Happy Half-Hours

by A. A. Milne

  However, the story is the thing. As long as a desert-island book contains certain ingredients, I do not mind if other superfluous matter creeps in. Our demands – we of the elect who adore desert-islands – are simple. The castaways must build themselves a hut with the aid of a bag of nails saved from the wreck; they must catch turtles by turning them over on their backs; they must find the bread-fruit tree and have adventures with sharks. Twice they must be visited by savages. On the first occasion they are taken by surprise, but – the savages being equally surprised – no great harm is done. Then the Hero says, ‘They will return when the wind is favourable,’ and he arranges his defences, not forgetting to lay in a large stock of water. The savages return in force, and then – this is most important – at the most thirsty moment of the siege it is discovered that the water is all gone! (Generally a stray arrow has pierced the water-butt, but in Masterman Ready the insufferable Tommy has played the fool with it. He would.) This is the Hero’s great opportunity. He ventures to the spring to get more water, and returns with it – wounded. Barely have the castaways wetted their lips with the precious fluid when the attack breaks out with redoubled fury. It seems now that all is lost … when, lo! a shell bursts into the middle of the attacking hordes. (Never into the middle of the defenders. That would be silly.) ‘Look,’ the Hero cries, ‘a vessel off-shore with its main braces set and a jib-sail flying’ – or whatever it may be. And they return to London.

  This is the story which we want, and we cannot have too many of them. Should you ever see any of us with our noses over the shilling box and an eager light in our eyes, you may be sure that we are on the track of another one.

  – Oscar Wilde –

  The last two acts of The Importance of Being Earnest are set in The Manor House, Woolton, Hertfordshire, the country home of Mr John Worthing. For the encouragement of British Railways I propose to examine the train service which the village of Woolton enjoyed in 1894 under private enterprise.

  The first arrival from London on this July afternoon is Algernon Moncrieff, nephew of Lady Bracknell. Internal evidence allows us to put the time at 3.30. He is followed by John Worthing, who arrives about seven minutes later (3.37); by the Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax (3.58); and by her mother, Lady Bracknell (4.28). Since each of these four was related to, or an old friend of, the others, and was greatly surprised by their arrival, it is clear that they came by different trains. Lady Bracknell, indeed, announces that she followed her daughter ‘at once by a luggage train’. This seems a little capricious of her. With three passenger trains arriving within half an hour, it is unlikely that she would have had long to wait for a fourth. As it is, we can but admire the unusual speed of the G.N.R.’s goods service, and the elasticity which allowed her ladyship to travel by it.

  Now three Down trains and a goods train arriving at a small country station within the hour is well enough; though not enough, perhaps, to impress any but the regular users of small country stations. But we must remember that other trains may have been flowing in at short intervals conveying other passengers than those destined for The Manor House. Indeed, to judge from the Up service, they must have been pouring in. At about 4.35 Lady Bracknell looks at her watch and says ‘Gwendolen, the time approaches for our departure.’ A little before 4.45 she looks at her watch again, and says, ‘Come, dear, we have already missed five, if not six, trains.’ Even accepting the lower estimate we can still admire the almost reckless enthusiasm of the Great Northern Railway. Today my own country station offers nothing between 3.13 and 5.14. However, as the 3.13 takes just over three hours to cover 36¾ miles, and the 5.14 just under two hours, it is perhaps as well that we are exposed to no further temptation.

  It is, I suppose, possible that some dogged Public Relations Officer, wishing to do what he can for nationalization, will now point out that The Importance of Being Earnest is a work of the imagination, and that the train service to an imaginary village in it cannot legitimately be compared with that provided so efficiently by British Railways. If so (and it would be very unromantic of him) he will merely shunt me on to another line. I shall now invite the innocent public, which knows so little and cares so little about the troubles of a writer, to consider how the passing years have removed, or added to, those troubles.

  Wilde wanted to get four people from London to The Manor House, Woolton, so that they arrived at four different times between 3.30 and 4.30. There was only one way of bringing them there – by train. Had this been what is called a serious play, he would have been criticized severely for his indifferent craftsmanship and his poor sense of reality. Today, how easy! Any character can arrive anywhere at any time, dependent only on his own whim and that of the author. Any number of people can start from London at the same time, if that be necessary to the plot, and arrive as required at any Manor House in any county. They can start at different times, and enter, should the situation demand it, dramatically together. They have driven down, and the horse-power of their cars, or the speed-lust of the drivers, is of no moment to anybody. No explanations are asked for or expected. Add to the motor-car the telephone, and the modern dramatist is seen to be on velvet, or in clover, whichever he prefers.

  LADY MARY (in the middle of triangular drama): I think it would be as well if my solicitor were here. He lives at the other end of the Cromwell Road, but he has a fast car. If you will excuse me, Mrs Fortescue, I will ring him up.

  (She goes out, thus giving George and Mrs Fortescue the short, passionate love-scene which the audience was beginning to wonder if it would get. Without the bites it would look nothing in print, and we shall therefore leave it out. Lady Mary returns.)

  GEORGE: Is he coming?

  LADY MARY: By a fortunate chance, he had only just reached home, so that his car was already at the door. He will be here at any moment. (A bell rings.) Ah, there he is.

  – Introducing Shepard –

  There are other differences between Author and Artist than the medium of expression. For instance, an artist of reputation who illustrates advertisements of soap is an object of nothing but envy to his fellows, whereas a writer of similar reputation, who had been exposed as the author of such delightful dialogues as precede the arrival of furniture in plain vans, would deem it necessary to slink past Sir Edmund Gosse with his hat over his eyes. Why this is so I cannot say; nor why, when an author produces a book entirely on his own, no artist is asked to write an introduction, whereas the book of Shepard cannot make its charming bow to the world until Milne, or somebody moderately respectable, has agreed to chaperon it.

  Mr E. H. Shepard, of all people, needs no introduction at my hands. Anybody who has heard of me has certainly heard of Shepard. Indeed, our names have been associated on so many title-pages that I am beginning to wonder which of us is which. Years ago when I used to write for the paper of whose staff he is now such a decorative member I was continually being asked by strangers if I also drew the cartoons. Sometimes I said ‘Yes.’ No doubt Mr Shepard is often asked if he wrote ‘The King’s Breakfast’. I should be proud if he admitted now and then that he did.

  I must confess that I am writing this Introduction a little self-consciously; feeling, no doubt, much as Mr Elliott feels when asked to photograph Mr Fry. We have a perfectly true story in our family that one of us was approached by an earnest woman at some special function with the words, ‘Oh, are you the brother of A. J. Milne – or am I thinking of Shepperson?’ E. H. Shepard, though surely he owes something to that beautiful draughtsman, is not to be mistaken for Claude Shepperson, nor am I that other, to me unknown, from whom I have so lamentably failed to profit; but you see what she meant. You see also what I mean; and how I am hampered by the fear that somebody may read this Introduction, and feel that Mr Shepard is not being very modest about himself. For if I let myself go I could make him seem very immodest indeed.

  Perhaps this will be a good place in which to tell the story of how I discovered him. It is short, but interesting. In those early days before the w
ar, when he was making his first tentative pictures for Punch, I used to say to F. H. Townsend, the Art Editor, on the occasion of each new Shepard drawing, ‘What on earth do you see in this man? He’s perfectly hopeless,’ and Townsend would say complacently, ‘You wait.’ So I waited. That is the end of the story, which is shorter and less interesting than I thought it was going to be. For it looks now as if the discovery had been somebody else’s. Were those early drawings included in this book, we should know definitely whether Townsend was a man of remarkable insight, or whether I was just an ordinary fool. In their absence we may assume fairly safely that he was something of the one, and I more than a little of the other. The Shepard you see here is the one for whom I waited; whom, in the end, even I could not fail to recognize.

  Art is not life, but an exaggeration of it; life reinforced by the personality of the artist. A work of art is literally ‘too good to be true’. That is why we shall never see Turner’s sunsets in this world, nor meet Mr Micawber. We only wish we could. But Life does its best to keep the artist in sight. Whether sunsets tried to be more Turneresque in the ’fifties I do not remember, but the du Maurier women came in a stately procession well behind du Maurier, and banting youth toils after Shepperson in vain. Kensington Garden children are said to be the most beautiful in the world, but in a little while Shepard will make them more beautiful than ever. Bachelors remain bachelors because they are always just a little too late for the fair, their adoration having shifted with the years from the du Maurier girl to the Gibson girl, and from the Gibson girl to the Baumer girl, until bachelordom was a habit. But every mother prays simply for a little Shepard child, and leaves it to Mr Shepard whether it is a boy or a girl….

  Which reminds me that, whether anybody else or not is liking this introduction, Mr Shepard himself is beginning to feel anxious about it. However modest we are in public, in private we are never too modest for praise; but we do like to be praised for the right thing. Mr Arnold Bennett will remain unmoved if you tell him that he knows all about the Five Towns, but he will blush delicately if you assure him that he knows all about Town. So with the rest of us. No artist but hates to be pinned in a groove like a dead and labelled butterfly, and none of the secular but loves so to pin him, feeling that thus, and only thus, is he safe. Not many of the pictures here are pictures of children, but I can imagine Mr Shepard saying wearily, when their legends were sent to him for illustration, ‘Children again! But I can do children! Give me something I’m not so sure about, like the inside of a battleship or a Bargee’s Saturday Night.’ Well, here are some of the others; nor battleships, nor bargees; but not children. For in a sense this book is Mr Shepard’s escape from me, and from the setting-board to which I have selfishly condemned him. How unfortunate that, even here, I am at his elbow. ‘Ah! Drawings of children,’ some fool will say, seeing our names together on the title-page. But he will be wrong. They are just drawings of Shepard’s.

  My one regret is that there are still no bargees. Not because, as some dull people seem to think, only the slow, the insensitive, and the unimaginative are proper subjects for a work of art, but because a Shepard bargee would so plainly be anything but slow, insensitive, and unimaginative. He would not be tied to the heavy lorry-wheels of the realist, but would soar over the Tower Bridge on wings; and we should say sadly to ourselves, ‘If only bargees were really like that!’

  And in a little while they would become more like that.

  – The End of a Chapter –

  I have been asked by an Editor to explain how it comes about that he has printed the last Christopher Robin story. In these cases it is generally the Editor who offers an apologetic explanation to the author; and though I am proud that it is not so now, I feel a little diffident about putting what is really a personal matter before a probably uninterested public. However, one can’t go on defying an Editor … so here goes.

  To begin at the beginning: When Christopher Robin was born, he had to have a name. We had already decided to call him something else, and later on he decided to call himself something still else, so that the two names for which we were now looking were to be no more than an excuse for giving him two initials for use in later life. I had decided on two initials rather than one or none, because I wanted him to play cricket for England, like W. G. Grace and C. B. Fry, and if he was to play as an amateur, two initials would give him a more hopeful appearance on the score-card. A father has to think of these things. So, one of us liking the name Christopher, and the other maintaining that Robin was both pleasing and unusual, we decided that as C. R. Milne he should be encouraged to make his name in the sporting world.

  ‘Christopher Robin’, then, he became on some legal document, but as nobody ever called him so, we did not think any more about it. However, three years later I wrote a book called When We Were Very Young, and since he was much in my mind when I wrote it, I dedicated it to him. Now there is something about this book which I must explain; namely, that the adventures of a child as therein put down came from three sources.

  1. My memories of my own childhood.

  2. My imaginings of childhood in general.

  3. My observations of the particular childhood with which I was now in contact.

  As a child I kept a mouse; probably it escaped – they generally do. Christopher Robin has kept almost everything except a mouse. As a child I played lines-and-squares in a casual sort of way. Christopher Robin never did until he read what I had written about it, and not very enthusiastically then. But he did go to Buckingham Palace a good deal (which I didn’t), though not with Alice. And most children hop … and sometimes they sit half-way down the stairs – or, anyway, I can imagine them doing so … and Christopher Robin was very proud of his first pair of braces, though I never heard that he wanted a tail particularly … And so on, and so on.

  Well, now, you will have noticed that the words ‘Christopher Robin’ come very trippingly off the tongue. I noticed that too. You simply can’t sit down to write verses for children, in a house with a child called (however officially only) Christopher Robin, without noticing it.

  Christopher Robin goes

  Hoppity hoppity –

  Practically it writes itself.

  But now consider:

  Christopher Robin had

  Great big

  Waterproof

  Boots on …

  Hopeless. It simply must be John.

  So it happened that into some of the verses the name Christopher Robin crept, and into some it didn’t; and if you go through the book carefully, you will find that Christopher Robin is definitely associated with – how many do you think? – only three sets of verses. Three out of forty-four!

  You can imagine my amazement and disgust, then, when I discovered that in a night, so to speak, I had been pushed into a back place, and that the hero of When We Were Very Young was not, as I had modestly expected, the author, but a curiously-named child of whom, at this time, I had scarcely heard. It was this Christopher Robin who kept mice, walked on the lines and not in the squares, and wondered what to do on a spring morning; it was this Christopher Robin, not I, whom Americans were clamouring to see; and, in fact (to make due acknowledgement at last), it was this Christopher Robin, not I, not the publishers, who was selling the book in such large and ridiculous quantities.

  Now who was this Christopher Robin – the hero now, since it was so accepted, of When We Were Very Young; soon to be the hero of Winnie-the-Pooh and two other books? To me he was, and remained, the child of my imagination. When I thought of him, I thought of him in the Forest, living in his tree as no child really lives; not in the nursery, where a differently-named child (so far as we in this house are concerned) was playing with his animals. For this reason I have not felt self-conscious when writing about him, nor apologetic at the thought of exposing my own family to the public gaze. The ‘animals’, Pooh and Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and the rest, are in a different case. I have not ‘created’ them. He and his mother gave them l
ife, and I have just ‘put them into a book’. You can see them now in the nursery, as Ernest Shepard saw them before he drew them. Between us, it may be, we have given them shape, but you have only to look at them to see, as I saw at once, that Pooh is a Bear of Very Little Brain, Tigger Bouncy, Eeyore Melancholy and so on. I have exploited them for my own profit, as I feel I have not exploited the legal Christopher Robin. All I have got from Christopher Robin is a name which he never uses, an introduction to his friends … and a gleam which I have tried to follow.

  However, the distinction, if clear to me, is not so clear to others; and to them, anyhow, perhaps to me also, the dividing line between the imaginary and the legal Christopher Robin becomes fainter with each book. This, then, brings me (at last) to one of the reasons why these verses and stories have come to an end. I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him. Moreover, since he is growing up, he will soon feel that he has had more publicity than he wants for himself. We all, young and old, hope to make some sort of a name, but we want to make it in our own chosen way, and, if possible, by our own exertions. To be the hero of the ‘3 not out’ in that heroic finish between Oxford and Cambridge (Under Ten), to be undisputed Fluff Weight Champion (four stone six) of the Lower School, even to be the only boy of his age who can do Long Division: any of these is worth much more than all your vicarious literary reputations. Lawrence hid himself in the Air Force under the name of Shaw to avoid being introduced for the rest of his life as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. I do not want C. R. Milne ever to wish that his names were Charles Robert.