‘Well . . .’ He hunted around for a reason he could give. Because it’s considered bad manners. Because you mustn’t? Because . . .
‘Well’, he said, looking in the direction that my fork was pointing, ‘suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might land on your fork and that would be very painful.’
When the young Enid Blyton came to interview Milne for Teacher’s World that October, just before the publication of Pooh, they naturally spoke of teachers and schools. Milne talked sympathetically of teachers who ‘spend their days struggling in the poorer districts with terribly large classes’. And he couldn’t resist showing off Christopher Robin’s prowess with problems – exactly the same sort of problems his father had set him nearly forty years before. ‘He likes problems . . . There are 500 cows in a field. They go out of a gate at the rate of two a minute. How many are left after two and a half hours?’ Miss Blyton did not reveal whether the six-year-old answered that one promptly, but she did say: ‘Christopher Robin finds no difficulty with problems of this sort.’ A similar problem would crop up two years later in the ‘Contradiction’ to The House at Pooh Corner.
The young mathematician that day seemed to be not quite sure whether he was a dragon or a knight. He stared at Enid Blyton fiercely and blew tremendously hard. He had paper tied round his legs and she asked why. ‘So’s dragons won’t bite me.’
He carried an enormous Teddy Bear, which he informed me was Pooh. He stood there in his little brown overall, with his great shock of corn-coloured hair, and looked about the room seeking for what he might devour. His bright eyes fell upon his father’s fountain-pen and he immediately took it up and pulled it into as many pieces as possible.
This sounds destructive, but fountain pens did come apart in a rather satisfactory way and undoubtedly Christopher would have been able to put it together again, its flabby rubber tube tucked neatly away, without disgorging any ink. Christopher was already very good with his hands and would be indignant about his father’s poem ‘The Engineer’, in Now We Are Six, which seems to have him saying:
It’s a good sort of brake
But it hasn’t worked yet.
‘If I’d had a train (and I didn’t have a train) any brake that I’d wanted to make for it – any simple thing like a brake – WOULD HAVE WORKED.’
There were numerous interviews in these years. There were numerous descriptions of the house in Mallord Street (‘a rhapsody in azure and primrose’ – carpets ‘a heavenly blue’, walls yellow) and of Milne’s book-lined study – ‘a neat and cosy room’, looking out on ‘a tiny townish garden’. Christopher would remember the smells of fuchsia and geraniums in Chelsea. There were numerous questions about how Milne liked being famous (‘Well, if I am famous, then, yes, I do like it’), numerous tributes to his good looks (‘his fine spare features, tanned and healthy-looking’), to his laughter, his diffidence and modesty, to his own charm, his charming wife and even more charming child.
The child was not asked at the time but he would say, much later, that ‘I also quite liked being Christopher Robin and being famous. There were indeed times . . . when it was exciting and made me feel grand and important.’ It was only later that he grew out of his part and came to resent the books so fiercely, to resent the fact that it seemed, almost, as if the father had got to where he was by climbing upon the child’s own puny shoulders.
The child’s grandfather said that winter: ‘Alan’s boy (6?), Christopher Robin, or, as he calls himself, Billy Moon, is quite unspoilt. He complains that his school is “easier than ever”, but Alan thinks he learns quite enough. He makes up for it by learning chess and whist at home!’ His cousin, Tony, just twelve, had been telling his grandfather that he was sure he could get a Westminster scholarship ‘and is not going to be behind his father or his uncle or his brother’. When Tony’s brother, Tim, had got the top scholarship to Westminster in 1925, Milne wrote to Ken: ‘I only hope Billy will be as clever, but I doubt it,’ and a little later added, ‘I suspect him of striking out an entirely new line of his own, like Archery and Spanish. But as long as I love him as I do now, I don’t mind.’
There were a lot of hard acts for Billy Moon, alias Christopher Robin, to follow, but so far he seemed to be bearing up well. He was showing little sign of strain though he was already famous, even before Winnie-the-Pooh brought him further into prominence. A piece in an American magazine, Town and Country, in May 1926, itself raving about Milne’s ‘adorable nonsense’ and coining the word ‘Milnenomaniacs’ for his fans, carried the following caption under his photograph:
A. A. Milne. English playwright. Children’s poet laureate by divine right of whimsy. His plays have been successfully produced in New York. And he is the father of Christopher Robin.
Milne seemed to see no need to protect the child from all the publicity. Daphne positively encouraged the press. There is no evidence for Christopher’s adult suggestion: ‘I imagine that the door was guarded with extra vigilance.’ Milne would say later that all the talk about Christopher Robin seemed to have nothing to do with the real child, Billy Moon. But the photographs were, of course, of the real child, whatever he was called. Milne was always allowing photographs to be taken of the two of them together. There is the famous image by Howard Coster, now in the National Portrait Gallery – Christopher Milne would say of that photograph that his father never held him like that. There are lots of other studies in less or more awkward poses. And plenty of the boy alone. Milne seemed totally confident, at least on the surface, that Christopher Robin would be able to cope when he got to prep school:
Years ago, school was a world of blips and buffetings, and a boy might have had a hard time, perhaps, if he had been a nursery celebrity, but conditions today are vastly different . . . I am not uneasy. A delicate or lonely boy used to have a terrible time, but those days are gone, thank goodness!
How could he have felt so sure?
In New York that spring there had been a ripple of sensation when Milton, Balch and Company published a rather clever parody of Milne and Shepard entitled When We Were Rather Older, focusing attention on a generation of ‘modern’ young things with cocktails and Charlestons and fast cars. There was some talk of a libel suit, but in fact the book (which went into a second edition immediately) did nothing but good to the original. Milne’s verse was so obviously much more skilled than that of Fairfax Downey. But the book is now a collector’s item itself with its own sociological interest and period charm:
James James
Morrison’s Mother’s
Had her hair shingled off.
She’s late
Home for her dinner
Being out shooting golf.
Jim says
Somebody told her
That was the modern view,
And since it’s the rage not to be your age,
Well, what can any son do?