The Path Through the Trees

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by Christopher Milne


  Luckily there were plenty of undergraduates in those days who neither smoked nor drank nor drove a car: so it didn’t matter. Instead we rode bicycles and discussed politics and both of these I enjoyed. My political life started when a smallish, darkish, spectacled and rather spotty man came into my room, introduced himself and asked if I would like to join the Cambridge University Socialist Club. Was I a Socialist, he asked. ‘No,’ I said. Did I know what Socialism was about? Well, not really. ‘Then join the Socialist Club and find out!’ he said cheerfully. So I did. After all there was nothing to lose. It didn’t change anything. I could still be a Liberal like my father if I wanted to. So I joined and met other Socialists and learned a lot of things. I learned, for instance, that the war in which we were engaged was an ‘Imperialist’ war. ‘But we’re not fighting to enlarge our Empire,’ I said. No, but we were fighting to maintain it. ‘No we’re not. We’re fighting for our freedom against Nazi aggression.’ ‘We are an Imperialist Power,’ they replied, ‘and therefore this is an Imperialist War.’ I was not convinced, but I continued to listen and to learn, to argue and often to disagree. Stalin and Russia were good, they said. England and Chamberlain, bad. But I didn’t think it particularly good when Russia invaded Finland, and I found their explanations far from convincing.

  It was, however, their attitude to India that finally disillusioned me with the Socialist Club. We were sitting round a gas fire in somebody’s room drinking coffee, about eight of us, planning our next campaign. ‘We must put India over big,’ said one of us; and the moment he said it I realized two things. First, that I was not the sort of person who ever wanted to put anything over ‘big’; and secondly, if I had been, India would have been at the bottom of my list, not the top. There was a war on, admittedly not yet a terribly exciting one, but things were happening in Europe that were surely of greater importance. I didn’t walk out of the meeting in disgust. I didn’t hand in my resignation. I just drifted away and spent my evenings doing other things with other people.

  However, it was not to learn about politics that I had gone to Cambridge. I was there as a mathematician, having won a major scholarship to Trinity College the previous year. Perhaps if there had not been quite so many things to distract me, I might have remained a mathematician. Perhaps if I had seen mathematics as leading to some desirable goal I might have remained a mathematician. Perhaps if I had been better taught I might have remained a mathematician. But none of these things happened and so it was at Cambridge that my love of mathematics perished. I left eight months later with a Second Class in the Preliminary to Part Two of the Maths Tripos – and no further interest in the subject. It was a first love that, as so often is the way with first loves, burned fiercely, then died suddenly. But though I lost my ability to solve differential equations, something remained, an attitude to life, a way of thought.

  People sometimes confuse mathematics with figures, assuming that a person who likes the one will be good at the other. In my case they have assumed that I would be looking after the bookshop accounts. So I was – but only because I could find no one else to volunteer. And as soon as I was able to, I gave it up. I hated it. I did it abominably. And I detest figures.

  I liked them once, of course, because mathematics begins with figures; adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. I used to get great pleasure testing my Nanny on the eight-times table. But once you have mastered multiplication you want to get onto something else. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life just multiplying things together. It’s like asking a mountaineer to spend his life walking round and round the base of a mountain. Mathematics has this in common with mountaineering: the proper direction is upwards. As with mountaineering each step upwards can only be tackled when the previous steps have been achieved, and each step – each traverse, each chimney or whatever it might be – poses its own unique problem, demands its own particular solution and gives, when solved, its own peculiar pleasure. Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics: these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics? It came, it flourished for a brief while, and then it died; and I cannot now recall what purpose it served or what problems it solved, just that I loved it for its beauty.

  But isn’t this enough? Does one ask more of mathematics? Does one demand that it shall serve also some practical purpose? No. Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it. And if, quite by chance, a practical man comes along wanting to measure the height of a tree or work out the best way of building a bridge, it is an added bonus, a happy accident, if he finds a theorem or a technique that will help him. So it is no criticism of a branch of mathematics to say that the only problems it seems capable of solving are those of its own creation. It is – to take a familiar example from the nursery slopes – no criticism to say that no one but a fool would attempt to fill a bath by turning on tap A and tap B without first making sure that plug C is firmly in position. The point of the problem is the beauty of its solution.

  The first great glory of mathematics, then, is that it is always offering you something new; and its second great glory is that it offers you beauty. It is never enough to solve a problem, to get the right answer. One must find the simplest, neatest, most elegant solution. Elegance: that was a word so often used by one of my maths masters at Stowe. Only the really elegant solution gave any pleasure: this was why I so loved Projective Geometry. Its problems called for no laborious calculations, no pages and pages of figures, merely (if you were clever enough to find them) half a dozen lines of ingenious argument.

  Today I am down at the bottom of the mountain again. I can’t even remember the binomial theorem. But I have not lost my delight in elegance. Today my problems are more practical – designing a new fitting for the bookshop, for instance. And if months go by and the fitting has still not been made (and if Lesley tells me that it really only needs a couple of nails and a bit of wood: lend her my hammer and she’d do it herself) my answer is that, yes, I agree, but that I cannot do it that way and she must wait a little longer until I have hit on the right way of doing it, the simple, neat and elegant way, the only way that will give lasting pleasure.

  ‘Two roads diverged in a wood . . .’ and so they do in the field of mathematics. One road is labelled ‘Pure’, the other ‘Applied’. Applied maths led to such things as engineering, the chance – you might think – of combining the mathematical brain that I had inherited from my father with the practical fingers that I had inherited from my mother. What an obvious road to choose! Pure maths led – if it led anywhere – only to teaching. My Grandfather, despite his shyness, had been a brilliant teacher, but I knew that I could never teach. So surely this was the road to reject. Yet I took it. For Pure Mathematics lured me with a beauty and elegance that I found totally lacking in Applied Mathematics. Where did it lead? Did it matter? The Piper played and I followed the music. In any case at that particular time all roads led to war.

  And then at Cambridge the tune changed, and notes became harsh, the siren song no longer enticed me. Mathematics and music: they have this also in common – each needs skilful interpretation. Music must be well played, mathematics well taught. And just as the great composer is seldom also a great player, so is the great mathematician seldom also a great teacher We took our seats in the lecture hall. Our lecturer swept in, spent forty minutes in private communion with the blackboard, then swept out. Our task was to take notes. It was an exercise in handwriting and nothing more.

  So, mathematics having failed me, it was indeed to music that I turned. I hired a wireless and listened to concerts as often as I could. And if today a theme pursues its way through my head and if I can attach a name to it, it will almost certainly be from something I met for the first time in P.1. Whewell’s Court.

  On May 10th, 1940, Germany invaded the
Low Countries, Chamberlain resigned and the Local Defence Volunteers were formed. The war was much closer now. I remember walking down Trinity Street with the captain of the Trinity Cricket Club. He was trying to visualize what he had just read in the papers – dead French troops piled up one on top of the other along the Maginot Line. He was a year older than I, due to enlist very shortly. Was he soon to see dead bodies, piled up? Would he himself end up on one of those piles? The Germans flooded into France. Stukas dive bombed troops and refugees alike. Parachutists floated down from the sky, and Fifth Columnists were on the ground to greet them.

  At Cambridge the exams came to an end, the sun shone, and we waited, enjoying to the full our last moments of a world, unreal at any time, but doubly so now. Then, a few days later and a fortnight before the official end of term, we were sent down. Coming back in October? Some were: those in reserved occupations – scientists, engineers. Mathematics had been listed as a semi-reserved occupation, meaning that one was allowed an extra year as a civilian. So – yes – I would be coming back in October.

  And so we said our goodbyes and wished each other good luck; and I caught the train to King’s Cross and then another to Hartfield and thus back to Cotchford. And with me I brought two very precious, very particular memories.

  The first concerns a cricket match.

  My father had always hoped that one day I would be a great cricketer, captaining the Stowe Eleven perhaps, or even playing for Cambridge. But at Stowe the tender plant that had been so devotedly nourished hour after hour at the nets during the holidays drooped and faded: I got no further than the Third Eleven. So when I went to Cambridge I might well have given up cricket in disgust. After all there were plenty of other delightful ways of spending a summer afternoon. But I didn’t. Some residual keenness made me answer ‘Yes’ when asked if I played – perhaps because the question was put in January when snow was on the ground and summer was a hundred miles away, or perhaps because I knew my father would have been disappointed if I had said ‘No’. So my name was put down, and I duly turned up for net practice.

  I must make it clear – before I come on to my particular memory – that a College First Eleven isn’t quite the same thing as a Public School First Eleven. The games, which are played against other Colleges, are played in a much more friendly, much more casual manner than were those epic battles with rival schools. It doesn’t really matter who wins, and so no one feels that the Great Batsman is letting down the side if he spends his afternoons on the river, preferring to save his energies for more testing bowling. Nevertheless, we fielded a team whose variously coloured blazers told of past glories, and among them was a solitary figure, unblazered, uncapped, modestly clad in a plain white jersey I was invited to play, and among my various innings was one of complete perfection, a late flowering, a final, glorious bloom, before the whole plant withered and died and I gave up cricket altogether. And in this innings, two shots in particular, an off-drive and an on-drive. How trivial it seems written down! How trivial it will seem to most readers! A year at Cambridge and almost all he has to set against his failure as a mathematician is a couple of shots in a cricket match! Quite true. And I will hurry on to my second memory in a moment. But may I just be allowed to say to anyone who understands about these things, that the off-drive was a half volley just outside the off stump and shot to the boundary between mid-off and extra cover. The on-drive came in the same over, a full pitch, quite fast, on the leg stump, and I was only just able to get my weight across in time. And never has a ball hit so gently buried itself in a distant hedge so shortly afterwards.

  Onto the second memory: a concert at the Guildhall within a few weeks of the end of term. It was given by the Women’s Symphony Orchestra and was the first public concert by a professional orchestra I had ever been to. My seat – I must have booked late or been feeling poor – was at the back of the orchestra, facing the conductor. The programme? Coriolan Overture, memorable chiefly for the conductor’s expression so visible to me at each recurrence of the main theme; a Beethoven concerto with Myra Hess at the piano, memorable for the fact that I could hear her as well as her piano; and finally, most memorable of all, Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. Today if I hear something new I must listen to it maybe ten times before I can recall any of it, and even then the themes do not always come when they are bidden. Perhaps it is different when you are young. I had never heard the Eighth Symphony before and indeed I have scarcely heard it since; yet in the weeks that followed, as I paced through the Cotchford fields and the German bombers flew overhead on their leisurely way to bomb London, back it all came theme after theme, movement after movement. The music, the Sussex countryside, the German bombers: fitting accompaniment to the arguments and emotions that were turning themselves over and over in my head, and which were awaiting only one tiny incident to crystallize into a decision that I could announce in public.

  The incident belongs to the next chapter. The decision can be anticipated in this. ‘I’m not going back to Cambridge next year,’ I said. ‘I want to join the army.’

  2. Preparations for War

  On May 29th came the evacuation of Dunkirk. On June 14th German troops entered Paris. German bombs were already falling on London. A German invasion across the Channel seemed almost a certainty. So it is not really surprising that I had by this time lost my enthusiasm for Cambridge. Yet, almost inevitable though the decision was, it was not one I could quickly or easily make. It took several days of tramping across fields and through woods to mature, and it needed that final incident to tip the scales. The incident was trivial in the extreme. It was not the destruction of an army, not the corpses that littered the roads of France, but the death in a flying accident of a single airman. Flying Officer E. J. Kain, returning to England on leave, attempted a ‘victory roll’ before landing – and crashed; and Flying Officer Kain, known to everyone as ‘Cobber’ Kain, was our first Air Ace. So here was a death that seemed to touch me personally, the death of someone whose photograph I had seen in the papers, someone I felt I almost knew.

  It is not abstractions – ‘liberty’, ‘England’ – that stir the imagination, but people: not even people in the mass but individuals. It is the drummer boy who leads us into battle. It is to the ensign bearer that we rally. How often in the past, I wonder, has it been the ensign bearer or the drummer boy who has determined the great issues of peace and war?

  My father received my announcement as I would have wished. He gave me his fullest support and encouragement both then and in the months that followed. And when I say this I don’t just mean that he said, ‘Your decision receives my fullest support and encouragement’, and then left events to take their course. He never left events to take their course if he could help them on their way; and helping them on their way meant going straight to the top. Sir James Grigg was Under Secretary of State for War. My father wrote him a letter.

  We had already decided that I should try to get into the Royal Engineers, and I had joined the Engineers’ section of the OTC while at Cambridge. But, even if it had been possible for me to get an immediate commission, it was very firmly my wish now to start in the ranks. My reason for this was simply lack of self-confidence. If I was ever going to be an officer, I needed the assurance that it was because I was a good enough soldier, not because I had been to University.

  How did one become a Sapper? That was the question. And you may well think it was not one worth bothering an Under Secretary of State about. Indeed, you might well think that a greater problem might have been how to avoid becoming a Sapper. However, this was what I had set my heart on, and we just didn’t know whether we could trust the War Office not to post me instead to an Infantry Battalion. In any case there was little enough else that a middle-aged author could do to help win the war, so my father probably welcomed this opportunity to exert himself on behalf of his son.

  I can’t remember now what was the outcome of his letter. But I do recollect another string he pulled producing a reply from
an Engineer Colonel in which he said how much easier it would all have been if I were skilled in some suitable trade. Was I by any chance an amateur bricklayer? And then it was that we suddenly saw that my one great qualification was not mathematics but carpentry. ‘So if the Engineers need a keen carpenter,’ wrote my father, ‘he’s your man.’ ‘And,’ he added to me, ‘while waiting to see where that gets us, you must jolly well make yourself as expert as you possibly can, so that when Lord Gort wants a bridge over the Rhine, Milne is the Sapper he sends for. I wonder if there is a helpful book we could get. And, going once more to the top, he wrote to Christina Foyle, the bookseller, to find out.

  Two books are now sitting on my table beside my typewriter: large, hefty volumes, both of them. The older, in spite of a new hessian-covered spine, is beginning to look its age, which is seventy. They are both by George Ellis and were published by Batsford. The first, the book Miss Foyle kindly gave me in answer to my father’s plea, is called Modern Practical Carpentry; the second, which I ordered from Foyles shortly afterwards, is Modern Practical Joinery. And as I turn their pages now, so I can see myself turning their pages thirty-six years ago, absorbing every word and every drawing. Did I learn how to bridge the Rhine? Well, I learned that the Mohawk River Railroad Bridge was a fine example of the arch-rib, trussed-frame type of construction much used in America. And on the opposite page I could study the intricate criss-crossings of stringers, strainers, braces, ribs, struts, posts and beams, all made of wood, of course, and each dovetailed, housed, scarfed, halved, cogged or saddled into its neighbour.

  Bridges and roof trusses, coffer dams and caissons, splayed, canted and bevelled work, stairs, windows and doors: page by page I learned the elaborate, painstaking way the Victorian carpenter went about his trade. Utterly fascinated I followed him into every mortice, every rabbet, every quirk, round every bullnose, down every birdsmouth, up every spandrel and every scarf. And I have remained a Victorian carpenter at heart ever since, refusing to equip myself with power tools, despising butt joints and skew nails when a stopped lap dovetail was the way Mr Ellis did it.

 

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