At the moment (4?) Christopher Robin is a man of action rather than a man of letters, and I doubt if the book makes the appeal to him which it does to more studious natures . . . But he quotes from it sometimes; and, indeed, just to hear him call it ‘My book’ is happiness enough.
‘Just now he has the Meccano craze (and so have I as far as I am allowed),’ Milne wrote to Ken. The boy also had a passion for drawing and painting. In February of 1925 he produced his masterpiece, which he told his father was ‘St. George and the Dragon’. Milne wrote, ‘It is of the Impressionist School. Daff and I were admiring it publicly and privately indulging in a little discussion as to some of the details. Billy meanwhile was finishing his lunch at the other end of the table, and, having finished it, said his grace to himself. This was it: “Thank God for my good lunch – and let those people understand the dragon.” How well I know his feeling!’
Milne was not yet wary of allowing the child to become involved in the public reaction to the book. There was some discussion over whether to take him to the private view of an exhibition of Shepard’s illustrations to When We Were Very Young, but that was probably because he might not enjoy the occasion. At this stage Milne’s son had barely heard the words ‘Christopher Robin’ and most of the boys in Shepard’s illustrations were certainly not him. Their hair was much shorter for one thing, though you couldn’t always see it because of the hats. It was because of the dedication that it was his book; it was written for him. He was there, of course, in ‘Hoppity’, in ‘Buckingham Palace’, in ‘Vespers’ and in ‘Sand-between-the-toes’, and he felt he was there in some of the others. But he was not, like Tootles in Peter Pan, dazzled by being in a story. It all seemed perfectly natural. Daphne suggested it seemed no more extraordinary than it did to other children to find their pictures in the family photograph album. None of Milne’s stories of Billy at this time suggest the shy creature of Christopher Milne’s memories. It is impossible not to think that he was made shy, and his natural confidence eroded, by the attention he received in the following years. If Christopher Robin had played a minor part in When We Were Very Young, in the next book he would take a starring role.
The child’s passion for St George and the Dragon determined one of his fifth birthday presents that summer: a shining suit of armour. It is interesting that Christopher Milne’s own story in The Enchanted Places, written nearly fifty years later, tallies exactly with the story Milne told at the time in a letter to Ken, a letter which Christopher never saw. Did he really remember so accurately or was it, more likely, a story his father often repeated?
As you know, he is very keen on dressing up, particularly as St. George v. Dragon. I was trying to teach him to catch last weekend, and he wasn’t very good at it. I said, ‘You must learn to catch, or you will never be any good at cricket. And you know when you’re nine or ten, you’ll think of nothing but cricket.’ And he opened his eyes very wide and said ‘Nothing but cricket? Not armour?’ A dreary prospect opening up before him.
The catching practice was going on at Cotchford, the farmhouse in Sussex, where the Milnes would now spend most weekends, as well as the Easter and summer holidays. Nanny would, of course, always go down with them. She would come in useful for fielding when it came to cricket, but it is remarkable how seldom Milne mentions her in his letters. She came between him and his son – there was no doubt about that – and he was jealous. Christopher Milne would say that jealousy was his father’s besetting sin. ‘Jealous by nature – as I was too – more than anything he hated rivalry.’ And Nanny – not Daphne – was his true rival for the love he longed for from his son.
Milne bumped his head happily on the low beams as he learned to live in the old house. He had a small, rather dark study with a window looking out across the front courtyard to the kitchen wing. Daphne had lavished a good deal of attention on the rest of the house, getting it just the way she wanted it, but it was in the garden that she really came into her own. There was something, it seemed, that she had always been wanting to do and that was to make a garden. She had a full-time gardener to help, but it was her garden and the picture we have of her in the country is very different from the image of her in London, with her hats and hairdressers and leisurely luncheons. ‘She responded to the beauty, the peace and the solitude’ that the country offered. ‘She found this in the garden and she found it too in the countryside beyond. Solitude. She was happiest alone.’ But their son would see Milne as ‘a Londoner, a real Londoner with a deep love of London in his bones. For him the country had always been, not where you lived, but where you went. Where you went on holiday. Where you went to do something – to ride a bicycle, to climb a hill, to look for birds’ nests, to play golf. Like a dog, he couldn’t just be in the country, sitting or strolling aimlessly.’ So Christopher would say, but once, in a novel, Milne himself would write that the good thing about the country is that you can do nothing there, because that means ‘doing everything: thinking, seeing, listening, feeling, living’. But it was true enough that, like a dog, he was never happier than when chasing a ball. He needed someone to play with and Daphne hated all games.
So there was tiny Christopher Robin, still called Billy, being trained to throw and catch, an ancillary of his father. And there was Daphne, absorbed in planting and planning her garden. Their pleasure in their first ‘picnic weekend’ was rather spoilt when they returned to find there had been burglars in Mallord Street. Alan wrote to Ken:
Fortunately they were only out for the jewellery, and ignored all the silver spoons and forks. Still more luckily they searched every drawer in the house for Daff’s jewel-case, and the actual case (which they probably thought was a tea-caddy) looked on and laughed at them. All they got was
Two silver boxes
Ciro-pearl necklace (which I hope they thought was genuine)
Jade and diamond brooch
Ear-rings
My gold wrist watch
My gold ‘albert’ (which I haven’t worn since 1914)
and
Two pairs of cami-knickers and two chemises of Daff’s! (You ought to have heard me describing the cami-knickers to two stolid policemen.) About ￡70 worth. Insured, of course. The visitors came in politely by the front door which they burst open with a jemmy. They did no damage whatever inside, owing to the lucky fact that not a single drawer, cupboard or desk is ever locked in this house. But bills, letters and clothes were scattered all over the rooms. Holmes (or Gillingham) would undoubtedly have said that they were really searching for the secret will or the compromising photograph.
Gillingham was Milne’s own amateur detective in The Red House Mystery.