Many, many years later, when Daff left Hartfield, after her husband had died, she gave that school bag to Bill Belton. For some time he used it to carry his bowls but the well-battered bag is now safely tucked away and treasured by his son Dick. Daff also wrote to him on several occasions when she was living in luxury at The Athenaeum Court in London. The letters, addressed to ‘Dear Mr Rabbit Man’ are sadly nostalgic, exposing a rarely seen aspect of her character; a regret for the happy times enjoying her garden among the daffodils, the roses and the chrysanthemums. When she died in 1971 she left Bill £250.
Ernest Shepard drew the bag near the end of his life in one of his last and most poignant illustrations. Christopher Robin, on his way to school, bag in hand, is kicking Pooh out of the picture. Did Kipper really feel so antagonistic to the bear?
Boarding school also marked the parting of the ways with the child who had for a while quite enjoyed being famous. Surrounded by boys who were not impressed by such things and could be cruel, he gradually began to hate the Christopher Robin who belonged on the Ashdown Forest – a bitterness which was eventually to eat into his adult life.
Chapter Twelve
The Doldrums
ON 6 JANUARY 1930, Pooh took his first steps towards America. Literary agent Stephen Slesinger had arrived in London to visit the Milnes. He was a visionary and had recognised a new career for Pooh as a marketing figurehead. He purchased uS and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works from Milne for a $1000 advance plus sixty-six per cent of Slesinger's income, so creating the first modern licensing industry.
Slesinger was recognised in America for his contribution to literacy for children and was highly commended as a well-known humanitarian for his work on behalf of youth, the pleasure he brought and the opportunities he furnished to those who might otherwise have been forgotten.
By November 1931, he had turned Pooh into a multi-million dollar a year business. Slesinger went on to market the bear and his friends for more than thirty years, creating the first Pooh look-alike toy bear, record, board game, puzzle, uS radio broadcast (NBC), animation, and motion picture film.
The first time Pooh appeared in colour was 1932, when he was drawn by Slesinger (not by Shepard or, as many people think, by Disney) in his now-familiar red shirt, and featured on an RCA Victor picture record. Parker Brothers also introduced A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh Game in 1933, again with Pooh in his red shirt.
By 1935, the New York Times was reporting that Slesinger had seen in Pooh something that no one else had realised; that there was a place in industry for a genius with very little brain such as Winnie-the-Pooh. The likeness of Pooh could now been seen on spoons and forks, honey pots (spelt ‘hunny’) and not so surprisingly even on fever thermometers! Today there are dozens of spin-off publications, such as Pooh’s Workout Book, The Pooh Craft Book and The Pooh Baby Book. There are puzzle books and pop-up books. Slesinger’s marketing genius was to result over the years in the production of special jars of ‘Strengthening Medicine’, tea towels and crockery, money boxes, hot water bottles and woolly hats.
It was estimated that A.A. Milne was now making more money from manufacturers than from publishers.
For the next ten years Pooh and his now well-worn companions were safely resting in a glass case on a wall for an enforced (but fortunately, temporary) retirement. They became spectators, with an uncertain future.
There is no reliable evidence of their life or of their participation in the constantly escalating success of Milne’s four children’s books. No photographs exist of these years between. After chapter fourteen of eighteen in Ann Thwaite’s biography, their activities are not mentioned. In her follow-up chronicle of Milne’s work for children, The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen 1992), from 1931 they appear only by name in interviews given by A.A Milne and Daphne to the American press.
Daphne gave a lengthy interview to Parents magazine in America in April 1931, in which she paints all too clearly the less than happy state of the ageing toys in England. By 1931 Pooh, she regretted, was thinner and more shabby. His nose had been patched and he had been taken to hospital for new paws.
She also told astonished readers that all little English boys of Christopher’s age go away to school! She explained that he thinks everything that happened to him is jolly and that he was frightfully keen on cricket, not homesick at all. He was far too happy living in the moment to miss his parents, even with the Atlantic Ocean between them.
Set against the background of the looming Depression both in England and America, her generalisations are breathtaking. She described the life of an English child in his nursery which, she said, usually occupied the top floor of a house and which, with his Nanny, became the child’s whole world, coming down only at teatime to meet his parents.
For Pooh and the toys she admitted things were now different. They were in their time-honoured places at home, waiting to be hugged in the holidays, when no one was looking.
‘Fortunately these most friendly and agreeable of toys seem to understand.’ She said. ‘Perhaps they have talked it over among themselves and decided not to hold it against Christopher Robin for growing up. It is one of those awkward things like having to go to bed and eat porridge and brush his teeth that a boy can’t help.’
Pooh shed a tear occasionally, she admitted, when he remembered that he and Christopher Robin were once the same size and that despite all the ‘hunny’ and tea parties, he has not added an inch to his stature, whereas Christopher Robin was growing taller and taller. But perhaps, she suggests, that is because Pooh’s young friend has had to eat all HIS jam sandwiches as well as his own. ‘Pooh shakes his head’, she says. ‘He does not understand.’
Daff sounds in this lengthy interview as though she, at least, is still living in that make-believe world of her son’s childhood that she created in her imagination and her husband put into words. Christopher himself was to acknowledge many years later, that his mother’s part in giving life to Pooh had always been unfairly eclipsed and then forgotten.
In an unusually reflective moment, Daff added that children were not small adults, but that adults were grown-up children. All the precious gifts from childhood ‘whimsy, fantasy, the dear nonsense of nurseryland, the stuff of dreams’ carried into adult life were, she said, ‘what gives the world its beauty and were essential to civilisation.’
Be that as it may, her vision was not quite the way things were in reality.
In July 1931, John Macrae asked his son Elliott to call on Pooh and the Milnes in Mallord Street. He asked Elliott to confirm Dutton’s delight with his latest novel Two People for which he had been waiting on ‘tip-toes’. The letter says that he is entranced with the book and looked forward to the visit of Daphne and Alan to America in October.
Like many commercial companies, E.P. Dutton was suffering from the economic situation in America and Macrae was confident that Winnie-the-Pooh and the new novel would help them ride the storm.
On 8 October 1931, John Macrae wrote to Milne expressing Elliott’s joy at a day passed with them and Christopher en famille. They had not, he said, replied to his letter of a month earlier asking for details of their proposed visit together to the united States. He is as usual, effervescent, explaining that the name of Milne stood for a great deal in the American household and asking if there was anything at all that he could do to improve their visit. ‘It will be a joy’, he said.
Pooh stayed at home.
Alan and Daphne arrived in New York aboard The Aquitania on 27 October 1931, to the kind of overwhelming welcome he dreaded and she loved: dozens of press and radio interviews, receptions and parties. They were there for the publication of Two People but everyone wanted to meet the father and mother of Christopher Robin. Like their son, they seemed trapped by the umbilical cord which had given life to Pooh and, to Milne’s chagrin, this very adult novel was once again billed as ‘by the author of Winnie-the-Pooh’ Eve
n the paperback edition of his detective story The Red House was promoted as ‘by the author of When We Were Very Young’. There was to be no escape from Pooh.
With Nou out of the way, the boy and his father grew ever closer through the thirties, as his mother moved gradually into a new world of her own. She was becoming bored with her husband’s acceptance of their mainly quietly countrified life and so, while Blue and Moon spent more and more time together, his parents spent less and less. Christopher admitted in the autobiography recalling the family’s traumas generated by Pooh, that there were few interests that his parents shared and so ‘wisely they did them separately and told each other afterwards of their adventures.’
Daff (now with auburn hair) embarked on many trips to America alone in this period, with her husband’s agreement. There she seems to have thrown herself wholeheartedly into New York’s social round. She had a discreet affair with playwright Elmer Rice, which everyone knew about.
Milne’s own literary career was hardly shining. He wrote several plays which did not polish his reputation, and one book, Peace with Honour, which was widely praised as a brilliant attack on war in the face of Hitler’s rise to power. Even so, he was spending more and more time like Pooh, doing nothing in the garden at
Usually in the spring, Daphne and Alan would take a short break in the Mediterranean. During one of these holidays, Reginald Berrow, the landscape gardener, who was working at Cotchford, took delivery of a specially commissioned sundial. The sculptor Carleton Ashwood, who never met the Milnes, came from Swindon in Wiltshire. He had already established a reputation for his work in cement fondue and his best known achievement was probably the Golden Lion situated in the town’s Canal Walk. Reginald Berrow suggested to the family that a sundial would be a fitting memorial to the creatures who had played such a large part in their lives.
Very few people realise that the sundial still stands, almost secretly today, in the garden of Cotchford Farm. It features Pooh and his friends cavorting round the base which bears the now famous quotation: ‘This warm and sunny spot belongs to Pooh’.
Pete Tasker remembers the unveiling at which his dad befittingly wore his Sunday suit. A set of the first editions of the Pooh books were buried beneath. But Daff did not like the sundial where her husband had put it as it spoilt her own plan for that part of the garden. After he died in 1956 she had it moved further away.
When Daff finally left Cotchford and went to live in London, she sold the house to an American who, in 1968, sold it again to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones – the first home he had ever owned. It gave him special delight to show the sundial to friends and he was proud to be the guardian of such a shrine. But as history knows there was a tragic postscript, for in 1969 Brian Jones was found drowned in his swimming pool.
Cotchford and protesting that he was a slacker at heart – acting as a chauffeur for his son, playing cricket with him and visiting school for prize givings and speech days (Daphne never went).
In the 1930s Daphne’s husband now also found occasional comfort and a new stimulus away from home through a growing love for the quick-witted and sparkling actress Leonora Corbett.
Christopher Milne, the schoolboy, (still known as Moon at home), increasingly adored and admired his father. The feeling was mutual and for nine happy years, the long letters which used to be destined for brother Ken were now addressed by A.A. Milne (signed Blue) first to Boxgove and then to Stowe public school and eventually to Cambridge university.
There were four nostalgic holidays in Dorset for them during the summers between 1934 and 1937. Ken’s widow, Maud and her family came too, when they all stayed together by the sea. Daff only came once. Sometimes a beautiful adolescent joined them. She was the little girl – Anne Darlington – who once held Moon’s hand in the buttercups at Cotchford, still a devoted friend of both Moon and Blue. Pooh was not invited.
Maud, now in her fifties, always remained quietly mother-in-charge behind the scenes but Christopher has described how the rest of them slipped easily back into childhood and became twelve years-old again, followers of Angela Brazil.
They undressed under towels, without huts, and with maximum inconvenience on the beach, collected pebbles and arranged them in groups according to appearance, such as legs of mutton, played ducks and drakes and threw stones at Blue’s hat.
Behind all this happy nostalgia loomed the growing threat from Europe of Adolf Hitler’s proclamation of himself as The Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
In 1939, Moon was at Cotchford preparing for Cambridge having won a Major scholarship from Stowe. He and Blue were sitting side by side on the sofa when they heard on the wireless Neville Chamberlain in his doleful voice make the famous declaration that Britain was now at war with Germany.
Everything was about to change for Blue and his son. It was to be for them, as for the rest of the world, the end of the past, but for Pooh at least, there would be exciting times ahead.
Chapter Thirteen
War and Peace
POOH'S WHEREABOuTS DuRING the War are uncertain. It would seem most likely that he retreated eventually to Cotchford Farm with the Milnes. But there are family stories which point to another possibility.
In 1942 the house in Mallord Street was let to Hugh Davson, the internationally-respected physiologist, and his society portrait painter wife, Marjorie, who was one of Daff’s ‘tea-at-Harrods’ best friends. Her husband was to undertake War work at Porton Down while she remained in London with their young daughter Caroline. Now Dr Caroline Roche, she recalls that when the family arrived the animals were in a glass case on her bedroom wall and that she was excited because she had read all the books. The Davsons ‘left after about two years’ and it seems likely that this was when Pooh and his companions were removed.
Christopher wrote years later, in a letter to W.A. Darlington, how the Milnes had collected some of the furniture from London and tried to squeeze it into Cotchford. He said that he took large articles to pieces and reassembled them upstairs himself. He felt sure that the toys were not included in the move. As the family carpenter, he explained that he would have been charged with securing their glass fronted cabinet to the wall in Sussex. But his memory was sometimes, like Pooh’s spelling, ‘wobbly’. For instance, he wrongly recalled that during the War that the animals were evacuated to America. In fact, their American adventure did not begin until 1947.
W.A. Darlington’s granddaughters Katie and Julia have heard a family story that some time after the Davsons moved in the animals were taken from Mallord Street by cab to the Darlingtons’ London house. They were probably looked after by Anne herself and were possibly driven down to her parents’ home in Sussex. It would not have been perhaps the best idea since their house lay under the path of German bombers arriving from France (the front of the house was, in fact, badly damaged). Both the Milnes in Hartfield and the Darlingtons were in the direct line of any German invasion from the English Channel. Bombs fell all round Cotchford Farm and the previously unlit lanes were illuminated by searchlights seeking out enemy aircraft on their way to London.
It appears that for a short time at the onset of war, Christopher remained at Cotchford and that Pooh was not there. The Government requisitioned the field where Jessica the donkey had lived.
He did recall the arrival of evacuees at Cotchford but Pete Tasker, the gardener’s son, claims today that they never lived in the Milne home itself but only with the Taskers in their farmhouse at the top of the drive. They all played cricket together on a home-made pitch where, according to Pete, Christopher was rubbish. Down in the village the local football team had called itself ‘The Tiggers’.
In 1941, Christopher decided not to return to Cambridge and first joined the Hartfield Defence Volunteers known as the Home Guard which met in the Hartfield Scout hut. He became aware of a truth that he had not previously appreciated – that the England into which he and Pooh had been born was divided sharply
into two classes. One said, ‘Good Morning, Smith’. The other replied, ‘Good Morning, Sir’. In the Hartfield Home Guard, the author’s son was no longer ‘sir’. He was on equal terms with the cowman’s son. It was for him a ‘tremendous experience.’
Before long he joined the Royal Engineers as a Private in the real army. There he was ‘Chris’ and a different person altogether.
He was commissioned in 1942 and travelled to North Africa, the Middle East and Italy. In 1944 he was wounded by a stray shot to the head. He recovered and father and son were able to renew the constant and affectionate correspondence they both enjoyed all the time he was away. Blue lived for the postman’s arrival with news from the Front and kept himself busy writing letters and articles for various journals.
At the end of the war Chris, returned home. He was demobilised in 1946 and returned home to Cotchford and then went back to Cambridge, graduating in 1947, only to find that there was no job anywhere for him. He was, he said, the ‘wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Nobody wanted a shy young man who could build a Bailey Bridge or defuse a Tellermine, was handy with a tenon saw, or knew how to take a rifle to pieces.
He would have liked to write but his father was still internationally famous and unintentionally paralysed his son’s shaky confidence. He wrote bitterly that it seemed if his father had climbed on his infant shoulders and had filched his good name, leaving him with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.
Perhaps it was not surprising that when Elliott Macrae – by then President of Dutton – made a visit to Cotchford Farm early in 1947, he met the toys and felt confident that there would be a new generation of Americans who would consider it a great privilege to share that experience. They would be thrilled to welcome what he described as a unique menagerie. At Cotchford, he was met by A.A. Milne and Daphne and was introduced to Pooh and his friends who had returned home from wherever they had been. It was, he said, a ‘particularly moving experience.’
The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh Page 9