In the midst of the acclamation for When We Were Very Young, and over the triumphant years to come, Alan Milne had to face over and over again his brother’s sadly contrasting situation. Ken was following Alan’s advice. Saving his strength in Somerset, he was trying to write. But he was intensely aware of how much he walked in his younger brother’s shadow. Writing about his dog, Pete, for Punch, he could not help remembering Alan’s pieces on another dog, Chum, years earlier. Alan tried to reassure him, before he had seen the article: ‘I am sure it derives from Pete and not from me.’ When it was published on 10 December 1924 (as the third impression of Alan’s book had already been ordered) he wrote to Ken:
Dear boy,
10000000000000 congratulations on Pete. It is admirable. Is it cheek if I say that I never suspected you of it? It is so damnably unforced; so leisurely; so mature; so – everything that it ought to be. The ghost of Chum salutes you: I strongly suspect him of saying sadly ‘Yes, that’s how my man ought to have done it.’
Give Maud my congratulation. I hope she is proud of you. In point of style it is miles ahead of the ordinary Punch article. Buy another piece of blotting paper, and stick to it. And I should be inclined to say ‘Stick to Punch’. If you write about your left boot like that Seaman couldn’t refuse it.
Your very happy
A. A. M.
Ken would also, thanks to Alan, eventually do some regular reading for Methuen, though they were not encouraging at first. Alan tried to cheer him. ‘There are so many available for this sort of work that other things than ability must count: proximity, for instance. Or some other case, even harder than yours, may have turned up.’ At last, they did take Ken on and Alan was able to pass on an appreciative report from E. V. Lucas: ‘You can tell your brother we regard him as a very valuable ally. He is so quick and decisive.’
In January 1925, Milne wrote to Maud with news of ‘a new consumption cure’ in Denmark. It was undoubtedly ‘genuine: hallmarked by the Lancet and the B.M.J.’. He urged her to persuade Ken to try it, or at least to send the preliminary reports and X-rays, which would allow the Danish doctor to decide whether to take the case on for the eight-week cure, or not. Alan offered not only to cover all the expenses involved, but even to put up with the certainty of seasickness on the North Sea in winter and to cross with him. But he was determined not to badger Ken about his health or, ‘so far as I can help it, have him badgered’. He just needed Maud to know how much he wanted (and how much he wanted he seemed hardly to be able to bring himself to say) Ken to take every chance there was of a cure. He said to Maud that he realised Ken might feel, ‘Leave me alone – I’m sick of doctors’: and that was presumably how Ken did feel, for he never went to Denmark.
Milne did not know quite what to do with himself in these early days of 1925, as the sales of When We Were Very Young continued to mount. He tried a novel, wrote the first chapter in the hope that the other chapters would write themselves, but ‘some of these novels don’t seem to try’, he told Swinnerton. There were lots of invitations. Sometimes he was forced to meet people he found even more rebarbative than the Princess Marie Louise. He loathed Michael Arlen. ‘He is in our eighth hell,’ he told Ken. ‘Above or below Gilbert Frankau?’ He couldn’t decide.
There were lots of letters to write. Daphne seemed to be losing the interest she had had in being Alan’s secretary masquerading as ‘Celia Brice’. There usually seemed to be other things she would rather be doing. Alan himself had always been bad about clearing his desk. In March, Chatto and Windus sent him an agreement for the publication of Four Plays. When the manuscript arrived in December, Swinnerton, his editor, had to beg for the counterpart agreement. ‘Its twin, resting here, is becoming blurred with grief and yellow with age.’ Milne liked getting letters. He told one fan: ‘Letters like yours are the best part of the game’; but it wasn’t, of course, quite the same when they had to be answered.
Probably the fan letter that moved him most was from Rudyard Kipling. He replied, ‘If you can remember what you once said to Tennyson, you will know what your letter makes me want to say to you. I am proud that you like the verses.’ Kipling had said to Tennyson: ‘When a private is praised by his General he does not presume to thank him, but fights the better afterwards.’ Only to Kipling himself would Milne have repeated such an analogy.
He was watching a certain amount of sport – rugger at Twickenham, the Boat Race – and playing a great deal of golf. His handicap was ‘now officially 9, fortunately for our domestic happiness’. As long as Alan’s handicap was in double figures, ‘Daff hardly dared to mention it in polite society’. Daphne’s feelings really did matter to Alan – on all things, great and small. She was very powerful. In this same letter, Milne joked, referring to himself and the four-year-old Billy, ‘We men are in a minority.’ Daff and he were laughing together over P. G. Wodehouse’s lament in John o’ London’s Weekly over the decline of the old English sport of hawking. It was all golf nowadays.
Golf and the world golfs with you;
Hawk and you hawk alone.
Alan Milne boasted to Ken (who was still able to play a gentle game himself) of going round Addington in 84, including an 8 at the last, where he lost a ball. He went round Walton Heath in a satisfactory 85, though it was
about the most difficult course in London, with heather a foot high on each side of a narrow fairway, and a perpetual wind. I play a terrible lot of golf now – always twice and often 3 times a week, and it’s really time I settled down to work again. But I don’t know what. There is a perpetual murmur of ‘Detective Story’ going on in everybody’s brain but mine: Daff’s, Curtis Brown’s, Methuen’s, Dutton’s (my American publisher), Hearst’s (who want the serial rights), Mr A’s (probably) and the Lord Mayor’s.
Ken sat at home in Somerset listening to an actress called Rita Ricardo reading ‘The Three Little Foxes’, ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’ and ‘The Christening’ over 2LO, on the ‘wireless installation’ that Alan had given him. And he read Alan’s long letters. Alan told him Billy was learning to count. When his father, hearing ‘One – Two – Three’, asked him how far he could go, he said with surprise, ‘Up to the end.’ It was an answer that appealed to the latent mathematician in Milne. The boy was also learning to read and write:
He autographed a copy of his book for somebody yesterday. Entirely by himself – except that he had to be told what letter came next . . . The silly woman had written asking for his ‘mark’ – for a X – Bah! We Moons are a cut above that at 4?.
Milne discussed the child’s feelings about the book in a letter to Lady Desborough, whom he had met a few times and who had written him a fan letter: