Alan Milne’s father died in 1932. All the links with his childhood were now severed. He had spent a great deal of his adult life looking forward to the next thing he was about to write, the next piece for Punch, the next play, the next book, full of optimism. It had always seemed that he was making his reputation. But now he had to accept that he had made it and it was not the one that he had wanted.
We do not need, in this version of Milne’s story, to read much about the strains and stresses of the thirties, even the politics, the rise of fascism, with which Milne told an interviewer his mind was ‘intolerably preoccupied’. There was the singular success of just one of his books, Peace with Honour, in 1934, his tract against war. At that point Milne was temporarily famous for something other than being the father of Christopher Robin, but the odds were stacked against his pacifist views. They came to be seen as ‘appeasement’ and Milne himself would admit that there were some things that had to be fought. Six years later, he would publish War with Honour. For the most part, there were sluggish sales of his adult books and bad reviews of his plays.
Just one play, Toad of Toad Hall (an adaptation of his favourite book) was enthusiastically received. It had been first suggested by Curtis Brown in 1921, but was not finally produced until 1929. It continued to be a Christmas treat for children for many years, until in the twenty-first century it was supplanted by Alan Bennett’s The Wind in the Willows.
Milne came to hate the word ‘whimsical’ in his reviews and the constant references to the Pooh books. Even if he wrote something as straightforward as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he said, he would be accused of being whimsical about cats, ‘not a real cat, but just a little make-believe pussy, such as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh invents so charmingly for our delectation’.
When Sarah Simple was produced in 1940 in America, one critic would reflect that the man who had written such excellent plays as Mr Pim Passes By, The Truth about Blayds and The Dover Road, ‘now writes with about as much maturity as Christopher Robin’. It was a hard time, of course, a time when theatre reviews seemed particularly irrelevant. But he now knew it would not be as a playwright that he would be remembered.
A. A. Milne was now richer than he would ever have believed possible. It seemed churlish to grumble. Pooh had already become an industry in the thirties. Vast sales of all four of the books, with translations all over the world, had stimulated the sales of ‘hygienic plush toys’, board games, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, writing paper and nursery china. There were endless spin-offs from the books: Hums, Songs, the Christopher Robin Story Book, the Christopher Robin Reader, the Christopher Robin Verses (with twelve colour plates) and so on. In America, the total sales of the four central books had already reached a million copies. Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and the rest were on their way to becoming lodged permanently in what could be called the folk-memories of the English-speaking people, part of our common language and frame of reference.
The most important thing for Alan Milne in the 1930s was his relationship with his son. As Christopher himself put it in The Enchanted Places: ‘My father, who had derived such happiness from his childhood, found in me the companion with whom he could return there.’ Not long after Ken’s death, the time had come for Olive Rand, to whom Christopher had been so devoted, to leave. At last she felt free to marry; Milne furnished her cottage, which she called Vespers, as a wedding present. At nine, Christopher was off to a boarding prep school, but in the holidays there would be no one to come between father and son, as there always had been when the boy’s first love was his nanny.
For Milne, Christopher could be, as he grew up, what his brother Ken had been in their boyhood. After Ken’s death, the letters to the invalid Ken in Somerset became letters to Christopher at school. In the holidays, at Cotchford, in London and in Dorset, they did things together more and more. For the next ten years the boy was his father’s closest friend. It even seemed, at this early stage, that he might become a first-class cricketer. Milne wrote to an old friend: ‘He is always the youngest boy in any form he is in and generally top. Forgive a proud parent; he is a duck.’ Christopher had a passion for knowledge, for algebra, for learning the Greek alphabet. They shared ball games, crosswords, Euclid, morse.
In the summer of 1934, Milne described his son as he turned fourteen. ‘Moon left his prep school in July, being then top of the school, leader of the choir, captain of cricket and in the football XI.’ He had won a scholarship to Stowe, his father’s choice. Milne was still happily unaware how much his son was coming to resent his celebrity. The boy did not blame his father at this stage, but ‘Christopher Robin’, as he himself put it, ‘was beginning to be, what he was later to become, a sore place that looked as if it would never heal.’
In 1936, Milne reported to a friend that the boy ‘is the most completely modest, unspoilt, enthusiastic happy darling in the world. In short, I adore him.’ Christopher, who had described his father as ‘buttoned up all through his life’, did not of course read this letter until he came across it in my biography. It was at this point that boys in the next study at Stowe were playing the record of ‘Vespers’ over and over again on their wind-up gramophone and driving the ‘happy darling’ into despair. He was very vulnerable, but most of the time he could forget the books and the bear and get on with his work. He was an even better mathematician than his father, but his cricket, which might have helped him, did not fulfil his father’s hopes; he got no further than the Third Eleven.
Four years running in the mid-thirties, father and son had holidays in rented houses on the Dorset coast with Ken’s widow and three of his children, Christopher’s cousins. Maud, aged fifty, organised the meals. The other five played and swam. Christopher recalled, ‘For us, to whom our childhood had meant so much, the journey back is short, the coming and going easy.’ Sometimes there were boats, sometimes tennis courts. Always there was the sea and crosswords and endless paper games.