by A. A. Milne
You ask for a poem, my ownest own editor—
Don’t be alarmed at the epithet, pray:
It occurs in Lord Tennyson’s Maud—have you read it?–a
Poem of merit authorities say.
Shall I write you a parody, smart and satirical,
After the manner of Punch and the rest—
Or something in dialect, pretty and lyrical,
Safe to remind you of Burns at his best?
Perhaps you would fancy an ‘Ode to an Eider-duck’
Telling his praises with never a pause:
How he was born a duck, lived—yes, and died a duck,
Hampered by Nature’s inscrutable laws.
Or a rapturous ode on the worth of some Lycidas—
Blenkinsop Brown he was called when alive,
And reckoned as likely as not an explicit ass:
Trivial facts not allowed to survive.
And so on. I was spending some of the holidays with Ken at Weymouth and we wrote this literally together; or, as more usually, by correspondence. The general idea, of course, was old and obvious. As I remember, Ken was responsible for the initiation of the first and fourth verses and I for the other two, but we worked them all out together. It is the third verse to which I invite your attention.
In the first ‘final’ version—as we thought a few days before it was finished—the last two lines were:
How he was born a duck, lived a duck, died a duck—
Fettered by Nature’s miraculous laws.
I am still uncertain whether we improved the first of these lines, but I know that we argued about it for hours. There is a charming monotony about this earlier version, which echoes the monotony of a life from which no duck can escape; but I like the break in the rhythm of the other—(‘How he was born a duck, lived—yes, and died a duck’)— and I like the hint of astonishment that even in death he was not divided from himself. I should say, though I cannot certainly remember, that Ken preferred the first version and I the second; modest Ken standing aside and letting the tragedy reveal itself, the more egotistic Alan intruding the writer’s personality in comment on that tragedy. The comment had to come, in any case, in the fourth line:
Fettered by Nature’s miraculous laws.
We thought this was very funny and ironic, until the more scholarly Ken pointed out that the one thing which Nature could not be was miraculous; it was a contradiction in terms. I agreed reluctantly, feeling that I ought to have seen this for myself, feeling it still more strongly when he suggested the perfect word ‘inscrutable.’ Now it was my turn to assert myself. I said that we ought to improve ‘fettered.’ If you were fettered, you were without hope; you knew you couldn’t escape, and you threw your hand in. It was much funnier to think of the duck continually trying to be a skylark, and continually being prevented, but always hoping. Some word like ‘thwarted,’ or ‘obstructed’. . . . or—Got it! Hampered. ‘Hampered by Nature’s inscrutable laws’—we said it over and over to ourselves, loving it.
My other example is from a set of verses which we wrote in The Granta when I was at Cambridge. They described (in, as it happens, the same metre) the proposal of a cosmopolitan young gentleman to his love.
He called her (in Latin) his something in—issima,
Hinted (in Greek) she was one of the best,
Asked her politely in Spanish to kiss him, a
Scandalous, scandalous thing to suggest.
And more in that strain. The poem was Ken’s idea, and he opened it with this verse:
An account of one Jones and the very last visit he
Paid to the girl he first met at a dance.
Now in languages Jones had a rare catholicity:
Insular prejudice eyed him askance.
I altered the last line to ‘Jones had two Spanish-American aunts.’ A consideration of the two versions gives the clue to the separate qualities which each brought to the collaboration.
3
On January 18th I was eighteen. Ken sent me a pocket-book, and (since we were in that vein) a charming set of laudatory verses. I wish I could print them here, as a tribute not to myself but to him. Like many other things which I wish that I had kept, they are gone, even from my memory. I went back to school, almost, for the first time, happily.
We offered our services to Punch first, but Punch was unappreciative; so we turned to the school magazine, The Elizabethan. Over the initials A. K. M. we contributed verses and parodies. It was lucky for us that at this time an old Westminster of whose poetry we had no opinion was sending up ‘serious’ verse to the editor. Four lines of an ode which he wrote on the death of a distinguished contemporary so burned themselves into the memory that after one amazed reading we could quote them to each other ever afterwards. Even now . . . yes . . .
He than I was somewhat older, and no common tastes we had,
He was good at cricket, football, I was but a pensive lad.
He would sally forth to Vincent Square attired in flannels cool,
I would spend my leisure moments in the cloisters as a rule.
One began to wonder which of them was writing an ode to the other. If only Tennyson could have put as much of himself into the Wellington ode—
He would sally forth to Waterloo attired in spur and boot,
I remained at home, Euterpe’s most industrious recruit.
He would interlard his speech with military ‘Blast’ and ‘Damn’—
I would spend my leisure moments writing In Memoriam.
We had great fun with this poet in The Elizabethan. The Captain of the school was ex-officio editor, and since we were both in College, and I was, as it were, his first lieutenant, I could make sure that all A. K. M.’s contributions were published. Indeed, I could even persuade him to publish some rival’s ridiculous doggerel in one number in order that we could parody it in the next.
All this was fun, but it never occurred to me that it might be a lifetime’s occupation. I was going to be I was not sure what, but first I was going to Oxford or Cambridge, I was not sure which. Oxford looked like being more suited to my means, and (I was told) would suit better my particular mathematical talent, which, as far as it existed, was for ‘pure,’ not ‘applied’ mathematics. As against this I had always called myself Cambridge from childhood, and, having been to Cambridge for that scholarship, had got to think of myself as living there happily. Which should it be?
Then one day a copy of The Granta came to Westminster. The Granta used to call itself The Cambridge Punch, until it got the idea of calling Punch The London Granta. It been had founded by R. C. Lehmann, and all the Cambridge humorists, Barry Pain, E. F. Benson, F. Anstey, Owen Seaman, had written for it. My friend the Captain and I stood looking at this copy of The Granta, and suddenly he said, ‘You ought to go to Cambridge and edit that.’ So I said quite firmly, ‘I will.’ It has an heroic sound, but to anybody who has said ‘I can do it’ at the age of two, saying ‘I will’ at the age of eighteen is easy.
So it was to be Cambridge. I didn’t tell Father why. His assumption was that I was going to a University in order to get a First. Having got a First, I was then going to come out top in the Civil Service examination, and turn (gradually) into one of those comparatively unrewarded but nearly always knighted gentlemen who are ‘the real rulers of England.’ He would have loved to think that I was going to follow him at Streete Court; but just as I had once deceived Rutherford into thinking that I was ‘too good for the Navy,’ so I was still deceiving Father into thinking that I was too good for a schoolmaster.
It was to be Cambridge, then, because I had set my heart on being Senior Wrangler, because the mathematical standards were higher there, because one could work there with less distraction. Cambridge—if Father could afford it.
He could. Streete Court had survived those first three years and was
now flourishing.
4
Father and Mother had always determined that there should be no favourites in their family. The three of us were to be treated alike: to be given equal affection and equal opportunities. In practice the affections are not so easily controlled. There was never any doubt that Barry was Mother’s darling and that I was Father’s, leaving poor old Ken to take second place in both their hearts, and first in mine and Barry’s. But we were not to profit by these preferences. Nobody should say that our parents had favoured one of us at the expense of the other. At times this determination not to distinguish between us took rather an absurd form. Complimented by a visitor on the complexion, eyes, smile, hair or what not of one of us who had strayed accidentally into the drawing-room, Mother replied firmly and untruthfully ‘All my sons are good-looking.’ A little later, when Ken, now in the Civil Service, had received official praise for the elegance of a report which he had drafted for his Minister, Father offered his congratulations in the words: ‘I always said that all my sons could write.’ Barry was then expressing himself in letters beginning ‘Yours of even date to hand in reply to which we beg to call your attention,’ and I was being funny on Punch, so that a Civil Servant got as little satisfaction from being compared with one as with the other. ‘All my sons’ became a catch-phrase with Ken and me, as it was becoming a habit with Father and Mother. We felt that, if one of us committed a murder, their first reaction would be a bland assent that all their sons ought to be hanged.
Meanwhile all their sons were to receive the same financial assistance. Consulting his beautifully-kept accounts, Father discovered that the cost of turning Barry into a solicitor, from the day he left school until the moment of admittance, had been just under a thousand pounds. A cheque for the balance was sent to Barry; Ken was told that he also would have a thousand pounds with which to turn into a solicitor; and when Alan left Westminster to educate himself in whatever way he wished for whatever profession he proposed to adopt, he could expect neither more nor less than his brothers had had. But it was to be understood, of course, that Ken and Alan drew the money in reasonable amounts to meet reasonable expenses. It was a very fair, very generous settlement, and I was delighted with it. I could live comfortably at Cambridge on £300 a year, £70 a year of which would come from Westminster exhibitions. At the end of three years, I should be fitted in some mysterious way for some unconsidered mode of life, and earning, for some unspecified services, a substantial income; and all this with £٣٠٠ in the pocket. Whose prospects could be brighter than mine? However, I had still to get to Cambridge. In those days the Universities insisted on a smattering of Greek, even from the mathematical. The Little-Go, which I could have passed with ease at fourteen, seemed formidable to one who had done no Classics for years. It was necessary to spend an intensive term trying to recapture Greek: more particularly the Greek of Lucian and the New Testament.
Having told the story of the man who learnt by heart the Kings of Israel and Judah, I shall now tell the story of the man who learnt the gospels by heart. His knowledge of Greek was even less than mine, but he hoped that, in any passage from the Greek Testament which he was asked to turn into English, some simple phrase or key-word would translate itself, and thus give him the cue for the appropriate passage from the Authorized Version. If he could discover a starting-place and an ending place, all the middle could be left safely to his memory. In one passage the words ‘Ho gegrapha gegrapha’ caught his eye. I put it into English lettering thus, so that my lady-reader can understand it, and for her sake also I explain that they are the words of Pilate: ‘What I have written, I have written.’ This translation, however, was beyond our student; all he made of it was ‘Ho’ followed by the repetition of a much longer word. Searching in his memory, he suddenly identified the cue. The rest was easy. ‘Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘thou that killest the prophets. . . .’
I timed my translation better than this, but it didn’t seem to be enough. An attempt to pass the Little-Go before I left school was unsuccessful, and it was not until I got to Cambridge in October that a second attempt gave me that standing as a Greek scholar which the University demanded. Having been a Westminster boy for far too long, I was now a Trinity man.
5
In seven years what had Westminster done for me, or failed to do? It is difficult to say. When I read that Shelly was despised and persecuted at Eton, I reflect that we still came out Shelley. When some superior young intellectual attacks venomously not only his own school but the whole public-school system, at least he makes it clear that he remains well satisfied with himself; so well satisfied, indeed, that it is difficult to see how any other school, or any other system, could have made a better job of him. On the other hand, the fox-hunting squire must feel that no system is sound which turns out fellers like this Bloomsbury feller; who, in his turn, is indicting the system as responsible for the fox-hunting squire. It seems as if the public schools leave us much as we were fox-hunters remaining fox-hunters, and prigs prigs.
So if I am to estimate my debt to Westminster, it is not enough to reckon up my assets and liabilities on leaving. As the landlady suggested when the lodger complained of the fleas, I may have brought them with me. Even if I didn’t, who can say that they were not due to a normal expansion of capital? Seven years at any other school might have left me neither richer nor poorer. Moreover, in the end there remains the constant difficulty of life, the knowing which is asset and which is liability.
That I was ruined as a mathematician was Westminster’s doing. On which side of the count shall we put that? Selfishly I have reason to be grateful; as Senior Wrangler, or anything like it, I should have been ‘too good for writing.’ Perched on the well-guarded heights which Wranglers reach, I should never have known those happy valleys where the unqualified may roam at will. But is it to Westminster’s credit that in my time mathematicians were so neglected? She might reply that it is her careless motherhood which has produced a Ben Jonson and a Warren Hastings, a Gibbon and a Christopher Wren. A true mathematician would have survived her treatment; anybody less than that was unworthy to survive, and must find some other means of expression. It is an attractive argument which could justify a good deal of indifferent teaching.
For the rest I was very much the conventional public-school boy of those days, with conventional views (in as far as I had any) on religion and politics, the conventional love of games, and conventional ideas about ‘good form.’ All that I have kept of that is the love of games. But these conventional views were not forced on us. I cannot remember anybody in College being on the unpopular side in the Boer War, but I feel that College would have tolerated him if he had been. Certainly it was possible to have no aptitude for, nor interest in, games and yet be liked. I loved games, but was not fanatical about them. Stalky and Co., that record, as it seemed to us, of incredible schoolboys at an incredible school, had just come out; and I can remember defending it hotly against a completely incompetent games-player on the ground that at least it justified the existence of the completely incompetent games-player. Why he should have objected to this I don’t know; perhaps he thought that his existence didn’t need justifying; but we argued, on what seemed to be the wrong sides, with great animation. As far as I remember, this was my only lapse into unconventionality, unless a notorious distaste for lavatory jokes was to be considered as one. In this respect I only differed from my contemporaries by thinking that the first necessity of a joke was that it should be funny; smuttiness was not enough. I still think so, and I am still bored with nine-tenths of the smoking-room stories which I hear, enjoying all the more the superb tenth one. Nobody minded this aloofness at school, even if nobody understood it. In fact, they were all rather nice about it, apologizing if I were present, in the way that one would apologize for telling a story from Aberdeen in the presence of a Scotsman. Looking back on it, I should say that tolerance was Westminster’s great quality. Her ways were conventio
nal, but you need not conform to them. If, after seven years of her mothering, you still had the orthodox religious and political views, it was because you hadn’t bothered to think about religion and politics, in which case it didn’t matter what your views were, but orthodoxy would make you less offensive to your own class. If, after seven years, you were no scholar, then scholarship had never meant much to you. It was for you to find yourself, and for her to let you find yourself. I didn’t find much of myself, but perhaps at that time there wasn’t very much to find.
UNDERGRADUATE
1900–1903
Chapter Nine
1
What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it. If it is not quite true that everybody has at least one book inside him, it seems to be the fact that every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him, and generally gets it out. Oxford men will say that this shows what a much more inspiring place Oxford is, and Cambridge men will say that it shows how much less quickly Oxford men grow up, and we can leave it at that. But it explains why this chapter will have no particular interest for those particularly interested in Cambridge. Just as the practised public speaker singles out one man in the back of the audience and speaks solely to him, so I have singled out one hypothetical reader who is interested in me, and am writing solely for her. Tomorrow, when she goes to the library, she can change this for a book about Oxford, and discover what University life is like.
One of the happy discoveries which I made was that I need not be hungry again. After seven years of starvation at Westminster it was delightful to be ordering one’s own breakfast and lunch. Even when one dined in Hall and left oneself to the authorities, one was safe. On my first evening a waiter leaned over my shoulder and addressed a shy freshman opposite in the unusual words ‘Capercailzie or beef, sir?’ Capercailzie is pronounced like Cholmondeley and Cirencester—wrongly first time. The dialogue went like this: