Happy Half-Hours

by A. A. Milne

You may tell a newly married man by the way he talks of his garden. The pretence is that he grows things there – verbenas and hymantifilums and cinerarias, anything which sounds; but of course one knows that what he really uses it for is to bury in it things which he doesn’t want. Some day I shall have a garden of my own in which to conduct funerals with the best of them; until that day I content myself with my cupboard.

  It is marvellous how things lie about and accumulate. Until they are safely in the cupboard we are never quite at ease; they have so much to say outside, and they put themselves just where you want to step, and sometimes they fall on you. Yet even when I have them in the cupboard I am not without moments of regret. For later on I have to open it to introduce companions, and then the sight of some old friend saddens me with the thought of what might have been. ‘Oh, and I did mean to hang you up over the writing-desk,’ I say remorsefully.

  I am thinking now of a certain picture – a large portrait, of my old head-master. It lay in a corner for months, waiting to be framed, getting more dingy and dirty every day. For the first few weeks I said to myself, ‘I must clean that before I send it to the shop. A piece of bread will do it.’ Later, ‘It’s extraordinary how clever these picture people are. You’d think it was hopeless now, but I’ve no doubt, when I take it round to-morrow –’

  A month after that somebody trod on it …

  Now, then, I ask you – what could I do with it but put it in the cupboard? You cannot give a large photograph of a head-master, bent across the waistcoat, to a housekeeper, and tell her that you have finished with it. Nor would a dustman make it his business to collect pedagogues along with the usual cabbage stalks. A married man would have buried it under the begonia; but having no garden …

  That is my difficulty. For a bachelor in chambers who cannot bury, there should be some other consuming element than fire. In the winter I might possibly have burnt it in small quantities – Monday the head, Tuesday the watch-chain – but in the summer what does one do with it? And what does one do with the thousands of other things which have had their day – the old magazines, letters, papers, collars, chair-legs, broken cups? You may say that, with the co-operation of my housekeeper, a firmer line could be adopted towards some of them. Perhaps so; but, alas! she is a willing accessory to my weakness. I fancy that once, a long time ago, she must have thrown away a priceless MS. in an old waistcoat; now she takes no risks with either. In principle it is a virtue; in practice I think I would chance it.

  It is a big cupboard; you wouldn’t find many rooms in London with a cupboard like that; and it is included in the fixtures. Yet in the ordinary way, I suppose, I could not go on putting things in for ever. One day, however, I discovered that a family of mice had heard of it too. At first I was horrified. Then I saw that it was all for the best; they might help me to get rid of things. In a week they had eaten three pages of a nautical almanac; interesting pages which would be of real help to a married man at sea who wished to find the latitude by means of two fixed stars, but which, to a bachelor on the fourth floor, were valueless.

  The housekeeper missed the point. She went so far as to buy me an extremely patient mouse-trap. It was a silly trap, because none of the mice knew how to work it, although I baited it once with a cold poached egg. It is not for us to say what our humbler brethren should like and dislike; we can only discover by trial and error. It occurred to me that, if they did like cold poached eggs, I should be able to keep on good terms with them, for I generally had one over of a morning. However, it turned out that they preferred a vegetable diet – almanacs and such …

  The cupboard is nearly full. I don’t usually open it to visitors, but perhaps you would care to look inside for a moment?

  That was once a top-hat. What do you do with your old top-hats? Ah, yes, but then I only have a housekeeper here at present … That is a really good pair of boots, only it’s too small … All that paper over there? Manuscript … Well, you see it might be valuable one day …

  Broken batting glove. Brown paper – I always keep brown paper, it’s useful if you’re sending off a parcel. Daily Mail war map. Paint-pot – doesn’t belong to me really, but it was left behind, and I got tired of kicking it over. Old letters – all the same handwriting, bills probably …

  Ah, no, they are not bills, you mustn’t look at those. (I didn’t know they were there – I swear I didn’t. I thought I had burnt them.) Of course I see now that she was quite right.… Yes, that was the very sweet one where she … well, I knew even then that … I mean I’m not complaining at all, we had a very jolly time …

  Still, if it had been a little different – if that last letter … Well, I might by now have had a garden of my own in which to have buried all this rubbish.

  – The Stream –

  At the end of the meadow into which our garden wanders is a stream. This is called The River. Between the garden and the meadow is a ditch. This is called The Brook. In front of the house the brook has been widened between sandstone walls into a piece of water forty yards long by four across, and this piece of water is called The Stream. Now we know where we are.

  When we came here, the stream had no containing walls, but followed an irregular course over the unlevelled ground, so that here and there little islands showed themselves above the water, and on these islands water-rats would polish up their whiskers. It was all very rural, and sometimes I wish that we had left it like that. But when the brook dried up in summer, making the stream all island, one felt that somehow a reserve of water must be kept in being. Could we collect enough in a deepened, widened and walledin stream to last us through a drought? The question was never answered, for it was at this moment that I discovered The Spring.

  I forget who discovered the source of the Nile, but probably he felt much as I did when I scratched a way of escape for the puddles on the sloping lawn which fell to the stream, and found an hour later that the puddles were still full. This end of the little lawn had been a rubbish-heap when we came. We had cleared away the rubbish, and filled in the ground, but it had remained boggy and unpleasant. Now we knew why. So we dug out an irregular pool (The Spring) eight feet in diameter and four feet deep, lined it with sandstone, ringed it with limestone, dotted it with that stuff which looks like rhubarb but isn’t, and gave it a channel into the stream; and, ever since, water has flowed down this channel at the rate of a thousand gallons a day.

  To the simple-minded a thousand anything sounds a lot, and perhaps they are now picturing to themselves a foaming cascade leaping and tumbling on its way to the stream. Actually this does not happen. The overflow (as the arithmetical may discover) fills a glass in a little less than six seconds, which means that it is a pleasant, fair-sounding trickle. But the trickle goes on for ever. And though the brook does not conform to this literary tradition, feeling perhaps (and quite rightly) that what it would do for Tennyson, it certainly won’t do for me, yet it does help to feed the stream all through the winter; sometimes, indeed, to repletion; and even in the summer it renews its activity after every rainstorm. In short, the stream may properly be described as running water; and at the east end, running out through a narrow opening in what must be called (still using these grandiloquent terms) The Stone Bridge, it becomes the brook again.

  Into this stream we put a few goldfish. They made themselves at home in the weeds and reeds and mud, and we saw less of them than we had hoped. But they were not idle. Raking out the weeds one day, I found that I had brought up some little black-and-silver sparklets, which looked more like metallic fish than real ones. Gossip-writers tell us of well-known people who breed Corgis or Siamese cats; and though one suspects that it is the Corgis or the cats who do most of the work, one assumes that the so-called breeders are not taken by surprise. We were. I can think of no surprise more delightful than the discovery that a rake-full of weed taken from a rapidly congesting stream is alive with little silver fish. Of all Nature’s bounties this seems for the moment the most bountiful. Suddenly the who
le Universe becomes a possibility.

  By the summer we had hundreds of goldfish in the stream, and on hot afternoons they lay about in glittering pools of light like a Turner sunset reflected in still water. We had other fish, not always identified, which came ‘out of the everywhere’ in that mysterious way only to be explained by Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum. Here was some not wholly occupied water, why not fill it? So she filled it with little fish and tritons and newts and water-beetles and everything else she could think of at the time, including grass-snakes.

  One does not take kindly at first to grass-snakes. The big four-footers look horribly menacing in the water, as indeed, they are to the gentler inhabitants, and the babies, slow-worm size, are even more unlovable. I hoicked a big one out with a putter at our first acquaintance, and having knocked it on the head before it could collect itself and ask ‘Where am I?’ I went away to collect the family – my own family, I mean. When we came back, it lay there dead, with, by its side, a disgorged and elongated frog stretched out to nearly a foot in length. I felt sorry then for having killed it (and sorry, of course, for the frog), and have taken no action against grass-snakes since, save to hoick an occasional one out of the water – a sport little practised, but demanding a delicacy of approach, and an exact calculation of the centre of gravity of the quarry, unrivalled in other sports.

  With all these fish in the water, the heron and the kingfisher have come and been welcome, earning their keep by the beauty they have brought. A pair of mallards have nested in the reeds; and once a swan found here a home from home. During a trial flight from a lake a few miles away it had developed engine trouble, and crash-landed in our little lane. We carried it down to the stream, and there it stayed for a few days, coming out occasionally to visit us through the open doors of the sitting-room. Having regained its nerve, and had a practice flight or two, it rejoined its family. But each year swallows play follow-my-leader down the length of the stream, touch and away; dragon-flies of every colour and size dart from point to point, and hover like helicopters; and from his home in the bank a water-rat launches himself silently, leaving no trace.

  The strangest visitor to the stream was a stoat. I was in a deck-chair on the lawn, when it came from the rhododendron bushes on the opposite side of the stream, in search, it seemed, of a water-rat. Diving eagerly into the first hole it saw, it popped out, before it was quite ready, at the water end. Its enthusiasm slightly damped, it scrambled to land, shook itself, and went into the next hole. Once more a startled face shot into the stream; once more a dripping but still businesslike back was climbing out. At the third hole, surely, somebody would be in. Nobody was. There was a third splash. And now, just opposite to me, it stood upright on its back legs, fingering its chin, and thinking back to the day when its mother had first told it about waterrats. Something had slipped up. For a minute it stood there, wondering how it had got the thing wrong; perhaps it was rabbits, not water-rats; perhaps – and then, with a final shake, which seemed equally a bodily and mental dispersion of all this water, it dropped on to its fore-legs and stole back into the bushes.

  So, one way and another, we have had great delight from our stream. But nothing lasts in a garden. There came a winter when the river rose to the top of its tenfoot banks and raced over the meadow; the stream merged into the general flood; and the rose-garden became a swimming-pool. Our goldfish left us and were last heard of at Sheerness. Then, on the day after the drive down from the lane had been re-surfaced with whatever chemical material was called for, the rains came, and poisoned water poured down the hill, and in the morning most of the natural inhabitants of the stream were dying or dead. Finally, the spring developed an oily orange scum, due to the iron in the water, and from being our pride was now our shame; so that we had to fill it in and cover it up, leaving only its outlet into the stream. But now the stream at that end became oilier, and scummier, and, because we had lost interest, more overgrown with weeds. Slowly the weeds and the scum moved towards the bridge, and even the water-rats deserted the banks, even the frogs came no longer to spawn. Well, we have had our fun from the stream. Nothing lasts in a garden, nothing stays the same. But something else takes its place. Perhaps one day it will be an orangery.

  – Cotchford Farm –

  The farmhouse wherein we live is a very old one. None can say exactly how old; but because it is still marked as a farm in the ordnance map, so it is still known. It had been more or less derelict for some years before we came. The lovely old house could be made habitable, and a barn turned into a garage with rooms for a gardener above it, but most of the outbuildings were as forlorn as Mariana; and as they gradually fell to pieces we used the wood and the bricks for other purposes, and let such fields to a neighbouring farmer as we were not going to make into a garden. For ourselves we have bred no more than goldfish and fattened no more than a few pigs.

  One day during the war, having to be in London for various reasons, I went into a large store to buy a sponge. We pumped our own water at that time, so we could not complain of its quality, but it was death to sponges. All the springs in these parts have iron in them, and the iron enters into the soul of the sponge, making the yellow, as Macbeth was saying, one red; after which the whole thing disintegrates.

  The price of a sponge has always come as something of a shock to me. Sponges don’t look expensive, as does a charmingly coloured piece of soap embossed Rêve d’Amour. They have a ragged, uncared-for appearance, as if their owner had never taken any pride in them. One feels that one should get for one’s money something more regular in shape, with fewer holes in it. It is true that sponges live at the bottom of the sea, which makes the overhead considerable, but there seems to be no lack of them. The love-life of a sponge is not a subject on which one can ponder for long without becoming unsettled; enough to know that in course of time, and after some pretty confusion by the bride when hinting at the possibility, they have small sponges. And so the breed goes on. A static life, I have often thought, being a sponge; but, of course, an absorbing one.

  I chose a large, healthy specimen, once, no doubt, the pride of the reef. Its price was wired on to it; otherwise I should have supposed the figure to be a rough valuation of the department, or possibly the whole store. When I had made the necessary calculations, ‘this way and that dividing the swift mind’ – banker, solicitor, stockbroker – I gave the assistant my name and address.

  The girl’s face lit up. This does happen sometimes, and on the rare occasions when it does, my face lights up too. It was pleasant to think that she had read my books, or (more probably) knew somebody who had. We smiled at each other in a friendly way, and she said that I must be feeling proud of myself. I gave a modest imitation of a man who prefers to have it said rather than to say it.

  ‘Taking a holiday now?’ she asked.

  This puzzled me a little. One need not take a long holiday in order to buy a sponge; and, of course, if one had known the price, one would have known that one couldn’t afford to. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have left my heroine in my hero’s arms, dashed to London, bought sponge, and dashed back in time to hear her say: ‘Oh, darling, I never dreamed it would be like this!’ However, I gave her another smile, and went to another department to buy a pair of slippers.

  It was to a man this time that I gave my name. His face also lit up; so, of course, did mine. Never before had I been such a public character. He said:

  ‘Well, you’ve been doing a fine bit of work.’

  Had I known him better, I should have asked him to which manifesto or pamphlet he was referring, for one likes to be told these things. As it was, I said with a shrug: ‘Oh well, we must all do what we can.’

  He agreed.

  ‘Got it all in?’ he went on.

  This baffled me. It seemed to be, but could hardly be, a low reference to the nominal fee which I accept sometimes for these things. But, before I could answer, he added – and so put the afternoon at last in its true perspective:
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br />   ‘We owe a lot to you farmers.’

  After all these years of authorship it is disheartening to find that it is not one’s name but one’s address which raises admiration in the breasts of strangers. Yet if one is to be mistaken for what one is not, I would as soon be thought a farmer as anything. I was to make a speech once at a City dinner, and the stranger next to my wife, having consulted her name-card and the menu, said:

  ‘I see your husband is talking to us tonight. Let me see, isn’t he something to do with the Gas, Light and Coke Company?’

  That, I think, did me an injustice; the other did not. Indeed I have sometimes played with the idea of making this place a farm again, but the amount of writing which it would involve has stayed me. I do enough writing anyway.

  At the beginning of the war the Army wanted to requisition a piece of waste land for which we had never found a use. I made no objection, and was sent a form to fill up, so that a fair rental might be fixed. I had to answer about sixty questions: the acreage of the land, how long I had owned it, what I had paid for it, what crops I had grown on it; its value as grassland if I hadn’t ploughed it up, its value as ploughland if I didn’t use it for grazing; my rotation of crops for the last six years; the average profit I should expect from turnips, from swedes, from oats, from raspberries, from chickens, from curly-kale; my outgoings on artificial manures – there were spaces for all these things and many more.

  I just couldn’t think of the answers. All it grew, besides bracken and bramble, was cowslips. After sleepless days and nights and many false beginnings, I wrote diagonally across the form: ‘I give you the thing.’ I had a most charming letter of thanks in return; I didn’t know that Government departments could be so grateful.

  PUBLIC LIFE