Forster and Milne never met, but this warm support from the distinguished writer must have returned to Milne’s mind two years later when A Passage to India was published. It is tempting to imagine that he might have felt he could really have written a powerful novel himself, if only he had had some wider experiences, if only he had been a different person.
Christopher Milne said that there were really very few things his parents enjoyed doing together. They had been married for ten years and certainly Alan had given up hope that Daphne would become a golfer. She had had lessons but she had never really taken to it. Harvey Nichols and Harrods were the playgrounds she preferred. What she enjoyed most of all was something Alan hated – having the decorators in and changing the appearance of a room. Alan would retreat to his study – a small dark room at the back of the house – and try to ignore the upheaval and the smell of paint. He would make all the right appreciative noises when it was safe to come out again. Daphne spent a great deal of time at her hairdresser’s and at Elizabeth Arden being groomed. She was not in the least beautiful but she was beautifully turned out – immaculate and untouchable. People described her as glamorous, sophisticated and elegant. She enjoyed her dressmaker and visiting her milliner; her clothes and hats were very important to her.
She wore a particularly splendid hat to the dress rehearsal of one of Milne’s plays. One hopes there was no one sitting behind her. Milne told Irene Vanbrugh a story that suggests how different they were. Apparently, the dress designer, ‘Madame Handeley Seymour’ of New Bond Street – who had been responsible for the leading lady’s clothes – told Milne that she had never seen a more lovely hat than the one his wife was wearing. Daphne was thrilled. She felt, Milne said, ‘as I would feel if Thomas Hardy patted me on the head’. There was very little chance of that happening. Though Hardy lived for another four-and-a-half years, he and Milne never met. Barrie could easily have arranged a meeting, but he must have realised that Hardy would have no interest in Milne, however much interest Milne had in Hardy. ‘How I loathe Christopher Robin,’ Florence Hardy would one day say, perhaps with a touch of sour grapes as her own children’s stories had had so little success.
There had been a long, admiring article in the Boston Transcript two years earlier by J. Brooks Atkinson, which urged Milne not to ‘stoop to pot-boilers and routine pieces of hack-work. Mr Milne’s knowledge of human nature and his bubbling sense of humor qualify him for more note-worthy achievement.’ Certainly, he didn’t want to write pot-boilers and he had no need to. He regretted having signed a contract with Curtis Brown on 15 November 1922 for three novels: the first was supposed to be published in 1923, following The Red House Mystery. An American editor had been so impressed by that novel that on his next trip to London he made his own contract with Milne, offering him no less than ￡2,000 for the serial rights of his next mystery story. But there never was another one. And his next novel did not appear until 1931. Perhaps it was his admiration for Jane Austen, for Samuel Butler, for Thomas Hardy, that made the novel so difficult for him. He was not sure he could write the sort of novel he would want to read.
There would be other plays, but now it seemed time for a change. During the previous winter, Milne had written a poem for Daphne (it was not a children’s poem) inspired by a glimpse of Billy, aged two, kneeling by his cot, being taught by his nanny to say the words so many children have been taught to say: ‘God bless Mummy, Daddy and Nanny and make me a good boy.’ ‘Mr Milne crept in and watched for a few moments,’ Olive Brockwell (as the nanny became) remembered many years later. ‘Then I heard him going away down the stairs chuckling as if he was very pleased about something.’ With hindsight she thought A. A. Milne was ‘chuckling’ because he had come up with a brilliant idea for a poem. ‘Such lovely words,’ she said. ‘And they were true. I did have a dressing gown hanging on the door of the nursery.’ But Milne was surely smiling first, of course, because the child looked so sweet and, secondly, because he seemed so perfectly to embody the fact that prayer meant nothing at all to a small boy. Indeed, it meant very little to Milne himself. Milne had no time at all for orthodox Christianity.
The sight of a child at prayer ‘is one over which thousands have been sentimental,’ Milne wrote in his autobiography. ‘It is indeed calculated to bring a lump to the throat. But, even so, one must tell the truth about the matter.’ And the truth is not only that prayer means nothing to a two-year-old but that, although children do have ‘an artless beauty, an innocent grace’, along with ‘this outstanding physical quality, there is a natural lack of moral quality, which expresses itself, as Nature always insists on expressing herself, in an egotism entirely ruthless.’
The critic Humphrey Carpenter pointed out that there was really no need for ‘Beachcomber’ to parody the poem, not long after it first appeared. (‘Hush, hush, nobody cares! / Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs.’) ‘Vespers’ itself is intended to be an entirely ironic picture of childhood. It is interesting that in his memoir of his childhood, Christopher Milne himself disputes what he calls his father’s ‘cynical’ attitude. A. A. Milne was obviously putting it forward so strongly to counteract the general idea of ‘Vespers’ as a sentimental poem about a good little boy saying his prayers. But his son himself felt much closer to Wordsworth’s view of childhood than his father’s. He remembered ‘those first affections, those shadowy recollections’ as ‘the fountain light of all our day’. Adults, though better at disguising it, are often as heartlessly egotistic as children.
In those days of splendour and glory I certainly felt myself nearer to God – the God that Nanny was telling me about, who lived up in the sky – than I do today. And so, asked to choose between those two views of childhood, I’m bound to say that I’m for Wordsworth. Maybe he is just being sentimental. Maybe the infant William has fooled the middle-aged poet in the same way that the kneeling Christopher Robin fooled so many of his readers. Maybe my cynical father is right. But this is not how I feel about it.