It's Too Late Now

by A. A. Milne

  The new editor made as little of the occasion as he could. In his new position he wanted somebody to relieve him of the worst of the donkey work: somebody who came in for, say, a couple of afternoons a week and sorted out the contributions: naturally I should be on trial at first: naturally I couldn’t expect to be put on the Punch table immediately: obviously this and obviously that: but what it came to, however he glided over it, was—How would I like to be Assistant Editor of Punch?

  It didn’t seem possible.

  ‘The Proprietors thought, seeing that they wouldn’t require your full time, that £٢50 a year would—er—meet the case.’

  That didn’t seem possible either.

  ‘As regards your own contributions, they would be paid for at double rates, and naturally we should expect you to contribute every week.’

  I tried to look grateful, eager, but not surprised, while doing simple arithmetic in the head. It wasn’t coming out. I put the arithmetic by for the ’bus, and looked grateful, eager, but not surprised.

  ‘Normally, of course, you would send them straight down to the printer, but I think perhaps that just at first you had better let me have a look at them before they go.’ Nothing that was going to happen ‘just at first’ mattered now, I was so certain that I should get everything I wanted in the end. Hadn’t I always said that I would be Editor of Punch one day? Or hadn’t I? I couldn’t remember. Anyhow I was going to be.

  ‘Of course,’ I said eagerly to everything.

  ‘You’d better start on Tuesday. I don’t come on Monday.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, wondering how I could possibly live until Tuesday.

  I left the office. It appeared on the ’bus that I should be getting £٥٠٠ a year. I had been living happily on £120 or less. How delightfully extravagant one could be with £500 a year. Could it be true? Could I have misheard the figures? Should I go back and ask for it all again? Perhaps in writing this time. No, it was true. I wanted to think of all that it would mean, of all that I would write to Father, of all that I would tell Ken, but I could not think for happiness.

  5

  Just as it had seemed wonderful to be editing The Granta after so short a struggle, so it seemed wonderful now to be, at twenty-four, Assistant Editor of Punch. In fact I had no need to be so surprised at myself. My real achievement in either case was to be not wholly the wrong person, in the right spot at the right moment. When Seaman was Assistant Editor, the Editor was travelling about the country writing his reminiscences. The new Editor proposed to live in his office chair and devote himself to his paper. The new Assistant Editor would have none of the responsibilities which Seaman had had, his position would be one of more subjection and less dignity. Clearly, then, he must be a young man; clearly he must be a young man who was already a journalist, but not a journalist bound to another paper; he must be himself acceptable as a contributor; and, not least important, he must possess, for the Editor’s peace of mind, a degree of presentability such as was only conferred, it was thought, upon the whiter students of the larger colleges at Cambridge. I met all the conditions. Two years earlier I should not have been acceptable, two years later I might not have been available. Burnand resigned at the exact moment, and I had, I must suppose, the field to myself.

  ASSISTANT EDITOR

  1906–1914

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  Although I was (undoubtedly) Assistant Editor of Punch, I had not been given a seat at the Punch Table. The Punch Dinner, at which the cartoons for the next number were planned, was held every Wednesday evening at seven on the floor below the editorial offices. Wednesday was a busy day, and I was generally in my room when the diners began to congregate. Most of them would put their heads in to say ‘Good evening’; some of them would stay for a little talk; just so (one felt) would kindly uncles who had come to dine look in on the nursery to say good night to the children, before joining the other guests in the drawing-room. I was too young to dine downstairs. There was no precedent for putting a child of twenty-four on the historic Table. There was also no precedent for removing anybody from the historic Table, once he had carved his initials on it. Any Proprietor of any paper might quail at the thought of giving me a seat at the Table at twenty-four and finding me still there at seventy-four.

  This, however, was not the reason given for my exclusion. The business of the dinner was the discussion of the cartoons. My political competence was doubted; my political competence (said the Proprietors) must be proved before I could come downstairs. When the Shade of Nelson was saying to John Bull: ‘The ships are different, but the spirit of the men remains the same,’ what would Milne be doing? Sucking his thumb in the corner and saying, ‘Who was Nelson?’—or making the idiotic suggestion that the legend should be: ‘The walls of England are no longer wooden, but the Heads of the Admiralty remain the same.’ Encouraged by Seaman I thought out cartoons by myself in the nursery, which he took down to dinner to show the grown-ups how serious I could be. Sometimes they were used just as I had suggested them; some­times they were adapted; but I remained upstairs.

  A year or two later, I emphasized my value to the Table in a more striking way. The first copy of Punch was printed on the Sunday morning, and sent to the Editor. The machines continued to go round, and other copies to tumble out of the press, but it was not too late for any small correction to be made, if such were necessary; a harmless error in the first five thousand copies could be eliminated from the remaining hundred thousand. It was our final precaution against the misprints which we derided in others. This first copy came to whichever of us was in London or nearer to London for the week-end. Imagine, then, my horror to discover one Sunday that not a simple comma but a whole cartoon had got out of place. The ‘senior cartoon’ (Partridge’s) was in the front of the paper, the ‘junior cartoon’ (Raven-Hill’s) in the middle. I hurried round to the office and became authoritative. The copies which had been printed must be scrapped, the pages must be set again, with the cartoons changed. The printer insisted that this was the order in which the pages came down to him on Friday night. That might be so, I had corrected each page separately and had never seen them together, but if it were so, then the Editor had made a mistake. Did I accept full responsibility now? Absolutely. So the machines stopped work at my word, and I, in the silence, felt extremely important, and wondered how much I had cost the Proprietors.

  A good deal, I hoped. For it appeared that at the Wednesday dinner Partridge’s cartoon, having been drawn in advance before he went on holiday, and being in consequence untopical, had been deliberately made the junior cartoon. I had deliberately, and at some expense to the Proprietors, made it the senior cartoon. This, I felt, was the best argument for my admission to the Table which I had as yet produced. The argument was not effective, but in recognition of the fact that I was spending about three times as many hours at the office as had been bargained for, my salary was raised by fifty pounds.

  Friday was my busy day. I sat down after breakfast to make my own personal contribution to Punch: a gay (I hoped) article of twelve hundred words, with a smile in every paragraph, and a laugh in every inch. (I was paid by the inch.) I might have sat down for this purpose on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday morning; I regretted now that I hadn’t; but it was too late. By four o’clock on Friday my article must be sent down to the printer, and the knowledge that it must be finished by four o’clock on this very day made both the writing of it possible and the writing of it earlier impossible. Ideas may drift into other writers’ minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere. The expression of it in writing is comparatively easy. A sort of agraphia may come over me sometimes: a terrifying inability to compress thought into a sentence: but normally I can follow up an idea with an enjoyment, at times lazy, at times eager, which may awake no echo
in the reader’s heart, but is doubtless audible to him. First, however, the idea. On Friday morning at 9.30 I sat down to search for it.

  At 11.30, my brain in ruins, I was still searching. At 11.30 I was telling myself that even if I did find it, I had to find fifty-one more before the year was over; and that if I stayed on Punch until I was seventy, as everybody seemed to do, then I should have to find about 2,500 ideas before I died. Yet now, in my prime at twenty-four, I couldn’t even find one. Why hadn’t I become a school­master?

  At twelve I was saying: ‘Well, it’s not very good, but I may as well begin, and see what happens.’ I began.

  At 12.30 I was saying: ‘It’s not so bad.’

  At 1.30 some variation of the idea came to me, and I began again. It was now definitely going to be good.

  At 3.30 it was finished. I dashed to the Punch office, sent it down to the printers, and went out again in search of something to eat.

  Soon after four I was back in the office, criticizing a play to which I had been the night before, and writing a book-review. By five o’clock I was ‘doing the paragraphs.’ The paragraphs were cuttings from other papers, with appropriate comments. (As an example: ‘Peacock and Peahen for sale: unrelated: 1906 chicks,’ with the comment: ‘Then it’s quite time they were related.’) After I had really got the thing going, cuttings poured into the office from all over the world, and I enjoyed myself enormously with them. Some, of necessity, were unprintable. I liked the one, and carried it about with me for a long time, which said of George V on his yacht: ‘The King has a delightfully keen sense of humour, and it is a joy to hear his hearty laugh when a sailor runs across the deck and catches his toe in a ring-bolt.’ We were much too loyal to print this sort of thing, but loyalty can be carried too far. An enthusiastic clergyman wrote to his local paper of a never-to-be-forgotten experience which he had just had. ‘Our Great Leader’ (Mr Balfour, no less) had travelled to Edinburgh the night before, and his train had stopped at the local station for a few minutes. ‘Probably I was the only person in the neighbourhood in possession of the information. I hurried round on my bicycle, and for five minutes had the inestimable privilege of gazing upon the face of the revered statesman.’ Unfortunately Seaman’s loyalty extended to Our Great Leader, and the picture of Balfour wondering, under that fixed gaze, who the lunatic was remained my private joke.

  The paragraphs were finished by six o’clock, and I had the day’s contributions to go through. These consisted of articles or verses, jokes for illustration, and press cuttings. Few of them were of any value. The possible paragraphs I kept for the following Friday, and the best of the other contributions were passed on to the Editor with appropriate comments. Sometimes a joke would be ‘going the rounds,’ and a hundred people would send it up, most of them alleging that it had happened to themselves last Tuesday. When Winston Churchill talked about a ‘terminological inexactitude,’ every other envelope contained some supposedly humorous substitution of this phrase for the more ordinary word ‘lie.’ When Tommy Bowles won a famous City of London election, the number of people who probed to its depths a joke based upon ‘a game of bowl(e)s’ was only less than the number who thought it made the matter clearer if they described it as a game of ‘bowls (Bowles).’ One old gentleman wrote: ‘Dear Sir, On my seventy-seventh birthday last week a young friend of mine who is a great footballer’—(and ‘footballer’ was crossed out, and ‘cricketer,’ in pencil, substituted)— ‘said to me, “Seventy-seven not out!” I think this is clever wit.’ It was difficult in this welter of clever wit to keep one’s head; difficult not to feel, on one day that anything which didn’t try to be funny was funny, and on the next that nothing would ever be funny again.

  At seven o’clock my own proof would come up. It was, and I never know why this should be so, an entirely different article in print, and, as such, needed critical appreciation. I gave it this, I finished off the contributions, and went out to dinner at eight.

  At ten o’clock Owen and I were back in his room. The paper had been set and the pages were beginning to come up. They came up three or four at a time. Every now and then I managed to get hold of one, and then waited . . . and waited . . . for the next one. All Owen’s past life (or something) came before his eyes as he corrected a page of Punch, but through it all he read doggedly, very slow, very sure, until I wanted to scream: ‘For Heaven’s sake, what’s it all about? Time isn’t a thing you do this to.’ I suppose it was, because my day had been so frantic until now that I could not bear these wasted hours. Leisured idleness is a lovely thing, but idleness without leisure is an invention of the devil. They think highly of it in the army.

  By one o’clock we were through. It had been interesting to cut ten lines out of somebody else’s article, and annoying to have to cut two out of my own. I had verified a quotation, explained the point of one of the paragraphs—

  ‘Not more than twenty people will see it. Can’t you make it clearer?’

  ‘Easily. But it will spoil it for the twenty.’

  ‘We can’t edit a paper for twenty readers.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be heavenly if we could? . . . Is that better?’

  ‘H’m. It isn’t too clear now.’

  ‘One must keep it funny somehow.’

  ‘Oh, well, all right. You may find a better one to-morrow.’

  ‘Can I have some more pages?’

  ‘Can’t you find anything to do? You’d better pick out some books.’

  ‘Right.’

  —had had a long talk with Owen, gone into my room and picked out half a dozen books for review, read them all, lit my tenth pipe, and been in time for the next page. By one o’clock we were through. I went back to bed.

  On Saturday morning the corrected pages came back for final correction. We were due at the office at eleven. I got there at ten, had all the pages to myself, corrected them, and waited impatiently for Owen to come. I was playing cricket at twelve, or I was catching an 11.40 into Sussex for the week-end, or I was going to Lord’s or Twickenham, or—Anyway—

  ‘I’ve done all the pages.’

  ‘H’m. Do you want to get off?’

  ‘Unless there’s anything else I can do?’

  ‘When’s your train?’

  ‘11.40.’

  ‘Plenty of time. You’d better enter up the books.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘What about that paragraph? You were going to find a better one. Anything in the post?’

  ‘Three. They’re on your desk.’

  ‘Right. Well—good luck,’ and with it that sudden charming smile which turned him in a moment from a cold schoolmaster into the delightfully warm-hearted human being which in fact he was.

  He was a strange, unlucky man. All the Good Fairies came to his christening, but the Uninvited Fairy had the last word, so that the talents found themselves in the wrong napkin and the virtues flourished where graces should have been. Humour was drowned in Scholarship, Tact went down before Truth, and the Fighting Qualities gave him not only the will to win but the determination to explain why he hadn’t won. There is a story of him as a golfer, making an excuse for every bad shot until he got to the last green, when he threw down his putter and said: ‘That settles it. I’ll never play in knickerbockers again.’ It could have been so delightfully said—but it wasn’t. He had, truly, a heart of gold, and if it had been ‘concealed beneath a rugged exterior,’ as so often it is in novels, it would have been more patent to the world than the veneer which was so nearly gold allowed it to be.

  If anybody, reading this, says: ‘And now, to make the portrait complete, I should like to know what he thought about you,’ he would be justified. I must have maddened him. I did ask him once whether he was happier with my successor, a man of his own age, than he had been with me, and he said that there was nothing much in it; which meant, of course, that he preferred the other. ‘You had a much li
ghter hand with the paragraphs, and you didn’t let so many bad contributions get past you, but he is tidier and more businesslike, and he doesn’t want to dash away on Saturday mornings.’ He might have added, ‘And you were an unpatriotic Radical, and he is a patriotic Conservative.’ For my politics also maddened him.

  Owen was one of the many non-party politicians of those days who took the strictly impartial view that all Radicals were traitors and all gentlemen Conservatives. He did honestly believe that Punch under his editorship was a non-party paper. At the Table Rudie Lehmann and E. V. Lucas did their best for Liberalism, but Rudie had been there so long that he had almost given up hope, and E. V. had always a sardonic tolerance for his opponents and a quick recognition that ‘the sense of the Table’ was against him. Lehmann, of course, had German origins; Lucas, poor fellow, had never been to a Public School or University; their politics could be understood. But Milne was in a different case. Sheer, wilful wrong-headedness. A young man from one of the Eight Public Schools and the Only University, who certainly dashed off on Saturdays, but dashed off to play cricket at country houses—it was ridiculous.

  It may seem odd, but politics were like that in the great days of Lloyd George’s Penal Budgets, when income tax soared up to—was it 1/10 in the pound?—and a super tax, if you can believe it, was actually put on employment-giving incomes of over £5,000 a year. In all my contacts on dance-floors, cricket-fields and at country houses in those days it never failed to be assumed that I shared my companion’s estimate of the Government’s perfidy.

  Owen discovered all too soon that I didn’t. I had given up submitting my contributions to him before sending them to the printer, but until I was on the Table he had a right of veto over them. Over the contributions of members of the Table he had none. When the slogan of the day was ‘We want eight (battleships) and we won’t wait,’ and Navy Leaguers were crying for Three and Four-Power Standards, without which we were at the mercy of our enemies, I suggested to Rudie Lehmann that he should re-write the Ballad of the Revenge on the assumption that Sir Richard Grenville had refused to put to sea until he had a 53-power standard: