by A. A. Milne
Our other dream must have been with us earlier, for if it had become reality, there would have been no Navy to join. Our dream was, quite simply, that we should wake up one morning and find that everybody else in the world was dead.
This sounds callous, but it was really no more than a variation of the desert-island dream which every small boy has. It just didn’t seem possible to get to a desert island, Kilburn being where it was. The problem bristled with difficulties. The adventure couldn’t begin until we were on some sort of schooner, and how would Papa, who could never get us off by train to Sevenoaks in the summer without arriving an hour too soon at Victoria, and saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. Good morning to you, a happy Christmas,’ to every porter of whom he took directions, how would Papa ever get us on to a schooner? And it was as unimaginable that he should let us go without him as it was that we should go without permission. Almost as babies we were allowed to go walks by ourselves anywhere, in London or in the country, but we kept to the rules, and he knew that he could trust us. Schooners were out. A desert island was an impossibility.
But it was conceivable that God, who had done something on these lines more than once, should destroy everybody in the world but Ken and me. And even if He were not doing it directly, or with any great enthusiasm, yet (as it were, in spite of Him) disasters did happen, a plague might fall upon the people, and everybody might die. (Except Ken and me.) One could imagine it. Papa doesn’t have to take tickets for anywhere first. He just dies like the rest of them . . . ‘and leaves the world to dear old Ken and me.’
Yes, it sounds horrible put like that. For we loved him dearly; we loved Mama too, though not so dearly; we loved Bee—and, more fitfully, Davis and Hummerston. We also loved a succession of animals. We were not unloving children, and of course we should keep the animals anyhow. It was just that we wanted to be alone, and free. In a week, perhaps: perhaps less if one of us hurt himself badly: in a week we should wish them all alive again. But oh! I to wake up one morning and find that everybody was dead—except Ken and me.
It was the freedom of the sweet-shops which we wanted most. Never to have to pass a sweet-shop again, but to be able to step in confidently over the body of the dead proprietor—that was Heaven. All up the High Road, darting from side to side as the fancy took us, across to West End Lane where they had those particularly good marzipan potatoes, over the footbridge to the Finchley Road (jumbles), and then up Fitzjohn’s Avenue to the Heath, stopping at that little shop on the right for ices, ices, ices: this was our immediate programme, this was how we planned it out in bed. Afterwards we might put on a Mexican spur each, and see if we could lasso something, and there was probably a good deal to be done in Wastnage’s Cycle Shop where Maida Vale began. And could one drive a ’bus? When one sat on the box seat and talked to the driver, he didn’t seem to be doing much. Well, now we would know. So many things to eat, so many things to try!
As a fact we were given more freedom than most children. We had a habit of getting up early, and it seemed to be understood, at any rate by us, that, if we got up early, we could do what we liked, so long as we did not wake Papa and Mama. At one time we had a passion for hoops; not the slow wooden hoop, which is hit intermittently with a wooden stick until it falls lifeless into the gutter, but the fiery iron hoop spurred by a hooked iron prong from which it can never escape. Even now I can recapture the authentic thrill of those early-morning raids on London, as we drove our hoops through little, blinded streets, clean and empty and unaware of us; never tiring as we should have tired with no magic circle of iron to lure us on; lured now into a remote world of tall, silent houses, pillared like temples, behind whose doors strange, unreal lives were lived; until at last we burst into the Bayswater Road, and wondered if anybody had ever run before from Kilburn to the Bayswater Road, and what Papa would say when we told him. Then back to breakfast, with pauses now for breath, and chatter, and challenges to each other, back to Davis’ porridge, back to the most divine meal of the day, the only meal which could never be a disappointment.
There came into the house one day two bamboo poles, twelve feet long. Papa had cousins in Jamaica, had indeed been born there, though whether this was to our glory or our shame, a fact to be circulated or suppressed, we could never be sure. On the one hand, very few boys could say that their fathers had been born in Jamaica; on the other, most of those who could had woolly hair. Somehow it seemed to leave Papa not quite an Englishman, and us, in consequence, a little suspect. Well, anyhow, there were the two bamboos, sent over by an optimistic relation, who hoped that Cousin John and Cousin Maria would find them interesting. Cousin Maria looked them over, and finding that they were as good as poker-work already, that they couldn’t be enamelled, and that even if cut into lengths they were serviceable only for firewood, disavowed interest; but Cousin John, a little on the defensive and feeling that he owed it to the West Indies, attached them, as a rowing-man his oars, to the wall over the aquarium.
At five-thirty next morning Ken and I slid down the banisters, turned our backs on Mexico, climbed on to the aquarium table and removed the trophies. We found them interesting. At the moment he was Robin Hood and I was Will Scarlett, but we might change round later; the important thing was that here at last were those ‘quarterstaffs’ for which we had been looking so long, and with which a ‘bout’ was so long overdue. We would go into the playground and have a bout.
At six o’clock an angry head looked out of an upper window. We had forgotten about him. It was one of the masters, and he said very loudly and clearly: ‘What the deuce do you think you’re doing?’ We could have told him that Little John was now having a bout with Friar Tuck, and that, as far as could be seen, neither was having an advantage over the other, but by this time we were as tired of the business as he was. It had sounded so wonderful in bed the night before, talking it over, but the wonder had gone, our arms were aching, and it would be more fun to empty the aquarium and fill it again. There was a finality about complete emptiness which neither of us (it seemed) could hope to achieve with a quarterstaff. We trailed in, replaced the poles, had a handful of oatmeal before Davis came down, took a suck at the siphon and thought perhaps not, went a quick walk round Mortimer Road and Greville Place, crossed the gymnasium on our stomachs, kicked a stone across the playground hopping on one foot (very difficult, we would get up really early one morning and do it properly), and were in our places for ‘prep’ at seven o’clock. The school day was beginning.
2
In a current number of the school magazine there was an analysis by ‘J. V. M.’ of the characters of certain boys, for whose names letters of the alphabet were substituted. Since in my case (I was ‘D’) the author was not only schoolmaster but father, he may be assumed to have been speaking with authority–in so far as the old can speak with authority for the young, or, indeed, for anybody but themselves.
D. He does not like French–does not see that you prove anything when you have done. Thinks mathematics grand. He leaves his books about; loses his pen; can’t imagine what he did with this, and where he put that, but is convinced that it is somewhere. Clears his brain when asked a question by spurting out some nonsense, and then immediately after gives a sensible reply. Can speak 556 words per minute, and writes more in three minutes than his instructor can read in thirty. Finds this a very interesting world, and would like to learn physiology, botany, geology, astronomy and everything else. Wishes to make collections of beetles, bones, butterflies, etc., and cannot determine whether Algebra is better than football or Euclid than a sponge-cake.
It is the portrait of an enthusiast.
Many years later, when I was myself the father of a boy of D’s age, I was a guest at a dinner of Preparatory Schoolmasters. They all, so it seemed, made speeches; two Public School Headmasters made speeches; and the burden of all their speeches was the obstructiveness of the Parent to their beneficent labours. I had disclaimed any desire to
make a speech, but by this time I wanted to. That very evening, offered the alternatives of a proposition of Euclid’s or a chapter of Treasure Island as a bedtime story my own boy had chosen Euclid: it was ‘so much more fun.’ All children, I said (perhaps rashly), are like that. There is nothing that they are not eager to learn. ‘And then we send them to your schools, and in two years, three years, four years, you have killed all their enthusiasm. At fifteen their only eagerness is to escape learning anything. No wonder you don’t want to meet us.’ It was not a popular speech. ‘Gymnastics strengthens the muscles’ would have gone better. But afterwards a Headmaster came up to me and said: ‘It was absolutely true what you were saying, but why is it? What do we do? I’ve often wondered.’
So if at this time I was still an enthusiast, it was because I was still at my father’s school, and he was an enthusiast. And if I disliked French, and thought mathematics grand, it was because he, who could teach, taught me mathematics, and did not teach me French. As I said once to a Headmaster, a school report cuts both ways; it is a report on the teacher as well as on the taught. ‘Seems completely uninterested in this subject, may mean no more than that the master is completely uninteresting. In Papa’s house it was natural to be interested, it was easy to be clever.
We ‘collected’ everything. We collected ‘minerals.’ We bought a ‘geological hammer,’ whose head was like a chisel at one end and a marlinspike at the other. With this on one Easter holiday we attacked the cliffs of Ramsgate for ammonites, stalactites, stalagmites and fossilized remains of prehistoric animals. We got no more than a piece out of poor old Ken’s leg, with the chisel end. Nevertheless our collection grew. It included Iceland spar, Blue-John spar and various other exciting crystals. In those days I knew that granite was composed of ‘mica, feldspar and quartz.’ Perhaps it still is. We spent many a Sunday afternoon in the neighbourhood of Finchley Road looking for a stray piece of feldspar which had got separated from its quartz. Every night our collection was taken from its drawer in the dressing-table and laid out on Ken’s bed.
On one proud afternoon we set out to show our collection to the Curator of the Geological Museum in Jermyn Street. He hadn’t invited us, we just thought that as fellow-workers in the same field we ought to meet. Papa gave us the ‘bus money to Oxford Circus, and made us promise not to cross Piccadilly without a policeman. We went. We still looked like Shirley Temple, and we had our collection tied up in a fairly clean handkerchief of Ken’s. The Curator was a little surprised at first, thinking that we were offering it to the nation; but when we explained that we only wanted one or two things identified, he was very helpful, identifying one ammonite as an old date-stone, and telling us all about Blue-John Spar. In return we told him all about mica-feldspar-and-quartz. And now—we had to cross Piccadilly Circus again. The first time had been easy. There was the policeman, there the traffic. The one held the other up, and we crossed royally. But now, as it happened, Piccadilly was entirely empty. We could have played leap-frog across it, we could have stopped in the middle of the street and spread out our collection again. Yet we had promised Papa; and without (I think) being prigs, we did believe that a promise was a promise. So, after a little discussion on the pavement, we waved to a policeman. He came across to us majestically, and, not understanding about promises, was extremely annoyed when we asked if we could go back with him. He strode away with great dignity and we followed with an air of being in the party.
We had twopence of our own to spend. Half of it went on a box of fusees. Fusees, I should explain, were very, very much more exciting than ordinary matches, and we proposed to strike one every night after the lights were out. In this way a box would last for several weeks. The other penny was to be spent at Callard and Bowser’s in Regent Street. We were looking wistfully in at the window, wondering how best to lay the money out, and wishing it were more, when we attracted the notice of a passer-by. He may have had a dear little girl just like us, or he may have wished he had, but for whatever reason he stopped, put a shilling on the top of the matchbox which I was holding, and hurried on. We could now, we felt, buy the shop.
But we didn’t. Not for a moment did it seem possible to keep the money. We had promised never to take money from strangers. It shows how completely Ken and I were one (and perhaps how completely Papa had our love and our confidence) that we didn’t even argue about it. We spent our penny, giving the shilling in payment. Sixpence went into a missionary-box on the counter, Ken being anxious to do something definite for the Chinese, about whom he had been reading lately; threepence went to a crossing sweeper at the next corner; the remaining three pennies were taken home and put in the dressing-table drawer with the ‘collection.’ After all, they were ‘minerals’ too.
Were we too good, too Shirley Temple? If so, we made up for it later; as regards finance, no later than in our schooldays at Westminster. In any case, I am (oddly enough) more ashamed of the bad things I have done than of the good things I have done, of the promises broken than of the promises kept. I like to think of that threepence in the drawer, tabu even in the darkest days before the Saturday pocket-money.
Pocket-money began by being a penny a week, and was then increased to threepence on condition that we didn’t drink tea. Later we seemed to be drinking tea and still having threepence, so I suppose there was a time-limit to the condition. I remember going with one of the boys to see his aunt (don’t ask me why), and as we left, she pressed a coin into my hand. The aunt of a Henley House boy was obviously not a stranger, and a ha’penny was a ha’penny, but when we were safely away and good manners allowed me to open my hand, it was a shilling. I can remember my utter incredulity, my certainty that a mistake had been made, until the nephew showed me his own florin. Being a good deal bigger than I, and it being his aunt, he might well have claimed my shilling too, but he contented himself with sending me into a chemist’s shop to buy him twopennyworth of pigeon’s milk. This was a great joke of those days, but unfortunately for him I knew it. Poor old Ken had bought it a few days before.
3
In our walks abroad, looking for feldspar and caterpillars, and qualifying for the Navy, we were accompanied by a Gordon setter called Brownie. Brownie attached himself to the family at Sevenoaks, where we had taken a house for the summer. If I couldn’t remember dates any other way (and I am not remembering them very well) I should always know that I was seven at Sevenoaks. Brownie was gun-shy, and a clap of thunder would send him under the table, so I suppose that he had been shown the door of whatever lordly kennels he had been disgracing. He came to our house, collarless and unhappy; in less than a week it was clear that he was ours and we were his. He was beautiful and faithful and loving, and, with the possible exception of Papa, the most admirable character in the family. We took him back to Henley House. He was ours.
It was on a damp and misty Sunday afternoon that Brownie first proved his real value as a sporting dog. The rejected of Knole became the hero of Finchley. In a field off the Finchley Road he began to dig; our excitement grew with his; and when a mouse scurried out, ordinary domestic mouse, but a live field-mouse, we felt one with Bevis, Masterman Ready and the Swiss Family Robinson. We were real country boys who had caught a real country mouse with a real sporting dog. All the secrets of the wild were ours; put us on a desert island and we should be for ever at home. Mice in themselves were nothing to us. We had bought mice, we had swapped mice. But to catch your own wild mouse, there was glory for you.
At the moment, however, we hadn’t caught it, nor, it seemed, would. But Brownie was still at his hole, and another mouse might come out. We prayed (it was Sunday afternoon) that another mouse might come out; another mouse did; and this time we were ready. We took it home and built a special cage for it. The mouse lived long enough to enjoy it, but died soon after, and was buried in the front garden amid the geraniums, the lobelias and the calceolarias. The little town, as Lord Tennyson had been saying, had never known a costlier fune
ral.
It was at this time, while still feeling countryish, that we found a toad and decided to stuff it. We began by trying to climb a tree, and when I had got a little way up, I fell out of it. Luckily nobody feared for my spine; but two little girls, who were playing with their mother in the same field, came running up to us. They stood hand-in-hand, very shy, and one said to the other, ‘You ask him,’ and the other said, ‘No, you,’ and the first said, Let’s bofe,’ so together they said, ‘Have you hurt yourself?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and they ran back to their mother. From then on, whenever Ken and I wanted to do a thing together we said, ‘Let’s bofe,’ and giggled. Well, now we were on the ground and bofe looking, with Brownie’s help, for anything we could find, and there was this toad, and it seemed suddenly of enormous importance that we should have a stuffed toad to live with us. Was it already dead, or did we kill it? I cannot remember. But there and then, the little girls and their mother having gone home to tea, we cut it open and removed its inside. It was astonishing how little, and how little like a toad, the remnant was. However, we took it home and put it in the mineral drawer, where gradually it dried, looking less and less like a toad each time we considered it. But a secret so terrific, a deed so bloody, had to be formulated. The initial formula was Raw Toad (as you would have believed, if you had seen what we saw). Raw Toad was R.T., which was ‘arte,’ and Latin for ‘by with or from art.’ Artus was a limb (or wasn’t it?) and the first and last letters of limb were L.B. Lb. was pound; you talked about a ‘pig in a pound’; pig was P.G. and (Greek now, Ken had just begun Greek) πηγη was fountain. So, ranging lightly over several languages, we had reached our mystic formula—‘FN.’ Thumb on the same hymn-book in Dr Gibson’s church, we would whisper ‘FN,’ to each other and know that life was not all Sunday; side by side in the drawingroom, hair newly brushed for visitors and in those damnable starched sailor suits, we would look ‘FN’ at each other and be comforted. And though, within six months (the toad still unstuffed and crumbled into dust), we were sharing some entirely different secret, yet, forty years later, the magic letters had power to raise sudden memories in two middle-aged men, smoking their pipes, and wondering what to do with their sons.