It served him right for being so rude about ‘Twinkletoes’.
Four days after the Drinkwater review, another book was published: Fourteen Songs – verses from When We Were Very Young, set to music by Harold Fraser-Simson, Milne’s neighbour in Chelsea. When the poems were coming out in Punch, Milne had been approached by all sorts of composers wanting to set them to music. At one stage it seemed as if Frederic Austin, who had been on the wet Welsh holiday, would do them, and Walford Davies was also keen. But Milne decided on Fraser-Simson, then immensely well known for his record-breaking musical The Maid of the Mountains. (A selection from that had been played at the New Theatre before the first act of Mr Pim Passes By, back in 1920.) One reason, apparently, was that Billy was extremely fond of the Fraser-Simson’s liver-and-white spaniel, Henry Woggins; they often met on their daily walks. It was the beginning of a long collaboration – in the end there were sixty-seven songs. ‘The music is exactly right,’ Milne wrote to Curtis Brown. Not that he knew much about music.
Milne’s story behind the dedication of Fourteen Songs is worth telling:
It was dedicated (by the composer of course)
By special permission of
H.R.H. Princess Mary
Viscountess Lascelles
to
Hon. George Lascelles
Hon. Gerald Lascelles
This was really Methuen’s idea (E. V. Lucas being thick with Royalty just now), but there is a limit to the number of Lascelles possible in a dedication, and I suggested – if they had to be dragged in –
By permission of H.R.H. . . .
to
The Autocrats of her Nursery
– which has been allowed. But I really don’t know why we drag in Princess Mary at all. A much more popular dedication would be:
By permission of
‘Mr A’
to his illegitimate children
in every clime
This was in a letter to Milne’s brother Ken. ‘Mr A’ was a source of constant interest and speculation at the time. He was, in fact, Sir Hari Singh, whose financial dealings and involvement with a Mrs Robinson were making headlines in the papers. A few days later Milne wrote: ‘The bother is that it’s no good telling you now who “Mr A” is, but of course I knew weeks ago . . . God how I see life . . . Mrs Robinson has refused an offer to appear on the films, but will merely write her life for the papers instead. I want to stand on tip-toe and scream.’ The Lascelles dedication of the extremely successful book of songs – and a further dedication in the second book of songs to the Princess Elizabeth (the present Queen) – added to the feeling that Milne was somehow the Top Children’s poet, and added to the hostile reaction that was beginning to be felt in some quarters. (Stephen Spender, for instance, whose parents had apparently been keen on keeping him from children who were rough, would later speak of the ‘pure horror’ of Christopher Robin.) Most people probably thought the dedication wholly appropriate and Milne kept his own feelings about royalty to himself most of the time. But on one occasion he could not help speaking out. He was dining at a private house and one of the other guests was Princess Marie Louise, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. It was she who had organised the Queen’s Dolls’ House not long before and she was graciously interested in A. A. Milne, whose tiny leather-bound ‘Vespers’ was in that exclusive library. ‘I talked to her for about an hour after dinner, said “Ma’am” as little as possible, put my foot in it once or twice probably, withdrew it with a loud sucking noise and continued cheerfully.’ The princess was foolish enough to lament to him ‘the objection to work shown by the lower classes’. Milne swallowed and murmured that, indeed, ‘every one of my friends would rather win ￡50,000 in a sweepstake than by working for it’. It was the best he could do on the spur of the moment. Her Royal Highness could perhaps hardly believe that the man she was talking to, whom, of course, she had supposed to be a gentleman, was identifying himself and his friends with ‘the lower classes’. Milne reported to Ken, ‘She didn’t say anything, but a faint twinge of pain seemed to pass across her face, as if the first violinist were playing out of tune. Very sad.’
Milne could also speak out clearly on the golf course. One of his opponents, making the usual assumption that Milne would be a right-thinking supporter of the right, was grumbling about the government. ‘What we need is a Mussolini,’ he declared, and was somewhat discomfited when Milne replied coldly, ‘Oh, do you like murderers?’ Milne also showed where he stood, ‘on the side of the people against privilege’, in a review in the Nation of a collection of the cartoons of the left-wing David Low, which had a text by Rebecca West, writing under the name of Lynx. When he wrote, Milne did not know the identity of Lynx and assumed her to be a man:
Perhaps I am prejudiced, for Lynx’s way of thought happens to be similar to mine . . . One follows behind Low with a fearful joy, knowing that the next top hat is for it, yet wondering just how; but one precedes ‘Lynx’ confidently after a little, saying over one’s shoulder, ‘Come on, there’s a man in white spats over here, absolutely made for you . . .’ To Low’s pencil Birkenhead and Thomas are equally comic, Bennett and Belloc equally worthy of deflation; but ‘Lynx’ separates the sheep from the goats and, if for the most part, his pens bear the labels which I had long given them in my own mind, I at least have no cause to complain.
Milne even began to think that he was Lynx himself, so closely did he identify with this writer ‘from the New Statesman school’. In his review he does not mention the description of his own plays, which cannot have been at all to his taste and makes his praise of the book all the more generous and interesting. After praising his children’s books, Rebecca West went on to say:
And when he turns to what is professedly his adult work he really does not move out of the nursery. What gives his plays their curious sense of eeriness which exists however matter-of-fact the content may be, and their unaccountably touching quality, is our feeling that somehow the limitations of age have been transcended and we are watching the British child, its fair hair beautifully brushed, its eyes clear, its skin rosy, well trained, sweet-natured, very truthful and knowing no fear at all save that there may perhaps be some form of existence which is not the nursery and will not be kind however good one is, looking at life.
And, in the meantime, the yellow-faced Colonels and shingled hostesses clamoured to clasp him by the hand and gush over his book, misled, as Grigson would be years later, by the superficial trappings, into thinking that Milne was a contented, smug and fully paid-up member of the Establishment.
4
THE BEGINNINGS OF POOH