The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t – not with children, that is. Later on it was different, very different. But I am thinking of nursery days.

  It was difficult for him, of course. For there was Nanny always in the way. Nanny who claimed so much of my affection. And on the rare occasions when Nanny was out of the room, there was my mother in her place. On Nanny’s day off there was Gertrude looking after me. Where did he fit in? Nowhere special. And now here was Soldier. You could see how my eyes lit up at the very thought of Soldier, at the mere mention of his name. You could see (or you could be told) how he made me laugh, how I adored him. No, my father couldn’t compete. Did this make him, I wonder, a little jealous, a little sad? Did he secretly envy those who had the gift? My poor father! All that was left to him were family visits to the London Zoo or family walks through the Sussex woods, and perhaps a few brief minutes of good-night story.

  People sometimes say to me today: ‘How lucky you were to have had such a wonderful father!’ imagining that because he wrote about me with such affection and understanding, he must have played with me with equal affection and understanding. Can this really be so totally untrue? Isn’t this most surprising?

  No, it is not really surprising, not when you understand.

  There are two sorts of writer. There is the writer who is basically a reporter and there is the creative writer. The one draws on his experiences, the other on his dreams. My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead.

  5. Self Portrait

  Height: Small for his age.

  Weight: Underweight. Needs fattening up.

  They did their best, of course, but it was really a waste of time, for no amount of eating has ever had any visible effect on me.

  When I was a child I was what grown-ups describe as a fussy eater. That is to say I ate what I liked well enough, and as much of it as I could squeeze in; but what I didn’t like I divided up into little bits and pushed around the plate and said ‘Need I, Nanny?’ until she relented and I was allowed to leave it. I accepted that this was how it was with food, part pleasure, part penance. It never occurred to me that the penance part was unnecessary. I used to say that if ever I was sent to prison I could at least enjoy the meals, bread and water being what I was specially fond of. And I said this, not sadly, not complainingly, but almost with pride – a criticism of nursery food all the more telling for being quite unintended.

  Why were meals so unappetizing? We had a good cook. At the time I’m thinking of Mrs Penn had left us and been replaced by Mrs Gulliver. I liked Mrs Gulliver. She was as large and fat and jolly as Gertrude was small and thin and solemn, and she could produce the most wonderful meals, as I later discovered. Why didn’t any of them find their way upstairs? Partly the reason was that nursery meals were served before dining-room meals. This meant that if Nanny and I had been allowed to share in the dining-room roast chicken and chocolate soufflé, neither would have been looking its best when it reached my parents. So for us it had to be shepherd’s pie and rice pudding. But this still doesn’t explain why the rice pudding was quite so white, quite so stiff, quite so unlovely. This remains a mystery. It was not until I went to prep school that I learned what a proper rice pudding was like and developed an absolute passion for it that has lasted to this day; which is not the sort of thing one normally learns at prep school.

  So there I was, not eating enough and not nearly fat enough. Something had to be done, and, as I have said, they did their best. They tried strengthening medicine (which Tigger was so fond of). I was fond of it too, but it didn’t make me any fatter. So then they tried gymnasium classes run by two Scotsmen called Munroe and Macpherson. On my first day, as we marched round the gym, horrible Mr Macpherson shouted out: ‘Christopher Robin, you look like a camel. Hold yourself up, lad.’ But though I learnt to climb a rope, I still didn’t get any fatter. So then they tried boxing classes. I cantered across the floor and struck Mr Macpherson on the nose, and he pretended it was a fly tickling him and said: ‘Harder, lad, harder.’ But though I was very proud of my boxing gloves, my muscles didn’t bulge the way they should. So then finally they tried massage. I lay on the ottoman in the nursery while Mrs Preston powdered me and then thumped and kneaded. But though I loved it I remained resolutely underweight. And I have done so ever since. Appearance: Girlish.

  Well, what can you expect? I had long hair at a time when boys didn’t have long hair. One day Nanny went into the grocer’s shop at the top of Oakley Street and left me lying outside in the pram. And while she was there two people came and peered at me and one of them said: ‘Oh, what a pretty little girl.’ That is not the sort of thing one forgets in a hurry. I used to wear girlish clothes, too, smocks and things. And in my very earliest dreams I even used to dream I was a girl. General Behaviour: Very shy and unselfpossessed.

  My father used to reassure me that he was shy too, that on the whole shy people were nicest, and that it was far better to be shy than boastful and self-assertive. But all the same I went a little too far the other way. When people asked me simple questions like did I want another piece of cake, I really ought to have known the answer and not turned to the hovering figure at my side and said ‘Do I, Nanny?’

  General Intelligence: Not very bright.

  There was a story – I think it was Anne who told me, many years later – that Miss Walters from my kindergarten was so impressed by my dimness that she got herself invited to tea at Mallord Street to see whether I was always like that or only at school. I don’t know what her conclusions were. I don’t know whether she came a little nearer to believing that I was not just being silly when I had said that I could do the difficult sums but not the easy ones.

  General Interests: Good with his hands.

  Here at last was something I was all right at. I used to love making things. I sewed things (the Cottleston Pie that Pooh once sang about was an egg cosy I made) and knitted things and made tapestry pictures. I had a Meccano set and made (among other things) a working grandfather clock. Or rather I made the works and a friend, older than I, came to tea one day and helped me with the case, the weights and the pendulum. That night, however, I couldn’t get to sleep. I lay awake all restless and unhappy. Finally, I called out:

  ‘Nanny, can you come?’

  ‘What is it, dear?’

  ‘It’s the clock. I don’t want to keep it. You see I didn’t do it all myself. Alec helped me with it. So can you take it to bits, please: just the stand part. Can you start doing it now?’

  So she did: one of the odder things that Nannies get called upon to do.

  Then there were the things that I took to bits myself. Using a penknife, I once took a dead mouse to bits to see how it worked. But it was hard to tell exactly and really rather disappointing and so I threw it away. I also took the lock on the night nursery door to bits. I discovered how it worked but not how it went together again. So an ironmonger had to be summoned. What! Couldn’t my father have mended it? My father, did you say? Mend something? Even at the age of seven I was already the family’s Chief Mender. And mostly I succeeded. Admittedly the lock was a failure, and another failure was when I tried to run my 6-volt electric motor by connecting it up to the electric light switch. Nothing happened. Even now, looking back on the event with greater electrical knowledge, I still can’t understand why nothing happened.

  It will now, I hope, be apparent why I said in an earlier chapter that the poem ‘The Engineer’ was not about me. The poem begins:

  Let it rain

  Who cares

  I’ve a train

  Upstairs

  With a brake

  Which I make . . .

  and it ends up:

  It’s a good sort of brake

  But it hasn’t worked yet.

  I may h
ave been a bit undersize. I may have been a bit underweight. I may have looked like a girl. I may have been shy. I may have been on the dim side. But if I’d had a train (and I didn’t have a train) any brake that I’d wanted to make for it – any simple thing like a brake – WOULD HAVE WORKED.

  6. In the Country

  In 1925 my father bought Cotchford Farm and we became countrymen, or, to be more accurate, half-countrymen. For we still spent most of our time in London, going down to Cotchford only at weekends and for the Easter and summer holidays.

  Up to then we had paid only occasional visits to the country. There had been visits to my mother’s lovely family home of Brooklands on the Hamble, visits from which survive the memories of a rocking horse and – annually reawakened – the colour and scent of azaleas. There had been a holiday at Woolacombe where I had first encountered what I’m told I called ‘the huge water’ and where – if anywhere – I had got ‘sand between the toes’. There had been a famous holiday in Wales where the first poems of When We Were Very Young had been written. And finally there had been visits to Decoy, a thatched cottage near Angmering in Sussex. At Decoy there was a lake. On the lake was a swan. And the swan’s name was Pooh. There were woods and meadows, too, and I have hazy memories of these; but it is the little close-up things that a child sees most clearly. I remember beans, smooth, with pink and black blotches, holding them, arranging them, looking at them. I remember butterflies, cabbage whites and meadow browns, caught and held in the hand and examined. I remember daisies, wild daisies, not white as they seem to be to grown-ups, but pink; and I have only to pick one now and turn it over and look closely at the pink underside of its petals to see again the daisies of my childhood.

  But Cotchford was different from all these. Cotchford was ours, and on an autumn morning in 1925 we climbed into the blue Fiat, my mother and father in the back, Nanny and I sitting next to Burnside in front, and drove down to take possession.

  No. I have got it wrong. It was Cotchford that took possession of us.

  My mother had been brought up partly in London, partly in the country. She knew what it was to live in a large country house and sit on lawns and wander past flower beds. London, no doubt, attracted her, especially as she grew older, with its gay parties and its pretty clothes, with its opportunity to escape from her wretched brothers and their muddy knees and everlasting sailing-talk. But at Brooklands her deep and abiding love of gardens was born and with it her love of the peace and the solitude that you can find only in the country.

  After the first War she and my father had settled down in London, and she was happy there, being gay and smart and meeting exciting people. And no doubt to begin with this was enough. In any case it wasn’t long before I turned up; and if I wasn’t a full-time job, I was at least a part-time hobby. But it wasn’t until we moved to Cotchford that my mother’s talents knew that this was the moment for which they had been all this time quietly waiting. With memories of Brooklands to inspire her, with a succession of books by Marion Cran to guide her, and with seed catalogues and plant catalogues to hand in the bathroom for quiet after-breakfast study, she set to work. And as the money began to come in from the books, so, from time to time, Mr Berrow appeared, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his plus-fours, his bow tie, pencil and paper to sketch out ‘proposed plans for terrace gardens, orchard and summer house’.

  My mother in her garden. Trowel in hand planting Darwin tulips by the hundred. Secateurs in hand snipping at roses. Crouched down, weeding, weeding, weeding. Pouring jugs of hot water over the ants. Exhorting Tasker to ever greater efforts. Teaching me the names of the flowers – lovely names like salpiglossis and spiraea Anthony Waterer, difficult names like eschscholtzia which were fun to spell. But mostly I remember her just quietly, happily, brooding over it all, alone in the half dark.

  You can love the country in two quite different ways, as a cat loves it and as a dog loves it. My mother was like a cat. She responded to the beauty, the peace and the solitude that it offered. She found this in her garden and she found it too in the countryside beyond. Solitude. She was happiest alone. Once, when she was going for a walk, I asked if I could come with her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but come and meet me on my way back. I like best being met.’ And so we spent a lot of time meeting her. She would walk to the village and half an hour later my father and I would set off up the hill and hope that somewhere before we reached the top we would see her coming round the corner. Or it might be the other way round, and she would meet us as we drove home (choosing the pretty way, of course) after spending the morning playing golf. At night, before going to bed, she would walk up to the forest, two miles along the road, until she was level with Gill’s Lap. On these occasions I sometimes accompanied her. It was different in the dark. You could be with someone and they would be there if you felt you wanted them, and if you didn’t you could forget them. Now and again, on our way, a car would come by: blinding lights, a roar and a whoosh of wind that seemed to suck you out into the road in their wake. We clung to each other, standing against the hedge, until they were gone. Then on again. We both loved the country at night, the black shapes of the trees, the tiny spots of light from wayside cottages, the sound of the wind bustling about its invisible business. We scarcely talked, absorbed in our private thoughts.

  If my mother was a cat, my father was surely a dog. He was a Londoner, a real Londoner with a deep love of London in his bones. For him the country had always been, not where you lived, but where you went. Where you went on holiday. Where you went to do something – to ride a bicycle, to climb a hill, to look for birds’ nests, to play golf. Like a dog, he couldn’t just be in the country, sitting or strolling aimlessly. It had to be a proper walk, a walk with a purpose, planned beforehand, worked out on the map even. And you couldn’t go alone; you had to be with somebody, with me perhaps, or with the whole family, Nanny included. Like a dog, too, he was happiest of all when chasing a ball.

  In front of the house a lawn sloped down to a ditch. It was virtually the only lawn that Cotchford possessed when we first arrived, and at once my father claimed it as his own private preserve, and laid it out for clock golf. And as a clock golf course it always remained, the only bit of the garden where my father reigned supreme. The ditch that bounded its lower edge was widened and turned into a moat, known as ‘the stream’. A marshy bit in one corner was dug out to make a rather unpleasant pond. And eventually the russet apple tree in the middle died and was cut down. But otherwise the putting lawn remained unchanged over the years, and round and round it my father went, round and round and round. If I was at home, I joined him. ‘Just time for a quick record before lunch?’ We played together, not against each other: more friendly that way. If I wasn’t there, he played alone; and if he did a particularly good round, he would proudly tell me. When I was at school or away during the war, he would tell me in his weekly letter. He didn’t tell my mother: she wouldn’t have been specially interested, wouldn’t even have known what ‘two under twos’ meant. She never played. She hated all games.

  So while my mother dug, my father putted. Does this sound like ant and grasshopper? In a way it was. But you can look at it another way. To each his trade. My father was a writer: this was his work. All he wanted from my mother was her encouragement and praise. My mother was a gardener, and praise and encouragement was all she wished for in return. No need also for a hand with the manuring: we had a full-time professional for that.

  The stream was included in my father’s domains. It had been hoped at one time that it might make an attractive feature with goldfish and water lilies. But all it seemed able to grow were dense mats of brown weed. Brown scum congealed on its stagnant surface, and strange creatures moved in its depths. So my father was allowed to keep it; and he and I shared it. We plunged nets and golf clubs into it, and piles of weed with their attendant black mud were landed on the bank. We stooped to peer closely. And gradually the various inhabitants would work their way up to the surface, flip-flapping
if they were fish, wriggling if they were newts, crawling if they were dragonfly larvae. Each was examined before being put back. Sometimes golf balls came up in the catch, their brownness telling us how long they had lain submerged. Once or twice we caught what my father said was a triton, an extra large, black and nobbly newt, slow-moving and looking prehistoric. This was a great excitement. Sometimes a grass snake would slip into the water and take refuge between the stones that lined the bank. Grass snakes were even more exciting, but they were not welcome for they ate the other creatures. And so they were pursued with putters until landed; and since landing a grass snake with a putter is not easy, we hoped it was also not too unsporting. They were then flung into the bullrushes and told not to come back.