At Poling that summer (just about the worst summer on record; it was even wetter than Wales the year before) Milne wrote yet another light comedy: Ariadne. He described it in a letter to Ken: ‘It is about a solicitor’; he knew about solicitors. He was still seeing something of his eldest brother Barry, who was one. J. M. Barrie was always saying how one should write about things one knows. But when it was produced in the spring of 1925, the reviews were very mixed and Milne was swearing once again never to write another play.
At Poling, between the acts and showers, Milne took photographs, and sent them to Ken. The captions included:
1) Child in pursuit of elusive cabbage-white. Nurse saying ‘He’ll never catch it’; Mother saying, ‘Surely those are the Parkinson-Smiths over there.’
2) Child examining captured butterfly. Observe the latter’s antennae.
Milne sent that snapshot to Irene Vanbrugh, as well, boasting about the antennae and about the beauty of the child. It would seem to be the photograph so familiar from the cover of the Penguin edition of Christopher Milne’s own memoirs, but it is impossible to see the antennae. Milne wrote to Irene:
I bore all the Garrick with it and it is, by general consent, the most perfect photograph ever taken. You might think I was become rather an expert with the camera but I have to confess, Madam, that these things are largely a matter of luck.
3) Child preparing Father’s bran-mash for breakfast.
In the absence of this actual photograph, we cannot be sure that this was really what the child was doing, mixing some ancestor of muesli, but it’s a nice thought.
There were more than cabbage whites at Poling. Alan wrote about butterflies to Ken, remembering the far-off golden summer of 1892, when Ken had had British Butterflies as a birthday present. There were plenty of Red Admirals and Peacocks in Sussex in 1924, ‘but the Painted Lady seems to have died out since our day and we’ve only had one Brimstone.’
The best thing in the summer of 1924 was that, after a considerable search, the Milnes found the country cottage they had been looking for. Irene Vanbrugh was in New Zealand when Milne wrote to tell her about it. ‘New Zealand is the one country in the world I envy you.’ He would say something similar in a reply to a fan letter years later, ‘I always suspect the others of being full of the worst kind of insect, Kangaroos that kick you, and other unpleasant beasts . . . We get possession (delightful word) in October’, but it was ‘more or less derelict before we came’. There was so much to be done it would be well into the spring of 1925 before they would be able to use it. Milne called it a cottage, but it was actually an old farmhouse – sixteenth-century perhaps, parts of it even older. It was known as Cotchford Farm and was near Hartfield in Sussex, halfway between Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead, on the borders of Ashdown Forest.
This is the Forest where, not long afterwards, Winnie-the-Pooh would take up residence ‘under the name of Sanders’ and E. H. Shepard, drawing the actual places, would add a new landscape to the imaginations of readers all over the world who had never set foot in the forest. Shepard’s impression of Cotchford Farm itself is in the background of ‘Buttercup Days’ in Now We Are Six, with Christopher and his friend Anne Darlington, to whom the book is dedicated, in the foreground.
In October, Alan sent Ken a photograph of the house, with a detailed description of the alterations. They were building on a servants’ hall adjoining the kitchen with, over it, ‘a dressing-room for me next to Daff’s bedroom’. They were converting attic rooms into servants’ bedrooms and making ‘a sort of ping-pong playroom for him and us’. The chief sitting room was a splendid room. Milne called it ‘the most lovely room in the whole world’, with a huge fireplace in the middle of it and French windows out on to a lawn – then overgrown – running down to a stream. They were converting a barn into a garage with a flat over it. Alan was taking his father down to see it the following week, but, for the most part, it felt, as the builders worked on it, tantalisingly out of reach. The Milnes were merely poring over seed catalogues and dreaming of a time when there would be a resident gardener with a wife who, in their happy imaginations, would have a delicious meal waiting for them on Friday evenings, when they arrived for the weekend.
When We Were Very Young was published in London on 6 November 1924 and in New York on 20 November. Methuen placed an order with the printers, Jarrold of Norwich, on 17 September for a special edition of 110 large copies on hand-made paper and for 5,140 regular trade copies. On 18 November they ordered the printed endpapers (with nine of Shepard’s small boys – called variously Percy, John and Christopher Robin – and one little girl, Emmeline) and these were first used in the second impression, which followed hot on the heels of the first, as that sold out on publication day. Milne had a royalty, of course, but Shepard had apparently accepted a lump sum of ￡50 for the illustrations, on top of what he had had from Punch. ‘The next day Methuen decided to give me a cheque for ￡100 as a bonus,’ Shepard remembered. They could well afford to do so. By the end of the year, less than eight weeks after publication, Methuen already had 43,843 copies in print. And John Macrae of Dutton’s, who had published a fortnight later, was able to cable Milne for Christmas, saying he had already sold 10,000 in America. ‘Not so bad,’ Milne commented. He already had some confidence in the extraordinary potential of this slim children’s book.
The cream paper jacket (which carried four more small boys, Little Bo Peep and the bear we now think of as Pooh) made much of the fact that this was a novelty from an already distinguished author:
Here is a departure from this popular author and dramatist’s usual lines. He has always amused and delighted grown-up readers and playgoers; in this gay and frolicsome book he will enchant the nursery too. Mr Shephard’s drawings are in keeping with Mr Milne’s irresistible fun and fancy.
Milne had first dedicated the book simply,
TO THE LITTLE BOY
WHO CALLS HIMSELF
BILLY MOON
but the final version (perhaps encouraged by Daphne) identified the child clearly not only as Milne’s own son, but as the character in some of the poems. It reads:
TO
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN MILNE
OR AS HE PREFERS TO CALL HIMSELF
BILLY MOON
THIS BOOK
WHICH OWES SO MUCH TO HIM
IS NOW
HUMBLY OFFERED