When We Were Very Young marks an epoch as positively as any children’s book has ever marked one. It is not extravagant to surmise that a distant posterity may find in that volume of children’s verse a key with which to unlock the present more easily than with any contemporary novel, poem or play.
Yet if one reads the poems objectively, ignoring the charming period illustrations (many of which, surprisingly, have not dated all that much – look at the boy putting on his raincoat) the main impression is of a number of entirely natural children, egotistical, highly imaginative, slightly rebellious, as children still are. Certainly, as we saw at the beginning of this book, Milne’s own memories of childhood, which play such an important part in the poems, have little to do with nannies and nurseries, and a great deal to do with adventuring, without adults, with freedom and growing independence. The children in the poems are always wanting to break free from the constraints that are constantly being imposed on all children, from whatever social background. (‘Don’t do that!’ ‘Come here.’) Milne’s children want to get ‘up the hills to roll and play’, to watch the rabbits on the common, to ignore the boring injunctions to ‘Take care, dear’ and ‘Hold my hand’. They want to go down to the wood where the bluebells grow or to travel to South America or to sail through Eastern seas.
It is not a bland world. The menaces and uncertainties of real life are there all right, but perfectly adjusted to a small child’s understanding. There are the bears waiting to eat the sillies who tread on the lines of the street. There are the Brownies hovering behind the curtain. There is the constant worry of pet mice, and mothers going missing – a fear, common in children, that the beloved animal may escape, that the person who goes out of the door may never come back. Bruno Bettelheim considers that the listening child can only enjoy the warning and has to repress the great anxiety that he will be permanently deserted. But the child in the poems is protected by his own egotism, is perfectly in control. Life goes on. (‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’) He would never be such an idiot as to tread on the lines; the bears are certainly not going to get him. There is a pleasurable thrill of danger, but ultimately a reinforced security.
The child answers politely all the endless grown-up questions (seething quietly inside) and thinks if only he were King of France he would not brush his hair for aunts. Indeed, if he were King of Greece, he would go so far as to push things off the mantelpiece. This seems to be a reasonable indication of three-year-old rebellion. The poems, in fact (and this is why they have lasted so long), are a true expression of the child psyche, as recognised by the child himself and as observed by his elders. They work both for children and for adults who can see through the class trappings to what is actually there. It helps too when one knows, as Grigson did not, that Milne did not come from a moneyed, smug background, or expect things which he had never earned. In fact, he was constantly worried by the established social order and the priorities of many of his readers, who were indeed very often just the sort of people both he and Grigson disliked and who took Milne’s verses to their hearts. ‘It is all most odd,’ Milne reported to Ken. ‘Yellow-faced Anglo-Indian colonels, with no livers and a general feeling that somebody ought to be shot down dammit sir, tell me with tears in their eyes how important it is to avoid the lines of the street and thus escape bears. And they light a long cheroot and tell anybody who is interested that they have knickers and a pair of braces.’ And ‘Pinero, of all people, patted me on the shoulder yesterday and told me what a wonderful book I had given the world. I don’t suppose he has seen or read a play of mine in his life.’
It was all most odd. At Methuen there was a packers’ strike and someone from the production department later remembered how he and every available person had volunteered to try to keep up with the demand as booksellers’ orders for thousands of copies poured into the office every day. In America, the bookshops were taken totally by surprise by the demand. The initial advance orders taken had been for 385 copies. The critics were not particularly enthusiastic, but there are times, John Macrae of Dutton’s would say, when ‘the American public makes up its own mind’. By 1927, when Now We Are Six came out, they had sold 260,000 copies of When We Were Very Young. The demand owed a lot in the initial stages to the extraordinary enthusiasm of Macrae’s son, who was then sales manager and sent copies of the book to anyone he thought would talk about it.
The letters of appreciation came pouring in – the first ones as a result of all the sales manager’s free copies – from thirty-eight state governors, six members of the Cabinet, three Justices of the Supreme Court, eleven Rear Admirals, twelve Major Generals and everyone from Hendrik van Loon to Fred Astaire. One letter, headed F. Ziegfield, New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, was from Lupino Lane and read like this:
I have to do an extra tumble tonight in the ‘Follies’, slide down a flight of steps or jump through an extra trapdoor. Why, you ask? Oh, simply to express my exuberance over the fun I got in reading A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
Even President Coolidge was delighted, or so his secretary said.
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt (sons of the former President) called in on Milne in London on their way to shoot tigers in Indo-Turkestan, ‘a curious and delightful couple’, Milne told Ken, ‘all agog to have their copies of When We Were Very Young signed. Kermit has got a first edition (English) and Theodore was almost in tears because he only had an American first edition.’ They were very proud (not realising how little it would impress Milne) that a newspaper had published a verse about their projected hunting trip:
Kermit, Theodore
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Said to themselves, said they,
There isn’t a beast
In Turkestan
That we aren’t prepared to slay.