The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  So it is not surprising that it was he who pressed Treasure Island into my hands, while my mother read me At the Back of the North Wind. And Wodehouse was something at which we could all three laugh happily together in the drawing-room after dinner.

  A schoolboy needs guidance on what to read. I remember, after my first glance at the library at Stowe, writing home to say it seemed to consist almost entirely of the Works of Burke in about 500 volumes. My father was only too glad to recommend something a little lighter and I was only too glad to take his advice. I worked my way through Wells, through Dickens and through Hardy, each leaving a very deep and enduring impression on me as, presumably, they had on him. If one were to say what these three writers shared in common it might possibly be that all three wrote about dustmen rather than dukes and wrote about them with understanding and compassion. The de Selincourts (dare I make this sweeping generalization?) liked to think of themselves as aristocrats who had fled from the Revolution. The Milnes were proud of the fact that Grandfather was poor and Great-Grandfather even poorer. In this I was a Milne, not a de Selincourt, and I and my father felt the keenest sympathy for Kipps, for young Copperfield, for Oak when he was penniless, for Henchard when he was ruined.

  So, one by one, with my father as guide, I scaled the heights of English Literature. Only Poetry, that range that thrusts up some of the greatest heights of all, did we skirt around. I wonder why? Shall I make a guess?

  When my father had reached an age when he could reasonably feel that it was not unbecoming to take himself seriously in public (he was then seventy) he had this to say of serious poetry.13

  I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

  Stand shadowless like Silence, listening

  To Silence

  Kipling (or a character in one of his stories) said that there were just five transcendent lines of enchantment in poetry; lines giving what Quiller-Couch called the Great Thrill. Two of these are known to everybody:

  Charmed magic casements opening on the foam

  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

  The other three, not perhaps quite so well known, are:

  A savage place, as holy and enchanted

  As ever ’neath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon lover.

  On my own account [continued my father] I add to them the lines with which I began, together with those earlier ones from ‘Kubla Khan’: and

  Where Alph the sacred river ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea

  and

  While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

  If these five passages have anything in common, what is it? I think it is that they transport us immediately into an experience which we seem to have known, in fact or imagination, all our lives.

  In other words, poetry for my father opened casements not on to new but on to old landscapes, reawakening old, dim, half-forgotten memories. In a single word, poetry was nostalgic.

  Perhaps because one man’s nostalgia is not another’s, because the memories poetry stirred in him could never be the memories it stirred in me, and because his memories were his most private possession – perhaps it was for these reasons that serious poetry remained in our family no more than something that my father was good at when it came to solving the quotations in The Times crossword.

  So, leaving poetry behind us, we come to the last book in my list. It was a list that began with a book that influenced my life very greatly in one sort of way. It ends with a book that influenced it equally greatly in a different sort of way. A book can be either a signpost pointing in a new (and hopefully better) direction, or it can be a companion keeping one company, year in, year out, through all life’s twisting ways. The first sort of book one reads once, the second over and over again. For me The Martyrdom was the first sort, Bevis the second.

  Bevis, The Story of a Boy, by Richard Jefferies, though still in print (and today in a very handsome edition with Shepard’s enchanting illustrations), is not, alas, a book that many boys now read.14 So perhaps Bevis fans will forgive me if I explain to the others that Jefferies was a naturalist and that the book describes in fictional form his boyhood on a Wiltshire farm. Bevis and his companion, Mark, play at savages, soldiers and explorers, explore rivers, woods and islands, build a raft and a hut, make a matchlock gun, learn to swim and to sail, squabble and make it up, brood, dream, stare up at the night sky and down to the meadow flowers growing at their feet. In short they do all the things that I was either doing or wanting to do.

  Though this was a book that my father put into my hands (literally: I remember his doing it), he did so saying it was a present from my grandfather; that it was my grandfather who specially wanted me to read it and who hoped I was now old enough to get from it the pleasure it had given him. And having done this, he did no more; and Bevis became and remained always a personal and private pleasure that I have made almost no attempt to share with anyone else. The book was published in 1882, the year my father was born. So my grandfather must have first read it when he was already a father and must have then urged it on his sons. Did any of the three share his enthusiasm? Certainly my father didn’t, nor really is this surprising. For though Bevis had Mark for his constant companion, and though Jefferies had a younger brother, this is really the autobiography of a solitary, lonely boy and so makes its appeal to other solitaries. I have known only two other Bevis fans. I can see what they and I had in common, and I can guess what it is that gives this book its particular appeal to the likes of us. It is the author’s relationship with the countryside, with nature. If there are two of you and you are really together, as Ken and Alan were together, then the country is your playground where you exercise your muscle. You plan walks and bicycle rides, and afterwards you boast about the distances you have covered. You scramble up rocks in order to be able to report that you got to the top. But if you are alone, then the country is not your playground, it is your companion; and nature becomes Nature, a person, someone to whom you can almost talk. You do not only walk through measured miles; you sit, dreaming, contemplating, absorbing it all, through unmeasured minutes. Your eye does not only identify the snipe flying overhead or spot the white-throat’s nest, it notices and remembers the pink tips on the petals of the daisy.

  I was shy, solitary, awkward in company, inarticulate in speech, becoming worse as I grew older. How lucky, then, I was to have parents who understood, who felt that, though perhaps what I needed for my own ultimate good was to be thrown in at the deep end, this was where, happily or otherwise, I was spending my term-time, so that during the holidays it was only kind to allow me to enjoy myself in the shallows. How lucky I was to have Cotchford for four blissful weeks at Easter and eight even more blissful weeks in the summer, and to have it almost entirely to myself. If someone came to tea – and sometimes someone came to tea – I need do no more than put in an appearance, then slide silently off, down to the river, to look for crossing places . . .

  Alone by the river, alone through the fields, alone in Posingford, alone in the depths of the Five Hundred Acre, alone on the top of the Forest. Sitting alone on the grass in the sunshine. Walking alone through the woods at night. Alone with myself. Alone – yet never lonely. What bliss this was!

  21. The Pistol

  I ended the last chapter by referring to Bevis. Reading Bevis is a little like spending the evening at the local cinema. It doesn’t enormously matter where you come in, you simply see the film round to that point. If you wish, you can then see it on again to the end. And if you are really keen, or your seat is particularly comfortable, you can start once more at the beginning . . .

  I have always found it difficult to stop reading Bevis. It is a circular book, the last chapter being the chapter before the first; and it needs a real effort to say ‘Enough’ and to put it back on the shelf. As a boy, of course, I simply stopped when the holidays came to an end, then started again the following holiday
s. The book remained permanently on my bedside table at Cotchford, read daily every morning while waiting for my father to appear and announce that the bathroom was empty.

  I mention this to explain why, although I thought I had dealt adequately with the book in the last chapter, it seems determined to make an appearance in this chapter as well.

  This time, however, it is not Bevis, the boy, I am concerned with, but his father, ‘the Governor’. Bevis, Jefferies and the reader are all, I think, deeply conscious of the vitally important part played by the Governor, even though, as a character, he scarcely appears. For a boy like Bevis he was all that a father should be: deeply caring for his son, anxious to encourage in him the growth of self-reliance and initiative, knowing that a boy learns better what he teaches himself, willing to let him take risks, believing that a father should be felt rather than seen, should watch but seldom interfere.

  He interferes only twice: first to teach the boys to swim and later (having first watched their vain struggles) to give them a small piece of advice on sailing.

  In many ways I was different from Bevis, and my father was even more different from the Governor. But the two men had this in common: they trusted their sons.

  Once when a friend of my parents was lunching with us, she asked what I did with myself all day. My father answered for me that I spent a lot of my time just wandering about.

  ‘You let him go where he likes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not afraid he might get into danger?’

  ‘No. He knows how to look after himself.’

  There are a hundred ways in which a boy can injure – if not indeed kill – himself. The more adventurous he is and the greater his initiative, the more ways he will find. If you protect him from each of the hundred, he is sure to find the hundred and first. Though most men can look back on their boyhood and tremble at the narrowness of some of their escapes, most boys do in fact survive more or less intact, and the wise father is the trusting father. My father’s trust was so natural that I never thought about it or about the anxiety that must often have lain behind it. Take the following story, for instance: the story of my pistol.

  One day Robin and I (Robin was a friend of mine: we were both about nine years old at the time) were playing in the gardens outside the Natural History Museum in London when we became aware of another boy who was engaged in firing a pistol. It was the sound that attracted our attention. For it was not the feeble popping of a cap pistol, but an ear-splitting explosion – quite the real thing. We went over to him to get a closer look. He fired again: it was most impressive. We asked him if we could see it, and proudly he showed it to us. We asked where he had bought it, and he told us.

  Robin had the sort of parents who don’t usually say no. So it was agreed that he should put the matter to them. And shortly afterwards the two pistols were produced and two boxes of blank cartridges, one for each of us. To try them out I was invited to Richmond Park; and while Robin’s mother sat on the grass surrounded by the remains of our picnic, he and I battled with his father over a fallen tree trunk. Afterwards his father said: ‘If those had been real pistols I’d have been riddled with bullets through and through.’ Riddled with bullets: what wonderful, memorable words.

  A year or two later, at Cotchford, I was looking at my pistol, still as beloved as ever. It was small and simple, but well and solidly and safely made. You could fire it point blank at an enemy without too much risk because it discharged downwards through a hole in the underside of the barrel near its tip. The tip itself was blocked. So you couldn’t in fact load it with anything other than blank cartridges, which was a pity – unless, of course, you filed the tip off. I had a file, and set to work.

  The file cut through the metal quite easily and soon the job was done and the end smoothed off. Then I loaded with a blank cartridge and pushed three or four gimp pins down the barrel. The cupboard where I kept my tools would do for a target. I stood a yard or two away and pulled the trigger. The noise indoors was deafening. I looked at the cupboard and was pleased to see that it was nicely riddled with gimp pins. This was a satisfactory start. The next step was to see about getting some better cartridges, cartridges with bullets.

  My contact for this sort of thing was Mitchell’s Garage. The two brothers who ran it – one fat, one thin – were useful allies. For without some sort of help I was a bit stuck: both Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead being beyond my range. So a message was passed to Mitchell’s – probably via Mrs Wilson – and eventually (oh, wonderful day!) a message came back that the cartridges awaited my collection. I put my pistol in my pocket, called for Pat (Mrs Wilson’s daughter) and together we set off up the lane.

  Mitchell’s Garage was a large, barn-like structure with room for lots of cars inside it, but on this occasion it was more or less empty. The cartridges looked fine, with round, lead bullets sticking out of their ends. I stood in the middle of the garage and loaded. I had a bit of difficulty getting the cartridge to go right in: it went most of the way, then jammed. But by slightly loosening a screw I was able to get the breech mechanism to close behind it. Then I pulled the trigger. There was a loud explosion, an alarming flash and a violent stinging sensation in my hand. I dropped the pistol with a cry and found the back of my hand spattered with gunpowder and blood. Luckily the damage was not serious and I turned my attention to the pistol. What had gone wrong? At once I saw. The hole in the barrel was not big enough. That was why I had been unable to push the cartridge in properly in the first place. I ought to have seen this at the time. The bullet had stuck and the explosion backfired. Tragedy! I took the pistol to Mr Mitchell. What could he do? Was it possible to drill out the barrel? He looked at it, said he thought it was, and together we went into his workshop. With the barrel drilled out, the cartridges fitted perfectly and I was all set to try another shot then and there, but rather to my surprise Mr Mitchell said ‘No, no. Please! Not here!’ and hurried me outside. So I kept my first shot for a gate on the way home that had a notice on it saying ‘Private’.

  The pistol now worked beautifully and I could fire it at all sorts of things, though only at inanimate things. Neither my father nor I ever took any pleasure in killing, and hated those who did. So mostly I aimed at trees and sometimes I let Pat aim too, and once I even allowed my father to aim. I aimed and usually I missed. The pistol wasn’t as accurate as I had hoped. Perhaps it needed sights. So I made a foresight and a backsight with bits of wire twisted round the barrel and then glued. Then I found an old plywood target and took it down to the river and hung it from a branch of the oak tree. I fired, expecting the target to be knocked sideways by the impact, but nothing happened. Had I missed? I went closer and fired again. Again nothing. This was very disappointing. My sights must be wrong. I went still closer . . . and then I saw the two neat holes going clean through the plywood, and I was thrilled.

  So that was my pistol, and for a year or two it gave me immense pleasure. Then one day at breakfast my father said: ‘Do you remember John Wetherell? I’ve just heard from his father that he’s lost an eye. He was playing with a gun and it went off in his face.’ An awful, icy feeling hit me in the stomach. John was a boy I used to play cricket with, a wonderful batsman, one of my heroes. ‘He could go on playing cricket, of course. You can play cricket with only one eye. Ranji did, as you know. But his father has thrown in his hand, doesn’t want him ever to play again.’ A pause while this awful story sank in and spread its message throughout my entire body, down into my feet and into the tips of my fingers. Then, very gently my father added: ‘That’s why I’ve never been too happy about your pistol.’

  Nothing more was said or needed to be said. After breakfast I put pistol, box of cartridges and a screwdriver into my pocket and went down to the river. I chose a place where the water was deepest. I threw the cartridges in first, one at a time, scattering them here and there over the surface of the water. Then with the screwdriver I took my pistol to bits. There were five pieces, and, w
alking down the river bank, I chose five separate places for them, so that they could never come together again, threw them in, watched them sink.

  Then I came home.

  22. The Ointment Round the Fly

  One of my father’s favourite stories is about an old lady and a snake-charmer. The story is not his: he heard it from a friend. But I will leave him to tell it in his own words. The old lady and her husband were visiting a fair at which one of the attractions was an Indian snake-charmer’s tent:

  It so happened that at the moment when all the snakes had come out of their box to gather round the snake-charmer and sway to his pipings, he was overcome by illness, dropped his pipe, and fell back unconscious. The snakes, no longer under control, and looking elsewhere for amusement, started a panic among the spectators; but before the children could be thoroughly trampled underfoot, the old lady stepped forward, took up the pipe, sat cross-legged on the ground, and gave the snakes the music they loved. They hurried back to listen, rapt; and one by one she picked them up and returned them to their box.

  As she and her husband were leaving the tent, followed by an enthusiastic and now intrepid crowd, he said to her: