The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  Armed with this thought, let us now look dispassionately at the object which Mrs Penn described so memorably on that August morning long ago as ‘tall like mistress’. It is lying in its cradle, wrinkled and ugly. Suddenly, unseen by anyone, a Fairy appears, stoops over the cradle, waves her magic wand and casts her magic spell. ‘He shall have his father’s brains and his mother’s hands!’ She speaks, then vanishes. The years pass by. The infant grows up. The spell begins to come true. Yes, she was a real Fairy all right. The only doubt is: was she the Good Fairy or was she the Bad Fairy? At first it seemed a blessing to be good at algebra and equally good at carpentry. ‘Versatile’ was our word for it. Later, we talked about ‘strings to the bow’. In the end I think we all had to admit to ourselves, if not to each other, that what a bow needs is one really good string, not two fairly good ones.

  But as I have already said, my father never wanted me to be a writer. An artist, perhaps. An architect, perhaps. But not a writer. This great talent was all his own and not to be shared. Anyway, a ten-year-old schoolboy doesn’t need to be thinking about his career just yet. Other things come first. Cricket, for instance.

  Cricket, like football, is a game you can either play or (equally happily) watch. My father did both. He did most of his watching at the Oval, and as soon as I was old enough I accompanied him. I was about ten or eleven, and, if I remember, Woolley was batting at the time . . . We lived in Chelsea and so should by rights have backed Middlesex, but my father’s allegiance as a Londoner was always to Surrey. When we bought Cotchford he transferred most of it to Sussex; and I was for Sussex, too, wholeheartedly. Yet I never saw Sussex play. We never went to Hove. We never even watched a match at Tunbridge Wells, though it was only eight miles away and we went there often to shop. Our cricket watching was confined to the first two days of the summer holidays while we were still in London. Once we had moved down to Cotchford, though we would listen to the Test Match on the wireless – my father in the garden suddenly remembering, looking at his watch, giving a shout, galloping indoors, me following, enthusiastic, but with my enthusiasm never quite matching his – and though we would excitedly follow the fortunes of Sussex in the papers, we would never watch another first-class match. Why was this? Partly, I think, it was because he didn’t want to have more than his fair share of me. If I was with him, then I was not with my mother. I played golf with him in the morning, I putted with him, played catch with him, and then in the evening we bowled at each other in the meadow. This was already almost more than his ration; and so, much as he might have liked to take me up to London to watch Surrey playing Sussex, it would have been wrong to do so. This was one reason, but there was, I think, another. Our visit to the Oval was more than just an opportunity to watch a game of cricket, just as the Green Sweet at the end of a meal was more than just the taste of peppermint. It was a ritual.

  When, I wonder, did it all start? When did their father first take young Ken and Alan to the Oval, and who were the great ones they watched and whose fortunes they followed? Did they, too, confine their visits to the first days of the summer holidays? Did Ken and Alan continue these visits when they were grown up? Did Alan try taking Dorothy, hoping to make her an enthusiast too? Vain hope! So in the end Alan would have gone alone, taking only his memories, until at last the day came when I was old enough to join him, and the ritual could be re-established.

  The turnstiles clicked as we went in. ‘Soft seats, sixpence! Soft seats, sixpence!’ My father dug a shilling out of his pocket. ‘Match card! Card of the match! Match card!’ From up here where we were sitting the distant voice had its own peculiar and memorable resonance. My father gesticulated to attract attention and gave his attention-catching whistle, and the voice came nearer . . . There’s more to watching cricket than wondering who’s going to win. Even the sparrows and the pigeons seem different here. Even the distant gasometers are lovely. Even the sky, palest blue patches showing between high, yellow-tinged clouds, is unique and unforgettable. And then, of course, there is the luncheon interval, and the battered leather attaché case can be put on the seat between us and opened. No need to wonder what is inside it: ham sandwiches, egg sandwiches and a paper bag full of cherries. This was how it always was. This, I suspect, was how it had always been. And while I looked forward happily to eight whole weeks of Cotchford, my father, equally happily, looked back . . .

  Two days at the Oval and then down to Cotchford to try out some of the strokes I had been watching; to be C. F. Walters flicking his wrists and sending the ball past extra cover to the boundary; to be Frank Woolley sweeping a long hop over mid-wicket’s head. If I never became a good cricketer (and I never became a good cricketer) no one could say it was for lack of instruction. In fact I suppose one might fairly say it was from over-instruction. My road to the Third Eleven began during the Christmas holidays when I was nine years old. The South African cricketer, Major J. A. Faulkner, was running a cricket school somewhere in South London, and thither Burnside drove us, my father and me, four mornings a week. Here I was put in the charge of T. B. Reddick and shown how to make the forward defensive stroke. By the end of the holidays I could play forward defensively and I could also follow through with a flick of the wrists when the good length ball was a half volley. The following May, armed with these two strokes, I went to my new prep school, and to my slight disappointment found them of only limited value. However, next Christmas I learned the back stroke. Subsequently, when Faulkners closed down, we moved to a school run by Sandham and Strudwick, and I progressed to square cuts, late cuts, hooks and glides. And I may say that I cut and hooked, glided and drove with considerable skill and elegance. So that if this was all there was to cricket I felt fairly confident that one day I would be playing for England.

  Unfortunately, however, there are other things: things like not getting out first ball and like making runs; even totally different things like fielding and not dropping catches. And here my skill deserted me. Cricket, one might say, makes two requirements of its practitioners: a co-ordination of hand and eye and the right temperament. I had the one but not the other. It was not just that I was content to be graceful and elegant without bothering about runs (though this was partly the trouble). It was that I trembled. And, as the cricket master at Boxgrove once pointed out to me: ‘The Captain of the First Eleven, taking his stance at the wicket, just ought not to tremble.’ I also trembled when a catch came my way, so that I nearly always dropped it. Once I had got past the trembling stage, had scored half a dozen runs and got my eye in, I might well end up with a creditable innings. And if, in the field, a ball was hit at me so hard that I hadn’t time to start worrying I might very well bring off a brilliant one-handed catch. Nervousness! That was what kept me in the Third Eleven at Stowe. Bad luck as well, of course, like that time I played slightly across my second ball trying to hit it past mid-on . . . But mainly, I must now admit, just nervousness. Inherited, naturally, which is a consolation . . .

  Grandfather Milne was nervous. Not nervous or shy or awkward with boys; only with grown-ups. ‘His shyness became apparent to us,’ wrote my father,11 ‘when we went out walking together and met an acquaintance. As soon as the acquaintance was sighted Papa would cut short his conversation, or ours, and prepare for the ordeal. The funny story, the explanation of the Force of Gravity, our answer to a catch-question had to wait . . . He let my hand go, and put his own up to his hat. ‘‘Good morning, Mr Roberts, good morning to you, good morning.’’ Mr Roberts returned the greeting and passed, but Papa’s greeting went on. His hand still went up and down to his hat in nervous movements, he still muttered ‘‘Good morning to you.’’’

  Some of his shyness was passed on to my father, but not enough to make him awkward or embarrassed or unhappy; enough only to prevent him from being a ready mixer, the life and soul of the party; enough to keep him behind his Times on a train journey; and enough, fortunately, to make him sympathize with me. For if the Milne shyness retreated when it reached my father, it d
id so the better to attack when my turn came.

  And what an opportunity it found! An only child, oddly dressed, odd hair-style, odd name, the hero of a nursery story. ‘Hullo, Christopher Robin! Still saying your prayers?’

  An only child needs someone to cling to. I began by clinging to my Nanny. I clung so tightly that she became almost a part of me, so that when I was told one August afternoon that I was to spend a fortnight with Anne and her family on the Kent coast and that Nanny would not be coming with me, I lay down on the ground and howled: and the memory of that howling is still vivid.

  But tiny children are often shy. This is quite natural and nothing to worry about. They grow out of it eventually. With such thoughts my parents no doubt reassured themselves.

  When I was nine Nanny left. I was still as shy as ever; worse, if anything. I still needed someone to cling to. So I clung to my father. For nearly ten years I had clung to Nanny. For nearly ten more years I was to cling to him, adoring him as I had adored Nanny, so that he too became almost a part of me, at first, no doubt, to his delight, later perhaps to his anxiety. ‘Do I, Nanny?’ I had asked when I was a child and Nanny had provided the answer. Now my father was providing the answer, not because I didn’t know it, but because I couldn’t say it. Around the age of eight – and not altogether surprisingly – my voice had begun to get itself knotted up. By the age of twelve, though I was fluent on occasions, there were other occasions when the words got themselves sadly jammed. By the age of sixteen the jamming had got worse, and my shyness wasn’t helping things. Grandfather Milne could at least say ‘Good morning’; I would have stuck at the ‘G’, and, aware of an insurmountable ‘G’ approaching me down the road, I would have hurried up a side street to avoid it. What does a parent do in such circumstances? Does he (for example) say ‘If you want it you must go and buy it yourself’? Or does he say ‘All right, let’s go and buy it together’? Rightly or wrongly, it was the latter that my father did, and I blessed him for it and loved him all the more.

  So there I was, very close indeed to my father, adoring him, admiring him, accepting his ideas, yet at the same time immensely sensitive, easily wounded, quick to take offence. An accidental word of reproof or criticism from him and tears would stream from my eyes and a barrier of silence would descend between us keeping us apart for days. So he had to be careful what he said. But provided he was careful I was, I imagine, an easy child to teach. His knowledge, his opinions, his beliefs could be passed on to me and I would eagerly accept them as my own. It was too easy, almost. In fact it was dangerously easy.

  My father used to say that the third-rate brain thought with the majority, the second-rate brain thought with the minority and the first-rate brain thought for itself. His was, and he wanted mine to be, a first-rate brain. There were facts that he could teach me: facts that were not in dispute, like how to bowl a leg break or solve a quadratic equation. But where there was uncertainty, where opinions differed, here I would have to think and decide for myself. And perhaps the largest, most fundamental and most vital area of uncertainty lay in what one believed about God.

  If you had talked to my father about his religious beliefs (and if he had been prepared to discuss them with you) you might have concluded that he was a Humanist. But of course he would have objected to the label as he would object to any label that seemed to put him among a class of people all thinking alike. He might have preferred to be described as an agnostic, since this was a purely negative definition, describing what he was not. As to what he was, as to what exactly he did believe, this, in the end, he recorded in his book The Norman Church. But The Norman Church was not written until 1948 when he was approaching seventy. Up to this his views had been his own affair, kept almost entirely to himself.

  As to my views, I have already boldly stated what I thought they were at the age of three; and they remained substantially the same for the next fifteen years. In other words, here was I a Believer, and here was my father an Unbeliever, and somewhere in between (and I never discovered exactly where) was my mother. An awkward situation? Not particularly. My father was quite happy that my religious education should be the conventional one (and my mother was no doubt only too happy to leave such difficult matters to him to decide). If my Nanny wanted to teach me to say my prayers, she could. If at school one did Divinity and went to Chapel, then it was far better that I should join the others than be the odd one out. For I was quite odd enough already. So provided he did not have to compromise his own beliefs and provided no irrevocable decisions were taken that might affect mine, he was prepared to let things take their course. This meant that, though I was given two Christian names, I was never christened. Nor (naturally) was I confirmed. I was too young to be aware of this first omission, but the second one puzzled me at the time, not really knowing the reason. Puzzled me and left me a little unhappy, but nothing more than that.

  When is a young person old enough to make up his mind for himself? When is his mind sufficiently developed to be able to weigh up all the arguments and not merely fall for the one that is most persuasively put? Certainly not when he is only sixteen.

  My father waited until I was twenty-four. The war was on. I was in Italy. From time to time he used to send me parcels of books to read. In one of them were two in the Thinker’s Library series: Renan’s The Life of Jesus and Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. I started with The Life of Jesus and found it quite interesting; I turned to The Martyrdom and found it enthralling. From the very first paragraph I felt myself seized and swept along on Winwood Reade’s tumultuous prose, through War, through Religion, through Liberty, to Intellect, finding at every stage the answers to all my questions, the resolutions of all the doubts that, over the past five years, had begun to gather. Then, after so much had been explained, after so much had been destroyed, came the new picture. In Reade’s words: ‘. . . the colours blend and harmonize together and we see that the picture represents One Man.’ One Man! Mankind! There was no God. God had not created Man in His own image. It was the other way round: Man had created God. And Man was all there was. But it was enough. It was the answer, and it was both totally convincing and totally satisfying. It convinced and satisfied me as I lay in my tent somewhere on the narrow strip of sand that divides Lake Comacchio from the Adriatic; and it has convinced and satisfied me ever since.

  I wrote at once to my father to tell him so and he at once wrote back. And it was then that I learned for the first time that these were his beliefs, too, and that he had always hoped that one day I would come to share them. But he had not wanted to put any pressure on me. For twenty-four years he had been willing to allow the Church a free hand to use all its influence and persuasiveness (though never its force, and that was why I had not been christened), while he himself had remained silent. But now, he had felt, the time had come for me to decide, for me to hear the other side and then to make up my mind. So he had sent me The Martyrdom. But even then he had wanted to play absolutely fair, and so he had added The Life of Jesus. And then he had been content to leave the verdict to me. Well, he said, the Church had done its best. It had had twenty-four years’ start – and it had failed.

  I read the letter many times. It joined the others in my battledress pocket and was in its turn joined by yet others until the pocket bulged too much . . .

  If I had to compile a list of ‘Books that have Influenced my life’, high on the list would undoubtedly be Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. And it would probably be equally high on my father’s list too. If you read a book and it influences you greatly, or even if you just enjoy it very much, you long to persuade others to read it too. A book is not just to be read privately in the evening in front of the fire. It is a pleasure to be shared, it is the cement that bonds person to person in greater sympathy and understanding. It was, after all, their shared love of the light verse of C. S. Calverley and Owen Seaman that helped to bring my parents together. (Admittedly Seaman was both my father’s Editor and my mother’s Godfather, bu
t their delight was genuine, and for years after he had relinquished these responsibilities they continued to quote from and laugh at his verses.)

  You can learn a lot about people by running your eye over the books they keep in their bookshelves. There were books by the thousand at Mallord Street and Cotchford: gardening books that my mother loved, detective stories that were my father’s passion, the complete works of this or that famous writer, Lord Edward Gleichen’s London’s Open Air Statuary (a puzzling one unless you knew the reason12), and many, many more. Impossible to look at them all, so let us just glance at a small handful.

  When I first made my appearance Calverley and Seaman were of course beyond me and would have to wait. But I could make an early start with Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Of the two my mother preferred Lear, my father Carroll. Carroll’s verses are technically the better and this partly accounts for my father’s taste. But they are also happier, more light-hearted, and this was, I think, another reason. Lear, though funny, is at the same time deeply tragic. You can laugh but you can also cry at the Yonghy Bonghy Bò, the Jumblies, the Dong and the Pobble, even at Calico Pie. My mother cried very readily, an easy prey to her emotions. She was emotional but not shy. My father on the other hand was shy but not noticeably emotional. I, inheriting from each, was both. This difference between my parents can be seen again in a book that we all greatly loved and admired and read aloud or alone, over and over and over: The Wind in the Willows. This book is, in a way, two separate books spliced into one. There are, on the one hand, those chapters concerned with the adventures of Toad; and on the other hand there are those chapters that explore human emotions – the emotions of fear, nostalgia, awe, Wanderlust. My mother was drawn to the second group, of which ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ was her favourite, read to me again and again with always, towards the end, the catch in the voice and the long pause to find her handkerchief and blow her nose. My father, on his side, was so captivated by the first group that he turned these chapters into the children’s play, Toad of Toad Hall. In this play one emotion only is allowed to creep in: nostalgia. And for as long as I knew him this was the only emotion that he seemed to delight in both feeling and showing.