As I watched the pillow take punishment, a small, gruff voice – the voice Pooh uses when Mrs Milne is in the room – cried ‘Here! hold me up! I mustn’t miss this!’ and a brown bear came tumbling over my shoulder down into my lap. I had him right-side up directly; I kept my cheek on his good comfortable head for the rest of the bout. I was thinking of the American children whose eyes would shine when I told them, ‘It was just this way that I held Pooh in my arms so he could watch Christopher Robin boxing.’
Pooh has been told that there will be no more books about him after this one that is just coming, The House at Pooh Corner. I do not know if he has quite taken it in; ideas come rather slowly to Pooh, and he makes no special effort to assimilate unpleasant ideas. What! retire from literature just when one has performed the unprecedented feat of changing the name of a household institution on the other side of the earth? for this is what happened when almost over night all the Teddy-bears of America became Pooh-bears in the vocabulary of childhood.
It seems there are to be positively no more Christopher Robin books. Mr Milne says so, and he ought to know. ‘No, more Christopher Robin books!’ said Mrs Milne. ‘Look, Pooh’s crying!’ And indeed the brown bear in her arms had his paws over his face. But between them his candid eyes looked out confidently. Pooh knows that his place in literature is safe.
Claude Luke, another visitor that year, gave readers in John o’London’s a further view of the happy family in the sunny house in Chelsea which somehow, mysteriously, seemed full of the ‘breath of morning, morning in a very young world’. After some lamenting over ‘the tragic ephemerality of such splendid childhood’, Luke yet managed to convey a very realistic small boy and his nursery – the animals (‘not the original Piglet which, alas, had been chewed by a dog’ and replaced by one of more suitable size), the books, including Dr Dolittle, the walls hung with Shepard drawings, a coloured Spy sketch of his father, that pictorial map of Africa, that Indian headdress. When Luke asked him the obvious question about whether he liked his father’s books, instead of doubling up his dimpled fist as the young Dorothy Parker would have done, Christopher Robin just ‘gazed at me for a moment, amazed at the immense foolishness of humans and then turned to his nurse with the expressive remark, “Do I, Nanny?” as though to say, “Throw out this absurd man!”’
When Nanny had gone downstairs to see about lunch, Christopher favoured Mr Luke with a glimpse of a row of bottles in a secret corner:
‘They’re my poisons!’ he whispered, in a voice that would have thrilled Edgar Wallace. I read the labels inscribed in a childish scrawl. One was ‘Salerd dressing for letters’; another ‘Cind of frute salerd – it is good to drink’; and a third ‘Loshun for the mouth’. He opened one for me to smell.
‘I can’t face that one,’ he admitted, wryly, and confessed that it was composed of ipecacuanha wine, flour paste, and ink! We agreed it had a deadly odour.
It was all getting a bit much. The time had obviously come to call a halt, to bring the whole business to an end. Milne would try, but as May Lambert Becker had said, ‘Pooh’s place in literature was safe’, and that meant that Christopher Robin would never go away either. Somehow the real boy, whose name had been taken, would have to continue to live with him, would have, eventually, to come to terms with him.
The House at Pooh Corner was published in both New York and London in October 1928. On the British jacket the totals of the sales were now:
When We Were Very Young
179th thousand
Winnie-the-Pooh
96th thousand
Now We Are Six
109th thousand
In America they were correspondingly larger. The reviews in both countries were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Everyone had been told it was the last book and again and again reviewers lamented the fact. Punch said: ‘The last book is as good as the first. It is too bad that Christopher Robin has to grow up.’ The Saturday Review: ‘The stories have lost none of their charm. It is a shame to see them end.’ Even the Times Literary Supplement, although it congratulated Milne on deciding to avoid ‘the temptation to repeat his successful formula mechanically’, said: ‘It is sad to see the stories end.’ Only Dorothy Parker, the Constant Reader, returning to her attack of the previous year, poured scorn on Pooh’s hum, the one about ‘The more it snows, tiddely-pom’. It was an easy target:
It ‘seemed to him a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others.’ In fact, so Good a Hum did it seem that he and Piglet started right out through the snow to Hum It Hopefully to Eeyore. Oh, darn – there I’ve gone and given away the plot. Oh, I could bite my tongue out.
As they are trotting along against the flakes, Piglet begins to weaken a bit.
‘“Pooh,” he said at last and a little timidly, because he didn’t want Pooh to think he was Giving In, “I was just wondering. How would it be if we went home now and practised your song, and then sang it to Eeyore tomorrow – or – the next day, when we happen to see him.”
‘“That’s a very good idea, Piglet,” said Pooh. “We’ll practise it now as we go along. But it’s no good going home to practise it, because it’s a special Outdoor Song which Has To Be Sung In The Snow.”
‘“Are you sure?” asked Piglet anxiously.
‘“Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom–”
‘“Tiddely what?” said Piglet.’ (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)
‘“Pom,” said Pooh. “I put that in to make it more hummy.”’
And it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Milne hated it, of course. He had resisted the temptation to reply the year before and now he would wait more than ten years. In his autobiography he wrote:
The books were written for children. When, for instance, Dorothy Parker, as ‘Constant Reader’ in The New Yorker, delights the sophisticated by announcing that at page 5 of The House of Pooh Corner ‘Tonstant Weader fwowed up’ (sic, if I may), she leaves the book, oddly enough, much where it was. However greatly indebted to Mrs Parker, no Alderney, at the approach of the milkmaid, thinks ‘I hope this lot will turn out to be gin’, no writer of children’s books says gaily to his publisher, ‘Don’t bother about the children, Mrs Parker will love it.’
Milne had made the decision to stop long before Mrs Parker. She simply added to his satisfaction in his own decision, so clearly included in the book itself. At the end of The House at Pooh Corner, shades of the prison house are beginning to close around Christopher Robin; it is all coming to an end. School and growing up are claiming the boy as they claim every child. Things would never be the same again.
That Christmas, Christopher had his first pair of football boots and wore them in the house, ‘so as to get used to them’. In January 1929, just three months after the book was published, he started at prep school, at Gibbs’ in Sloane Square, in a bright red blazer, with a bright red cap on his newly trimmed hair. Nanny took him in the number 11 bus along the King’s Road. Milne wrote to Ken: