The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  Another question she had put. ‘What does your son think about it all now?’ (She had given up referring to him as Christopher Robin: nobody else seemed to.) ‘How has it affected him, being, you might almost say, a household name?’ Mr Milne had answered this question rather more slowly, rather more thoughtfully, perhaps rather less confidently. He hoped it had done him no harm, might even have done some good. His boy seemed perfectly happy and was certainly doing very well indeed at school and enjoying it all. He didn’t think he would ever grow up to wish his name was Charles Robert.

  Then she had asked what he hoped his son was going to be when he was a man. Mr Milne had smiled at this. ‘At present his great interests are mathematics and cricket.’ ‘Does he show any inclination to take after you?’ ‘He is taking after me. I was a mathematician and a cricketer when I was his age!’ ‘I mean as a writer?’ Laughter. Then: ‘I don’t know that I would specially want him to.’

  Now for some general impressions. Mr Milne. An odd mixture of opposites: shy, yet at the same time self-confident; modest, yet proud of what he had done; quiet, yet a good talker; warm, yet with a thin lip and an ice cold eye that might, if you said the wrong thing, be pretty chilling; sympathetic, yet unsympathetic to what he felt was stupidity; friendly, yet picking his friends with care. Next, Mrs Milne. A certain hot and cold about her, too. You had to say the right thing. Obviously very proud of her husband and wrapped up in his work, though perhaps even more wrapped up in her garden. Lastly, Christopher. Didn’t really get much of a chance to see him. Only managed a how-do-you-do and then he was gone. Clearly very shy indeed, painfully so. Probably his parents try to keep him out of the limelight, because, whatever his father says, it can’t be too easy growing up with all this publicity. ‘Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.’ It can’t be too pleasant to have that hanging round your neck when you are at school, however good you are at sums. Boys, after all, can be pretty beastly to each other when they try. There must be moments when he does wish his name was Charles Robert and he could be himself. And that long hair, too. Whose idea was that? His mother’s or his father’s? And when was it finally cut off? That was a question she never dared ask!

  Some more thoughts. (The drive back to London would take an hour and a quarter, leaving plenty of time for thinking.) There were the books, four of them. You could read them and enjoy them. Behind them were the Milnes, three of them. You could meet them as she had, and talk to them and see something of the reality that lay behind the books. And somehow that gave the books an added pleasure. Galleon’s Lap is Gill’s Lap, a real place, and she’d actually stood there and looked across the Forest to the distant rim of the world. The bridge where they had played Poohsticks was a real bridge, looking just like the drawing in the book. Yet that was not all. For behind what she had seen and had been shown lay who-knew-what that she had not been shown. She had seen the drawing-room, but no one had opened for her that door halfway down the passage. She had glanced into Mr Milne’s study, but – well, naturally, of course – she had not been allowed to poke about among his papers. Yet what a gold mine lay there. The letters, the half-finished manuscripts, the jottings, even the scribblings on his blotting paper. What a gold mine for somebody, some day . . . perhaps. She had only seen what she had been allowed to see, a show arranged by the Milnes for her especial benefit. But what went on behind the scenes? What, for example, were they doing and saying right now?

  But supposing she knew, supposing she were allowed to open every door and poke into every cupboard, supposing she could eavesdrop every conversation, even listen to their silent thoughts. True, this might throw a new light on the books, lead to a deeper understanding of how they came to be written and of their inner significance. But would her search end there? The child is father to the man (as who-was-it said?). And the mother and father and attendant circumstances make the child. One would have to dig back, into Mr Milne’s childhood, meet his family, and then their family, and theirs. One would have to go right back to the beginning of the world to understand it all. And if one did, then what? One would understand, but would the books be any more enjoyable in consequence? Shakespeare was a great poet. Does it lessen our enjoyment of his plays that we know so little about his life, his parents? And anyway, fascinating though it is to see how every effect has its cause, fascinating though it is to track back along the endless chain of effect and cause, is one man’s life chain all that more interesting than another’s? Is a famous author’s necessarily more interesting than that of an unfamous stockbroker?

  With these thoughts spinning around in her head, Miss Brown reached Streatham Common. It was now dark. There was more traffic on the road. If she were to get her story back to her office intact, she would have to pay more attention to her driving . . .

  2. Names

  We had intended to call it Rosemary [wrote my father1], but decided later that Billy would be more suitable. However, as you can’t be christened William – at least we didn’t see why anybody should – we had to think of two other names . . . One of us thought of Robin, the other of Christopher; names wasted on him who called himself Billy Moon as soon as he could talk and has been Moon to his family and friends ever since. I mention this because it explains why the publicity which came to be attached to ‘Christopher Robin’ never seemed to affect us personally, but to concern either a character in a book or a horse which we hoped at one time would win the Derby.

  I have suffered – if not all my life, then at least for the first thirty years of it – from an embarrassment of names. Let me now, with as much clinical detachment as I can manage, look in turn at each of the four mentioned above, together with their more common variants.

  BILLY – Survived to get itself into my copy of When We Were Very Young, which my father inscribed ‘Billy’s own book’, but died between there and Winnie the Pooh. It did, however, linger on among those friends of the family who knew me in the early 1920s and so made occasional reappearances. But today it is totally extinct.

  MOON – This was my early attempt at saying ‘Milne’. Superseded Billy within the family around 1925, and thereafter remained my father’s only name for me; used by him among his friends and acquaintances on every occasion when something more precise than ‘my boy’ was required. Universally used among close friends and family, my mother only excepted, until after the war. Still surviving here and there.

  BILLY-MOON – A rare variant of Billy. Now quite obsolete.

  CHRISTOPHER ROBIN – My official christian names and so still appearing on occasional legal documents, but now generally superseded by ‘Christopher’ even when ‘christian names in full’ are required. My formal name with acquaintances until about 1928, after which determined efforts were made by the family to kill it off. Today used only by complete strangers, some of whom think (or are charitably assumed to have thought) that Robin is my surname.

  CHRISTOPHER – Used by school friends and the like from about 1929. Used by my mother when introducing me to her friends from about 1938. Now used almost universally. The only name I feel to be really mine.

  CHRIS – A variant of the above used in the army and today only surviving at Christmastime on two or three Christmas cards.

  C.R. – An acceptable variant of Christopher Robin, though not widely used.

  ROBIN – Used only by the Hartfield Platoon of the Home Guard.

  3. Nursery Days

  Billy made his appearance at 112 Mallord Street, Chelsea, at 8 o’clock on the morning of August 21st in the year 1920. He had been a long time coming and this may partly explain why he never had any brothers or sisters. It is reported that Mrs Penn, the cook, on seeing him, went downstairs to inform the Master that he was ‘tall, like Mistress’ – an early promise that was to remain unfulfilled for another sixteen years. What Gertrude said was not recorded.

  Gertrude and Mrs Penn: they really have no more than walking-on parts in this story. But they must be introduced if only to give today’s reader the flavour of
a middle-class household in the 1920s. Mrs Penn is a hazy figure, for she left when I was about seven. I see her as small (so she must indeed have been small), round, grey and elderly. Gertrude was small too, but thinner. My mother’s family were well-to-do and had dozens of servants from butlers downwards, and among them was Gertrude, my mother’s personal maid; and when Miss Dorothy married she was allowed to take Gertrude with her as part of the marriage settlement.

  Domestic staff wore uniform. I imagine that in those days there was a department in Harrods that catered especially for their needs; and thither their mistresses would repair, armed with sets of measurements, to be shown the latest uniforms. ‘This style, if I may say so, Madam, is greatly favoured by the nobility.’ How little my mother would be influenced by the preferences of the nobility. How much more likely to choose something to match the curtains. Mrs Penn I see in grey with a very large white apron; Gertrude was in bottle green with a small and elegant apron and a big black bow which she wore in the back of her hair. Mrs Penn cooked, and seldom left the kitchen except to go up to her bedroom, which she shared with Gertrude on the top floor. Gertrude did everything else. She cleaned the house before breakfast. She laid the fire in the drawing-room. She served at meals. She made the beds. She polished the silver. She went round the house pulling the curtains when it got dark. And when it grew chilly she would apply the match that lit the fire – though to be fair this was something that my mother often managed on her own. And all this she did with quiet efficiency and great solemnity. I never once heard her laugh.

  And what about me? Who was there to change my nappies and powder my bottom?

  One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened. My first memory – if indeed that was what it was – is of lying on a rug in the nursery. There was a screen round me. I looked up and there above the screen was a round kindly face smiling down at me. So I smiled back at it. I was eighteen months old at the time. There had obviously been nannies before that, but either I hadn’t taken to them or they hadn’t taken to me. This was the one I had been waiting for.

  In the domestic hierarchy nannies come somewhere in the middle. There were times when they would join the servants in the servants’ quarters and times when they would join the gentry. But mostly their place was with their charge and that was in the nursery. They, too, wore uniforms. There were black-and-white nannies, grey nannies, blue nannies and pink nannies. There were nannies with hats and nannies with veils. My nanny was grey and she wore a veil when out in the street and a white cap and starched cuffs when indoors. We lived together in a large nursery on the top floor. We lived there, played there, ate there – the food being brought up from the kitchen on a tray – and then at the end of the day we retired, each at our appointed time, to the night nursery next door. So much were we together that Nanny became almost a part of me. Consequently it was my occasional encounters with my parents that stand out as the events of the day.

  Our first meeting would be after breakfast when I was allowed to visit the dining-room. There was a large chest by the window and this was opened for me and I climbed inside while my father finished his marmalade and my mother ate her apple. Our next meeting was in the drawing-room after tea. In the drawing-room I could play on the sofa or on my father’s arm chair. One day, climbing about on the back of his chair, I fell off. In exciting books people often give – as they never seem to do in real life – ‘a whistle of surprise’. That’s what I gave when I reached the carpet. And for weeks afterwards if I wanted to whistle I had to climb on to my father’s chair and fall off. Later I found a simpler way. My final excursion was to the dining-room in the evening. Here, on the floor under the table in the dark, I would play ‘boofy games’ with my mother, getting more and more excited until the arrival of Nanny would bring it all to an end and I would be swept upstairs to my bath.

  I enjoyed playing with my mother. This was something she was good at. There were plenty of things she couldn’t do, had never been taught to do, didn’t need to do because there was someone to do them for her, and she certainly couldn’t have coped alone with a tiny child. But provided Nanny was at hand in case of difficulty, she was very happy to spend an occasional half hour with me, playing on the floor, sitting me on her lap to show me how the gentleman rides, reciting (for the hundredth time) Edward Lear’s ‘Calico Pie’.

  My nursery was in the front of the house facing the street. If I stood on the ottoman where I kept my toys I could look through the bars of the window and see the whole length of Mallord Street below me. It was a quiet, almost deserted street, no cars, no people, no noise, nothing to look at. But if something of importance came, it would announce its arrival and then I could run to the ottoman and climb up and hold on to the bars and watch. If there was a yodelling shout, that would be the log man leading a horse that pulled a cart loaded with logs. If there was the ringing of a hand bell, that would be the muffin man with a tray of muffins on his head. If there was a roaring, rattling noise, that would be the coalman pouring sacks of coal through the little holes in the pavement that went down into the cellars. I even got to know the various clicks and creaks that announced the arrival of the organ grinder and so I would be all ready for ‘Tipperary’ when it came. Organ grinders always made me feel sad, and I used to throw them a penny. But the harp man made me feel sadder. He came on Friday evening and set up his stool just opposite my window. I never knew one organ grinder from another, but the harp man was my friend. He had black hair, a small moustache, a dark grey coat and an air of quiet melancholy. I was allowed to go downstairs and cross the road; and I would put two pennies into his little velvet bag.

  But of all the noises the most welcome was ‘Coooooo-eeeeee’. And that was Anne.

  Anne Darlington lived half a mile away in a flat in Beaufort Mansions. She was eight months older than I was, and, like me, without brothers or sisters. So instead we had each other and we were as close and inseparable as it is possible for two children to be who live half a mile apart. It was a closeness that extended to my parents, for Anne was and remained to her death the Rosemary that I wasn’t.

  Anne had a Nanny who wore black-rimmed glasses and a black straw hat. When we were feeling wicked we called her Jam Puff because she had so many chins, and she would pretend not to have heard. Anne also had a monkey whose name was Jumbo, as dear to her as Pooh was to me. When we were six we left Jumbo and Pooh behind and went to Miss Walters’ school in Tite Street, and one morning Anne, who always knew things before I did, told me there was no such person as Father Christmas. We sat next to each other in class while Miss Walters did her best to teach us this and that and mostly we got it wrong.

  ‘Christopher Robin, I’m afraid six from nine does not make five.’ ‘No Miss Walters. I’m not very good at easy sums. I’m better at them when they are harder.’

  I was better, too, at being Andrew Aguecheek and saying that Nay by my troth I knew not but I knew to be up late was to be up late. I was better at singing.

  On the grassy banks

  Lambkins at their pranks

  Woolly sisters, woolly brothers

  Jumping off their feet,

  While their wooooo-leeeee mothers

  Watch by them and bleat.

  After three years of this sort of thing I went to Gibbs and learned Latin while Anne moved upstairs into Miss Hunt’s class. But we continued to meet in the holidays. At Easter she came and stayed with us at Cotchford, and sometimes again in early summer.

  Where is Anne?

  Head above the buttercups,

  Walking by the stream,

  Down among the buttercups.

  Those were the Buttercup Days, and there, in Shepard’s picture, is Cotchford Farm. In late summer I used to join her (alone, while my Nanny was on holiday) at St Nicholas on the Kent coast. And finally we spent Christmas together at Mallord Street. She and I inevitably drifted apart as we grew older but she and my parent
s remained devoted to each other, and until I was twenty-five my mother cherished fond hopes that one day we would marry.

  ‘Cooo-eeeee.’ I ran to the ottoman, climbed up, leaned over the bars and waved; and Anne and her Nanny waved back. Where were we going? To the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens? To the Embankment Gardens by the river? Or across the Albert Bridge to Battersea Park? Were we taking our hoops or our skipping ropes?

  When Anne and I go out a walk,

  We hold each other’s hand and talk

  Of all the things we mean to do

  When Anne and I are forty-two.

  But the Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. For this was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round. So sometimes my father is using it to describe something I did, and sometimes he is borrowing it to describe something he did as a child, and sometimes he is using it to describe something that any child might have done. ‘At the Zoo’, for example, is about me. ‘The Engineer’ is not. ‘Lines and Squares’ and ‘Hoppity’ are games that every small child must have played. ‘Buckingham Palace’ is half and half. Nanny and I certainly used to go and watch the changing of the guard, but I must – for a reason that will appear later – disown the conversation. On the whole it doesn’t greatly matter which of the two of us did what: I’m happy to accept responsibility. But I must make two exceptions. The first is ‘In the Dark’.

  There was one great difference between my father and myself when we were children. He had an elder brother; I had not. So he was never alone in the dark. Lying in bed with the lights out he could so easily be ‘talking to a dragon’ and feeling brave, knowing that if the dragon suddenly turned fierce he had only to reach out a hand and there would be Ken in the next bed. But I could take no such risks. I had to keep reminding myself that the dragon was only a bedtime story one, not a real one. I had to keep reassuring myself that all was safe by staring at the little orange strip of light that ran along the bottom of the night nursery door, by straining my ears to hear the gentle but, oh, so comforting movements of Nanny in the next room. Sometimes she would call out. ‘I’m just going downstairs. I shan’t be a minute’: and then I would wait anxiously for the sound of her returning footsteps. Once I waited and waited until I could wait no more. Something awful must have happened. I got out of bed, opened the night nursery door, crossed the deserted nursery to the door at the far end. And there was Nanny coming upstairs. ‘You naughty boy. What are you doing?’ ‘O Nanny, you were such a long time; I didn’t know what had happened to you.’ She was cross, but only a little bit, and I didn’t mind. It was so lovely to have her back.