In 1924 there was also, nauseatingly, The ’Normous Saturday Fairy Book, which included some verses by Marion St John Webb, the author of The Littlest One, which had first appeared in 1914 and had sold 50,000 copies by this time. It was a collection of verses told in the first person by a six-year-old boy, complete with lisp and appropriate spelling. Milne had himself, years earlier, poured scorn on the taste for baby-talk. ‘It is important,’ one of his characters had said long ago, ‘that even as a child he should always be addressed in rational English and not in that ridiculous baby-talk so common to young mothers’, and had then been challenged himself for calling the child ‘his nunkey’s ickle petsy wetsy lambkin’. There was masses of it in Punch – but also some signs of a revulsion against it, as in an A. E. Bestall cartoon in which a nurse says to her charge: ‘Look, Dickie, what a dear little bow wow!’ and the child replies coolly: ‘Do you mean the Cairn or the Sealyham?’ People often found it quite hard not to use such talk, to address a tiny child as straightforwardly as someone of their own size. And in rendering children’s own speech, many writers (even H. G. Wells) apparently did not blush to write ‘pritty f’owers’ or ‘Do it adain, Dadda’. Milne actually used the device sparingly, but would come to regret using it at all when Dorothy Parker got hold of him.
The poem, whose proof he was correcting in that Welsh summer house as the rain poured down, was the first he had written deliberately for children, but there were no children in it, no baby talk and no fairies. When Rose Fyleman first approached him, he had said no. In 1925, two years later, he said it was on the grounds that he was too busy, but that then he began to wonder what he would have written if he hadn’t been too busy. In 1939, in his autobiography, when he was so intent on denying the label of children’s writer, he gave a slightly different explanation. He said he told her he didn’t write verse for children: ‘I didn’t and couldn’t, it wasn’t in my line.’ And then, after he had posted his letter turning down the suggestion, he began to wonder what he might have written if he had not refused; and then he did write it, and it turned out to be one of the best of all Milne’s children’s poems – ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’. The misguided doctor in the original illustrations by Harry Rowntree is himself a rather large rodent, in top hat and striped trousers, prescribing milk and massage-of-the-back, and freedom-from-worry and drives-in-a-car, and above all chrysanthemums, quite oblivious of the fact that there is nothing at all wrong with the dormouse, except for a longing
to be back in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).
There was a lot wrong with poetry for children in 1923, quite apart from the prevalence of fairies. Viscountess Grey of Falloden, in her introduction to A Child’s Book of Lyrics, compiled by Philip Wayne and published by Methuen that year, wrote of the time as being ‘this age of psycho-analysis when everyone is becoming aware of the importance of first impressions’. And yet, she went on, ‘If I could buy up all the Christmas annuals and school periodicals and magazines that provide verse written specially for children and burn these things publicly in the marketplace, I would do it with both hands. The mass of sickly nonsense of this nature that appears today is a great evil. Popular carelessness allows rubbish to be given to children for no better reason than that children are young.’ ‘They don’t get any richness into their words – they don’t get any flavour. There’s no bite’, as Milne put it in a story about a poet’s daughter. (This poet’s first poem about his child, had, owing to a misunderstanding, been used to wedge the nursery window, which rattled at night. It was probably the fate the poem deserved.)
When Milne had finished correcting his proof, the work of only a few minutes, and had addressed the envelope to Rose Fyleman, he had to think of an excuse not to return to the house and his fellow guests. Obviously, he must write something. One might think of him, standing, looking out of the summer-house window at the relentless Welsh downpour and trying to cheer himself up.
Is it raining? Never mind—
Think how much the birdies love it!
See them in their dozens drawn,
Dancing, to the croquet lawn—
Could our little friends have dined
If there’d been no worms above it?
Is it murky? What of that,
If the owls are fairly perky?
Just imagine you were one—
Wouldn’t you detest the sun?
Milne had written that a couple of years earlier: not as a children’s poem, of course, but just for fun, on another wet summer’s day. Perhaps writing children’s poems wasn’t so much out of his line after all. And he certainly wasn’t too busy. He sat down and started playing with words. He had a reddish marbled quarto exercise book and a pencil with an eraser on it (‘just the thing for poetry’). He felt slightly embarrassed about what he was doing, as so many children’s writers have done over the years. Wouldn’t it sound much better if he could report progress each evening at dinner on that second detective story everyone was so keen for him to write? (He could not help remembering he had been offered a contract for ￡2,000 for the serial rights alone.) It was, perhaps, all right to be turning out some children’s verses on holiday – but was it really what he wanted his next book to be? Writing for children was not taken very seriously. It was something, people thought, that anyone might do in an idle moment. But Milne never underestimated the genre. He remembered The Wind in the Willows, the book he had admired for so long, and knew that ‘no one can write a book which children will like, unless he writes it for himself first.’
That the book, when written, should satisfy children must be regarded as a happy accident, just as one regards it as a happy accident if a dog or a child loves one; it is a matter of personality, and personality is the last matter about which one can take thought. But whatever fears one has, one need not fear that one is writing too well for a child . . . It is difficult enough to express oneself with all the words in the dictionary at one’s disposal. With none but simple words, the difficulty is much greater. We need not spare ourselves.
Not that Milne believed in a strictly limited vocabulary; he wanted his words to have richness, flavour and bite, and he knew the power of the occasional unfamiliar word – just as Beatrix Potter did when she commented in The Flopsy Bunnies on the report that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific’. If one hears a small child refer to someone as ‘well-intentioned’ (‘Ernest was an elephant and very well-intentioned’) or to someone else ‘wandering vaguely quite of her own accord’, one knows one is in the presence of a Milne-listener. But most of the language in A. A. Milne’s children’s poems is, without being boring to an adult, easily understood by a three-or four-year-old, and that is a remarkable achievement. Milne wanted to make his position quite clear. He said of his first collection that it ‘is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously, even though he is taking it into the nursery.’ Milne’s technical skill is admirable. It is his dextrous use of rhythm and rhyme that makes his children’s poems lodge in the head, and this was what he most wanted. He said once in a preface addressed to young readers: