The Enchanted Places
Page 16
‘So this is the original. Well, well! Come over here a minute, Mandy love. Come and say how-do-you-do to Christopher Robin. Come on. Don’t be shy. Shake hands with the gentleman. There now. You can tell your little friends that you’ve shaken hands with Christopher Robin.’ After years of practice I am still terribly bad at this sort of thing.
Many years ago a woman followed me into our office (if you could call it that) at the back of the shop. She leaned over my desk. ‘What are you writing?’ she asked with a coy smile. ‘An invoice,’ I said, ‘Oh.’ Her face fell. ‘I thought it might have been a book.’
No. Booksellers don’t often write books. They know only too well that there are already far too many. Also they haven’t the time. Writing a book is not the sort of thing one can do (or rather not the sort of thing I can do) in the office between serving a customer and preparing an invoice. If by any chance a bookseller does write a book, it is because he feels he must: because the urge and the opportunity combine to say ‘Now! This is the moment. Take your typewriter and away to the attic with you!’ Ripeness – as anyone who has had to study King Lear for his English Tripos will tell you – is all.
The first fairy to visit the cradle had said ‘He shall have his father’s brains and his mother’s hands.’ When she had vanished a second fairy appeared. ‘And his name shall be famous throughout the world.’ Yes, it was another one of those cryptic spells that fairies have always been so good at, those spells that sound like a blessing but are in fact something of a curse. To be fair, in my particular case, it was again a bit of both. It is tempting, but of course quite impossible, to try and separate the blessing from the curse, to weigh them up and calculate which has been the greater. Tempting but impossible, and I shall never know whether or not I would have been better off as Charles Robert – or even Rosemary.
Some years ago I had a letter from a small child in America. She was very, very angry with me because – so she had heard – I didn’t like being Christopher Robin. If she had been Christopher Robin, she told me, she would have been VERY PROUD, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for not feeling proud, too. It was a ‘Wol’ letter, naturally: I doubt if she expected it to be otherwise. She will be older now. Older, wiser, more tolerant. And if she happens on this book she may perhaps understand just how and why it all came about.
‘Pooh’, said Christopher Robin earnestly, ‘if I – if I’m not quite –’ he stopped and tried again – ‘Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?’
I like to think that Pooh understood. I hope that now others will understand too.
Endnotes
1 In his autobiography It’s Too Late Now, published in 1939.
2 Later renumbered 13.
3 Now the 1/50,000 sheet 188.
4 Not Anne Darlington. Another Ann.
5 Quoted in It’s Too Late Now.
6 It’s Too Late Now.
7 Year in, Year Out, published in 1952.
8 It’s Too Late Now.
9 It’s Too Late Now.
10 It’s Too Late Now.
11 It’s Too Late Now.
12 Fellow soldiers during the War (he was my father’s Divisional Commander), and near neighbours afterwards, they had exchanged works. Equally surprising must have seemed the presence of Winnie the Pooh among the General’s books.
13 Year in, Year Out.
14 Bevis has recently been published in a Puffin edition.
15 Year in, Year Out.
16 It’s Too Late Now.
‘A book full of glorious detail, it gives a unique view of the making of a myth’
Good Book Guide
‘Mr Milne has set out to recreate a world . . . he has been totally successful’
Times Literary Supplement
THE ENCHANTED PLACES
Christopher Milne was born in 1920. He went to Stowe School with a scholarship in 1934, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in Mathematics in 1939. For the first few years of his life Christopher Milne lived in Chelsea and later his family moved to Cotchford Farm in Sussex, which is the origin for almost every place described in A. A. Milne’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh books. Following the outbreak of the Second World War he defended the village of Hartfield in Sussex with the Local Defence Volunteers and then joined the Royal Engineers, serving in the Middle East and in Italy with the 56th Division.
At the end of the war he returned to Cambridge, where he took a degree in English in 1947. After a series of jobs in London, in 1951 he opened the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth with his wife, Lesley, which they ran together for many years. Christopher Milne tried for a long time to escape from the Christopher Robin image, retiring quietly and shying away from journalists and the curious public who wanted to know the truth about the owner of Edward Bear. Finally, in 1974, he decided it was time to lay the ghost of Christopher Robin to rest, and the result was his first book, his autobiography, The Enchanted Places. Christopher Milne died in 1996, and Lesley died in 2014.
Also by Christopher Milne
The Path Through the Trees
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author and the publishers wish to thank Mr Andrew Holmes, who made the film Mr Shepard and Mr Milne (photographer Bob Davis), for giving them access to his documentary material on E. H. Shepard and A. A. Milne.
First published 1974 by Methuen
This electronic edition published 2016 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-1-4472-6984-7
Copyright © Christopher Milne 1974
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