The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  So the garden for my father was where you sometimes looked for newts, but mainly where you putted and where you admired my mother’s labours. It was also where, after lunch, you sought out a sheltered spot, and, armed with deck chair, cushions, rugs and pullovers, retired there to reverberate gently until tea time.

  These were the things you could do alone. But there were other things which needed two of you. There was cricket and there was catch: cricket could be played in the meadow, and catch with a tennis ball up against the wall. So my father was determined that, however much I enjoyed just being in the country, playing happily by myself, doing nothing happily by myself, however cat-like I was, I was jolly well going to spend some of my time enjoying dog games with him.

  I was not immediately enthusiastic. On my fifth birthday I had been given a shining suit of armour, and lived in it, almost went to bed in it, was in tears at the prospect of being unstrapped from it. ‘One day,’ said my father to his tiny St George, ‘you will be thinking of nothing but cricket.’ I stared at him aghast. My breast plate, my back plate, the wonderful things that protected my arms (even though slightly too long and rather scratchy round the wrist), my helmet with its red plume and the visor that I could pull down when danger threatened: how could I ever abandon these? ‘Nothing but cricket,’ I said in amazement. ‘Not armour?’

  But my father was right.

  Cotchford was built on a hillside and so almost everything was on a slope. But there was one level bit, a grass path that, starting off between two giant yews, ran through what we called the orchard. Five feet wide, twenty yards long, and absolutely straight, it would serve admirably; and it was here that I first took up my stance, while my father bowled at me with a tennis ball and Nanny stood at deep cover point to retrieve anything that went down the hill towards the dovecot. Years later a proper pitch was made in the meadow beyond the stream and a net was erected. And on summer evenings I changed into my white flannels (my first long trousers), put on pads and gloves, collected bat and ball, and off we went together. I batted, he bowled. And sometimes an off drive, slightly lofted to clear the thick grass, would almost reach the river; but more often a sweep to leg, flying over the net, would land in the swamp by the willows. ‘Oh, well hit! Quick!’ and we would rush to the spot and tramp up and down among the rushes, while horseflies hovered overhead. Cricket was for summer evenings, and afterwards there was a tray with a jug of lemonade waiting in the dining-room. But catch with a tennis ball, like putting, was for the odd five minutes while waiting for Pat to ring the bell for lunch.

  At the edge of the brick path where it ran beneath the nursery window were two small holes, something to do with ventilation. In one of these the tennis ball was kept. We stood about five yards back from the house, on the lawn where the big sycamore grew, and we threw against the wall, hard, as if returning a ball from cover point. We threw to each other, back and forth, and as we caught, so we counted. One, two, three, four, five . . . A high one from me and my father would leap and bring off a brilliant one-hander while the blue handkerchief he kept up his sleeve fluttered to the ground. ‘Oh, well held, sir!’ Six, seven, eight – A wide one from my father and I would make a dramatic dive, but in vain and the ball shot over the flower bed, bounced across the putting lawn and into the stream. I would fish it out with a golf club and we would start again. What was the world’s record? Fifty? A hundred? I forget.

  Putting, golf, cricket, catch, these were the things we did together – but not until Nanny had left us and I was at boarding school. Up to then I was much like any other child in the country. I took my toys out and played with them in the grass. I played in the hay, I played in the mud, played in the water, played with friends, played with Nanny, played alone, climbed trees, picked primroses in the spring and nuts in the autumn, went exploring, rode a donkey. To begin with the country was very much for playing in. Later, much later, I began to enjoy long solitary walks. Or I would go down to the river and find a quiet place, secluded, hidden beneath the bank and sit there for hours, watching the water as it gently twisted and eddied past me. Then perhaps I might see something: an eel, wriggling its way upstream; a grass snake with just its black head showing above the surface, moving gently from side to side; damsel flies, their wings making a dry whispering sound as they came to investigate me; the plop of a water vole, and if you looked quickly you might see it running underwater along the river bed; a shy moorhen, a noisy mallard, a flashing kingfisher, whistling urgently. But never, though I waited in hope day after day, never the sight of an otter.

  So of the three of us, I suppose it could be said that I was the one most totally captivated by Cotchford, for it gave me all the delight it gave my mother and all the delight – the very different delight – it gave my father; and it continued to do this, on and off, for thirty years.

  On an August morning in the year 1942 I said goodbye to Cotchford. The penstemons, the bergamots, the phloxes, the heleniums, the rudbeckias, the dahlias and even the solitary coreopsis that had seeded itself so cleverly in the paving stones by the sundial were still looking as lovely as ever. I said goodbye convinced, absolutely, that I would never return.

  During the four years that followed I twice tried to while away moments of idleness by writing about the house and the garden, the fields and the river, the woods and the forest that I knew and loved so well – once when I was in Iraq, later when convalescing in Italy. I wrote happily, page after page, then read what I had written and tore it up.

  Now, and for very much the same reasons, I am making my third attempt.

  7. Cotchford Farm, 1932: A Conducted Tour

  ‘Come on. Let me show you round the house.

  ‘In here – mind the step: there are odd steps all over the place because we’re built on a hill – in here’s the dining-room. Nothing very special, but it’s just worth going over to the fireplace because if you stand inside you can look up and see the sky. There was another fireplace like this in the drawing-room. We used to burn peat in it – brown slabs like square biscuits – which was nice and rustic but gave us more smoke and draught than heat. So we had it bricked up and now it’s so small you can scarcely burn anything bigger than a matchstick. This one in the dining-room we don’t use at all.

  ‘Through that door’s the kitchen and the servants’ quarters where Mrs Wilson and Pat live. No need to show it to you, so let’s go back into the hall again . . .

  ‘This is just the downstairs lav and in the corner is the pump. We’re not on the mains and get all our water from a well. You can see the well house if you look through the window: that little building under the tree. There are usually two or three frogs living in it, and sometimes a grass snake, but the water tastes all right. Edward Tasker – he’s our gardener’s nephew – comes every morning after breakfast to do the pumping. There’s a tank up in the attic – in my carpenter’s shop, actually – and when it’s full the water comes out of a pipe and you can hear it splashing down outside . . .

  ‘Now let’s go down the passage. Mind the step. This is my room in here. It used to be my nursery ages ago and we still call it that. It’s not used for much: just where things get put, my cricket things and so on. Oh, yes, that’s a gas-light. We don’t have electricity. We make our own gas out at the back of the kitchen from drums of white stuff. There’s a gas-light here, one out in the passage, two more in the drawing-room and another at the top of the stairs. Apart from that we use candles, which is nice and countrified.

  ‘On we go . . . That’s my father’s room in there. Not worth looking at. Very small and damp and dark, and after he’s been in it all morning smoking his pipe the smell is terrific.

  ‘Now mind the step and don’t bump your head. Even I can bump my head on this door. My father is always bumping his head all over the place. He has a perpetual lump in the middle of his bald spot. If you listen you can hear him doing it. Bump! ‘‘OUCH! Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh . . .’’ This is the drawing-room and this is where all our visitor
s start studying the beams in a learned way, saying: ‘‘Ships’ timbers’’. I can’t see why they should have been, myself. They were obviously something once because of their odd shapes and holes. But I should have thought it much more likely they came out of somebody else’s house or an old barn . . . Note and admire my mother’s ‘‘Constance Spry’’ flower arrangement, by the way – done specially in your honour. And that’s Tattoo asleep on the sofa. We have three other cats and she’s their mother. She’s had hundreds of other kittens but they’ve mostly been drowned. She’s about seven years old although she looks so small. Now let’s go upstairs.

  ‘Let’s go right through to the far end first and I’ll show you the Secret Passage. You have to go through my mother’s bedroom to get to it. This is her room. There’s a bees’ nest in the roof just outside the window. So a lot of bees come in and die on the window-sill and you have to be a bit careful if you walk round with bare feet. Through here is what used to be my father’s dressing-room. It’s nothing much now. And here’s the front door of the Secret Passage. You can ring the bell if you like. Right. In you go. Mind the burglar alarm. The light switch is over there. This is the only room in the house with electricity. No, it’s not really old at all; in fact it’s one of the newest bits of the house. I think it was put on just before we arrived. It’s where we used to put trunks and suitcases and things. I was playing here one day when I discovered the Passage. So then I sort of took possession and the trunks and things got moved somewhere else. This is the actual Passage over in the corner. You can just about squeeze through. But be careful to tread on the joists or you’ll be in the kitchen. The lights down here are fitted to a two-way switch so that I can turn them on and off from either end. My bedroom’s at the far end – not my real bedroom, of course. It’s being a sort of space under the roof that makes it this funny triangular shape. But it’s quite long: it runs the full width of the house. The walls were wall-papered by me, which was quite a business squatting down here doing it by candlelight. And then I made all the various bits of furniture, the arm chair, the sofa and so on. Seen all you want? Let’s go, then.

  ‘The bathroom’s in here. The water comes out of the hot tap as brown as tea when you first have a bath at the beginning of a weekend. There’s supposed to be a lot of iron in our water: I don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it. If you try swimming in the river you come out looking like a Red Indian. Spare bedroom in here. It doesn’t get used much nowadays. We don’t often have people to stay. My father’s bedroom is in there. And this is my bedroom. The floor’s a bit sloping and you tend to roll out of bed until you’re used to it. That little door leads to a sort of dressing-room which was once used for washing in. It’s quite handy because it’s got a window you can climb out of, which can be useful if there are visitors in the house you don’t want to meet.

  ‘Then we’ve got one more lot of stairs, very winding and dark. Would you like to come up? You’re almost certain to bump into something or trip over something, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mrs Wilson’s room’s in there. Bad luck; but I did warn you. I expect you’ll survive. And here’s my carpenter’s shop where all the Secret Passage furniture gets made.

  ‘There. You’ve seen it all now. So let’s go outside. I think we’ve just got time to have a quick look at the river before lunch. We can hear the bell from there. Then after lunch we can do a proper explore and I can show you some of my crossing places and the trees I climb and the marsh where I found the snipe’s nest and the weir and Posingford Wood where the charcoal burner used to live . . . Come on.’

  8. Field and Forest

  You must start with a map. We kept ours in the drawing-room on the bookshelf by the window. You must start with a map because Cotchford Farm is on the map and this was something we were all very proud of. Look. Here! And what is more it is underlined. I used to think that it was the printer who had underlined it, but I realize now it was more likely to have been my mother or my father. And over the years, as countless proud fingers pointed it out to countless admiring visitors, so a sort of grey haze descended upon it, making it even easier to find. But as your map may be a new one, I had better help you.

  The map you need is the 1-inch Ordnance Survey Sheet 183.3 Just off it up in the top left-hand corner is East Grinstead, and just off it up in the top centre is Tunbridge Wells. The village of Hartfield is half way between them, about eight miles from each. From Hartfield a road runs due south, the road to the coast. It goes up a steep hill and then down on the other side, and just before it reaches the bottom and crosses a little river there is a lane off to the right. As we made our weekly journey from London, this was the exciting moment. The car slowed down, almost stopped, then swung into the lane and our smooth motion changed into the familiar, welcoming, beloved bumping. For the lane was no more than a sandy track, well rutted by the wooden, iron-rimmed wheels of farm carts. In winter the ruts filled with water and we sloshed as well as bumped. I loved it. It was just how it should be: a proper country lane. My parents liked it this way, too: the bumpier it was the less likely were people to want to build houses along it. Only Burnside grumbled. ‘Jolly old lane,’ he said.

  Cotchford Farm is a couple of hundred yards along on the left, a steep gravel drive leading down to it. We never knew its history, just spoke vaguely of Queen Anne and of its having once been three separate houses now turned into one, which accounted for its odd shape. We never knew it as a working farm, though various outbuildings survived, owned by a neighbouring farmer, and were still used in a half-hearted sort of way. It came to us through a man called Jervis who had rescued it, done it up and then sold it. And with it went two fields that took our boundaries up to the main road and along the river.

  So there we were in 1925 with a cottage, a little bit of garden, a lot of jungle, two fields, a river and then all the green, hilly countryside beyond, meadows and woods, waiting to be explored; and Nanny and I set out at once to explore them, bringing back reports of our discoveries.

  First we set off towards the river. We called it the river, though it was really only a stream, to distinguish it from the stream (at the bottom of the putting lawn) which was really only a long thin, almost stagnant pond. We were proud of our river. It was, we told our friends, a tributary of the Medway. This seemed to emphasize our remoteness from London. Not a tributary of the Thames: a tributary of the Medway; much grander, much more countrified. It was fringed all along by trees, mostly alders, and quite large ones, so that at a distance, looking towards it from the house, people could be excused for mistaking it for a wood. ‘Is that the Hundred Acre Wood?’ they asked. You didn’t discover that it was a river until you were right on top of it, for it had carved itself a deep channel through the red-brown, sandy-clay soil. If you climbed down to the water’s edge you were quite invisible from the meadow above you. Here the air was cool and richly scented. The water, brown and mysterious, moved with unhurried dignity. It was just the right width: too wide to jump, but where a kindly tree reached out a branch to another kindly tree on the opposite shore, it was possible to swing yourself over. It was just the right depth: too deep to paddle across but often shallow enough to paddle in and in places deep enough to swim.

  This was the river that Nanny and I set out to explore, and immediately we made our first discovery: Dragon’s Bridge. There could be no doubt about it; for there was the great, blunt snout raised above the bank; there was the eye, round, hollow, staring; there was the branching wing, ready to beat the air; there was the leg poised above the water; and there was the great, green, scaly back down which you could – (‘Do you think I dare, Nanny?’ ‘Be very careful, dear.’) – down which you could, if you were very careful, clamber until you were right across to the other side. Dragon’s Bridge. This became and remained one of my favourite spots, the site of so many small adventures and happy memories. It was here that I built my hut of ash poles and bracken, here that I had my rope ladder (fastened to a giant oak tree that had p
erhaps sprung from one of the dragon’s very own acorns), here that I launched my raft on its ten-yard voyage, and here that I swam with Anne. Four strokes was all we could manage before we ran aground or got mixed up with a bramble, and even on the hottest day the water was achingly cold . . .

  And it must have been here that, in the poem, ‘Us Two’, Pooh and I

  . . . crossed the river and found a few –

  ‘Yes, those are dragons all right,’ said Pooh.

  ‘As soon as I saw their beaks I knew . . .’

  For on the other side of Dragon’s Bridge was a chicken farm.

  Two hundred yards or so upstream from Dragon’s Bridge is the fence that marks our boundary. Who owned the land that lay beyond? Mostly we didn’t know. Mostly we didn’t care. As far as Nanny and I were concerned it belonged to us, and we never met anyone to contradict us. We wandered freely from field to field, from wood to wood, and scarcely met a soul.

  On the other side of our fence is a hazel copse where wood anemones grow and where a tiny stream – a tributary of the tributary of the Medway – could be dammed or diverted or made to turn a miniature water wheel. Beyond the copse is a marsh, a tangled mass of rushes and bracken where only the gum-booted dare leave the path. It was here that, towards the end of one Easter holiday, to my enormous excitement, I finally tracked down the snipe’s nest I had been searching for. At the end of the marsh the footpath crosses over the river above a weir, a plank spanning the water at the point where it curls smoothly over and crashes into the darkness, and a pole giving the nervous something to hold on to (and the daring something to swing on). On the other side is a good field for butterflies where blues and coppers could usually be found. Here I once came upon a weasel family out for a walk, and watched fascinated as mother weasel escorted her children to the edge of a little backwater and then, with much chattering and fussing, ferried them to the far side. The path follows the river bank and soon enters a wood. This is Posingford Wood and is marked on the map. So just in case, map in hand, you are trying to follow me, I must remind you that the countryside I am describing is the countryside I wandered in as a boy somewhere between 1925 and 1940. It didn’t change much in those fifteen years, but it may have done so since.