With the extraordinary success of the children’s books, Milne altered his life in no way at all. He had completed the purchase of Cotchford Farm almost at the very moment that When We Were Very Young was published. He had no wish for any larger or grander home either in London or the country. Both houses were comfortably equipped and furnished and staffed. He ran a good enough car (later there would be another, which stayed permanently at Cotchford) and employed a chauffeur. Milne said he had inherited from his father a love not of money but of not having to worry about it, of being extravagant in a thoroughly sensible way. ‘We set our standards within our income and then enjoyed them carelessly . . . I shouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t be reckless about golf-balls, taxis, the best seats at cricket grounds and theatres, shirts and pullovers, tips, subscriptions, books and wine-lists.’ He liked buying expensive lingerie for Daphne at Christmas, going to Harvey Nichols, consulting the assistants and choosing with enormous care – ‘soft, pretty crêpe-de-chiney, lacey things. What fun!’ He enjoyed these minor extravagances. (Daphne would enjoy more major extravagances of her own.) He made sure he was always salting enough away not only for the future of his own family, but for Ken’s as well.
Milne never gambled, but he would put up money for something he thought worth doing. For instance, in the summer of 1928 his friend P. G. Wodehouse was looking for an extra backer for Ian Hay’s dramatisation of his novel A Damsel in Distress. Wodehouse wrote: ‘The management, Ian and I are each putting up ￡500. We needed another ￡500 to make up the necessary ￡2,000 and A. A. Milne gallantly stepped forward and said he would like to come in. I don’t think we shall lose our money as Ian has done an awfully good job.’ It indeed proved a safe investment.
Milne had taken on the responsibility for Ken’s family with a real joy that he was able to do it. ‘CVSD’ (?a va sans dire) he would say to Ken, over and over again, when some question of education or medical expenses came up. They were such a rewarding family. ‘I love you all,’ he ended one letter to Ken and obviously meant it. At the end of another letter he wrote, ‘You must be very proud of your family. So am I – I mean of yours, but also of mine. He is a darling. Much too good for me. So is Daff.’ (Viola Tree had just described him in the Woman’s Pictorial as ‘a natural bachelor’. ‘For a natural bachelor I have done well,’ he wrote. Certainly, a great deal better than Kenneth Grahame, that other ‘natural bachelor’.)
It was fortunate for both families that he had done so well financially. But he never let his riches go to his head. He remained sensible about money. Christopher Milne would say, ‘There was something not quite nice about being rich.’ A. A. Milne could hardly believe that he was or that, if he really was, that he would remain so. He always had the feeling at the back of his mind that in some mysterious way it would suddenly stop, that no one would buy his books or produce his plays and he would have to live on his savings. One of Ken’s children remembered that he always read bills carefully before paying them and was often appalled by high prices (a relic surely of the time when he first came to London). He would be amazed at the cost of Christopher’s school clothes or of a particular restaurant (‘Gosh, this costs more than the Mirabelle!’) and his niece once caught him out in an extraordinary small economy, ‘re-using last year’s diary, altering the days’. Perhaps it was really just that he had kept forgetting to buy a new one until the point when there were none left in the shops. He sometimes failed to realise just how short of money Ken’s daughters were when they were first working in London. He would ask them to dinner at Mallord Street before the theatre, forgetting how the cost of the taxi, which they would need to take because of their theatre-going clothes and the time factor, meant that they would have to cut down on their lunches for a week.
J. V. Milne took a particular pleasure in his son’s new kind of success. It was as if he had been waiting all the time for the children’s books. He relished every sales figure, every sign of their widespread fame (Pooh prints being given away with Home Chat, ‘Vespers’ being sung on the wireless). Alan wrote to Ken: ‘Father seems so terribly happy and excited that he makes me feel ashamed of not having made him happy before.’
Christopher Robin had other things on his mind besides Pooh, now that he was six and a half. His world was expanding. Someone had given him a map of Africa, which hung on the wall of his bedroom and fed his imagination. One day he would travel far further than A. A. Milne ever had. Books fed his mind too. ‘Moon is devoted to the Children’s Encyclopaedia, which I gave him at Christmas, and brings a volume down to breakfast whenever he comes. Flags, beetles and the inside of engines seem to be his favourite reading.’ Years before, Milne had surprised a nursery of Ken’s children similarly absorbed. He had gone up expecting to have to impersonate a bear but had found there was no demand for bears. ‘Each child lay on its front, engrossed in a volume of the Children’s Encyclopaedia. Nobody looked up as I came in. Greatly relieved, I also took a volume of the great work and lay down on my front.’ He considered many of the answers were aimed more at him than at the children.
Take a question like ‘Why does a stone sink?’ No child wants to know why a stone sinks; it knows the answer already – ‘What else could it do?’ Even Sir Isaac Newton was grown up before he asked why an apple fell, and there had been men in the world fifty thousand years before that, none of whom bothered his head about gravity.
Christopher was particularly concerned about his wildlife, and not just beetles. He went off to stay with the Darlingtons on one occasion, taking the volume containing CATERPILLARS with him, much to his father’s dismay when he wanted to check on a curious caterpillar he had found in Christopher’s absence. Was it a Death’s Head Hawk Moth? It was certainly bigger than a Poplar Hawk. He wrote to Ken that it ‘Looked exactly like a small snake in marking and colouring . . . and the Enc. Britt. isn’t very forthcoming on the subject.’
Now We Are Six was slowly taking shape. Milne wrote to Shepard after a day at Methuen, ‘Muller and I got to work on the book today, and I saw the new drawings. At present we have pasted up 14, taking 42 pages.’ Milne told Shepard how much space he was reckoning ‘for some of the poems which you have still to do’. He planned, for instance, that ‘Forgiven’, the one about Alexander Beetle, should take up three pages, giving Shepard the chance to draw the disappearing beetle over and over again as he runs away and disappears off the page. But it didn’t work out quite right. It should have been a right-hand page. As it is, poor Alexander Beetle looks as if he has been cut in two.
Milne was slightly worried about the length of the new book. In the end, it turned out to be a couple of pages longer than When We Were Very Young, though there were nine poems fewer. Shepard was already working on the second collection of Pooh stories. Milne had bought another new character and looked forward to seeing him for the first time: ‘I’m longing to see the “Tigger” illustrations,’ he wrote. Shepard had introduced the toys into the illustrations for Now We Are Six far more than Milne had into the poems themselves. Pooh goes nearly everywhere that Christopher Robin goes, of course, as Milne suggests in ‘Us Two’:
Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
Whatever I do, he wants to do,
‘Where are you going today?’ says Pooh:
‘Well, that’s very odd ’cos I was too.
‘Let’s go together,’ says Pooh, says he.
‘Let’s go together,’ says Pooh.