It is there, too, in the child who plays in the woods – in Christopher Robin himself. On the one hand he is Robin Hood revelling in the freedom of the Greenwood but he’s also a babe lost in the wood. What marks Christopher Robin out from other children in literature – from William, say – is that he’s often absent from the adventures. Often his role is to come and put things right. He’s more like a kindly uncle than a child. Through the carefree forest he carries a burden of responsibility.
The other unusual thing about Christopher Robin of course is that he was – to some extent – a real boy. It also swallowed Christopher Robin. The difference between Winnie-the-Pooh and, say, Sherlock Holmes, is that Pooh did not just swallow Milne. Imagine if Barrie had called Peter Pan Peter Llewelyn Davies. When Czeslaw Milosz said, ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished’, he meant that a writer will betray his parents and siblings. Milne on the other hand – however innocently – betrayed his son. The magic of the Hundred Acre Wood is that it takes something painfully fleeting and makes it stay for ever. The tragedy of Milne’s success is that it trapped a real child in that moment like a fly in amber and made it almost impossible for him to become that thing that every child wants to become – a grown-up. Is there a threat more pathetic and painful than Christopher Robin’s cry, ‘We’ll see how father likes it when I write poems about HIM.’
It’s a complex, nuanced story and it takes this whole book to unpack it. But it’s worth pointing out that what abides of this story – what moves us – is the happiness and beauty that Milne rescued from it. I’ve used the word ‘aftermath’ a couple of times in this preface. Aftermath nowadays is almost always used to refer to damage and ruin but its original meaning is the second harvest that is sometimes possible after the first has been gathered in. For all its shadow, what really abides about this story is the light, the sense that happiness – no matter how fleeting – is real. The fact that we are all moved and enchanted by the Hundred Acre Wood, that it calls to us, is proof that these passing moments are as real and essential as the more solid and enduring things with which we surround ourselves, that we find in them something true and paradoxically enduring, even eternal.
As R. S. Thomas put it in his poem ‘The Bright Field’:
It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
INTRODUCTION
I have often been asked how I came to write about A. A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin. After my second biography, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, won a prize, I was approached by a number of publishers and A. A. Milne was one of the suggestions. He seemed particularly appropriate for a biographer who had just written about another complex father–son relationship; and before that about Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose son, Vivian, had inspired Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1974 the Observer called Christopher Robin ‘the most famous of all tiny boys (by comparison Little Lord Fauntleroy was a mere starlet)’.
It was also relevant that I had myself been brought up on A. A. Milne. My father had given Winnie-the-Pooh to my mother when it first came out in 1926, six years before I was born. I knew many of the poems and stories by heart. My own London childhood had been a slightly downmarket version of Christopher Robin’s. We did not have a country cottage, but we did have a stream, the Dollis Brook, at the bottom of our north London garden. Even my double name (I was always called Ann Barbara as a child) had more to do with Christopher Robin than with Princess Margaret Rose.
When A. A. Milne came up as a possible subject for me, I felt it likely that Christopher Milne would turn me down, as I knew he had rejected others. He had himself written two memoirs and had actually said in the second one, The Path Through the Trees, that the first one, The Enchanted Places, was written to forestall strangers. But I knew I could only write about this father and son if I had his approval and permission to quote any relevant material.
I was elated when Christopher said not only that he was prepared to let me write the book, but that I must write it as if he were not going to read it. When, after the long years of research and writing, I gave him his copy of the finished book, he eventually wrote to tell me that ‘if I had any doubts and reluctance at the beginning, they have all been swept away and I am left with nothing but admiration and happiness.’ His reaction was a great relief to both of us.
A. A. Milne: His Life was published in 1990, on both sides of the Atlantic, and won the Whitbread Prize for the best biography of the year. It went into a number of editions and is now available from Pan Macmillan as an ebook and as a print-on-demand paperback. Goodbye Christopher Robin is not just a cut version of the biography. It is the full story of how A. A. Milne came to write the four great children’s books and how Christopher Robin became one of the most famous children in the world. It is a story of celebrity and of the joys and pains of success.
Christopher Milne died in 1996 after what he himself called a happy life. I don’t know whether he would have been surprised at the new twenty-first-century surge of interest in Winnie-the-Pooh. Recently the book came top in a BBC poll to find the best children’s book ever. In 2017 there is a grand exhibition devoted to Winnie-the-Pooh at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And best of all, because it can be seen all over the world, in all the countries where the books have been translated, there will be the remarkable film produced by Damian Jones, directed by Simon Curtis and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. This is the story behind that film.
May, 2017
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Alan Alexander Milne was born on 18 January 1882, the much-loved youngest of the three sons of a schoolmaster called John Vine Milne and his wife, Maria. Both his parents were of what one might call humble origin. They had made their own ways in the world. Alan Milne grew up at Henley House, a small private school in a part of London Milne would call ‘the Kilburn end of Maida Vale’. Five minutes’ walk away, in what he would call St John’s Wood, lived a boy, born just over two years earlier, who would grow up to be Milne’s illustrator, E. H. Shepard. Their names would be permanently linked, but they did not meet until years later in the new century, when they both worked for Punch, described then as the most famous humorous paper in the world.