The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  A couple of months later I was in London in a bedsitter. The hunt was now on in earnest. The first application forms had been filled in and shortly afterwards the first letters of regret had been received. And so it was thought (meaning that my father thought and I agreed) that I ought to move to where the prospects were brightest, where interviews would be a bus ride rather than a train journey away. So I said goodbye to Cotchford and left home. And among the few possessions I took with me was my typewriter. I would need it for writing letters, of course, but I would also need it if, in the intervals between interviews, I tried to write other things as well.

  ‘I want to be a writer.’ I suppose I had said that first at the age of eight or thereabouts, and I had certainly said it again at the age of twenty-five while I was in Trieste. What is a writer? If I were asked now I would say that he is half of a partnership, the other half being enough readers to keep the first half in business. In those days I might have answered more naively that a writer was someone who wanted to be a writer. So I sat at my table in my bedsitter and wonder what to write about.

  Another definition of a writer might be that he is someone who transforms experience into words. He can either do this very rapidly, as a reporter does at a football match, or he can digest his experience more slowly and more thoroughly as does a novelist. At the age of twenty-seven I possessed neither a stock of experiences on which to draw, nor the ability to go out into the world and seek new ones. I wished to write in the privacy of my room – and I had nothing to write about. So I wrote about nothing. After all this was what, forty years earlier, my father had done, and done both well and successfully.

  I tapped away at airy nothings, sent them off an got them back. First study your market: this, of course, is the golden rule, and if I had done so I would have seen that I was living in the past. In 1947 as far as light articles were concerned there was no market to study: current tastes and the paper shortage had seen to that.

  Then came my first job. It was with the Central Office of Information, the civilian heir to the war-time Ministry of Information. The first Labour Government was in power grappling with the first of the succession of economic crises that have plagued government after government ever since. ‘The balance of payments’, ‘higher productivity’, ‘fair shares for all’, ‘the Nation’s housekeeping’; the phrases were fresh in those days, and the problem seemed simple enough, the remedy obvious. All that was necessary (so we thought) was to ensure that everybody knew and understood. So speakers were sent out, and wherever they could find an audience – in factory, canteen or parish hall – and whenever they could make their voices heard above the clatter of machinery, knives or knitting needles, they would explain it all in simple, homely terms. The words were theirs; the facts and figures were ours. This was the work of my section and I enjoyed it. And since I was occasionally allowed to attend Government Press Conferences, I had the added bonus of being able to boast of encounters with Cabinet Ministers, and this made me feel pleasantly important.

  So I was happy: happy, that is to say, while I was busy. But gradually the work began to run out. Whether this was because our speakers were themselves the victims of the austerity they urged on others or because one crisis was so like the next that the same speech served them all, I cannot now remember. All I do remember is increased periods of idleness; and it was then that I learned – if I had not already learned it at Kirkuk – how hateful it is to have too little to do.

  At first it was pleasant to alternate between work and idleness. Both were welcome, the one providing a relief from the other. But gradually I began to resent the work. The less there was, the more I resented the fact that there was so little and so resented even the little that came my way. At first the crosswords I did, the papers I read and the letters I wrote were all done a little guiltily, a little surreptitiously. Later they were done ostentatiously, provocatively, defiantly. And included among those later letters – and giving me particular pleasure in that they were written during office hours – were answers to advertisements, applications for other jobs.

  I joined the John Lewis Partnership early in 1949. John Spedan Lewis, the Chairman, had great faith in the product of our Universities; so my Degree in English Literature undoubtedly helped, but my chief qualification – as it had been when I joined the army – was my carpentry. For it was as a trainee furniture buyer (or possibly furniture designer) that I was engaged. Indeed there were several similarities between 1949 and 1941. Another was that my training did not aim to fit me for a specific appointment but merely to give me all-round experience and competence; and yet another was that I started in the ranks.

  So on the appointed day I reported to Mr Jackson, manager of the Lampshade Department at Peter Jones, and thus found myself doing – for the first time perhaps, but not, as will be seen, for the last – the one thing I had vowed that I would never do. A year or two previously I had gone into the electrical department of a big store to buy a light bulb, and while waiting to be served by a young man elegantly dressed in black jacket and striped trousers, I had myself been mistaken for a shop assistant by an old lady wanting a vacuum cleaner. That was when I made my vow.

  Was it just his clothes? Certainly the clothes we wear have a powerful effect on our personalities, and so on our relationship with one another. The army realizes this when it dresses its troops in uniform and then allows its officers a rather smarter uniform. Dictators realize it when they give jackboots to their supporters and remove the braces of their enemies. The king is more kingly under his crown, the fool more foolish in his ill-fitting trousers. How great a transformation can one achieve in this way? Can any fool, suitably dressed, become a king? Could I, in black and grey, have walked the soft carpeted floors of Harrods with confidence and poise? Probably not. Clothes can accentuate: I doubt if they can change. The seed, the potential must be there in the first place.

  So, as the elegantly dressed young man handed me my light bulb,

  I was conscious of a vast gulf between us, a gulf that could, of course, have been summed up by that single, haunting, Italian word, disinvoltura. I felt it then acutely. What is odd is that I didn’t feel it at all during my first day at Peter Jones. Instead I felt only my feet.

  I enjoyed selling lampshades. I enjoyed the companionship of my fellow assistants: they were a cheerful, friendly lot. And I enjoyed serving customers. Altogether it was a good and happy start to my new career.

  There is no need to retrudge every step I took from Department to Department during my year and a half with John Lewis. I can list about fifteen of them which would seem to indicate that I spent about a month with each. I can’t think it was anywhere near as long, so perhaps there are some I have forgotten. I learned a lot, most of it at one time or another to come in useful. I learned many practical things – though not, alas, by practising them, for I was never allowed to do, only to watch. Watching the expert throw a handful of tintacks into his mouth and then bring them forward one at a time between his lips, I learned how to upholster a sofa. I learned how to make loose covers – and later put theory into practice on our own armchair at home. I learned how to French polish, how to make curtains, how to paint straight lines – and the lines that still decorate the chest of drawers in our bedroom today are testimony to that particular lesson and to my enthusiasm at the time.

  I learned how curtains were hung and pelmets fixed, and accompanied the hangers and fixers as they went from house to house, and occasionally (‘Here’s something for the boy’) picked up a tip when the job was done. And I learned – though I’ve yet to find a use for these particular skills – how to apply gold leaf and how with a feather dipped in paint one can imitate the effect of marble. In a different field I learned how secondhand furniture was bought and I accompanied buyers on their visits both to private houses and to auction rooms. I helped myself to books from the Partnership library and learned about Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Regency. I visited two factories near High Wycombe and wat
ched machine tools in action, to excellent effect at one, to appalling effect at the other. I read Partnership for All and was as favourably impressed by what Spedan Lewis was trying to do as I was unfavourably impressed by the way he wrote. But of all the things I did and saw, the most important of them all came when I was told to design a dining-room suite.

  I wonder if the Departmental Manager who gave me this particular task realized at the time how totally unequipped I was to tackle it. At home I had made small pieces of furniture – stools, shelves and so on – and I had altered and repaired larger pieces. But I had never designed anything in my life, that is to say I had never taken pencil and paper first and made a drawing. My furniture making started with a plank of wood and a saw. Consequently not only did I not know how to make a scale drawing; I had no idea of the sort of shapes, proportions and dimensions that were appropriate to chairs and tables. Though I might have been able to measure and copy, without a pattern to follow I was helpless.

  This must have been all too obvious to him as soon as he saw my efforts. He made little comment. What was there to say? Instead he lent me a book to read, a large and beautiful picture book of modern furniture; and from the moment I opened it I began to have a feeling for furniture that I had never possessed before, a feeling that could perhaps be summed up by the word ‘love’.

  Up to then I had ‘liked’ the furniture my parents had in London. It was mostly old, Italianate, and painted with gay floral themes (for my mother hated what she called ‘brown wood’); and I had liked the rather more rustic furniture we had at Cotchford. I didn’t specially like but I was beginning to know something about the various second-hand pieces we sold at John Lewis, and I knew that I disliked most of what we sold in our new furniture departments. Then I opened my book and for the first time met Gimson, Waal and Barnsley. For the first time I saw beauty – not just prettiness – in proportion, in shape and in the very nature of the wood itself, and I saw this flowing from something that had its source in a rural past where beauty lay not in ornament but in simplicity. I saw twentieth-century inspiration coming not from the nineteenth but from the sixteenth century. But in 1949 this new found love was virtually confined to illustrations in books. Outside books, in shops generally and in John Lewis in particular, ‘second-hand’ meant eighteenth and very early nineteenth century, and ‘new’ meant either ‘repro’ with its stained wood and cabriole legs or ‘contemporary’, splay-legged and pale. Furniture design was at its lowest ebb. Only in the Craft Centre near Piccadilly could I see on exhibition individual pieces of furniture, handmade, beautifully designed and following in the tradition of those early twentieth century masters. It was at the age of eight that I first learned the pleasure of handling tools, finding in wood something satisfying to cut and shape. It was at John Lewis that I discovered the added pleasure that could come from good design. There was pleasure in the making: this I knew. There was beauty in the shape and in the material: this I now discovered. I won’t pretend that I went home and set to work on my own dining-room suite: I’ve yet to do that. It was just that where before there was a single seedling growing, now there were two.

  These were the things I learned about the world around me. But I also learned something about myself. I learned that, much as I might enjoy myself with a chisel and a plane, even with a hammer and a mouthful of tintacks, I would never be at home in John Lewis. It was as it had been at OCTU: I impressed my various Departmental Managers as little as I had impressed my Officer Instructors, and for almost exactly the same reasons. Like Hedda they too had a word for it. It caught my eye as I glanced at one of their reports: a French word this time. Gauche. Just as I felt ill at ease in Service Dress, so would I have felt ill at ease in a Business Suit. Service Dress was obligatory, the Business Suit optional. They urged me to buy one but I never did: and this in itself probably told them all they needed to know – that I was unable to become one of them, that I would always remain an outsider. The shop assistant, poised, polished and self-assured, from whom, years before, I had bought my light bulb did in fact typify what I would never be. I imagine that this was blindingly obvious and I don’t suppose that Spedan Lewis when he sat down to dictate his letter to me had a moment’s hesitation. It was not a letter that I welcomed at the time: nobody likes to be given the sack. Gratitude came later, when I had found what I was looking for and realized what a stony path I had escaped from.

  His letter was waiting on the mat when Lesley and I arrived home after a holiday spent at the village of Laveissière in the Auvergne. In spite of the fact that this holiday had been punctuated (or rather I had been punctuated) by a succession of boils under my left arm, it was, and remained, one of our happiest and most memorable. And this was fortunate not only because the memory lingered on to warm the bleak days that were to follow. There was another reason. I had got the sack. I was out of work. I was beginning to feel that nobody wanted me. I was beginning to lose confidence in myself. There was now no doubt about it: the road was going downhill fast.

  It was at this point that we saw our glade.

  From time to time Lesley’s parents used to come to London and stay with us in our flat in Chancery Lane. It wasn’t just for the pleasure of seeing their daughter that they made the long journey from the Isle of Wight. It was to perform on the BBC. They wrote stories and talks, and from time to time came to London to broadcast them. And so, when the moment arrived, Lesley and I would put one or other of them into a taxi and then, an hour later, switch on the wireless. And as I listened to the familiar voice, so I knew that of all the things I could never summon the courage to do, giving a talk on the BBC headed the list. Reading aloud – whether from Shakespeare in class, from the Bible in Chapel, or from a list of names at roll call – was the one thing I had always, determinedly, unashamedly and usually with very great success, done my utmost to avoid. Reading aloud into a microphone, with the thought that there were thousands listening to me at the other end, would have been the ultimate refinement to the torture.

  But this was not to stop me from writing a talk. Probably it wouldn’t be accepted; and even if it were, no doubt they could arrange for one of their professionals to read it.

  During our holiday we had had a small adventure. Setting off one morning to climb the Puy Mary we had been caught in a violent storm, and seeing a small solitary stone hut ahead of us on the hillside, had hurried towards it. Inside we had found two men and all the apparatus for making and storing cheese. So I wrote a little piece called ‘The Story of a Cheese’ and sent it off to a BBC friend. To my delight it was accepted; to my horror I was invited to read it. ‘But I can’t possibly. I can’t read. Couldn’t you get someone else to?’ His answer was a very firm No. I looked at Lesley in despair . . . and surely one of the bravest things she has ever done was to offer to read it for me. This she did: she not only read it beautifully, but during the rehearsal they discovered that the script was a couple of minutes too short. So, with the clocks ticking away towards the fatal hour, she wrote an extra paragraph, spliced it in and polished round the edges so that the join didn’t show. The BBC gave us £15, and I reckon that her share was about £13.10.0. But we didn’t divide it up. Instead we went round to the Craft Centre and had a coffee table designed and made for us by Robin Nance.

  If that was Lesley’s bravest moment, mine came shortly afterwards. Buoyed up by hope, humbled by shame, I wrote another talk – this time about painting a meat safe. It too was accepted – and I read it myself on Woman’s Hour. I stammered during the rehearsal, but not during the performance. I then wrote and gave two more talks.

  Such was the sunlit glade in the middle of a very black forest. For when not writing, I was answering advertisements and being interviewed – with total lack of success. Indeed my search at one point took me – unwittingly – to the very brink of that path that so many once-proud ex-army officers had followed on its sad journey from hope to despair: at one point I found myself in the office of the Sales Manager of a firm of e
ncyclopaedia publishers. Kind man: he knew, and he knew that I didn’t know, and he sent me away.

  Finally, in desperation I grew a moustache, and after nursing it in private for a day or two, took it out and showed it to the world. It was scarcely visible, being gingery in colour, so I darkened it up with some of Lesley’s mascara. The moustache marked the nadir in my fortunes; and I find myself now wondering how many moustaches owe their origins to some period of depression in the lives of their owners and were grown initially more as a gesture of defiance than anything else. Mine lasted a fortnight. It was totally out of character, totally idiotic, but it served its purpose. For with its removal I was able to make a fresh start. I cannot recall exactly the succession of events that led to the decision. ‘Two roads diverged. . . .’ Does the wise man standing at the junction attempt to draw up a balance sheet? I never have. Indeed I dislike making conscious decisions at all. I prefer to wait until either the matter decides itself or instinct prompts me. Just as the right key slips easily into the lock and turns the wards smoothly and sweetly, so, without effort and without forcing, should one know what to do. On this occasion the two roads were very unequal. I was in my glade. It was either back to the stony track I had left or on through the trees with scarcely the ghost of a footpath to reassure me that here was a way forward that led anywhere at all. Would I have ventured that way if I had been on my own? I think not. Happily, both in London in 1951 and in Italy in 1976 Lesley was with me. On both occasions it was a shared conviction that this was the right course that made the decision so easy, so inevitable.

  On August 1st, 1951, I shook the dust of London off my feet and, clutching our bowl of goldfish, caught the train from Paddington to Kingswear where Lesley, who had gone on ahead, was waiting for me.