Many adults undoubtedly bought the book for their own pleasure, but the papers invariably reviewed it as a children’s book as the publishers intended. Most of them gave it a good deal of space, though the Star gave it only two lines ‘between the Chatterbox Annual and The Girls of St Monica’s’ and the Morning Post headed its review ‘Jingles for the Nursery’ and continued in that vein ‘to our utter disgust’, Milne said. John Drinkwater’s review in the Sunday Times was one of the most interesting. He told Milne beforehand that it would sell ‘thousands of copies’ – but ‘whether of his books or mine’ Milne wasn’t sure before he read it.
Drinkwater made a strong distinction between ‘the inventive fun’ of the rhymes written ‘for a young fellow called Christopher Robin’ and the stuff which seems to have strayed in from any book of bad poetry for children ‘into an extremely good one’. Drinkwater particularly disliked ‘Twinkletoes’ which ‘had reduced even Mr Shepard to a level of ordinary fairy inanity’. Dismissing such poems as ‘Water Lilies’ and ‘Spring Morning’ and ‘There’s a cavern in the mountain where the old men meet’ (all the ones that nobody remembers), Drinkwater spoke out for the arrival of ‘a new prophet’, someone fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Lewis Carroll.
Mr Milne’s deftness is not to be questioned, but the fortunate thing is that it is, apart from the few lapses, always at work, as Lewis Carroll’s was, on a sound common sense foundation . . . Mr Milne treats his small companion as a sensible being who, indeed, wants to make up things, as is proper, but wants to make them up about real life and not about fairy doodleum. These two go about in the gayest and most whimsical of tempers, but the things that engage their attention are the soldiers at Buckingham Palace, the three little foxes who didn’t wear stockings and didn’t wear sockses, the gardener, the king who asked for no more than a little butter for the royal slice of bread . . . It is all great larks, but I wonder whether the Sterner Critics will realise that it also is a very wholesome contribution to serious literature.
Milne would fortunately not live long enough to read the sternest critic of all, Geoffrey Grigson, fulminating about the book even while realising that ‘few other poems have sold so enormously’, not since Byron and Tennyson, anyway. Grigson would see Betjeman’s debt to Milne. ‘How is it that no one is asked, in Advanced Level English or even in the Tripos to estimate the influence’ of Milne on ‘Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn’, for instance. But Grigson thought Milne’s poems smug poems, poems for Us, marking us off from Other People – from titled people as well as the plebs, he observes, remembering Bad Sir Brian Botany, who has to be cured of his arrogant ways and become one of Us as B. Botany Esquire. The children in the poems, he says, live in the right London squares and, if male,
are earmarked for the better schools, then the better colleges, high on the river (mens mediocris in corpore sano), at one of the ‘two’ universities; and that male and female they come of families comfortable, secure, self-certain, somewhat above the middle of the middle class.
Are the poems for other children of such homes? No, rather than yes. Children, in my experience, of every generation since and including the Twenties, have found the poems nauseating, and fascinating. In fact, they were poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies – for parents with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover. When We – We – Were Very Young the book is named, after all, indicating its aim; which, like the aim of all natural bestsellers, was not entirely explicit, one may assume, in the author’s consciousness.
Here mamas of the middle way, and fathers, and nannies, those distorting reflectors of the parental ethos, could be sure of finding Innocence Up to Date. Little Lord Fauntleroy – here he was, stripped of frills and velvet (as we can tell by the splendid insipidity of the accompanying drawings) for modern, sensible clothes; heir, after all, to no peerage, but still the Eternal Child. No hint in these poems of children nasty, brutish and short, as Struwelpeter or Hilaire Belloc made them.
Are there ever tantrums, as these nice children say ‘cos’, and ‘most’, and ‘nuffin’, and ‘purfickly’, and ‘woffelly’, in their nice accent?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain.
If there were tantrums, it is rice pudding again; but not the child psyche, not infant sexuality, not Freud, who had now entered the pure English world.
The innocence of When We Were Very Young – of course it chimes with the last tinkle of a romantic innocence which by the Twenties had devolved to whimsy. Christopher Robin comes trailing the tattiest of wisps of a glory soiled by expectation and acceptance. The clouds have gone grey. The Child, in spite of Westminster and Trinity, is all too much at last the Father of the Man. And whenever the Child’s impresario allowed an entr’acte, it came in parallel modes of the expected and decayed – daffodowndillies and the last fairies (inherited from the more fanciful – and sinister – inventor of Peter Pan), Twinkle toes upon the apple leaves, the Lake King’s daughter on the water-lilies, cave ancients tapping at golden slippers for dainty feet, bluebells, and blackbirds’ yellow bills . . .
These poems for people towards the top with children beneath the age of literary consent have the qualities of rhythm, shape, economy, and games with words – good qualities, after all. Would it be too ponderous to say as well that they were poems for a class of middle to top people who had lost their intellectual and cultural nerve, who expected of right things which they had not earned, and who had scarcely looked a fact in the eye for fifty years? It might be too ponderous. But it would be true.
There is some common ground between the two poet critics, writing exactly fifty years apart. They dislike the same poems; they admire Milne’s deftness, his technical skill. The difference is mainly that Drinkwater was writing at a time which took the class background completely for granted, and indeed when the word ‘whimsical’ could be used without pejorative undertones. Grigson, though born into such a world, was unable to enjoy the verse for the sociology. He is nauseated, in fact, as many have been, not by the rhymes themselves, but by the whole paraphernalia of nannies and afternoon walks and clean hands for nursery tea. ‘It’s that bloody nanny,’ Roald Dahl said to me, admiring Milne enormously and regretting how his books have dated. In fact, the nanny (or ‘Nurse’) appears in only five of the forty-five poems in When We Were Very Young and in another four in the second collection Now We Are Six – and, of course, not at all in the Pooh books.
Compton Mackenzie, writing in 1933, also saw the first book, above all, as a social document: