The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  3. Lesley

  To be socially graceful one must not only say the right thing but say it at the right time, and this is what I am bad at. The right time comes, but the conversation flows on without the hoped for lull, and the right thing remains unsaid. It is so often like this with me and it was like this in the last chapter. Lesley slipped quietly into its pages and I never properly introduced her. So I must do so now.

  In the early days of our marriage people would ask us: ‘How did you two first meet?’ And I would say: ‘I invited her to supper. We had dried egg omelette and chips. I made the omelette. She made the chips.’ In those days this was an adequate explanation – adequate as far as it went, I mean. Dried egg powder was to be found on every larder shelf – and little else. Today I would perhaps need to explain that in 1948 eggs were so scarce that they were known as ‘shell eggs’ and the ration was one a week. No guest would have expected her host to feast her on a fortnight’s supply.

  Of course I would then go on to add that she was my cousin. This was how I knew of her existence. I knew her address too; and having nothing better to do at that particular time I thought it might be interesting to discover what she looked like. So I wrote her a letter.

  She was a cousin on my mother’s side, a de Selincourt: and de Selincourts were not always on speaking terms with each other. In particular my mother hadn’t spoken to her brother Aubrey for about thirty years. That was why we had never met before. It was my Grandfather’s second wife, Nancy who, in an attempt to bring us together, had given me my cousin Lesley’s address.

  I was in London, living alone in a flat in Chancery Lane, working at the COI. She was in London, living with a friend in Claverton Street, working in the showroom at the Cambridge University Press. At 7 o’clock on Thursday February 5th, 1948, she knocked on my door.

  Well, she could certainly fry potatoes: a useful accomplishment. And no doubt, lying in bed that night, she pondered over the fact that I could certainly make dried egg omelettes. But as she didn’t like omelettes, even shell-egg ones, I doubt if this made me immediately more desirable than any of her other young men. Come to that, I wasn’t particularly keen on chips. But I had recently taken my farewell of Hedda and my heart was vacant.

  You can use a diary in one of two different ways. You can use it as a journal to record events that have happened: or you can use it as an engagement book to remind you of events that are still to come. I use my diary in the second way. In fact I can think of only one single entry in the past thirty years in which I recorded an event that had already occurred. Nevertheless, dull though they are to re-read, limited almost wholly to dentist’s appointments, with day after day left blank, I do not like to throw them away at the end of the year but add them to the growing pile that I keep in my chest of drawers. And it was here that I have just found my diary for 1948, the oldest of them all and unique in that, being a present from Hedda, it is an Italian one.

  So I can report that on Thursday, February 12th, I had supper with Lesley at Claverton Street; on Sunday, February 15th we went to Kew Gardens; on Monday the 16th we went to a play and on Thursday the 19th we met for lunch. Nevertheless it was not really, as this might seem to suggest, love at first sight, but rather the discovery that we liked doing things together. Particularly we liked doing nothing much together.

  Although Lesley had an older sister, a four year gap and a great difference in temperament lay between them. So, like me, she had led the life of a solitary child and like me she had enjoyed it. We had both of us been brought up in the country, both of us had spent long, happy hours wandering alone through fields and woods, sitting alone under trees, lying alone in the grass. Like me she preferred animals to humans. Our discovery was that though we were both solitaries we liked being solitary in each other’s company. We enjoyed walking together along a country footpath, we enjoyed sitting together on a sofa, we enjoyed lying together beneath a hedge. Together we were yet separate; touching, yet silent; she and I each engaged with our own thoughts – yet lost and lonely now without the presence of the other.

  ‘Lesley lunch’ says my diary. I was working in Baker Street, she in the Euston Road, two stops away on the Tube. If it was sunny we could take sandwiches into Gordon Square or Regents Park. If it was not so sunny we could go to a pub near Warren Street Station where we could get a good meal at a modest price. ‘Lesley 6.30’. This would be at Chancery Lane, of course, so that we could be on our own; and then I would escort her back to Claverton Street on the bus.

  On Sunday March 14th there is a complicated timetable indicating a trip on the Green Line to West Wycombe. On Friday March 19th there is the entry ‘W’loo Platform 7, 6.15’, indicating my first visit to the Isle of Wight to meet her parents, my first meeting with my Uncle Aubrey. On Saturday April 10th are the words ‘Sir Charles Napier Hotel, Spriggs Holly’.

  Of all the things I enjoyed doing in the country, a longish walk was what I enjoyed most, for not only could I then be a naturalist looking out for interesting birds, I was at the same time an explorer, finding my way. I shared my father’s passion for maps and map reading, for planning a route and then following it. The best route was a circular one, out one way, back another, and as far as possible following footpaths rather than roads. Lesley and I had already discovered the Chilterns on our visit to West Wycombe in March but the walk had been a short and simple one. It was time to try something more ambitious. If it turned out a success, I might even look upon it as a sort of omen for the future.

  The Green Line Bus took us to High Wycombe and a local bus took us on through West Wycombe to Stokenchurch. From there a footpath led across country to the tiny hamlet of Spriggs Holly5 and here, no more than a modest country inn despite its grand name, was the Sir Charles Napier Hotel. A friend of Lesley’s at the CUP had recommended it. He had recommended well.

  The following day, in perfect spring weather, we set out on our walk. I had planned it the evening before, planned it on my own, as I liked to do. I understood maps. Lesley didn’t. We set out towards Chinnor Hill in Bledlow Great Wood and made our way to where the ground falls steeply to the valley of the Thames. From there we took a track diagonally down the slope to the village of Bledlow and then by footpaths came to Saunderton. This was the limit of our walk. Of our return journey I am less sure. I know that at one point we came to a wood where the path was indistinct and I was in fear that we might lose our way. And I know that, almost at the end, the path ran up beside another wood towards a gate in a hedge. Beyond the hedge was the road. Once on the road it was half a mile back to our pub. So we had done it. We were practically home. I looked again at my map to be quite sure and found that the wood we had been walking beside was called Venus Wood. Beyond the gate on the other side of the road was a little corrugated iron chapel. Here undoubtedly was the right place and the right time for saying the right thing; and for once I was not going to miss it. I had navigated her through the Chilterns. We had done the entire homeward journey with arms round each other’s waists and her head on my shoulder. If I could navigate her so successfully and we could walk like this so happily through the spring countryside, surely we could go on together a little further.

  I stopped just short of the gate and we turned to face each other.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ I said.

  ‘Of course I will, darling,’ she answered.

  In my diary on April 11th occurs that retrospective entry, the only one I have ever made. In ink are the words ‘Got engaged!’

  4. Westwards

  On March 3rd, 1951, the following advertisement had appeared in The Bookseller.

  Partner wanted: Young man, well educated, with initiative, offered one-third share in West Country bookshop. Ability to drive essential for developing travelling bookshop to remote parts. Home given with some social life. Capital required, minimum £350.

  At the end of my long, stony, downward road, here was the signpost, its message the famous and familiar one that had first appeared
in the columns of an Indiana newspaper exactly a hundred years earlier: ‘Go west, young man.’

  A fortnight later we were in a train heading for the Cotswold Bookroom in Wotton-under-Edge near Gloucester. Dr Paxton had apologized for the fact that he would not be there to greet us as he had a christening that afternoon, but his wife would be in the shop and would look after us until his return. Dr Paxton? DD, presumably. The local vicar? We pictured an elderly clergyman and wondered what sort of books he would want me to drive to remote parts with. . . . So it was a delightful surprise and a great relief to find that the Paxtons were about our age and that he was a prep school master. Not DD but PhD. Not christening anybody: being christened himself (‘. . . and a great mistake,’ as he confessed many years later).

  Though we never went into partnership with them, John and Joan Paxton were exactly the people we needed to find. The jump that we were eventually to make, from London to Dartmouth, from the security of being employed to the insecurity of being self employed, was greater than we could have managed on our own. We needed an intermediate stepping stone and a helping hand. For this the Cotswold Bookroom was ideally placed, almost exactly midway, geographically and metaphorically between the world we were leaving and the world we were going to. And as for the Paxtons, two kinder and more helpful people, both then and still, we have yet to meet. Though we briefly contemplated the idea of opening a companion shop in the nearby town of Chipping Sodbury, John, who was an economist, knew that there wasn’t really enough money in it to support the two of us with no other source of income.

  But if the idea came to nothing it pointed the way ahead. Inspired and encouraged by the Paxtons’ enthusiasm, by their evident enjoyment of what they were doing, by what they had already achieved, by their faith in what it was possible for a small-town bookseller to achieve and indeed by their whole attitude towards life generally, and bearing with us their promises of help and advice whenever we should need it, we returned to London convinced that this was the life for us, that we would snap our fingers at London and at all those employers who had refused to employ me, and open our own bookshop in a town of our own choosing.

  Today the road westward is lined with young people, their belongings on their back, their worldly wealth in their pocket, boldly thumbing their way towards new hope and a fresh start. Where are they bound for? What will they do when they get there? Anywhere! Anything! Were we more timid twenty-five years ago? Had my generation less self confidence, less optimism? Possibly this is true generally. Certainly it was true of Lesley and myself, and the reason lies partly in our nature and partly in social attitudes. Yes, we were timid and we did lack self confidence. But at the same time, in those days and even at our level, noblesse oblige: which meant that I had to earn a living and earn it in a way that was considered appropriate for someone with a University education. Failure to do this mattered very much. Failure in London was bad enough. To leave London and then to fail would have meant an ignominious return – and that would have been very much worse. An employee can always blame his employer: the self employed has only himself to blame.

  ‘Really,’ said my mother some two months later when I announced our plans, ‘it does seem a very odd decision.’ And of course in many ways she was quite right.

  In 1945, when my father had suggested to me a career in publishing, I had said what I thought of the business world. Five years later, the business world – in the form of J. Spedan Lewis – had said what it thought of me. The antipathy appeared to be mutual and it was indeed odd that I should be trying again to do something I both despised and was bad at. But that was not all. There was something even odder in my choice. There were two things that were then overshadowing my life and that I needed to escape from: my father’s fame and ‘Christopher Robin’. Yet, here I was apparently deliberately seeking out his shadow so as to work beneath it, choosing a trade that would put me on public exhibition as Christopher Robin, wrapping up the books he had written. Was it that I was deliberately turning to face the dragon that had been pursuing me? I must be honest and confess no such courageous intention. I was running away, all right. I was running away from London.

  London was the scene of my father’s successes. London was the scene of my failures. Neither Lesley nor I had any love for the place, and every weekend we used to escape into the country. What was there to keep us here? Why should we not make our escape permanent?

  ‘But what made you choose Dartmouth?’ So often we have been asked this question. Our London friends wondered why we had chosen a place they had never even heard of. Our Dartmouth friends wondered – in our early days at any rate – why we had chosen a place where the prospects of making a fortune seemed so remote.

  Looking back, I still think we chose as intelligently and as carefully as we could. Certainly as it turned out we chose extremely well, but equally certainly a large amount of luck came into it. I doubt if any modern ‘feasability study’ could have offered us a town in which both bookselling and living have been such a pleasure for so many years.

  This was how we went about it.

  First an atlas. The whole of England lay before us, but instinctively our eyes turned to the southern half. We were southerners. Cambridge was my northern limit; Oxford, where she had been born, was Lesley’s. North of that, despite our Scottish blood, lay foreign country. Anywhere south of London we could feel at home. South of London yet at the same time well away from London. This sent our eyes westward. Lesley had been brought up in Dorset and the Isle of Wight. Her father had a boat, and from sailing holidays she knew the Dorset and Devon coast. I too had holidayed in Dorset and Devon. Lesley had a special fondness for the sea and I was very happy to share it with her. A coastal town, therefore, somewhere between Weymouth and Plymouth. Large or small? Small for choice, to be as different from London as possible and because there was inevitably going to be a sort of amateurishness, a sort of tweediness, about our shop that would be out of place in a big town where smart suits were worn. A small seaside town then, a holiday town that would give us a bit of extra business during the summer. A town that didn’t already have a good private bookshop. . . .

  So first the atlas to list the towns. Then a gazetteer to tell us their populations. Then a guidebook to describe their appearance. And lastly a classified telephone directory to locate existing bookshops. This gave us about half a dozen possibles. Back to the telephone directory for local estate agents; and finally a dozen letters.

  This, when I am asked, is my story. But there is another story I would now like to tell. It is a detective story and I wrote it during those bleak days when I was still searching for a London job. The Evening Standard was at that time running a series and was welcoming contributions from their readers. They didn’t welcome mine, and I resurrect it now, not for its intrinsic merit, which I am prepared to accept is slight, but for a reason which will emerge.

  The story was built round an idea, and the idea was this. A murder is to be committed. It is planned to look like an accident. Fate, watching from the wings, decides to lend a hand. Unknown to the villain his victim meets with exactly the accident that was being prepared for him. The victim dies. The villain of course is innocent. But alas, the ingenious scheme that was designed to make murder look like an accident now makes an accident look like murder. And so the villain is arrested. Ironic – or so I hoped. . . .

  I need not fill in the details, except to say three things. First, the victim was to be pushed over a cliff. Secondly I wanted a wild flower. And thirdly I wanted a name.

  The flower had to be a rare one such as one might hope to find growing on cliff tops by the sea. It also had to be an attractive one such as a keen gardener might wish to dig up to plant in his own garden. So I went to a public library to search through books on wild flowers: and in the end I found just what I wanted: the white rockrose.

  The name was the villain’s name. I wanted a collection of letters that sounded possible but in fact was not a name at all. And for thi
s I went to the London telephone directory to check that it wasn’t there. And the name I failed to find was ‘Prout’.

  Soon after our arrival in Dartmouth I made two discoveries. The rare white rockrose grows on the cliffs at Berry Head. And there were Prouts all round us.

  It was almost as if Dartmouth had known all along that we were coming.

  5. Setting up Shop

  It was of course a big event in our lives, opening a bookshop in the West Country, and one that we might in later years like to look back on, reminding ourselves exactly how we set about it. So I bought myself an exercise book and began keeping a journal.

  The exercise book still survives and in this chapter I record some of my entries.

  1951. May 9th. Among all the unlikely premises that we have been offered – the cafés, the fishmonger’s shops, the butchers (complete with marble slab) and the guest houses – are three possibles. Two of them are in Brixham and one in Dartmouth. And since Brixham and Dartmouth are neighbouring towns, we felt they might be worth a visit. So, leaving Lesley behind – for she is still working – I catch a train from Paddington, arrive at Brixham and meet Mr Webster, estate agent. He is short, fat, bow-tied and exuberant. He takes me to a boarding house that is off the road and miles from shops. But never mind. ‘Brixham is expanding’ and there would soon be shops all round me. Sorry! Can’t wait – and anyway it’s too expensive. Next he offers to show me another boarding house ‘belonging to a lady in the theatrical profession who has been told by her husband to sell out at any price so that they can go touring’. However, she is out. So he takes me on a guided tour of the town, nudging me in the ribs to draw my attention to Brixham’s fleet of 27 taxis, to the best grocer’s shop in England, to the new car park, etc., ‘Brixham,’ he assures me, ‘is fast coming to the fore!’ I mention that I am going on to Dartmouth tomorrow. ‘Dartmouth!’ he cries in horror. ‘Dartmouth is dead!’ He takes me to my hotel and we part. After supper I call on the actress. Nice house – but it is a shop I’m wanting.