The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  But if Nanny was still with me, Pooh was moving into the shadows. For seven and a half years he had been my constant companion; now our ways were beginning to part. ‘GON OUT BACKSON BISY BACKSON’ said the notice on the piece of paper. I was now living in two worlds. In one of them we could perhaps still meet for a little longer, but in the other I was on my own. We had had a happy time together. The imaginary world we inhabited was very much the world you meet in the stories. Our real world was the sort of real world you would expect to find lying behind them. I loved my Nanny, I loved Cotchford. If I cannot say that I loved my parents it is only because, in those early days, I just didn’t know them well enough. And if I do not say that I loved Mallord Street, it is only because I loved Cotchford so very much more.

  I also quite liked being Christopher Robin and being famous. There were indeed times – as at pageants – when it was exciting and made me feel grand and important. But of the ripples of fame that came through my nursery door, each was judged firmly on its merits. A child loves getting presents at Christmas, loves opening parcels, but he becomes instantly critical once the brown paper and string are off. The double-barrelled shotgun is wonderful and just exactly what he wanted; the large rubber ball is rather stupid. The rubber ball is left on one side and instantly forgotten (except by Nanny who has thoughtfully noted down that it was sent by Aunt Mary), the shotgun is borne off to the nursery and the instructions are eagerly read and puzzled out. It was the same with the Christopher Robin things. If, in the watercolour painting by Honor Maugham, I looked sad, this was because I was sad. The sun was shining, Hannah had come round to play with me and was hanging about outside waiting, and here I was indoors having to sit still.

  When I was about eight years old, being fond of animals, I was not surprisingly a Dr Dolittle fan; and one day I wrote to Hugh Lofting to say so. Partly I wrote because Nanny encouraged me to, partly I wrote because I really did want to say how much I liked the books, and I suppose that partly I wrote because I hoped I might get a letter back. And I did; and I was thrilled when he asked me which of his books I had not read so that he could send me copies. Kind Mr Lofting to give a small boy so much pleasure. Was the small boy always as kind to those who wrote to him? Would he, as he grew older, become kinder or less kind? If the answer to the second question is ‘Less kind’ this is because there is a difference between being an author and being a character in a book. The author remains the author always. The character may well grow out of his part. At the age of seven I was quite pleased when a large ‘Piglet’ arrived in a box with his creator’s best wishes. He was much more handsome, indeed frankly much more appealing and lovable, than my one (who was anyway by this time in a rather dog-bitten state). I christened him Poglet and he and Pooh accompanied me on one of my visits to Littlehampton. But had he arrived five years later his welcome would have been cooler. Anyone wanting to make toy Piglets to send to the little boy in the book had to study the back of the title page to be sure that the little boy was still a little boy. Miss B. was really too late. Miss B. produced a Pooh and a Piglet modelled in clay. Forty years later she discovered that she still had my thank-you letter and sent me a copy of it to ask if I thought it was worth anything. I replied that I hoped not; anyway it wasn’t to me. But on second thoughts I feel I may be mistaken. It is perhaps just worth printing as the only contemporary document that survives to give the true flavour of a Christmas holiday when I was twelve years old.

  Dear Miss B . . .

  Thank you so much for Pooh and Piglet. I did love them so, and I love having them with me. They weren’t too tired out with the journey although Piglet broke his arm; however he is all right now.

  I am playing cricket (net practice) nearly every day here. Every weekend we go down to the country: I can go on long explores in the forest and up to Gill’s Lap (Galleon’s Lap). We have four cats in the country, but although they are very common they are awfully friendly and go to sleep on your knee. Their mother who is about 7 or 8 years old has had at least 60 or 70 kittens 50 of which had to be drowned. We have in our country house two so-called secret passages. Unfortunately I am the only one who can get into them but I have great fun furnishing them, wall-papering them and putting up electric bells and lights. This is very grand because my room (or passage) is the only one which has electric lights or bells.

  My mother has just come back from New York. The boat arrived a day late though and left her only two days for her Christmas shopping.

  I do hope you have a very happy new year

  with very best love from

  CHRISTOPHER ROBIN MILNE

  P.S. Excuse bad writing.

  It was not entirely Miss B.’s fault that she was five years late. Every year brings its new batch of readers, meeting Christopher Robin and Pooh for the first time, learning that maybe Christopher Robin is a real live person and expecting him still to look like his picture. Even if you are wise enough to realize that the books were written a long time ago and that real live people grow up, you may still find yourself judging them by today’s standards. It is easy to see that some of the verses in When We Were Very Young are now rather out of date. Nannies in uniforms are now more or less extinct. But attitudes as well as people change. If today’s reader detects an air of snobbishness and class consciousness here and there it would be unfair to blame the author for this. My father was writing in the 1920s about the 1920s to entertain people living in the 1920s and these were the attitudes current at the time. Yet if Christopher Robin seems a rather odd little boy, in one respect he is now less odd than he once was. Today his long hair and curious clothes are very much in fashion. But at the time, when other little boys had short hair, shirts and ties, they were decidedly unusual. Was this Shepard’s idea, or my father’s – or whose?

  First let me say that it had nothing to do with Shepard. It is true that he used his imagination when he drew the animals, but me he drew from life. I did indeed look just like that. And the reason I looked like that had nothing whatever to do with the books either. What the reason was I can only now guess. At the time I accepted it as I accepted nursery food. It was just part of life. And I was that sort of child: the sort that accepts things without question. Later on, when I was older, I might perhaps have asked; but a tactful moment combined with a sufficient interest in learning the answer never presented itself. And it is not really until today that I have found myself wondering. Too late now to know for sure, and so I must just try to piece together such clues as survive.

  When a child is small it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than to my father. He was busy writing. It was she who gave the instructions to Nanny. And so it was she who found the patterns and provided the material (leaving Nanny to do the actual sewing). It was she who outlined the hair-style (leaving Nanny to do the actual scissor-work). This I know. All the same, there could well have been consultation and discussion in the drawing-room while I was in bed and Nanny was busy with the ironing – before decisions were made and orders were given. This I don’t know. But I suspect that the result appealed equally to both my parents – though for quite different reasons. I suspect that, with my golden tresses, I reminded my mother of the girl she had always wanted to have. And I would have reminded my father of the boy with long, flaxen hair he once had been. Each reason – as I hope to show – would have been in character. And the second provides the key that unlocks the secret of the Pooh books.

  15. Another Portrait

  In May 1930 I said goodbye to Nanny. I was nearly ten years old. She had been with me for over eight years. Apart from her fortnight’s holiday every September we had not been out of each other’s sight for more than a few hours at a time. Even when I had gone to hospital to have my tonsils out she had come with me. I was also saying a temporary goodbye to home, for I was off to Boxgrove School near Guildford and would be spending the next three months in a strange place among strange p
eople.

  Life at a boarding school is so very different from home life that the only way some boys can cope with it is to become two boys. They split themselves down the middle and become a schoolboy at school, reverting to home-boy during the holidays. This, I suspect, is particularly true of introspective boys, such as I was. Indeed in my case the split was particularly deep. For it was now that began that love–hate relationship with my fictional namesake that has continued to this day. At home I still liked him, indeed felt at times quite proud that I shared his name and was able to bask in some of his glory. At school, however, I began to dislike him, and I found myself disliking him more and more the older I got. Was my father aware of this? I don’t know. Certainly this must have been an anxious period for him. Up to now my mother had been mainly responsible for me. Now it was his turn. He had made me a name, more of a name than he had really intended. How much of a help would this prove to be? Or how much of a hindrance?

  On the last day of the holidays the pattern was always the same. We were back in London. My father went to the Garrick Club in the morning. I lunched alone with my mother. After lunch she read aloud to me in the drawing-room. At about three o’clock my father returned. Burnside came in for my trunk and loaded it on to the car. I changed into my school clothes and said goodbye to my mother. She never came with me. The journey to school was always with my father alone. We did The Times crossword, then sat silent. School was all right when I got there, but home was so very much nicer, and these journeys, three of them every year for nine years, were as sorrowful for me as the three annual journeys in the opposite direction (by train) were blissful.

  We said our goodbyes while still in the car and while there was still a mile or two to go. We said them looking straight ahead. It was easier that way. The goodbye I said to my father was different from the one I had said an hour earlier to my mother. Hers was goodbye until the next holidays. His was only a partial goodbye; for part of him would be remaining with me, hovering over me, lovingly and anxiously watching me, throughout the term. It was he, not she, who got something done about the draughty classroom at Gibbs and the overcrowded changing-room at Stowe – (and, many years later, about a military hospital at Bari). It was he, far more often than she, who used to visit me on visiting days; he who knew the masters; he who could chat happily and naturally to the other boys.

  But first we had to get to know each other, and a vivid picture still remains with me of his first visit to Boxgrove during my first term. This was one of those rare occasions when my mother came too. It was a Wednesday afternoon. There was a cricket match on and I was watching it from the bottom of the field. Then a message came down to me: ‘Your parents have arrived’; and I hurried back up the hill towards the school. And then I saw them, side by side, coming towards me. How strange and unfamiliar they looked, how out of place in these surroundings. How little I felt I knew them. How little they seemed to be mine.

  Maybe they felt the same about me. This quiet, small, serious-looking boy, wearing his curious school clothes, with his hair now so very short. Who is he? Are we going to like him?

  During the next few years we were going to find out; and in the remaining chapters I am going to report what then, and later, was discovered. The first discoveries concern mainly my parents; the later ones myself. And we will begin with a very early – indeed a pre-school – discovery about my father.

  How much does a child ever know about the adults he lives with? There are certain things they show him, either because they want to or because they can’t help it, and there are certain other things they keep from him. Of all he sees, some he understands: of all he understands, some he remembers. And if what survives is worn and fragmented, he can, in later life, an adult now himself, do a little repair work. Now and in the chapters that follow I am not attempting more than this.

  One of the first things a child discovers about a person is what he looks like – his face. My father’s face was easiest in profile and so that was how I used to draw it. He came up to the nursery and sat, smoking his pipe, at one end of the nursery table, while I sat at the other. He sat and smoked and thought. I sat and drew and occasionally rubbed out. We both sat in silence. This was something we did from time to time, something we could do together on our first shy meetings.

  My father was not an artist. Nor was I, though there were hopes in those early days that I might eventually become one. My father was good at writing. How nice if one day I were equally good at drawing. Drawing rather than writing. You wouldn’t want to have two writers in the family; for then people might say that the son was not as good as the father, which would be sad for the son. Or they might say that the father was not as good as the son, which would be sad for the father. But if one wrote and the other drew, they could each happily tell themselves that they were both equally clever.

  So from time to time I was given pencil, paper and a profile and set to work. The result was then slipped into the wallet to be produced later at the Garrick. ‘Oh, by the way, you might like to see what my boy did yesterday.’ Or: ‘I think I might have something of his in my pocket. Not too bad really, considering he has never had any lessons.’ And then the question of possible lessons might follow. Perhaps Munnings could give some advice. (He didn’t, but he gave me a signed print of one of his paintings.) Perhaps George Morrow might come round one day. (He said he might but he never did, and we made the obvious joke as we waited hopefully.) Anyway, lessons or no lessons – and it was beginning to look a little like no lessons – it was an enjoyable way of spending an evening.

  And here I am, at the age of about eight, settling down to enjoy it. First, the bulging forehead, where all those brains were. Would I have a bulging forehead like that one day? I hoped so. Eating fish was supposed to help. I must eat lots of fish. I liked cods’ roe and haddock . . . Then the nose, large, beaky and easy. Noses were easy in profile, not so easy if they came straight at you . . . Now the mouth. ‘I’m doing your mouth. Could you possibly take your pipe out just for a moment?’ The mouth always went wrong and had to be rubbed out several times. It always came too heavy. My father had a thin, delicate mouth, and a lot of the sort of person he was could be seen in it. So if you got it wrong you had drawn someone quite different . . . ‘Done it, but it’s not very good. You can go on smoking now’ . . . The chin was a lot easier, and so was the neck with its large Adam’s apple . . . And that finished the right-hand side. Now for some bits in the middle. The eye first. The eye was even harder than the mouth. There was so little to it, yet so much of my father was in his eyes. They were blue and like the blue sea they could be warm and caressing or icy cold. Mostly they were warm and kind and gentle and humorous and perhaps a little mocking but always understanding. But how did you get all this into a few pencil lines? . . . I sighed and went on to the ear which, though full of intricate loops and curls, was easy once you were sure you were putting it in the right place . . . Then the thin fair hair brushed back to cover the bald spot . . . A few final touches: the curly line joining nostril to corner of mouth, the pipe to disguise some of the smudges round the mouth, back of head, collar, tie . . . ‘Done it!’ I passed it over. My father studied it. ‘It’s not bad,’ he said. ‘Not at all bad.’ He tried covering the lower half with his hand, then the upper half. Was the top half better than the bottom or the bottom better than the top? The eye wasn’t quite right; the mouth a little odd. But the nose was quite good. It was hard to get a likeness. How did one do it? Perhaps George Morrow, if he ever came, would tell us . . .

  Well, if I failed, at least I failed in good company. Others tried

  – distinguished professionals – and they did no better. Only Spy in his full-length portrait really – triumphantly – succeeded. What was it about my father that made him so hard to draw? And why, when he was so hard to draw, was he so easy to photograph?

  Not long ago I came upon a photograph of my father taken when he was about eighteen years old and showing him with his brothers, Ba
rry and Ken. I had not seen a photograph of my father as a young man before; and as for my uncles, I had no idea at all what they looked like, either then or at any other time; for I never met them. I wouldn’t have met Barry: my father never even spoke of him. And Ken had died when I was eight. I knew my aunts Connie and Maud well enough and I knew my cousins; but of my uncles I knew only what my father’s autobiography told me: that he had disliked Barry (though it was never made clear exactly why), and that – for reasons all too obvious – he had adored Ken. And now, seventy years after it had been taken, here was this photograph of the three of them. It was, in its small, private way, a dramatic meeting. It would have been that in any case, however indifferent the photograph. But the photograph was very far from being indifferent. It was eloquent beyond anything I had ever seen. It was not content to show me three young men. It told me all about them.

  In a single snapshot everything that I knew about the three brothers was confirmed and much that I didn’t know became clear. There in the middle is brother Barry. But can he really be their brother? Is he really a Milne? He looks so different. Everything about him is different from the other two. His hair is black and curly and parted in the middle. Theirs is fair and straight and parted on the side. Ken and Alan are dressed alike in dark suits and stiff white collars. Barry is wearing a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. And since there is only one chair, it is of course Barry who is sitting in it, leaving the others to stand on either side. They are clearly posing for their photograph, thinking it all a bit of a lark. ‘All right then, here we are, the three Milnes. Fire away and don’t blame us if it breaks the camera.’ And you can see at a glance that Barry is Mephistopheles and that inside himself he is chuckling ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ And Ken is St George and inside himself he is laughing ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ You feel you know both Barry and Ken and that if you were an artist your fingers would itch to put it all down on paper. But Alan? Alan is different. Alan is difficult. He is clearly Ken’s man, dressed like Ken, looking like Ken, on Ken’s side and so on the side of the angels. But Alan doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve as the others do. Alan’s heart is firmly buttoned up inside his jacket and only the merest hint of it can be seen dancing in his eyes, flickering in the corners of his mouth. You can see now why Alan has always been so difficult to draw.