Milne called that essay ‘The End of a Chapter’, as he came to the end of the five years or so in which he had been involved in writing the four children’s books for which he will always be remembered. There was another much longer chapter – indeed one should rather call it a book – that was also coming to an end. Just after The House at Pooh Corner was published his brother Ken became seriously ill. He had been ill with tuberculosis for years, but he had learned to live with it, to move around, to live a quiet but almost normal life. Now he had to take to his bed.
At first his brother was not really alarmed. Ken had been in bed before. There was no reason to suppose he would not recover from this setback. Ken was having the best medical advice and treatment his brother could procure for him. ‘Don’t be afraid of having another specialist if you want one,’ Milne wrote. In his next letter he told Ken he had seen Christopher as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night: ‘It’s a rotten part. For pages at a time he says nothing but “Ay, ’tis so” and, after an enormous wait, “And me too.” But he did make an effort to keep the thing going, and other people say he was very good. I suppose my standards of acting are too high.’ It was the first time, but it would not be the last, that Christopher disappointed his father. He went on:
The Fourth Wall is a great go in New York. But I get terrible setbacks to make up. A Scarborough school-master wrote to ask if they could do a scene from Pooh without paying a fee. Daff wrote back certainly as long as it was a private performance etc, etc. Now he writes: ‘I wrote to you last Sunday, and received a reply from ‘Celia Brice’. I was not asking her but you. As you write (if you have written it) in this discourteous way, the dramatisation of that, or of any other scene in any of your works can go to blazes, and you with it. Yours faithfully.’ So I have nothing to hope from Scarborough.
Life was not always plain sailing, even for the rich and healthy. ‘The Fiat broke down next to the Nurse Cavell statue and had to be towed home. I haven’t heard yet when if ever I shall see it again.’ Milne ended his letter. ‘Get well, please. Ever your very very affectionate, Alan.’ In the months to come, he would say that over and over again: ‘Get well, please.’
Even at this difficult time, Ken’s wife Maud organised a special pencil with his name on it for Christopher’s Christmas present. Alan sent them not a cheque but a large bank note, hoping that would make it more likely that they would spend it on something nice but ‘entirely unnecessary’. ‘A happy Christmas to you with your family,’ Alan wrote to Ken, not allowing himself to realise it would be the last time he could send such a greeting. ‘I hope that you will all have a happier New Year.’
Daphne and Alan Milne went to Grindelwald for skiing in February 1929; Ken and Alan had been there together in 1907, soon after Alan had joined Punch. Ken was much in his mind. He recalled an enormous walk they had done together. He showed it to everyone on the map and ‘nobody believes it’. His last visit to Switzerland had been in 1913 – when he and Daphne had become engaged. He thought of that time too:
Sixteen years ago, I just went down moderate slopes, falling at the bottom and Daff didn’t go down, collapsing at the top. But there appears to be a lot more in it than that. Everybody here is terribly keen and many of them terribly good. Some of the things they do are beautiful to watch, and I feel, as I feel about anything I can’t do, that I would sooner do this one thing than everything which I can do. (Which isn’t much.)
He told Ken about a Boy’s Own Paper lunch he had been to just before going to Switzerland:
The Editor in replying to Baldwin’s toast told us of some of the questions boys ask him; and said that one boy – about 10 by his writing – asked for the price of an expedition to the North or South Pole, ‘for one man and his dog’. I gave one great ‘O-oh!’ when I heard this, and unaccountably found a tear trickling down my nose.
He knew Ken would understand why he was so moved. He was weeping for the boys that he and Ken had been. He was weeping for lost childhood and for all the expeditions and adventures that they had had together, the two boys and their dog, a long-ago mongrel called Brownie. He was also weeping, perhaps, for the fact that life, rewarding and comfortable as it was, had not given him the challenges that he had imagined as a child, that the only snow he knew was the snow of safe comfortable Switzerland, not of the North Pole.
Above all, Milne was weeping for the brother he was losing. Ken died on 21 May 1929, aged forty-nine. His most vivid link with his childhood had gone. Memory, that wellspring of his best writing for children, was now painful.
AFTERWORD
Alan Milne lived another twenty-eight years after the death of his brother Ken, and after his decision to stop writing about Christopher Robin. But neither he nor the boy himself could avoid the particular kind of fame the children’s books had brought them. When Milne went to America in 1931, ostensibly to publicise his new adult novel, Two People, and to discuss plans for a new play, he found nearly all the questions in bookshops and at parties were about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. Two years later the American Parents magazine named Christopher Robin as one of the five most famous children in the world.
The thirties were a time when Alan and Daphne were increasingly leading separate lives. Daphne’s enthusiasm for the Pooh books and all the celebrity associated with them was itself a cause of friction between husband and wife at a time when Milne sometimes wished he had never written them. Daphne was finding the quiet life Milne liked (golf, watching cricket, and crossword puzzles, when he wasn’t writing) was not enough to satisfy her. There is plenty of evidence that both of them found some happiness with other people. Alan Milne would say: ‘Don’t miss any happiness that is going or you will find it gone.’ He felt only children can experience unalloyed happiness. When we are adult, ‘happiness is always tainted with the knowledge that one will have to pay for it.’ There were important relationships, but the marriage survived.