The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  Light verse started where almost everything else in my father’s life started – with Ken. They were young men, Alan still at home, Ken articled to a solicitor, when they made the unexpected discovery that each had a talent for it. ‘Good Heavens,’ wrote Ken in answer to Alan’s first effort, ‘you can do it too.’ So from then on they collaborated, and for two years they wrote light verse together.

  ‘Writing light verse in collaboration is easier than one would think,’ wrote my father.

  I don’t mean by ‘easy’ what our fellow Westminster, Cowper, meant when he boasted of the ease with which he wrote John Gilpin . . . What I mean is that light verse offers more scope for collaboration than at first thought seems possible. For a set of light verses, like a scene of stage dialogue, is never finished. One can go on and on and on, searching for the better word, the more natural phrase. There comes a time when one is in danger of losing all sense of values, and then one’s collaborator steps in suddenly with what one sees at once is the perfect word.8

  But this is only true if the two collaborators are at the same level, as Ken and Alan were when they started. If one is a professional and the other only a beginner, the beginner has little he can contribute. So he and I did not collaborate as he and Ken had done. There were verses in his letters to me. There were, rather more rarely, verses in my letters to him. But there were no verses that were the joint work of the two of us . . . You can’t teach someone how to write light verse. You can tell him the rules, your rules, the rules of your generation. But even the rules may change . . .

  In my day [wrote my father] poets said what they had to say in song. This song (poetry it was called) demanded rhyme or, at least, rhythm from its devotees, and in consequence was hard work. It was obvious, therefore, that if you were going to improve poetry you would improve it most comfortably by omitting the things which were difficult to manage – rhyme and rhythm – and concentrating on what might come to anybody, inspiration.9

  There was anyway not much point in teaching a dying art. Better stick to mathematics. After all, mathematics was where it had all started with him. Mathematics had led to light verse, to articles in Punch, to plays, to Pooh. Mathematics could in the same way start me off on the road to wherever it was I was going.

  Where was I going? ‘The boy, what will he become?’ How easy if my father had been a publisher instead of an author; for then I could have entered the family business and taken over from him when he retired. But an author has nothing tangible that he can hand on to his son. Only a handful of talents. A mathematical brain, perhaps, a sense of humour, an aptitude for games. Where did that lead you? Perhaps it didn’t really matter. Perhaps it didn’t matter what you did in life provided you did it as well as you were able to and provided you did it happily.

  These, really, were his two great talents: perfectionism and enthusiasm. He handed them on to me – and he could have given me nothing more precious.

  19. Eeyore’s Gloomy Place

  Where did Eeyore live? The others lived on the Forest or in the Hundred Acre Wood. But where was the Gloomy Place? If I were pressed I would say that the actual gloomy place was the bottom corner of the field where we used to keep Jessica. It was a very wild, tussocky, thistly field and the bottom corner was suitably marshy. With a donkey living there anyway (though not a specially gloomy one: moody, rather) this would seem the obvious spot. Yet I don’t feel quite happy about it, and I think the reason is that elsewhere it was fact that inspired fiction – Gill’s Lap that inspired Galleon’s Lap, the group of pine trees on the other side of the main road that became the Six Pine Trees, the bridge over the river at Posingford that became Poohsticks Bridge. But here it was the other way round. So that if there was an original Gloomy Place before Eeyore came along to take possession of it, it was not here. Perhaps it was nowhere. Or perhaps . . .

  Mallord Street was my mother’s work: hers alone. My father paid the bills but it was she who planned it all – who chose the furniture and the carpets and the curtains and the colour of the walls – she who decided what (and indeed who) would go where. But if there was no collaboration, there was also no argument. It was agreed that the house was her domain, and that, provided she didn’t spend money that wasn’t there, she could rule as she pleased. And this she did. She was a firm ruler. If there were any obstacles in the way she would ignore them. If any unwelcome facts upset her hopes, she would treat them as if they didn’t exist. I suggested earlier that one of the unwelcome facts that faced her soon after my arrival was that I was clearly a boy, and that for nine years she tried to ignore this by dressing me as a girl. I am not entirely sure how seriously I take this theory, but at least it is not out of character. Fortunately, in this particular instance, mind failed to triumph over matter and I remained a boy. But only just; and I was one of her few failures.

  But if she was an autocrat, she was a benevolent autocrat. She ruled well; and the house, and all who visited it, all who lived in it, all who worked in it, would pay unqualified tribute to her abilities. The fact that Gertrude stayed with us throughout our Mallord Street days and only left when she found she couldn’t bear life in the country; the fact that we had only two cooks in London – Mrs Penn and Mrs Gulliver; only two cooks at Cotchford – Mrs Tasker (until a growing family compelled her to become a full-time mother) and Mrs Wilson; only two gardeners (the first one blotting his copybook almost at once and having to be dismissed); only one Nanny: all bear testimony to this. And my mother was not only good with people. She was good with things, too. She had an eye for what was beautiful. It was her own eye, a natural eye, an untaught eye. She liked what she liked because she liked it, not because it was supposed to show good taste to like it. She didn’t like antique furniture because she didn’t like brown polished wood, and she particularly disliked mahogany. Brown was a dreary colour: she preferred gay colours – reds and yellows and greens. So she preferred painted furniture, and it didn’t particularly matter whether it was old or new. It was nice to think that the chair she sat in to write her letters had come out of an ancient Venetian gondola, but it was equally nice to think that the wardrobe in her bedroom had been painted for her by a friend. The result of her labours was undoubtedly very lovely: at its best in the drawing-room and in her bedroom, but later on, when Peter Jones took it in hand, almost as good in the dining-room. At Peter Jones in the 1930s they were buying up ugly, heavy, Victorian, mahogany furniture – the sort of thing my mother most disliked – stripping off the polish and painting it in a style reminiscent of that of the Adams brothers. It was a treatment that fitted in very pleasingly with the pieces of old Italian painted furniture that a friend of my mother’s (who ran a small antique shop) was occasionally able to acquire for her.

  As a child I specially loved her bedroom. I loved to sit on the soft carpet in front of the gas fire drying myself after a bath. It was on top of her wardrobe that the Christmas parcels were put; and day by day I would watch the pile grow until at last, about a week before Christmas, I was allowed to start opening. One a day. Which one shall it be this morning? This one, large and square and rattly. My mother lifted it down and put it on the floor for me. Oh, unforgettable bliss, never to be recaptured!

  At the top of the house was my nursery. We have already seen it through my childish eyes. An adult, visiting it, would find it no less pleasant: large, light, airy and gay, pleasingly furnished in a simple, modern style, a room designed – as a nursery should be – for doing things in, messy things, racketty things, rough-and-tumble things . . .

  At the back of the house on the same floor were two smaller rooms, side by side. One was shared by Gertrude and Mrs Gulliver, the other was my father’s bedroom. It was a very dark room and consequently only a very dim impression of it survives: an impression of ugly, heavy, Victorian, mahogany furniture, and of very little floor space in between. There were two pictures on the wall, or it may have been a double picture in a single frame. You could see them when you turned on the light. In the
one a jaunty little man was taking his stance at the wicket: ‘The Hope of the Side.’ In the other was the same little man, but jaunty no longer: ‘Out First Ball.’ This was possibly the only thing in the whole room that really belonged to my father, the rest having been put there (so it seemed) because they had to go somewhere. As a boy these twin pictures used to make me smile. Today I still smile at the memory of them, but sadly now. Poor little cricketer! Do you remind me of somebody?

  As a child one accepts without question that this room is the drawing-room, this the dining-room, that this is your bedroom and this mine. It never occurs that these are things that have to be decided. And certainly I would never have wondered who did the deciding, whether anyone else was consulted and whether or not all were in favour.

  Of course it was my mother who decided and my father who accepted – and who then made the discovery that once again the dampest, darkest, coldest, dingiest rooms had been reserved for him. I doubt if he ever complained, but I just don’t know how much he silently minded.

  One doesn’t want to offer sympathy unnecessarily. If you are a writer what you want above all else is quiet. You don’t in the least need gay, light, airy surroundings. A lot of sympathy is wasted on those who write in garrets. I am writing this in a garret, a small room that is utterly unlovely, that has never been decorated, never even cleaned since we came here twenty-two years ago. The plywood ceiling boards are sagging, the distemper is flaking off them and they are blotched with damp stains. The room is lit by a small skylight which also lets in the rain. There is no other lighting, there is no heating, and it is November. Yet I have chosen this room from all the others and it suits me perfectly. So I doubt if my father was sad about the rooms where he worked. I doubt if he ever wondered to himself when it might be their turn for a visit from the Peter Jones man. Indeed, any complaining was more likely to come from my mother. ‘It really is just like a third class railway carriage in here.’ But his bedroom, surely, was different – his bedroom, dark, cramped and dismal, furnished, so it seemed, with what was left over, what wouldn’t go anywhere else . . .

  Then there was his armchair by the fire in the drawing-room at Cotchford. All the other chairs were re-upholstered from time to time as they grew shabby, but somehow this chair always got overlooked. Sitting in it he had a slightly restless habit with his right elbow and over the years this had worn a hole not just through the cover but deep into the flock padding. Nothing was ever done about it. Now and then gentle hints were dropped: my father would never have gone further than that. But my mother’s rather brusque reply was always the same: ‘Well, I don’t really see that there’s much point. You would only go and fidget another hole.’

  So perhaps somewhere here – in his armchair, in his little, north-facing bedroom at Cotchford, in his dark, cramped, dismal bedroom next door to Gertrude and Mrs Gulliver in London – is to be found the original of Eeyore’s Gloomy Place.

  Most of us have small, sad places somewhere in our hearts and my father was no exception. Sometimes we let our feelings escape in bursts of anger. Sometimes we make long, dismal faces. My father did neither. He felt deeply but he kept his feelings to himself. Or rather, being a writer, he let them escape in his writing. But even here he disguised them, unable even in fiction to allow himself to take himself too seriously. And so such sadnesses as there were put on cap and bells and emerged as Eeyore, the old grey donkey. Eeyore is gloomy, but you can’t feel sorry for him. You never long to make him happy. You know that it would be impossible, and that in any case he really prefers it that way. Silly old Eeyore to feel so sad in a world that is really so sunny and gay!

  This book, as I said earlier, is a photograph album, a collection of snapshots. There is no place in it for an anatomical drawing. If the sad side of my father’s life was kept from me as a child, I shall not now try to unearth it. Enough for me to be grateful that I knew only his smiles. Enough for others that he gave them Eeyore.

  20. Collaboration

  ‘In August of that year (1920) my collaborator produced a more personal work.’10

  In those early days my father liked to think of himself and my mother as collaborators. His book, Once a Week, appearing in 1914, was dedicated to ‘my collaborator who buys the ink and paper, laughs, and in fact does all the really difficult part of the business’. But of course this was not the collaboration that had produced the light verse that he and Ken had written together. My mother and father were not really collaborators at all in that sense: not in what my father wrote. Nor indeed in anything he did. Or rather only in one thing, and that was the work they jointly produced in 1920.

  About sixteen years after that event I was standing with my father in front of the summerhouse at Cotchford when, thinking his thoughts aloud, he said: ‘You know, I often tell myself that everything we are is that way because that was how our parents made us. Every talent we have has been inherited. And this is something worth remembering if ever we feel ourselves getting a bit swanky. The credit is not ours: it is theirs. Not even theirs, really, but their parents’. And so on, back and back. And even if you say ‘‘I had this talent and he had it too, but he wasted his and I used mine. Surely that is to my credit,’’ the answer is no. For if we make use of a talent it is only because we have another talent, a talent for using talents, a talent for hard work, if you like; and this too was inherited . . .’

  Perhaps one of the things I have inherited from my father is his attitude to pride. One is entitled to feel proud of something one has done if one genuinely believes one has done it well. One is entitled to feel inwardly proud of oneself for doing it well. One is even allowed to bask happily, though modestly, in the praise of others. But one is never entitled to be conceited, to be boastful, to display one’s pride in public. It is conceit rather than pride that is the deadly sin. So that when we feel our pride bubbling up inside us, threatening to spill out into conceit, we must cork it down with the thought that, clever though we are, it is a cleverness that was given to us, not one of our own making. In this way we can perhaps look at ourselves dispassionately, with something of a Mendelian eye, seeing ourselves as the product of two people who have collaborated. Perhaps this thought may help us not just to suppress our pride but also to feel less unhappy about our failures; for if we have inherited all that is good in us we have also surely inherited all that is bad. If our talents came from our parents, so too did our un-talents; and this thought is consoling.

  Of course, inheritance is only where it starts; my father was well aware of this. Teaching played its part, and a very important part. A talent for cricket, a ‘natural eye’, was not enough. Instinct won’t tell you how to deal with an in-swinger on the leg stump. There must be coaching, long hours at the nets: ‘Head down, Milne. Nose over the ball.’ Teaching was vital if a talent was to be given its best chance. What brilliant son of a brilliant schoolmaster would not acknowledge that? Nor is it surprising that my father was, himself, a good teacher, and that I, like him, enjoyed learning.

  First the talent, then the teaching. Lastly the luck. This, too, my father acknowledged, again and again. He had been lucky and he knew it. ‘My real achievement’, he wrote, contemplating the fact that he had been made Assistant Editor of Punch at the age of twenty-four, ‘was to be not wholly the wrong person in the right place at the right time.’ Luck! Like the dropped catch that enables you to go on to score fifty and so get a trial for the First Eleven . . . Or equally the catch that wasn’t dropped, and doomed you for ever to the Third Eleven.

  If in this chapter I take the stage again, dressed now in grey flannel trousers and tweed jacket, and with my hair at last mercifully short, I do so as the product of that collaboration that started in 1920, and for the light which I hope it will throw on those two collaborators, my parents.

  ‘And do you write, too?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t inherited any of your father’s great gifts, then?’

  ‘No,’ I sai
d.

  ‘Well, now. Isn’t that extraordinary!’

  No, I thought. But I kept quiet.

  Why should it always be assumed that it is talents that are passed on and not un-talents? If my father had a talent for writing, my mother had an un-talent. Why should people always assume that I ought to have inherited the one rather than the other? If talents always dominated un-talents we should today be a world of Newtons, Shakespeares, Leonardos and saints. Blessed are the untalented!

  Writing (so it seems to me) is a combination of two separate skills: the ability to use words and the ability to create with words; rather in the way that building a house demands two separate skills, the bricklayer’s and the architect’s. A writer, in other words, is simultaneously a craftsman and a designer. If my father felt, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, an urge to be a writer, it was probably because he felt first an urge to create; and it was probably fortunate for him (and us) that this was an urge he could satisfy in no other way. Another man might have made things with his hands; my father made things with his imagination. If you haven’t the creative urge or if it is satisfied elsehow, then, although you may be a skilled craftsman, writing the most delightful letters to your friends, the most lucid reports to your superiors, you will never produce a poem or a play or a story. You may make a journalist but you will never make an author.