From now on, until Ken’s death, there are regular letters from Alan, seeking to cheer and entertain his brother in his rural isolation, so that we know far more than we would otherwise have done, if Ken had remained in London, about Alan’s activities during the years of publication of the four children’s books. Several times Milne invited Ken to visit them in the country. Whether he went or not we do not know. Christopher could not remember meeting his uncle. Occasionally Alan would go down to Somerset (never with Daphne), occasionally at the beginning Ken would come to London (sometimes with Maud); sometimes there would be telephone calls (‘Maud’s voice on the telephone did me a lot of good, and made me feel much nearer to you both’); sometimes Alan would meet the children off trains. But for the most part there were just the letters, often long.
Alan treads a delicate tightrope, knowing how interested his brother is in what is going on, wanting him to know how much money is coming in, so that he can realise how easily Alan can afford to help him (this year Tony had considerable medical expenses, which Alan cheerfully paid, when the boy’s appendix flared up) – but not wanting to seem to boast or to make it difficult for Ken to accept. It is always harder to receive than to give, as Christopher Milne too would find. (‘I am bad at receiving, bad at having to be grateful.’) It seemed particularly hard for Ken that the bitter end of his own career should have come just before the time of Alan’s greatest triumphs.
But in April 1924 Milne was having a terrible time with Gerald du Maurier during rehearsals at Wyndham’s of To Have the Honour, struggling to get him to produce it ‘in the proper fantastic-comedy spirit’. How Du Maurier must have loathed the interfering author. Milne was relieved to get down to the rented cottage at Poling in May. At least the reviews were reasonable. It was, The Times decided, ‘Mr Milne at his lightest. The fun is in the details and you don’t trouble yourself over much about the story.’ It would have its 150th performance in September.
But, as usual, there were people longing for Milne to do something bigger. The Illustrated London News critic begged him to ‘drop his masquerade and forget to be polite’. It was all very well for him to poke gentle fun at the British love of rank and titles, but, the critic suggested, he should ‘use his splendid gifts in serious satire, to be less gracious and more in earnest, for we have sore need of his talents.’
On the same page as the review of ‘The New Milne Comedy’ the magazine carried a picture of ‘The First Labour Premier and his daughter as guests of the King and Queen at Windsor’. Milne started at about this time a habit he would continue for the rest of his life of writing letters to The Times. A few months earlier the General Election had ended in a stalemate – the Tories with 258, Labour with 191 and the Liberals with 159. When the final outcome was still in the balance, Lord Hawke, well known as a cricketer (captain of Yorkshire for many years) had written to The Times appealing to the Tories and the Liberals to form a coalition to keep Ramsay MacDonald out. Milne could not resist drawing Hawke’s attention to an interesting precedent:
Lord Hawke, horrified at the political prospect, makes a despairing appeal ‘from a sportsman’s point of view’ to Messrs Baldwin and Asquith. From the same point of view, I make an appeal to him. I remind him, in short, that not only was Australia ruled by Labour for many years without detriment to the Empire, but that it was actually under a Labour government that she won the last Test Matches, and under a Coalition Government that we lost them. I would ask him, therefore, to consider, before he commits himself to a new coalition, whether the prospects for 1924–1925 are really as desperate as he imagines.
This rather teasing letter is indexed solemnly by The Times as ‘on possible Labour ministry’; and the possibility, as we know, became an actuality. Ramsay MacDonald, with the support of the Liberals (determined to keep the Tories out of office) formed the first Labour government. There was a generally jumpy attitude to the new government. Milne must have smiled wryly at one particular cartoon in Punch, where a golfer groans ‘I’m dead tired tonight’ and his wife tries to cheer him up with ‘Never mind, dear, perhaps the Labour government will abolish golf.’
Late in the year, just at the time of the publication of When We Were Very Young, Milne was enraged by a letter from the Bishop of Gloucester in The Times, written on board the Cunard liner RMS Berengaria, complaining because he could no longer afford to keep three gardeners. No wonder, he said, that there is so much unemployment when everyone is pricing themselves out of the market. The Bishop also bewailed the way the lower classes wasted their money. Milne adopted a highly satirical tone in his reply:
It is refreshing to find that the higher clergy are as human as ourselves, and one sympathises with the Bishop of Gloucester’s feeling that if his income tax were lower, and if he could employ three gardeners for the price of two . . . not only would he himself be happier, but that a reflected glow of happiness would probably spread itself over the rest of the community. We have all felt like this from time to time.
But upon one point in his letter I ask for further enlightenment. He writes of the wealth which, by the lower classes, is squandered on ‘the pictures’ and charabancs as ‘economically an unprofitable employment of labour’. From one of our spiritual instructors this is a little surprising. What does he hold to be the reason of our existence – the provision for each other of bread and boots, or the development of our souls? Agriculture, he insists, is a ‘profitable’ employment of labour, presumably because the product of it is not ‘wasted’ – it helps to keep us alive? But why are we keeping alive? Apparently in order to make boots and build houses for each other – good, profitable employment. Profitable employment in short, is employment which benefits the body; unprofitable employment, squandered money, is that which is devoted to the soul. Strange teaching for a Bishop! The pictures and charabancs, poetry and painting, the view from Richmond Hill, and the silence of a Cathedral, a concert and a day in April, these things, like education, were admirable when the country was wealthy; but now, with the wages of gardeners what they are, money spent on them is money wasted. Is this indeed what the Bishop wishes us to believe? and are there never moments when he understands that ‘pictures and charabancs’ are not merely profitable, but the only profitable things in life? I seem to remember a text . . .
‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ It was the same argument Milne had used years before to justify the life of the writer, the artist. But did he ever have a sneaking feeling that plays like The Dover Road and To Have the Honour (good entertainment, certainly; enjoyable, apparently) were not exactly developing anyone’s soul? Did he read The Waste Land, which had just been published, and admire it? Probably not. But he went to see Sybil Thorndike in Saint Joan that year and perhaps felt a pang of envy. He certainly admired Shaw. In a letter to The Times Milne would say:
Let us curse the present state of the theatre (or whatever we call the managers who refuse our plays) as heartily as we like, but don’t let us wash our hands of it with a superior air, and then look around for sympathy. That was not how Saint Joan came into the lives of the half-crown public.