The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  But if the great coffee innovation was a failure, there were others that were more successful. There was, for instance, the occasion when my mother and I decided that as we didn’t like tea for breakfast there was really no reason why we should always have to drink it. We could drink something else instead. Brilliant idea! So I chose Horlicks and enjoyed my breakfasts much more. Then there were the fish paste sandwiches, wafer-thin crustless triangles, that we always had at tea time. I think my father was supposed to like them, and perhaps he did. But did I? One day, after I had been eating them for about five years, the question was asked. No as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I’d much rather have a nice thick crust of bread and perhaps a tomato. ‘And I don’t see why you shouldn’t, you poor little thing,’ said my mother. So from then on that’s what I had, and tea joined breakfast as another meal to look forward to.

  Now just as naturalists learn a lot about the creatures they are studying by observing their eating habits, so can we, by watching them at their dinner table, learn a lot about human beings. But it is not enough to know what they like; one must also discover what they dislike. And this as I have shown is made very much easier if there is a professional cook on the premises.

  Here are some more things that the observer, lurking in the shadows of our dining-room, might have noted. My father put six lumps of sugar into his tea, but he disliked chocolate soufflé and instead was served with his own small cheese soufflé. With my mother it was the other way about: no sugar in her tea but a passion for rich puddings. My father liked milk but not milk puddings, my mother milk puddings but not milk. A study of what they ate might then be followed by a study of how they ate and again certain differences would be noticed. Knives and forks being tools, it is perhaps not surprising that my mother handled hers with great dexterity, my father with his usual clumsiness. (It was generally agreed within the family that my father couldn’t eat a pear without getting his elbows wet, and that after a honey sandwich he had to have a bath.) I said in a previous chapter that there was something cat-like about my mother. There was something cat-like about the way she ate, too. Just as a cat will lick at a saucer on and on until not even the ghost of a smell remains, so would my mother scrape at her plate, not greedily, just methodically, until it was spotless. My father, on the other hand, mushed his food up and then left all the bits he didn’t like – the gristly bits, the stringy bits, the skinny bits – round the edge. And because they were so different, each found the other’s habits mildly irritating. ‘I wonder why you always have to mash up your strawberries in that rather repellent way.’

  What conclusions, I wonder, would the observer draw from all this. He would spot that my mother ate omnivorously and elegantly and that my father ate fussily and messily. But would he notice that my father also ate nostalgically? Probably not, though he might have listed some odd likes and dislikes that seemed without obvious explanation.

  Why, for example, did my father, who disliked every other form of milk pudding, have such a passion for crême brulée? What was there so very special about ‘ham-and-eggs’? Why, with his sweet tooth, did he not share my mother’s Charbonnel et Walker chocolates but prefer his own private acid drops? And finally, what was the origin of the mystique that surrounded the Green Sweets?

  The answer to all these questions is that my father ate not just for present pleasure but also to re-evoke past pleasures. In the way that smells are nostalgic to most of us, so to him were tastes. Crême brulée he loved because it reminded him of when and where he had so happily first discovered it – as an undergraduate at Cambridge. ‘Ham-and-eggs’ was what he and Ken restored themselves with on their numerous walking and bicycling expeditions. ‘We then had a lovely dinner of ham and eggs . . . We had a tremendous tea of ham and eggs . . .’ wrote my father in his school magazine. This particular walk was nineteen miles and Alan was only eight and a half years old; so his hunger can be understood. And so, too, his thirst. ‘We went into a shop and bought some ginger beer . . . When we got there we bought some biscuits and some ginger beer . . .’ Ham and eggs and ginger beer, this was what the two wayfarers invariably asked for when they stopped for refreshment. Forty years later my father was once again asking for it when he and I were on the road. Did the ginger beer still taste as good as in those golden childhood days? Did it matter if it didn’t?

  As for acid drops, he didn’t in fact particularly like them, just liked having them. They were his ‘suckers’, and his time for eating them – if at all – was when my mother and I had gone up to bed and he was alone. Did he and Ken spend their pocket money on suckers? They certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford Charbonnel et Walker. Unlike Dorothy, they were not rich. They enjoyed modest pleasures; and it was these modest pleasures that my father from time to time loved to return to. ‘Ham-and-eggs’ at an inn, ginger beer in a pub, acid drops in a paper bag. It was exciting to dine in style at The Ivy but not so memorable (because memory-recalling) as the meal the two of us sometimes had towards the end of the winter holidays. ‘Let’s go to an ABC for lunch.’ ‘Oh, do let’s.’ My mother was going to be out, lunching with a friend. We would be alone together. It was our chance . . . There was an ABC at the far end of the King’s Road just before you got to Sloane Square. That was the one we went to, and we went there by bus, of course, for the bus trip was part of the memory. My father had scrambled eggs on toast (they didn’t run to ‘ham-and-eggs’) and I had baked beans on toast. And when the holidays were over and I was back at school, his first letter to me would recall that happy lunch that he and I had had together. He and I – and the ghost of Ken . . .

  There are some secrets that we long to solve. We are intrigued by the problem and long to know the answer. But there are others that are best left as they are: where an aura of mystery is worth more than the probably rather prosaic solution. In such a category I put the Green Sweets. They were a sort of crême de menthe Turkish delight, round and flat like a peppermint cream, and they were called ‘Starboard Lights’. They lived in their own special amber cut-glass jars on the dining-room table; and after lunch and after dinner we each had one – just one: never two. It was a sort of ritual. During the war these very special sweets became hard to find. ‘I’m afraid this is the best Mrs Wilson could manage.’ ‘But they’re terrible, not right at all, much too gummy.’ So friends in London were told to keep a look-out. ‘They must be “Starboard Lights”: nothing else will do’; and sometimes a tin was discovered, and, oh, what joy it brought . . . Where, I wonder, did it all start? What memories were recalled twice a day every day, year after year? When at last it all came to an end – Mallord Street sold, Cotchford sold, all the family treasures dispersed – one thing only I kept as a reminder: the pair of jars that had housed the Green Sweets since before I was born. Somewhere inside them was locked away the secret of the happiness they gave. I shall never discover it. I don’t want to learn it. It is enough to look at them from time to time and know that it is there.

  18. The Enthusiast

  Grandfather Milne was a schoolmaster. To be specific, Grandfather Milne was the headmaster of a boys’ private school called Henley House. Among his more distinguished assistant masters he could count H. G. Wells and among his more distinguished pupils his two sons, Ken and Alan.

  Of Alan he once wrote, in the school magazine:

  He does not like French – does not see that you prove anything when you have done. Thinks mathematics grand. He leaves his books about; loses his pen; can’t imagine what he did with this, and where he put that, but is convinced that it is somewhere. Clears his brain when asked a question by spurting out some nonsense, and then immediately after gives a sensible reply. Can speak 556 words per minute, and writes more in three minutes than his instructor can read in thirty. Finds this a very interesting world, and would like to learn physiology, botany, geology, astronomy and everything else. Wishes to make a collection of beetles, bones, butterflies, etc., and cannot determine whether Algebra is better than football
or Euclid than a sponge cake.5

  As my father commented: ‘It is the portrait of an enthusiast.’

  Being one of the brightest pupils of a very good headmaster and at the same time the fond son of a loving parent gave my father an attitude towards schools and teaching not generally shared by other parents. He was once the guest at a dinner party of Preparatory Schoolmasters:

  They all, so it seemed, made speeches; two Public School Headmasters made speeches; and the burden of all their speeches was the obstructiveness of the Parent to their beneficent labours. I had disclaimed any desire to make a speech, but by this time I wanted to. That very evening, offered the alternatives of a proposition of Euclid’s or a chapter of Treasure Island as a bedtime story, my own boy had chosen Euclid: it was ‘so much more fun’. All children, I said (perhaps rashly) are like that. There is nothing that they are not eager to learn. ‘And then we send them to your schools, and in two years, three years, four years, you have killed all their enthusiasm. At fifteen their only eagerness is to escape learning anything. No wonder you don’t want to meet us.’6

  My father knew a good schoolmaster from a bad one. He set high standards, and felt that he was in a position – both as the son of a headmaster and the father of a pupil whose bills he was paying – to make criticisms. Even in the best schools lapses could occur, mistakes could be made, and these must be put right. One day I came home from Gibbs and told him that we had been learning all about the Georges. ‘George 1714 to 1727, George II 1727 to 1759, George III 1759 to . . .’ ‘1759?’ said my father. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Quite sure. That’s what Miss McSheehy said.’ ‘Not 1760?’ ‘No.’ We were in his library, the dark room at the back of the house in Mallord Street where he wrote. All the way round, from floor to ceiling, were bookshelves. Somewhere here, surely, he would find confirmation . . . He went across, looked, then took out a book and opened it. ‘I thought so. George II 1727 to 1760. We’d better put them right on that.’ And so he did. That evening he rang up Mr Gibbs. Next morning in class we chanted our knowledge: ‘George I 1714 to 1727, George II 1727 to . . .’ ‘One moment, please.’ Miss McSheehy held up her hand. Then with a smile she pointed at me. ‘You tell them, Christopher.’ ‘1727 to 1760,’ I said rather smugly. Uproar. Indignation. Cries of ‘No!’ and ‘But you told us . . .’ And Miss McSheehy smiling through it all. She was a good and dedicated teacher. Accuracy was what mattered. Anyway the fault had not really been hers. It was in the book she had been using. She had shown it to Mr Gibbs and he had quoted it to my father. ‘I have it before me in black and white,’ he had said. But then he had referred to other books, and they had said differently . . .

  But if my father could stand up to schoolmasters and if he inherited some of his own father’s gifts as a teacher, he himself could never have become one. He could teach and loved teaching. He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could never impose discipline. He could never have taught a dull subject to a dull boy, never have said: ‘Do this because I say so.’ Enthusiasm spread knowledge sideways, among equals. Discipline forced it downwards from above. My father’s relationships were always between equals, however old or young, distinguished or undistinguished the other person. Once, when I was quite little, he came up to the nursery while I was having my lunch. And while he was talking I paused between mouthfuls, resting my hands on the table, knife and fork pointing upwards. ‘You oughtn’t really to sit like that,’ he said, gently. ‘Why not?’ I asked, surprised. ‘Well . . .’ He hunted around for a reason he could give. Because it’s considered bad manners? Because you mustn’t? Because . . . ‘Well,’ he said, looking in the direction that my fork was pointing, ‘suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might land on your fork and that would be very painful.’ ‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t really. It seemed such an unlikely thing to happen, such a funny reason for holding your knife and fork flat when you were not using them . . . But funny reason or not, it seems I have remembered it. In the same sort of way I learned about the nesting habits of starlings. I had been given a bird book for Easter (Easter 1934: I have the book still) and with its help I had made my first discovery. ‘There’s a blackbird’s nest in the hole under the tiles just outside the drawing-room window,’ I announced proudly. ‘I’ve just seen the blackbird fly in.’ ‘I think it’s probably really a starling,’ said my father. ‘No, it’s a blackbird,’ I said firmly, hating to be wrong, hating being corrected. ‘Well,’ said my father, realizing how I felt but at the same time unable to allow an inaccuracy to get away with it, ‘perhaps it’s a blackbird visiting a starling.’ A blackbird visiting a starling. Someone falling through the ceiling. He could never bear to be dogmatic, never bring himself to say (in effect): This is so because I say it is, and I am older than you and must know better. How much easier, how much nicer to escape into the world of fantasy in which he felt himself so happily at home.

  Luckily for him, I was, as he had been, an enthusiastic learner, eager to sit beside him on the sofa and be shown how one solved simultaneous equations. It is true that mathematics didn’t lead anywhere, neither in his day nor in mine. It had got him a scholarship to Westminster and an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. It got me a scholarship to Harrow (by mistake) and another to Stowe (which was what I really wanted) and then, later, one to Trinity. But after that, with both of us, our enthusiasm burnt itself out. The exciting road we had been following had come to an end: almost the only prospect open to the mathematician was to become a mathematics master; and neither of us could have faced that.

  So as we sat side by side, it was not of my future career that my father was thinking, but of the immediate present. For now, at long last, Nanny was out of the way. Now at last he and I could do things together. Here after ten years of waiting was his opportunity to share with me his boyhood enthusiasms, to relive his own boyhood through me, and in the process to find my love.

  How long would it last? How long does a son feel for his father that very special love that he knew so well? With him it had lasted until he was twelve but with him it had started so very much earlier. Would I stay with him a little longer to make up for those lost years? Till fourteen, perhaps, or sixteen? He was lucky. We were together until I was eighteen, very, very close. He knew he was lucky, that he had got perhaps more than he deserved, and he was very grateful. And once, a little shyly, he thanked me . . .

  Father and son. What sort of relationship is it? Does the father look down to the son, the son look up to the father? Or does the father get on to his hands and knees so that they are both on the same level? Sometimes the one, sometimes the other; but in our case neither would do. We had to be on the same level, but we both had to be standing, for my father couldn’t bend, couldn’t pretend to be what he wasn’t. We could do algebra together, and Euclid, and look for birds’ nests, and catch things in the stream, and play cricket in the meadow. We could putt on the lawn and throw tennis balls at each other. We could do those things as equals. But what about those other moments, which adults pass in casual chit-chat, which husband and wife can so happily share in complete silence, content to be in each other’s company? Meal times. Car journeys. After dinner in front of the fire. Conversation with a small child is difficult. Perhaps instead one might learn the morse code. My father had learnt it during the war when he was battalion signals officer. So now he taught me and with hand squeezes we were able to pass messages to each other as Burnside drove us down to Cotchford. Then at lunch time mightn’t I feel a bit left out if he and my mother discussed dull, grown-up things? So, ‘How about a game?’ he would say, and we would play clumps, or go through the alphabet to see how many flowers we could name beginning with each letter in turn. And finally, after dinner, almost a ritual, there was The Times crossword, with my mother (to give her a slight advantage) reading out the clues and my father trying not to be too quick with the answers.

  My father had a passion for crosswords. We shared The Times: this was the rule. It was fairly easy. I took ab
out half an hour, and though he would get most of the answers (including all the quotations), my mother and I would be able to manage a few contributions. On Sunday we took the Observer and so on Sunday evening we did the ‘Everyman’ crossword. This left my father free to wrestle single-handed with his favourite Torquemada.

  How many Torquemada solvers survive today? Any that do will surely agree that his were the most difficult crosswords and he the most brilliant composer of them all; and that even Ximenes, good though he was, was never quite in the same class.

  Solving crosswords is immensely satisfying. In a way it is the same sort of satisfaction you get from solving mathematical problems. Pencil, paper and brains: that’s what you need. And you wrestle away until at last the answer comes. Or you can describe it as fitting words into an exact, interlocking pattern of squares. You can’t alter the pattern: that is fixed. You juggle with the words, juggle with the letters, until at last it all fits, until the last letter falls neatly, satisfyingly into place. ‘Got it!’ and with a happy sigh you put your pencil back in your pocket. In this respect it resembles the writing of light verse. Does this sound surprising? Then I must get my father to explain.

  Charles Stuart Calverley was born on December 17th, 1831. He was the supreme master of one of the loveliest of arts: an art, even at its most popular, practised by few and appreciated by not many more: now a dying art, having such exigent laws, and making such demands on the craftsmanship of its practitioners, that it has no place in a brave, new, unperspiring world: the Art of Light Verse. I propose to be so old-fashioned as to write in praise of it.

  Light Verse obeys Coleridge’s definition of poetry, the best words in the best order; it demands Carlyle’s definition of genius, transcendent capacity for taking pains; and it is the supreme exhibition of somebody’s definition of art, the concealment of art. In the result it observes the most exact laws of rhyme and metre as if by happy accident, and in a sort of nonchalant spirit of mockery at the real poets who do it on purpose. But to describe it so leaves something unsaid; one must say what it is not. Light Verse, then, is not the relaxation of a major poet in the intervals of writing an epic . . . It is a precise art which has only been taken seriously, and thus qualified as an art, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . . Light Verse is not the output of poets at play, but of light-verse writers at the hardest and most severely technical work known to authorship.7