. I have never set much store by this myself, but to my father, on the numerous occasions later when he recalled it to us, it became the token by which he realized that his youngest son was Destined (under Providence) for Great Things; or, as I suppose he meant, was not after all a half-wit. We were walking along Priory Road, when a coal-cart stopped in front of us, and the coal-man staggered through the gate of a house with a sack on his shoulders. I said, ‘Why do they both?’ Nobody knew what I was talking about, and nobody ever did know, and nobody knows now. But Papa, hammering away at it, decided that what I meant was: Why do you have to employ both a man and a horse? Why shouldn’t the horse deliver the coal, or the man pull the cart? ‘Isn’t that what you mean, darling?’ Having a lot of other questions to ask, natur-ally I said, ‘Yeth’; whereupon Papa gave me a lecture on the Economics of Co-operation. In after years he got to think that I had given him the lecture; and that, since I was only three at the time, I must have been pretty well advanced for my age. However it was, ‘Why do they both?’ joined ‘I can do it’ in what one might call the family incunabula. It seemed to Papa that the future of his youngest son was assured.
We went to Torquay that summer, and Ken on his fourth birthday was given his first real book Reynard the Fox. We both read it. When, forty years later, I wrote a book called Winnie-the-Pooh, and saw Shepard’s drawing of Pooh, the bear, standing on the branch of a tree outside Owl’s house, I remembered all that Reynard the Fox and Uncle Remus and the animal stories in Aunt Judy’s Magazine had meant to us. Even if none of their magic had descended on me, at least it had inspired my collaborator; and I had the happy feeling that here was a magic which children, from generation to generation, have been unable to resist. Uncle Remus was read aloud to us by Papa, a chapter a night. One night he had to go away. Little knowing what we were doing we handed the sacred book to our governess, and told her to go on from there. Some such experience, no doubt, caused the first man to coin the phrase that he ‘could not believe his ears.’ Terrible things were happening all round us. Was this Uncle Remus? Was this our own beloved Bee? One of our idols had to go. Stumbling painfully through the dialect, Bee got to the bottom of the page and asked if she should go on. We said not. It wasn’t very interesting, she thought. We thought not too. Should she read another book, or should we play a game? We played a game. Next night we found the place for Papa. Three lines in that lovely understanding voice, and Uncle Remus was saved. But Bee never read aloud again. She was a darling; I still loved her; but I was glad that I was marrying Molly.
Papa also read The Pilgrim’s Progress to us, or, as we always called it, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: I can see the book now, in a dirty yellow binding. We longed for it, we were thrilled by it, as we should neither have longed nor been thrilled had it been read to us on a week-day. But we were Presbyterians; Sunday was reserved for religion, and Papa had somehow got it into his head that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was a religious book. We didn’t tell him the truth. We listened, rapt, and hoped that he would never find out. For it was the only excitement of Sunday, apart from the possibility, on the way back from church, of finding a religious-minded caterpillar out for a walk. The other permitted books were bound volumes of The Quiver, and a series of works which began with Line upon Line, went on, a little unoriginally, to Verse upon Verse and Chapter upon Chapter, and ended, the author now completely in the grip of his theme, with Testament upon Testament.
I have mentioned Aunt Judy’s Magazine. I hope that she means something to some of my contemporaries, for she meant Heaven to us. We had all the bound volumes but I never knew, nor know now, whether the component were still in circulation. Was Mrs Ewing Aunt Judy? Who were the other contributors? Any poor laurels which I have won as a writer for children I strip from my head and distribute apologetically, leaf by leaf, to those of them who have remained unknown. To us the volumes of Aunt Judy’s Magazine were friends as familiar and as well-loved as were (in this more practical age) the volumes of the Children’s Encyclopaedia to my own child. Aunt Judy was not practical. She entranced us, but never told us how to make a tricycle.
4
Henley House was two houses. On the Family Side you entered the front door, and found yourself in a small lobby. Opening the coloured-glass door of the lobby you came into the ‘hall,’ a hall no bigger than was determined by the junction of a broad staircase with the passage. From the right-hand wall depended the horns of a buffalo, a looped lasso and a pair of Mexican spurs; so that every time one slid down the banisters, one slid through Kilburn into a romantic world of which one’s imagination was the only master. To-day complete synthetic Mexicans ride down complete synthetic buffaloes in continuous performance and imagination can take the modern child no further than Hollywood has left him. But we roamed prairies such as were never seen (as Papa, we supposed at first, had once roamed them), wearing spurs as big as saucers, lassoing buffaloes as big as elephants, stamping rattle-snakes into the ground with our big, high boots, sliding under the belly of our horse when Indians went by, and then regretfully leaving all this and sliding down the banisters again. It was some Old Boy, we discovered later, who had given us these trophies of a life in Mexico for which Papa’s Algebra lessons may or may not have prepared him; a boy called Nuñez. Mama remembered him too, but still thought that the bit of buffalo between the horns would collect the moth, and as for the spurs, they would just have to get rusty, that was all. With her permission they did.
On a little table, opposite Mexico, was an aquarium, stocked with samples of all the animal life which the Leg of Mutton pond at Hampstead could show. A piece of coral stood in the middle, and the little fishes and the newts swam through it and around it in a pleasing manner, and sometimes a frog would climb to the top and sit there, half in, half out of the water, and wait, the lid being off, and we watching to see that he did not escape, for flies to come within his jump. The aquarium was emptied each week with a siphon. Papa explained, in his delightfully interesting way, why the water continued to rush up one bend of the pipe and down the other, when once you had started it by suction; and we all took turns at starting it by suction; and if anybody sucked too long, and found himself with a mouthful of dirty water and a small left-over newt, it was probably poor old Ken. No doubt Papa went on to tell us, while he was there, all about the Principle of Archimedes, and for days afterwards we would go about shouting ‘Eureka’ (preferably with nothing on) and at first frightening and then boring our governess.
The first door on the left of the passage led into the drawing-room. The drawing-room had a gas-fire, which was a novelty in those days, and made us wonder whether anybody else in Kilburn had a gas-fire. This was my first acquaintance with asbestos (not that it has ever come into my life very much), and Papa explained asbestos to us; but without any great conviction, being perhaps a little uncertain of it himself. However, as the drawing-room was only used when visitors called, it was convenient to have a gas-fire in it. It was said from time to time in our hearing that Mama had the most beautiful drawing-room in Kilburn. I remember asking a governess once if it were really beautiful, or if Mama only thought it was, and she assured me that it really was. Ten years later, when the school had moved to Thanet, and I was at Cambridge (and it was identically the same drawing-room), I asked the matron if she really thought it was beautiful. She said she did. So I left it at that. To-day, if the curtain rose on it in the First Act of a period play, it would be received with a round of applause, and Motley or Mr Rex Whistler would walk away with the notices. For it was perfect: it had everything. But I am certain that it meant nothing to my mother. Having seen, in other people’s houses, enamelled drain-pipes (for bulrushes), poker-work bellows (for blowing out the gas-fire?) and velvet-embroidered frames (for hand-tinted family groups), she would say scornfully to Father: ‘I could make a better one myself,�
�� and prove it. Only one sample of her work remains with me. It is almost her earliest work. Hanging on the wall of the room—which I write in a tapestry reproduction of Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’—three feet by two, as they say in catalogues. In her farm in Derbyshire little Sarah Maria sat stitching, stitching, stitching; and on the snows of the Crimea men lay dying, dying, dying; and in a thousand churches over Europe the Christ to whom little Sarah Maria was paying her childish tribute was pledged in aid of the appropriate artillery. Only Sarah Maria’s work has survived. It is always better to be an artist, however little.
The next door led into the sitting-room, and through a door opposite we went in to the big schoolroom which was the corresponding drawing-room and sitting-room thrown into one. An iron bar beneath the ceiling marked the old division between the two rooms, and with dependent curtains could make the division again, but it was never so used. Indeed its only use was an unofficial one which we found for it in the holidays, jumping on to it from a convenient desk and swinging off it on to a more distant one. The first that Papa heard of this was a loud crash one evening; followed by a curious groaning noise. He rushed in to find his Benjamin on the floor, badly winded and quite unable to explain that there was nothing the matter with him except that, being winded, he couldn’t explain that there was nothing the matter with him I was carried up to bed—Mama looking up from her sewing machine to say ‘Better send for Dr Morton, dear, tell Hummerston to go’—and the doctor was sent for; I might have been Royalty. In later years Father would refer to this as the great crisis of my life, and say gravely ‘At first we feared for his spine;’ and in still later years, when Ken and I did a little amateur rock-climbing and I slipped, and grazed a shin, Ken would say, ‘Hurt?’ and then shake his head and say gravely—well, he would hardly need to say it, for it had become a catch-phrase with us.
To return (as I did, in the arms of Papa) to our own side of the house. At the end of the passage were two little rooms. One we needn’t bother about. The other was called the music-room, having a piano in it. A Mr Howard came in from time to time, to find out which boys were making a mistake in trying to learn the piano, and under his tuition Ken and I practised a duet for the school concert. I remember this as a wild romantic piece full of grace-notes and arpeggios, in the course of which our hands crossed from time to time (intentionally, I mean), and our feet fought vainly for the loud pedal. On referring to it in the school magazine I find that it was called quite simply ‘Melodious Exercises,’ and the name of the composer is not given. Perhaps I am confusing it with a later appearance at the Town Hall, when the school held what it was pleased to call a Conversazione. On this occasion Ken and I gave a stirring rendition of ‘Duet in D,’ also anonymous, like the cheaper wines, but obviously in a different class from Melodious Exercises. We also sang a song called ‘Tommy and the Apples,’ after which it was decided that I had better be something else.
Mr Howard was of French extraction, and had fought in the Franco-German war. Indeed he was said still to have a German bullet in his head, but I may be confusing him with a later acquaintance, a French master at Westminster who was said still to have a German bullet in his behind. They both had bullets, but they may have had them the other way round; and, in one case (since both, I am sure, were brave men), it must have been an accidental French bullet. No doubt all the foreign masters of those days were so credited. There was another one at Henley House, who had been engaged for years on an invention to render the tops of omnibuses waterproof. It took the comparatively simple form of a large umbrella in the middle of the floor but there were technical difficulties about opening and shutting it, which I never understood, and which Mr Steinhardt (if that was his name) never properly surmounted. Perhaps he was a little before his time.
We now open a door on the right, and fall down some stairs into the basement. Beneath the drawing-room was the kitchen where Davis the cook, and Hummerston, the butler, reigned. I used to think that they were married, but they weren’t, which accounts for their having different names. They were as essential a part of Henley House as the buffalo horns, with, in Davis’ case, much of their rugged quality. When (some years later) my son was born, our cook, who had been allowed an early preview, came down excitedly to tell me that he was ‘tall, like mistress.’ No doubt Davis, who must have been in at the birth of all of us, gave Hummerston some such rapid summary of the new presentation: ‘short, like mistress,’ or ‘ugly, like the devil.’ Of me she probably said: ‘Don’t tell the master, but it may be an albinium, it’s that fair.’ Outside the kitchen-door Davis kept a large bin of oatmeal; and when Ken and I got up at five o’clock in the morning, as for various purposes of our own we often did, we would take out a handful of oatmeal from time to time, and stick our tongues into it, thus keeping ourselves alive until the breakfast porridge. Davis made perfect porridge, which was one of the reasons why she stayed with us so long. Papa, being a generation nearer to Scotland than we, never had sugar on his, and was a source of amazement to us, who never had enough. He seemed to have wasted the whole business of growing-up.
Beneath the sitting-room was what the rest of the school called The Kids’ Room. Here we ate, lived, worked, played with our governess, until we had left Miss Budd’s, and here, when we were part of the school, was still our home from home.
Chapter Three
I
We were undoubtedly part of the school, but we still had long hair, and one foot in the Family Side of the house. A kindly old gentleman, whose function it was to preside over the annual examination set by the College of Preceptors, came across me in the sitting-room on his first arrival, and was so carried away by my nursery charm that he turned up next morning with a toy butcher’s-shop for the little one. It was a good shop in its small way, the joints of meat being realistically coloured and hung on hooks, but in the interval, under his not too invigilating eye, I had been dealing with the Algebra paper, and, as appeared later, had got ninety-five marks out of a hundred. Mama said, ‘Well, he didn’t know, darling,’ and Papa said that it was really very kind of him, and I must write him a letter, and I wrote him a letter: reluctantly: feeling that, if only I could have my hair cut, the need for these letters would not arise. Only a few days before, owing to the fact that, by some mismanagement, it was my hair-washing night, I had nearly missed a meeting of the school Debating Society at which we pledged ourselves to give Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy our support. When women complain to me now of the time they have to spend at the hairdresser’s, and the subsequent appointments for which they are late, and the bother it all is, I smile to myself in a superior way. They’re telling me. Me!
The only occasion on which I spoke in the Debating Society was at what was called an ‘Impromptu Debate.’ The names of the members were put into one hat, the subjects for speech into another. In an agony of nervousness I waited for my name to be called. It came at last, ‘Milne Three.’ Milne III tottered up and drew his fate; not that it mattered, for one subject was as fatal to him as another. He tottered back to his desk and opened the paper. The subject on which he had to speak was ‘Gymnastics.’
I stood there dumbly. I could think of nothing. The boy next to me, misapprehending the meaning of the word ‘impromptu,’ whispered to me: ‘Gymnastics strengthens the muscles.’ I swallowed and said, ‘Gymnathticth thtrengthenth the muthelth.’ Then I sat down. This is the shortest speech I have ever made, and possibly, for that reason, the best. A little later I came out top in the Gymnastics Competition (Junior Division), and won a prize . . . and (presumably) strengthened the muscles. I also boxed a boy called Harris; we were the only competitors. No doubt I made some use of my hair for covering-up purposes, such as would not be allowed in the ring to-day.
The result was declared a draw, ‘Harris using his right with good effect, but Milne III dodging well,’ or so the magazine chronicled. Probably I ran away and he couldn’t catch me.
And what was Ken do
ing all this time? No prizes or showings-off for him. And equally no grudges against me. School meant little to either of us compared with the life we lived together, a life into which competition did not come.
We had two day-dreams. The first was of a life on the sea. This was the result of reading that great book The Three Midshipmen. We three (for Barry was in this for a moment) would be three midshipmen, and capture Arab dhows, knife sharks, and swim through the heaving waters with a rope in our teeth. After talking the matter over carefully, we went up to the sitting-room to announce our decision. We went solemnly in, closed the door behind us (as requested) and spoke by the mouth of the eldest.
‘We have come to tell you that we all three want to be sailors.’
It must have been a little surprising to Papa, coming for no apparent reason at no particular moment, but he took it well. He just said, ‘Well, you’ll have to work, you know. There will be examinations to pass.’ This was the moment when Barry decided not to be a sailor. Ken and I, however, continued to prepare ourselves for a life on the sea. We used to go for long walks, taking care to keep in step all the time, for we felt that the ability of two sailors to march in step for long periods must count in a naval career. We also tried chewing tobacco. This is said to allay the pangs of hunger, and is obviously more useful when shipwrecked than when aboard a well-found vessel. In the sense that we were not hungry for a long time afterwards we did allay the pangs of hunger, but the experiment was not really a success, and we decided that, if any ship we were in should find herself piled up on a coral-reef, we would remain on board with the captain. It was only when Ken accidentally got a scholarship at Westminster that my love for the sea left me, for I knew then that I could not be happy until I had got a scholarship too. As I have said, I did this when I was eleven, and a year or so later the Headmaster wrote in my report: ‘Have you ever thought of the Navy as a profession for him? I think it would be the making of him. Or is he too good for that?’ That was as near as I got to the Navy: my father thought that I was too good for it. I like telling sailors this story. They laugh breezily, but you can see that they are affected by it.