In July 1922, they stayed for a month with a Mrs Hobbs in Woolacombe Bay in Devon. This was the place, Christopher says, where he first encountered ‘sand-between-the-toes’, though, at not yet two, he was still at the age for eating it and really too small for clutching sixpences tight. (A more likely venue for that poem would be Whitesand Bay near Plas Brondanw in Wales, where they were the following summer, when the poem was written.) Swinnerton wrote to Woolacombe: ‘If the weather where you are has been anything like the weather I have been having on Arnold Bennett’s yacht, I am sorry for you. On the other hand, if it has kept you indoors to write more plays, it has done good work, and in that case only Billy and his mother are to be sympathised with.’ Milne replied to ‘beloved Swin’: ‘We’ve had three fine days and spend most of our time changing our clothes. But we enjoy ourselves and Billy and Daff are blooming. So am I. And also very slack. When I return to London, I shall WORK; a constant stream of GREAT PLAYS and POWERFUL NOVELS will flow from my pen.’ Writing to Swinnerton, Milne was always at his most self-mockingly boastful.
The Milnes would soon be looking for a country place of their own. Kenneth Grahame offered Boham’s at Blewbury in Berkshire, which he was leaving in the anguished aftermath of his son’s death on the Oxford railway line. But Milne wanted to buy, not rent, and in the meantime the Decoy would do.
Milne had been in contact with Grahame because of Curtis Brown’s suggestion that he should dramatise The Wind in the Willows. The play was not produced until 1929 – after Milne’s own success with his children’s books – but it was as early as 1921 that Milne responded to his agent’s suggestion. Curtis Brown had been trying to get managements interested in it earlier, but had reactions to the idea very much like that of the publishers themselves when the book was first written. When they finally accepted it, Methuen had not even had enough faith in the book to pay a guaranteed advance. But in spite of the famous Times Literary Supplement review (‘As a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible’) and Arthur Ransome’s in the Bookman (‘If we judge the book by its aim, it is a failure, like a speech to Hottentots made in Chinese’), it is difficult to believe, from the list of editions that followed, that The Wind in the Willows was as much in need of Milne’s one-man crusade to publicise it as he always suggested. Already in 1921, thirteen years after its first publication, it had gone into eleven editions. Milne was always pressing it on his friends. In 1919 he wrote of The Wind in the Willows as ‘a book which should be a classic, but is not’.
Usually I speak about it at my first meeting with a stranger. It is my opening remark, just as yours is something futile about the weather. If I don’t get it in at the beginning, I squeeze it in at the end. The stranger has got to have it some time. Should I ever find myself in the dock, and one never knows, my answer to the question whether I had anything to say, would be, ‘Well, my lord, if I might just recommend a book to the jury before leaving . . .’
and much later, in an introduction to a new edition, Milne added:
One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character . . . When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself.
Some people would come to feel the same way about Winnie-the-Pooh. There is no doubt at all, though the links are subtle, that The Wind in the Willows lies behind Winnie-the-Pooh and that, without it, Milne’s book might well not have been written. Milne, like Grahame, remembered his childhood as the great, good time. ‘The queer thing is,’ said Grahame, ‘I can remember everything I felt then. The part of my brain I used from four till seven can never have altered.’ Coming back to the Thames Valley wakened every recollection for Grahame. Milne had no such clearly defined childhood playground to return to, but it was all there inside his head. E. H. Shepard would report that one of the first questions Milne asked him was indeed whether he had read The Wind in the Willows. This was long before he illustrated it (not until 1931) and made the link between Grahame and Milne seem ever closer. ‘I realised even then,’ Shepard said, ‘what a very great influence it had been on him. It all seemed to come from that, and he was quite frank about it. He was an honest bloke; he had an admiration for the book.’ No wonder that when Curtis Brown wrote to him with the proposal that he should dramatise it, Milne responded like this on 15 November 1921:
The Wind in the Willows – now you’re talking! If Kenneth Grahame is willing, and if you feel pretty sure that you can find the right manager for it (as I think you should be able to), I will do it. And I shall love doing it. In fact, as soon as I got your letter, I began sketching it out, and I think I see how it can be done. I think it should be a children’s play, with a little incidental music.
*
Alan Milne would tell his brother Ken that he had become ‘sick of and entirely uninterested in politics’ since the war. That was certainly true of party politics but he continued to hold his strong pacifist convictions and to follow the international news closely, reading both The Times and the more left-wing Daily News at this period. As a pacifist who had experienced the Somme, Milne was even more deeply concerned than most that that should indeed have been the war to end all wars. It was bitter to realise already how unlikely that was to be so. In September 1922, Lloyd George nearly brought the country to war with Turkey. It was when, having encouraged the Greeks to invade Turkey (after the nationalist revolt which threatened to upset the allied post-war settlement), Lloyd George saw the Turks rout the Greeks and move right up to the barbed wire of the British positions at Chanak in the Neutral Zone. There was not only a threat to navigation in the Straits but, some said, a debt owed to the British war dead at Gallipoli. This chauvinistic suggestion was ridiculed by A. A. Milne in the Daily News on 4 October 1922 in an article which impressed E. M. Forster:
They have almost brought it off, the War to End Peace, for which they have been striving for three years. What an incredible joke! A war ‘to defend the freedom of the Straits and the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli’, says Punch magnificently. Of course you can think of it like that, and it sounds quite dignified and natural. But you may also think, as I do, of those five or ten or twenty men, our chosen statesmen, sitting round a table; the same old statesmen; each with his war memories thick upon him; each knowing his own utter incompetence to maintain a war or to end a war . . .
Forster, taking up Milne’s title, ‘Another Little War’, wrote five days later:
Sir, – Mr A. A. Milne’s brilliant article deserves special thanks for its scathing analysis of ‘the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli’. Our rulers knew that their policy would not be popular, and in the hope of stampeding us into it they permitted this vile appeal – the viler because the sentiment that it tries to pervert is a noble one and purifies the life of a nation when directed rightly. The bodies of the young men who are buried out there have no quarrel with one another now, no part in our quarrels or interest in our patronage, no craving for holocausts of more young men. Anyone who has himself entered, however feebly, into the life of the spirit, can realise this.
It is only the elderly ghouls of Whitehall who exhume the dead for the purpose of party propaganda and employ them as a bait to catch the living.