The game, in fact, did little to dispel Milne’s gloom. Moreover, there was a depressing butler called Griffiths (who had come with the house), who seemed to have taken a particular dislike to Milne, always serving him last, when the food was lukewarm. And Billy, aged three that month, had been whisked away to the nursery wing with his nanny to join the youngest Playfair, four-year-old Andrew, and was rarely seen. Indeed, Joan, the then sixteen-year-old, looking back, could not even remember the infant, absorbed as she was in her grief at the death of her father and trying to concentrate on a black-and-white check dress she was making – but she did remember Alan and Daphne Milne. In her memory, the holiday seemed a sort of background ‘out of which that couple protruded’. She was particularly interested in A. A. Milne because she had had a small part as one of the children in his play Make-Believe at Hammersmith, five years earlier. She had never met Daphne before, and now she found them, ten years married, ‘honey-mooney, as they were always together and speaking very little to anyone else’. She thought them ‘a nice and attractive couple, both tall and he ascetic-looking and serious, not laughy’, as one might have expected.
Giles Playfair confirmed her memory, saying, ‘They adored each other.’ He found Milne himself ‘prudish, very, very proper’, disliking anything vulgar. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘my father and he liked each other very much.’ But obviously, to the thirteen-year-old, the well-known playwright was not at all as he felt a writer should be. When one lists the things Milne disliked one can easily see how priggish he could have appeared to young Giles Playfair. He disliked not only beer, but gin and whisky too. (‘Why are you the devil of a fellow if you like drinking whisky, and the devil of a prig if you don’t?’ as a boy in one of Milne’s plays would ask.) He disliked professional football and hated all blood sports (‘the taste for killing small animals’). He had no interest in racing and disliked all gambling – the whole business of getting something for nothing, whether the gambling was on sport, on the stock exchange or on a state lottery (the possibility of one was being discussed at this time). Milne had no time for jazz; he was not particularly interested, in fact, in any kind of music – though he once enjoyed a cello recital, by one of his cousins, rather more than he expected. Above all, Milne loathed, and made clear that he loathed, all forms of aggression, all unthinking talk of the glories of war. It was rather a rebarbative collection of feelings for a thirteen-year-old to stomach.
Milne became increasingly irritated by the proximity of his fellow guests. ‘In a week,’ he wrote later, ‘I was screaming with agoraphobia’ – not claustrophobia, but the dislike of public places, dislike of the drawing-room. He needed to get away. The post one day brought him, forwarded from Chelsea, the proof of a poem he had written for Rose Fyleman for a new children’s magazine she was starting, called The Merry-Go-Round. Milne retreated gladly to a summer house to correct the proof.
Rose Fyleman was the author of numerous books for children, with such titles as Fairies and Chimneys and The Fairy Flute. Fairies were fashionable in the early 1920s. Children, if not just an attractive form of interior decoration, were seen as imaginative little creatures whose fancies must be allowed to flourish and not be quashed by sceptical adults. There was some feeling that children should be sealed off in pretty nurseries from the painful realities of the outside world and there was a tremendous suspicion of ‘progressive’ parents who, like some of their Victorian predecessors, but for very different reasons, distrusted fairy tales and those who offered sails to minds that rather required ballast. Compton Mackenzie would satirise parents who surrounded their children with nothing but Meccano and clever mechanical toys and who offered them The Wonder Book of Why and What, concentrating on pictures of steam engines and aeroplanes, and banning ‘stupid stories about fairies, or ghosts, or the heroes of the past’. There was a revulsion from their tendency to explain that the rings in the grass are actually caused by fungi or that Cinderella’s glass slipper, through an error in translation, was actually made of fur.
Rose Fyleman was also editing the annual Joy Street, which was published for the first time that year, just a month after the first issue of Merry-Go-Round. Joy Street was promoted as ‘a meeting place for literally all the best writing for children’, but Rose Fyleman was definitely on the side of the fairies. Her famous, banal ‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!’ was only one of scores of verses she contributed to Punch in the 1920s, verses that were certainly not intended to be funny. It was only a year since Arthur Conan Doyle in The Coming of the Fairies had examined the case of the Cottingley fairies, those much-publicised photographs which seem such obvious fakes, and yet on which he returned an open verdict.
‘It is too late for a modern mother,’ Milne wrote in 1925, ‘to wonder if her children ought to be brought up with a belief in fairies. Their acceptance of fairies is as natural as their acceptance of the Milkman or the Mayor . . . To say that a child has no need for fairies when there are so many beautiful birds and butterflies in the world, or no need for seven-league boots so long as five and five most wonderfully make ten, is like saying that a man has no need for Switzerland until he has exhausted (as none of us has) England, nor any need for Wordsworth until he has mastered every line of Shakespeare.’
The trouble was that most fairy stories and poems were feeble by any standard. Enid Blyton’s second book was published this year. It was called Real Fairies, and the Morning Post commented, ‘Children have received a new educational charter restoring their right to believe in fairies.’ The Morning Post had obviously forgotten the children’s answer to Peter Pan’s regular question each Christmas, saving the dying Tinkerbell.