by A. A. Milne
6
In 1913 Owen Seaman’s god-daughter, Dorothy de Sélincourt (Daphne to friends), was persuaded to marry me. Owen had taken me to her coming-out dance, and we had gone about together in a way common enough now, but less usual in those days. When I wanted a present for a sister-in-law or a new suit for myself, I would summon her to help me; when she wanted a man to take her to a dance she would ring me up. She laughed at my jokes, she had my contributions to Punch by heart before she met me, she had (it is now clear) the most perfect sense of humour in the world; and I, in my turn, had a pianola to which she was devoted, and from which I could not keep her away. We might have gone on like this for ever. One day we found ourselves in a boot-shop.
‘Any sort of boots or just boots?’ she said.
‘Ski-ing boots,’ I said proudly. ‘This is a great day in your life.’
‘I bought mine yesterday.’
‘What for?’
‘Ski-ing.’
‘Where? Hampstead Heath?’
‘Switzerland.’
‘But that’s where I’m going!’
‘Well, there’s plenty of room for both of us. I’m going to a place called Diablerêts.’
‘Dash it, so am I.’
‘What a very small—’
‘Don’t say it. Are you at the Grand?’
‘Yes. What fun. I’ve got a pair of orange trousers.’
‘I shall be wearing a red carnation in my button-hole. We’re bound to recognize each other. What are you like with a lot of other people about?’
‘Heavenly.’
‘So am I. I do hope we shall like each other.’
We did. The ‘other people about’ made everything different. I proposed to her at eleven o’clock one morning in a snow-storm. I had to, because she was going back to London that afternoon, where also there were other people, and it was clear to me now that it was my mission to save her from them.
This is the autobiography of a writer, not of a married man. My next book was dedicated ‘to my collaborator who buys the ink and paper, laughs, and in fact does all the really difficult part of the business,’ and it is as a collaborator that Daphne plays her part in this book.
We were married in June, and took a flat in Embankment Gardens, Chelsea. I was now getting eight guineas a week for my contributions to Punch, which was then the top price for writers on the staff. When I stopped writing for The Sphere, the Proprietors compensated me by raising my salary to £500, so that with double pay for Almanacs and Summer Numbers, and a trickle of royalties from the books, I was making about £1,000 a year. We were very comfortable and very happy. I had met the Williamsons (C. N. and A. M.) a year or two before at a luncheon-party, and romantic Alice Williamson had made me promise that, when I fell in love or got married or did any of those things, I would introduce the lady to her. So, after our return from a rather cold and bleak honeymoon on Dartmoor, we asked them to dinner. They returned our hospitality (if you can call it that, the cook-general being temperamental) by offering us their villa at Cap Martin for a second honeymoon. The offer, as we discovered when we got there, included not only the villa but the staff, the food, the cellar and even the cigars, together with letters of introduction to everybody and the company of that delightfully wheezy bull-dog Tiberius. It was a noble piece of hospitality, but Alice Williamson was an American, to whom such gestures are natural.
7
My friend Alderson Horne, at whose house in Sussex I had spent so many delightful week-ends, was putting on his first play. Disguised as Anmer Hall he has since become the high light of what critics call the uncommercial theatre, by which is meant the theatre which hasn’t got to make both ends meet. In those days most plays were preceded by ‘curtain-raisers’: one-act plays which entertained the cheaper seats while the stalls were finishing their dinners: acted, mostly, by the understudies. Alderson, either from friendship or because he thought I had an unrevealed talent for such things, asked me to write the curtain-raiser.
For some years now I had been trying to catch a glimpse of the middle-aged man who writes this book. What should I be in 1930, in 1940? Still writing for Punch? Editor of Punch, perhaps. Nothing (I felt) which I wrote for Punch in 1930 would be better than what I was writing now. I had by this time mastered the technique (the tricks, if you like to call them that) of the ‘humorous’ sketch; I couldn’t expect to become ‘funnier’; and the gaiety and light-heartedness would gradually become less gay, less carefree. Having made a reputation, however small, by 1910, it was silly and unexciting to spend the rest of one’s life trying to keep the spots off it. It was true that to be editor of Punch was a career in itself, but should I be allowed to do what I liked with Punch? No. And would it be a good thing for Punch if I were? No. Its secret was that it was a National Institution. Did I want to edit, could I edit, a national institution? I thought not. In any case the editorship would not be vacant for another twenty years . . . another thousand humorous articles . . . the best of them no farther on than the best of those which I had already written.
Then how escape?
Obviously, and only, by writing in my spare time novels or plays on which ultimately I could depend for a living. When should I begin? There was only one day—to-morrow—and to-morrow, as is its habit, never came. Then I married, and, it seemed, became more tied to my surroundings. Could I give up the certain income; could I renounce my collaborator’s great ambition for me, the editorship of Punch? I didn’t see how I could. Nor (it being Friday morning, and Jane having had a temperament the night before) did I see how I could endure to go on for ever like this. Something would have to happen some day.
So, when Alderson asked me to write a curtain-raiser, I told myself that it was happening now. I was going to be a dramatist.
I wrote a one-act play called Make-Believe, a title which I used later for a full-length children’s play. My collaborator sent it off to Alderson and bought a new dress for the first night. After a few exciting days the play came back again. The reason given (and there is always a kindly reason given) was that the characterization was too subtle for understudies to put over the footlights; it needed a star cast. Quite possibly Alderson didn’t like it.
So what? Should I try another manager, or should I try another play? Could I write plays or couldn’t I? I didn’t know. But probably Barrie would know. I sent Make-Believe to him. Barrie said that without any doubt I could write plays, and sent it on to Granville Barker. Barker wrote to me enthusiastically, accepted the play for production and added, ‘But the important thing is that you should immediately write me a full-length play.’ The thing had happened. I was escaping. I was going to be a dramatist.
But, as it turned out, I was to escape in other circumstances. War was declared.
AMATEUR SOLDIER
1914–1918
Chapter Thirteen
I
I should like to put asterisks here, and then write: ‘It was in 1919 that I found myself once again a civilian.’ For it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war. When my boy was six years old he took me into the Insect House at the Zoo, and at the sight of some of the monstrous inmates I had to leave his hand and hurry back into the fresh air. I could imagine a spider or a millipede so horrible that in its presence I should die of disgust. It seems impossible to me now that any sensitive man could live through another war. If not required to die in other ways, he would waste away of soul-sickness.
I was a pacifist before 1914, but this (I thought with other fools) was a war to end war. It did not make the prospect of being a soldier any more attractive. There was an extraordinary idea among the elderly that ‘being a soldier’ meant just no more than ‘risking your life for your country,’ and that the man who was unwilling to do this was a coward, and that the man who was willing to do this was a hero. To people like myself the Great Sac
rifice was not the sacrifice of our lives but of our liberties. Ever since I had left Cambridge I had been my own master. I fixed my own hours, I was under no discipline; no bell rang for me, no bugle sounded. Now I was thirty-two; married, with a happy home of my own and engaged happily in work which I loved. To be a schoolboy again, to say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ and ‘Please, sir’ and ‘May I, sir?’ was no hardship to schoolboys, no hardship to a million men in monotonous employment, but it was hell itself to one who had been as spoilt by good-fortune as I. However, again I was fortunate. There are Colonels and Colonels; I met only the one sort of Colonel. If a special order had gone round the British Army: ‘For your information and necessary action: Milne is joining us. See that he is given the easiest and best possible time, consistent with ultimate victory,’ I could not have had more reason to be grateful to my commanding officers.
As the result of an introduction from Graves I was commissioned to the 4th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, then stationed at Golden Hill in the Isle of Wight. In the orderly room I said ‘Sir’ to the Adjutant, whose uncle I called ‘Charles’ on the Punch Table. It gave me no compensating thrill that elderly sergeants who knew all about soldiering said ‘Sir’ to me. It was a reserve battalion, into which the Colonel had persuaded many of his personal friends, some of whom were married. After six experimental weeks in which I learnt to be just a little, but not much, like a soldier, Daphne joined the married strength, and from then on, whenever it was possible, she shared the war with me. Through a variety of accidents I became Signalling Officer. After a nine weeks’ course at the Southern Command Signalling School I really knew something about it, with the result that I was kept at home as an instructor until July 1916. As a specialist officer I was, I thanked Heaven, independent again. Nobody in the battalion could tell me anything about signalling (except my sergeant, and he only when we heliographed from one range of hills in the Island to another, and he thought he was back in India); I was excused–or excused myself, it was never clear which–orderly officer’s duty; never saw my company commander from one week to another; and having the whole battalion behind me on route marches could almost imagine that I was taking a brisk country walk in civilian knickerbockers. Mrs Williams, the Colonel’s wife, mother of five children and the regiment, only to be described as a ‘perfect dear,’ became great friends with Daphne. They put their heads together and organized entertainment for the troops, one of the features of which was to be (whether the troops liked it or not) a little play in which Daphne and the Colonel’s children would act. The play would be written by the Signalling Officer. My collaborator was detailed to break the news to me. I said that I was much too tired in the evenings to write anything. She said that she would do the writing; all I had to do was to lie in an armchair and tell her what to write. Easy work. So we wrote a ‘little play’ about a Prince and Princess and a Wicked Countess (Daphne) and a magic ring. Some of the dialogue seemed to us rather funny, and my collaborator said, as she has so often said, ‘You mustn’t waste this.’ But there seemed to be nothing to do with it, since it was no more than one scene in a children’s play. ‘Write a book round the people in it,’ said my collaborator. ‘I’ve never written a book,’ I protested, ‘not straight off.’ ‘Well, now’s the time to begin,’ she said.
So after I had come back from my signalling course, and rejoined the battalion which had now moved to Sandown, and we had taken the prettiest cottage in the town with lilacs and cherry-trees in the garden, I dictated the book: a long fairy-story called Once on a Time. There are, I think, some good things in it, but few people have read it, and nobody knows whether it is meant for children or for grown-ups. I don’t know myself. But it was the greatest of fun to do. We began every evening at half-past five, I in my chair before the fire, my collaborator, pen in hand, brown head bent over table, writing, waiting, laughing: it made the war seem very far away, it took us back to our own happy life in London. On Sundays—for I seem to have excused myself Church Parade too—we went for long walks over the cliffs with lunch in our pockets, and the characters in the book came with us, listening to us as we settled their fate for the next chapter.
It was a great moment when the last word was put down on paper. I had thought that I could never write more than two thousand consecutive words, and I had written sixty thousand. I had written a book. It was finished. Spring was here, and now, save for this trivial business of soldiering, I was free, I could take a holiday, I could rest.
But I couldn’t. In a week my collaborator was saying ‘What shall we do now?’ We had to do something. I couldn’t just be, of all stupid things, a soldier. What should we write?
Not a book. We had written a book. What about a play? The play, the full-length play which I had been going to write before the war.
So I wrote a Comedy in Three Acts, called Wurzel-Flummery.
In one of those Sphere articles I had referred to the unimaginative way in which millionaires leave their money. ‘How much more amusing,’ I wrote, ‘to leave £٢٠,٠٠٠ to each of fifty acquaintances on condition that they all take the same ridiculous name. Fifty Spiffkinses in the same club, just because you said so.’ This idea came back into my mind suddenly and was made the theme of the play. The ridiculous name was Wurzel-Flumery. We imagined Dennis Eadie, who had played the irresponsible clergy man so delightfully in The Honeymoon, playing the solicitor. Barrie, who had promised to give me any introduction I wanted, read the play, praised and critized it, and sent it to Eadie.
Eadie asked me to lunch with him at the Carlton Grill to ‘talk it over.’
How happily I went to the Colonel to ask for a day’s leave, how readily he granted it, how excitedly next morning we went to the station together, my collaborator and I, how fondly, how hopefully we waved good-bye to each other, how eagerly she waited on the platform for me as my train came back. The news was as good as could be expected. Eadie seemed really keen on the play, and wanted to do it, but there was just something not quite right with it. ‘If I knew what it was, I would tell you, but I don’t. I just feel that there’s something. Why don’t you ask Barrie? Or read it through again yourself. It’s so nearly right.’ I said that Barrie had already made one or two criticisms. ‘Well, there you are; he would know. And when you’ve got it right, send it back to me. I want to do it.’
Who could say fairer than that over one’s first play? We had a happy dinner together, chattering excitedly, building the wildest castles in Shaftesbury Avenue. At half-past ten we went to bed, still chattering. At eleven there was a heavy knocking on the front door. Our servant slept out. I went down, knowing what it was. An orderly saluted and said that the Colonel would like to see me in the Mess. I was for France in forty-eight hours.
Somewhere in the waste land round the Somme I opened a letter from Daphne, written from Burnham-on-Crouch where she was staying with her mother. Enclosed in her letter was a note from Gerald du Maurier to Barrie. For better or worse Wurzel-Flummery had had to stay as it was, and since Eadie didn’t like it as it was, some other manager must be approached. It had always seemed possible, now in this dead country it seemed certain, that this was all I should have to leave to my collaborator. So Barrie had sent the play to du Maurier, and here was du Maurier’s answer.
‘Dear Jimmy,’ he wrote, ‘I like it enormously; I know his work in Punch, of course. If I were in this for fun, I would do it like a shot, but there’s no money in it.’
For some reason, his name perhaps, his technical perfection as an actor, the fact that he was George du Maurier’s son, I had always thought of Gerald as an artist who did things ‘for fun.’ How else could one write, paint, compose, act, engage in any of the arts? When one knew him, one knew that the stage meant nothing to him but a means of getting money; he never pretended otherwise; but somehow it was a shock to make the discovery at this particular moment, in this particular place.
2
I was attach
ed to the 11th Battalion of the regiment, then commanded by Lieut.-Colonel C. S. Collison. If I quote again from The Times, it is not because I do not dislike quoting myself, but because I dislike still more paraphrasing anything which I have already written.
All who served under Colonel Collison in the 11th Battalion of The Royal Warwickshire Regiment will have heard with deep regret of his death, and those of them who had the honour of his friendship will feel that some small tribute should now be paid to his memory, even if it be by the least of his subalterns. But it was a privileged subaltern who, by the accident of being a signalling officer, was attached to the H.Q. mess, and thus admitted to the intimacy of his company. To a young, anti-military, ‘literary man,’ hating the Army, and prepared to resent all Regulars, he was a revelation. Handsome, debonair, the ideal monocled colonel of fiction with all a soldier’s love of soldiering and traditional faith in the value of military service, he added to this conventional equipment a fastidiousness, a feeling for beauty, and a humorous, detached irony which made him the most invigorating company imaginable. He called you by a nickname, but he was your colonel; his humour asked for humour in return, but his military façade kept you from taking liberties; he was intimate and aloof, human and astringent; in his manner always on parade, in his mind always alert for companionship.