The Enchanted Places

by Christopher Milne

  ‘Why, Mary darling, we have known each other for more than fifty years, and you never told me you could charm snakes!’

  And the old lady said: ‘You never asked me, John.’15

  Perhaps what gave this story its particular appeal to my father was that he was a Mary-ish person himself, reluctant to volunteer personal information, preferring to wait and be asked, waiting often in vain. And the same is true of me.

  We have both at times been utterly bored listening to others talking about themselves. We have both of us felt, on occasions, ‘What a show-off that man was’. We have both of us been terrified of being thought either bores or show-offs. And so we have preferred silence.

  My father wrote It’s Too Late Now in 1938 when he was fifty-six. It is subtitled ‘The Autobiography of a Writer’ but it isn’t really that at all. It is the story of a boy. A third of the book covers only the first eleven years of his life: half the book the first eighteen years. ‘When I read the biography of a well-known man,’ he wrote in his introduction, ‘I find that it is the first half of it which holds my attention . . . Tell us why the boy became an apothecary, and how the apothecary found himself writing ‘‘Endymion’’, and let us guess for ourselves that the author of ‘‘Endymion’’ will meet Wordsworth and Shelley, and surprise neither of them with an ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ . . . Feeling like this about other people I feel like it also about myself.’

  He wrote his autobiography to please himself. He is not telling the reader how he became a great writer. He is not boasting of his successes. He does not give us a list of the famous people he rubbed shoulders with. The Pooh books occupy only eight rather unhappy pages. No, he wrote his autobiography because it gave him an opportunity to return to his boyhood – a boyhood from which all his inspiration sprang. It was in a sense his last visit: for I was now eighteen.

  Let me explain.

  When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six: the titles trip from the tongue and we scarcely pause to ask ourselves who exactly is meant by ‘we’. It is, of course, the obvious pronoun. ‘He’ might have done instead but would have been a bit limiting. ‘They’ is a bit condescending. ‘I’ and ‘you’ are clearly wrong. So only ‘we’ remains. But that still leaves the question ‘Who is we?’. Is it the ‘we’ with which so many adults address the young? ‘And how are we today?’ Heaven forbid! Is it then the universal ‘we’: all of us – for, whatever our age now, we were all young once? Possibly this was how it was meant to seem. But I guess that in his heart my father intended it for just two people: himself and his son.

  My father, who had derived such happiness from his childhood, found in me the companion with whom he could return there. But with Nanny in the way he could only take his dream son and return in imagination – to mend a train or keep a dormouse or go fishing. When I was three he was three. When I was six he was six. We grew up side by side and as we grew so the books were written. Then when I was nine and he was nine Nanny left. We could now do real things together: reality could in part replace the dream. For the next nine years we continued to grow up alongside each other. I was not aware of this, of course. I just saw him as my father. But he, I now suspect, saw me as a sort of twin brother, perhaps a sort of reincarnation of Ken. I – as I have already mentioned – needed him. He no less but for a different reason needed me. He needed me to escape from being fifty. It was a private dream of his, but he did once share it. I say once but I really mean in one place. The place was Dorset.

  Up to now I have made no mention of Ken’s family. Oddly, they didn’t enter my life until I was fourteen – the year of the first Dorset visit. Ken’s illness and death – when I was eight – may have been part of the reason, but mainly I suspect it was because his children – my cousins – were all so much older than I was. What has an eight-year-old in common with a thirteen-year-old? But as I grew up the gap would have lessened. And so when I was fourteen there came a letter from Aunt Maud. It was August. We were at Cotchford; and they, so she told us, were renting a house by the sea at Osmington near Weymouth. ‘It has a flat roof where you can sunbathe and there is a swallow’s nest under the porch. Won’t you come and join us?’ Shall we? Just the two of us? It might be rather fun. ‘Oh, do let’s,’ I said. So we did. We bought maps. We studied them. We planned the route. We calculated distances. We prepared a ‘schedule’ (a word which for this purpose my father pronounced ‘skeddle’). And then early one sunny morning we departed. He drove. I was the map reader. Our luggage was in the dicky behind us. We stopped for plums at Billingshurst. We turned left instead of right at Trickett’s Cross – and I was in disgrace. We lunched at an inn at Midhurst – and there’s no need for me to say what we ate. And in the early evening we arrived at Osmington and there were Maud, Angela, Tim, Tony and the swallow to welcome us.

  This was the first of four such visits. My mother joined us briefly on the second but was not at her ease. Anne was happily with us on the last. Others came and went but mostly it was just the six of us: a boy just beginning at his public school, a young man at Oxford, another young man in his first job, a young woman wondering about marriage, a middle-aged mother and a middle-aged father. How did we all fit in together? What did we find to do all day? Well, we had the sea, of course, just a short walk away, offering rocks to clamber over and rock pools to hunt for creatures in. Further off was a beach to which we could take a picnic lunch, towels and bathing dresses. On two occasions we had a tennis court, and on one occasion a couple of dogs had been left behind by their owners to entertain us. But this still left plenty of time for wondering what to do next; and it still left the catering and cleaning to be organized. I came from a home where these things looked after themselves, or rather they were looked after by cooks and maids. But at Osmington there were no cooks or maids. So how did we manage? Like this.

  Maud presided. She was mother to us all, a regal figure moving quietly in the background. She and the scrambled eggs were there at breakfast. She and the ham salad were there at supper. In between, while we were lying happily on the beach, idly throwing stones into the water, I imagine that she was busy fixing things with the grocer and the milkman. If floors needed to be swept I imagine that it was she who swept them; if dishes had to be washed, she who washed them. But I hope (because I cannot now recall) that if beds were to be made I at least made my own. Maud, aged about fifty, remained fifty. The rest of us became children.

  Perhaps it was Tim’s discovery of an Angela Brazil story in the bookshelf that started it. We joked about it. Some of us read it. And then, quite naturally, quite un-selfconsciously, we slipped back through the years to our schooldays. I would put our age at around twelve. Five twelve-year-olds playing happily together. I don’t for a moment think that this was done deliberately in order to level out our assorted ages. Nor do I think that it was my father who led us back. I think it just happened because we were all Milnes and this is a thing that Milnes can do. We do it without effort and we do it for our own private delight. There is no winking at the audience; no ‘Look at me playing with the kiddies’. For us, to whom our childhood has meant so much, the journey back is short, the coming and going easy.

  Our Dorset became the world of Angela Brazil, of the Fifth Format St Dominic’s, of schoolboy slang and schoolboy ideals, where prep was a swot to be cut if poss, where you battled on the playing field for the honour of the House. And somewhere there still survives a photograph of us, the Owls, a small, earnest, idealistic Boy Scout/Girl Guide Troop posing in front of the camera . . . and not so very unlike those thousands of group photographs that line the walls of hundreds of prep schools today.

  The Owls! We even had our special Owl Song. It was written when summer had faded, when our valiant deeds were but a memory, when I was back at Stowe and the others were gathered round the fireside one evening in London.

  It was in collaboration with Ken that my father started writing light verse. How appropriate that this, the only other time he collaborated, should have be
en with Ken’s children. Four lines only survive unforgotten, and so they had better be entitled:

  THE OWLS – A Fragment

  Look for the rainbow in the sky!

  Look for the kidney in the pie!

  Look for the ointment round the fly!

  Rally, Owls! Rally!

  On the whole it doesn’t make a bad motto for us Milnes.

  Epilogue

  If the Pooh books had been like most other books – published one year, forgotten the next – there would have been no problem. If I had been a different sort of person there might well have been no problem. Unfortunately the fictional Christopher Robin refused to die and he and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms. For the first misfortune (as it sometimes seemed) my father was to blame. The second was my fault.

  Actually it was not one but two problems. First: Christopher Robin and the Schoolboy; secondly: Christopher Robin and the Man. The two are separated not just in time but by the fact that two quite different sides of my personality were the cause.

  Take the Schoolboy first. This was by far the lesser of the two. It was a problem caused by my shyness. I have already said that this was Grandfather Milne’s responsibility rather than my father’s: that I would have been plagued by shyness anyway, Christopher Robin or no. Nevertheless, Christopher Robin undoubtedly made things worse, though perhaps less so than might have been supposed. His appearances at school were few. Mostly we were occupied with other things, other anxieties, other delights. Fridays, for instance, were clouded by the thought of Latin, Latin, Maths, Soup, Fish, Biscuits, P.T., History, French. If I fussed over the Fish and dreaded the History this had nothing to do with a boy and his bear. Nevertheless, Christopher Robin was beginning to be what he was later to become: a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up. To begin with it was only sometimes sore; at other times it was quite the reverse. It would depend, of course, on the intentions of the person who raised the subject. If he intended to hurt, he could do so quite easily, for I was very vulnerable. I vividly recall how intensely painful it was to me to sit in my study at Stowe while my neighbours played the famous – and now cursed – gramophone record remorselessly over and over again. Eventually, the joke, if not the record, worn out, they handed it to me, and I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field. But mostly I had other things to think about and didn’t bother about being Christopher Robin one way or the other. And because I spent so much time at school not bothering and the entire holidays not bothering, it never occurred to me that perhaps I ought to be blaming somebody for it all. In fact I blamed nobody. I felt no resentment. My relations with my father were quite unaffected.

  Christopher Robin and the Man is a less happy story. Here the cause of the trouble was jealousy.

  My father was lucky in that this was something that could have clouded, but in fact did not, his earlier relations with his brother, Ken. Alan, sixteen months his junior, was intellectually his superior. Ken was clever, Alan cleverer. Ken was successful, Alan even more successful. All through their very happy lives together Alan was always to beat Ken, yet Ken was never to feel resentment. How fortunate for the two of them that the talents had been dealt out in this way, that if one of them had to suffer from jealousy it was Alan (who didn’t need to), not Ken. How nice if, when my turn came, I could have been another Ken. How sad that I wasn’t.

  As a schoolboy my jealousy was directed mainly against my contemporaries. I was jealous when Tompkins minor made more runs than I did and got into the Second Eleven while I remained in the Third. But luckily I was brainier than he and this consoled me. At home I was only jealous of my father when he beat me at golf. The rest of the time we were not rivals but friends. The sun shone equally upon us both. Neither stood in the other’s shadow.

  But in 1947 all this changed. Up to then we had run neck and neck. He had been the better cricketer but I had been the better mathematician. We had both done equally badly at Cambridge, but I – with a six-year break for the war – could offer the better excuse. We had both been equally indifferent soldiers, but I had at least started from the ranks; and a wound in the head was surely more glorious than trench fever. We had been companions, but now our ways were to part. Admittedly fortune had then smiled on him. He had been ‘not wholly the wrong person in the right place at the right time’. Admittedly fortune was now frowning on me. I was the wrong person in the wrong place with qualifications nobody wanted. But this didn’t alter the fact that he had pressed on to become a famous writer and here was I staring up at him, filled with resentment. Other fathers were reaching down helping hands to their sons. But what was mine doing? What, to be fair, could mine do? He had made his own way by his own efforts and he had left behind him no path that could be followed. But were they entirely his own efforts? Hadn’t I come into it somewhere? In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

  This was the worst period for me. It was a period when, suitably encouraged, my bitterness would overflow. On one or two occasions it overflowed more publicly that it should have done, so that there seemed to be only one thing to do: to escape from it all, to keep out of the limelight. Sorry, I don’t give interviews. Sorry, I don’t answer letters. It is better to say nothing than to say something I might regret.

  That is how I saw it, looking up at him. How did he see it, looking down at me? Neither of us knew what the other thought. We could only guess. Did he guess right? Did he sympathize? Was he resentful? Did he have any feelings of guilt? Well, he had his own battles to fight and, curiously, they were not dissimilar from mine. If I was jealous of him, he was no less jealous of himself. If I wanted to escape from Christopher Robin, so, too, did he.

  It is easier in England [he wrote] to make a reputation than to lose one. I wrote four ‘Children’s books’, containing altogether, I suppose, 70,000 words – the number of words in the average-length novel. Having said good-bye to all that in 70,000 words, knowing that as far as I was concerned the mode was outmoded, I gave up writing children’s books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape. In vain . . . As a discerning critic pointed out: the hero of my latest play, God help it, was ‘just Christopher Robin grown up’. So that even when I stop writing about children I still insist on writing about people who were children once. What an obsession with me children are become!16

  He was forty-six when The House at Pooh Corner was published. Up to then his star had been steadily ascending: editor of Granta, assistant editor of Punch, successful playwright, and now author of four brilliant children’s books. But The House at Pooh Corner was to mark his meridian. After that came the decline. He was writing just as fluently, just as gracefully. But fluency and grace were not enough: the public wanted stronger meat. His last play was put on in 1938: it was a failure. During the war he returned to light verse, and for a number of weeks A. A. M. was back again in Punch. His skill had not deserted him, but his public had; and eventually the editor, E. V. Knox, wrote to tell him so. After the war he turned to short stories. He had always written what he had wanted to write. His luck was that this was also what the public wanted to read. Now his luck was deserting him. People didn’t want books of short stories. Nor did they want long philosophical poems. Nor even collections of random reflections. He at the top of the hill, I at the bottom: we each had our sorrows, our moments of disillusion. We were both of us unwanted.

  Well, if nobody wanted me, if nobody was looking for a very shy young man who had once been quite good at solving differential equations, who knew how to build a Bailey Bridge and defuse a Tellermine, who had scraped a third class Honours Degree in English Literature, and who was handy wi
th a tenon saw, if nobody would employ me, I must employ myself. I toyed with the idea of making furniture. In the end I decided to sell books.

  ‘I would have thought,’ said my mother, who always hit the nail on the head no matter whose fingers were in the way, ‘I would have thought that this was the one thing you would have absolutely hated. I thought you didn’t like ‘‘business’’. You certainly didn’t get on at John Lewis. And you’re going to have to meet Pooh fans all the time. Really it does seem a very odd decision.’ She was quite right, of course. I was no businessman. There were certainly draw-backs to the idea. However hard I tried to play down Christopher Robin, however little space I allowed on my shelves to the Pooh Books, people would inevitably think of mine as ‘The Christopher Robin Bookshop’. However much I wanted to succeed as a bookseller on my own merits, people would inevitably conclude that I was succeeding partly at least on my father’s reputation. They might even think (wrongly) that my father’s money was subsidizing the venture and that – unlike other less fortunate booksellers – I did not really need to make ends meet. ‘It’s easy for him,’ they might say. And to some small extent this might be true, though I would do my utmost to make it as little true as possible.

  On the other hand there were compensations. For here was something my wife and I could do together as partners; here was something we could do in a part of England of our own choosing; and if I wasn’t too happy about four of the books, there were still plenty of others.

  So in 1951 we left London for Dartmouth; and twenty-one years later we celebrated our coming of age. If, immediately after the war, fortune had frowned, from 1951 onwards it smiled. We had had the good luck to be not wholly the wrong people opening the right shop at the right time in the right town.

  Of course, Christopher Robin has intruded, however hard I have tried to keep him at bay; and he still fills me with acute embarrassment.