Difficult to draw, yet easy to photograph. Artists failed. Photographers – even unskilled amateur photographers – succeeded. What about writers? What about an unskilled amateur writer? Well, I must just do my best. Luckily I shan’t be attempting anything too ambitious, certainly not a full-length study, just a collection of snapshots.
My father’s heart remained buttoned up all through his life, and I wouldn’t want now to attempt to unbutton it, to write about the things he never spoke about. All I hope to do is to catch some of the overflow that came bubbling out and get it on to the page before it runs to waste. No more than that.
16. She Laughed at My Jokes
Alan Milne married Dorothy de Selincourt in 1913. This, of course, was before my time, and since they didn’t talk to me about those early days (why should they?), I have to rely now on my father’s autobiography for information. Not that he gives much. However, two sentences are all I need for the present. The first is: ‘She laughed at my jokes.’
Surely this is the one absolutely vital qualification for a professional humorist’s wife: that she should laugh at his jokes. Jokes are delicate things and my father’s were especially delicate. Was it funny? Only someone’s laughter would tell you. Only someone’s laughter would encourage you to go on trying to be funny. It is true that a writer writes first to please himself and that his own satisfaction with what he has done is perhaps his greatest satisfaction. But writing is a means of communication. It is not enough to speak; you must also be heard. The message must be received and understood. Also a writer needs praise. At least my father did. He needed someone to say: ‘I loved it, darling. It was awfully good.’ Of course, anyone who is well trained can say that without really meaning it, and I know that on one or two rare occasions my mother did. You can pretend to admire, but, unless you are a superb actress, you can’t pretend to laugh. Laughter is genuine or else it is just a noise.
So if a marriage bureau had been trying to fit my father with a suitable partner, a girl who laughed at his jokes, who shared his sense of humour, would be at the top of the list quite regardless of any other qualifications. Did it matter that she couldn’t play golf? Did it matter that she didn’t enjoy watching cricket? Did it matter that she wasn’t very brainy? Not in the least.
Of course, young married couples like doing things together, delight in sharing each other’s pleasures. So perhaps in those early days there were moments of sadness, as when my mother discovered that my father didn’t like rice pudding, or when my father had to admit that my mother would never be any good with a mashie-niblick. In fact, there were really very few things that they did enjoy doing together. So wisely, they did them separately, then met afterwards and told each other of their adventures: and if something funny had happened to one of them, they could laugh together about it and be happy.
This meant that when, in 1930, I came downstairs to join them, I found that I was either doing things with my mother or doing things with my father; not very often with both. It all seemed quite natural. I wasn’t expecting my mother to bowl to me at our net in the meadow, or come looking for birds’ nests. And if she and I were engaged on some sort of redecoration in the house or work in the garden, I wasn’t expecting more than just admiration from my father when it was done. So far as I know, both my mother and my father continued to enjoy in married life all the pleasures they had enjoyed when single. They had been enjoying them alone. Now they could enjoy them with me.
No. This is not quite true. There is one possible exception, one pleasure that I think my mother had to sacrifice.
This is guesswork on my part. For she never admitted it. Indeed she may never have been consciously aware of it. My clue is a remark she made. It struck me as surprising at the time and so I remembered it. And now, sorting through my jumble of memories, I have come upon it with its label ‘Surprising Remark’ and the date: 1940.
We were at Cotchford. We had left London for good, but my father had gone up for the day, as he did once a week, and I was alone with my mother. It was not a very nice day, not nice enough to be out of doors, and there was nothing special I wanted to do indoors. So I thought I would listen to a concert on the wireless. This was a thing I had never done at home before. We had a wireless but didn’t use it for music – just for the news and perhaps also the Saturday night play (which my mother enjoyed up to the point at which she fell asleep and which my father and I were more or less able to read our books through). It was a pity about music, a pity good music meant so little to either of them, not that our wireless was really much use if you wanted to listen to that sort of thing: for it had been chosen for its smallness and neatness and elegance, not for its voice. However, it was better than nothing. I was rather hoping that my mother was going to be upstairs in her bedroom, but she had come down and was now lying on one of the sofas reading. Bother! But it couldn’t be helped. I took the wireless to the other sofa at the other end of the room by the window and turned it on not too loud. I loved music. I had discovered my love for it at school when I had discovered that I could sing. Since I can’t sing at all now, and since I can look back on my boyhood self as someone quite different from me today, I feel that it is not being boastful if I say that I used to be able to sing very well indeed. The music cup at Boxgrove bore my name for three successive years. In fact my father was so impressed by my voice that he bought me a ukelele and had someone in to teach me to play it. ‘It’s only a shanty in old shanty town,’ I crooned to him, ‘The roof is so slanty it touches the ground’. When the music master at Stowe, searching for talent among the new boys, had shaken my top A out of his ears, he asked me if I also played any instrument.‘A ukelele,’ I said proudly. ‘I don’t call that an instrument,’ he answered. Nor, now, do I, but I was a bit hurt at the time. I wish now that I had learned to play something – some proper instrument – to replace the voice I lost when, a year later, it broke. But there it was, and I could at least enjoy listening. I had a gramophone at school. My parents had given it to me. They had chosen it for its neatness and elegance; but luckily my study companion had one too, and his had been chosen for its voice. So we listened to Sibelius on his.
And now I was listening to Elgar’s viola concerto, and when it was over I turned the wireless off. I had been playing it quite softly. I hoped I hadn’t disturbed my mother. She had been very quiet, perhaps reading, perhaps sleeping. And now came her remark: ‘I liked that,’ she said.
When my father made Rabbit say to Owl: ‘You and I have brains. The others have fluff’, he might have been thinking of the de Selincourts. For there was no doubt that Uncle Ernest, the famous Wordsworth scholar, had immense brain, and so had brother Aubrey. And there is equally little doubt that Dorothy and brother Bob had fluff. But if there had been this unequal distribution of brain among the family, all, in their individual ways, were artistic. This turned the brainy ones into intellectuals, making them, in the eyes of the unbrainy, totally unbearable. They talked about Art in a solemn and learned manner which the others couldn’t stand. One can imagine Uncle Ernest sweeping Aubrey off to the Tate Gallery or the Queen’s Hall, leaving Dorothy, to whom chiaroscuro and allegro vivace meant absolutely nothing at all, upstairs in her bedroom, contemplating her wardrobe and humming her own private home-made hums. If only Beethoven didn’t have to be surrounded by all this eyes-shut, lips-pursed stuff, this intenseness, this awful Uncle Ernest, she might have enjoyed him.
Then came Alan. And now comes my second quotation from his autobiography: ‘. . . and I, in my turn, had a pianola to which she was devoted, and from which I could not keep her away.’
Go on: smile. You are meant to. It is a little joke. You don’t really imagine girls can be devoted to pianolas, surely!
Alan was brainy, but Alan was not artistic. And so Alan mercifully was not intellectual. He disliked Uncle Ernest as much as did Dorothy. If Alan knew Tennyson by heart, this only meant that he could be relied on to do the Tennyson quotations in The Times crossword. Alan and
Dorothy, as well as laughing at the same jokes, would laugh together at intellectuals. But, alas, Alan was not musical. The pianola led nowhere. Poor Dorothy! She could read her own books. She could decorate her bedroom to her own taste. There were many things which she could do on her own, but listening to music was not among them: this was something that they had to do together. Together they enjoyed Sullivan and Jerome Kern. Together they went to Stop Flirting, No, No, Nanette and Music in the Air. And if, on the following day, my father said: ‘That was a catchy little song at the end of the second Act. How did it go?’, my mother would think a little, then try out a few notes, stop, shake her head, look up at the ceiling, smile, try again – nearly – once more – Got it! And she would be off, humming it all, perfectly remembered. She liked what she liked: that was something. But she might have liked so much more.
Sullivan, of course, was also Gilbert. Musical comedy was comedy as well as music. And so, sitting side by side in the stalls, listening to the music, they could also laugh at the words. And so, too, could I. And since so much of the holidays was going to be spent doing things either with my mother or with my father, how nice to start with something we could all three enjoy together. What shall it be this time? Hooray! Leslie Henson, Fred Emney and Richard Hearne were on at the Gaiety. This was my absolute favourite. Or perhaps it might be Bobby Howes. Or Arthur Riscoe. Once it was Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, and I enjoyed myself so much that in the intervala box of chocolates was brought round for me. ‘For me?’ ‘Yes, sir. It is from Miss Courtneidge. She said it was for the little boy who is laughing so loudly.’
So you see, whether you are an actress or whether you are a writer, it is all the same. You do need someone to laugh at your jokes.
17. Green Sweets
Today we ‘do-it-ourselves’. Indeed we do so much ourselves that it is hard to remember there was a time, not so very long ago, when a newly-married couple could manage virtually nothing without help. Naturally they couldn’t tackle the wall-papering or fix the leaky tap: even today we feel quite proud of ourselves if we can cope with that. But neither could they sweep the floor or make the beds or do the laundry. Nor could they cook or wash up. At least they couldn’t if one of them was a de Selincourt. Dorothy had never been taught any of these things. From time to time my father and I used to wonder just what it was that Dorothy had been taught. We knew that she had been ‘finished’ in France. But where and with what it had all begun remained a mystery.
Dorothy was not brainy. No one expected her to shine at algebra. But this still left plenty of things that she could have learnt and which she would have enjoyed doing and done well if only this had been proper. In the 1914–18 war when it was all right for nicely brought up young ladies to do manual work for the sake of our gallant boys, my mother had learnt to tie up parcels. I’m not sure what went inside them, probably comforts for the troops, Balaclava helmets and socks lovingly knitted by other young ladies. This was, almost certainly, the only practical thing she was ever properly taught how to do in her whole life, and the result was that she did it both then and ever afterwards exceedingly well. If today I am an expert parcel tier myself – and I may say that I am an expert parcel tier – it is because I learnt the craft at my mother’s knee. I used to watch her fascinated: the brisk competent folding of the paper that pressed the misshapen contents into a neat, firm rectangular form; the string tied so quickly, so tightly and with such an economy of knots; the result so solid and symmetrical that it seemed wrong that anyone should ever want to open it. Today from time to time I try to pass on this skill to others, but I know that, however hard I try, all they will be able to manage in the end is a squashy brown bundle loosely slung in a hammock of string. Pick it up at the wrong end, give it a shake, and all has to be done again.
But if my mother was taught to tie up parcels, she was (naturally) never taught to untie them. She was at the supplying end, not the receiving end. And anyway undoing parcels was not really a thing that needed lessons. So she taught herself. She did it by the light of nature. She merely reversed the process of tying up. It took about half an hour if the knots were tight. It left my father and myself jumping up and down with impatience if the parcel was an exciting one. ‘Oh, go on. Cut it!’ But no. String was precious. You can’t buy string. At least my mother wouldn’t have known how to set about trying to buy it. And you can’t buy paper. So it all had to be saved. ‘Anyway, I like undoing parcels,’ she said as she wound up the string on her hand. ‘Don’t rush me,’ she said as she carefully flattened the crumples out of the paper.
My mother was practical. She was no good at games. Give her a putter and you only had to see the way she held it to realize that. But just watch her with a pair of shears cutting the grass! I still model my technique on hers. My father was the reverse, a natural games player, at his happiest with a club or a bat, but all fumbles with any sort of tool. ‘You’re not exactly the neat-handed Phyllis,’ as my mother once pointed out to him.
My mother would have made a good cook. But young ladies weren’t taught cooking. They were not taught gardening either; but there is a difference between the two. No matter how many gardeners there are, it is still possible for the mistress to have her own trowel and her own pair of secateurs. There are still things that the mistress can do and do well and which the gardener will be only too happy to let her do. But in the kitchen there can only be one cook. So if you’ve never been told how to boil an egg or make a pot of tea, and if the presence of cook makes experiment impossible, you will go through life without ever knowing. My mother never knew. She visited the kitchen from time to time. In London she visited it every morning and spent half an hour or so with Mrs Gulliver planning menus and chatting about this and that. At Cotchford the menus were left to Mrs Wilson and her visits were less frequent. But I doubt if she ever watched the experts at their work. I remember an occasion after the war when I was visiting Cotchford for a weekend. Things were a little different now. Times had changed. There was an awareness of the fact that Mrs Wilson wasn’t getting any younger, that the presence of visitors made extra work for her, and that we must all do our bit to help. So after tea the tray was carried into the hall; then, one by one, the cups and plates and saucers were taken into the little washroom (where in the old days the pumping used to be done). And I can see my mother now, plate held under the tap, forefinger delicately urging fragments of jam towards the drain. ‘I always think,’ she said, ‘that getting jam off plates must be the hardest part of washing up.’
The reader may smile at this naïveté, may think how lucky people were in those days to have cooks to cook and maids to wash and scrub. And indeed an author today, who, when not writing, is probably bathing the baby or making the breakfast or washing up the supper or hoovering the hall or any one of a hundred domestic chores, may well envy my father who wrote from about 10.30 in the morning until just before lunch and from after tea until just before dinner, and who could then do just as he pleased for the whole of the rest of the day. Nevertheless, there is another side to it, which I must mention.
If, for instance, you boil your own egg and give it four minutes and it is too soft, the matter is easily remedied: next time you give it five minutes. But if the egg has been cooked by cook and brought in by the maid and is then discovered to be too soft, the problem is virtually insoluble.
‘Oh, dear. My egg’s all runny.’
‘Don’t you like it like that?’
‘Well, you know I don’t. I don’t mind the yolk a bit soft but I don’t like being able to see it through the white.’
‘What a fuss-pot you are.’
‘I’d rather it was too hard than too soft. You couldn’t mention it to Mrs Wilson, perhaps.’
‘But you’ve been having eggs like this for years. I can’t suddenly say you don’t like them. She’d be terribly upset.’
However good they are – and both Mrs Wilson and Mrs Gulliver were very good – cooks do bring a certain inflexibility to the
menu. Eggs, once soft-boiled, remain soft-boiled for ever. It was much the same with coffee. We had coffee after dinner at Mallord Street. Why did we never have it at Cotchford? Just because we never did: the opportunity for asking for it had been missed and now it was too late. Anyway, there would be coffee again when we got back to London, ‘And it’s nice not always having everything the same,’ said my mother. But when we left London for good in 1940 we were faced with coffeeless evenings for the rest of our lives unless something was done about it; and somewhere around seven years later the innovation was achieved. Great excitement. Great congratulations. A landmark in our lives. My father ladled in the sugar, stirred and drank, paused, drank again, then looked across at my mother.
‘Do you think she’s got it quite right?’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’
‘Well, mine tastes salty. She can’t have muddled up the salt with the sugar, can she?’
‘You’re supposed to put a little salt in. She told me so. It brings out the flavour.’
My father took another sip.
‘Darling, this is really quite undrinkable.’
‘Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. You can’t leave it. She’d be so hurt.’
So we used to drink it. It was frightful and we drank it very fast, like medicine.
The Enchanted Places Page 10