I have been interviewed by detectives, insurance people, bloodhounds and what else, and have reconstructed the scene of the crime a dozen times. There is no doubt we shall get our money back all right.
The bulbs Daphne had planted on day trips from Chelsea with sandwiches and a Thermos flask, when they had first got possession in the autumn, were coming into flower – hundreds of Darwin tulips that May. Just as Daphne’s role in Milne’s writing was simply admiration and praise, so was Milne’s role, officially, in relation to Daphne’s garden. He admired very much what she and the gardener were doing, but perversely took even more pleasure in the self-sown things, the flowers that sprang up of their own accord – eschscholtzia, coreopsis, sidalcea and aubretia. ‘A cynic might say that my love is no more than delight in an unearned, unexpected bonus. This is entirely to misjudge me. It comes from a feeling that . . . this unclaimed, unworked-for bounty is in some mysterious way the product of my own idleness.’ He did pull up an occasional weed, priding himself on the length of its root, and he wondered at the miracles of nature. ‘That a nasturtium seed should take any further interest in life is the most optimistic thing that happens in the world.’
The garden was Daphne’s kingdom and Milne never considered himself more than an under-gardener. In 1929 he would inscribe The Secret ‘For Daffodil Milne’ with ‘the homage of the under-gardener’. But already in the summer of 1926 he would write, ‘I am getting wildly keen on the garden, and slightly less unintelligent about it.’ His own territory was the putting lawn and he was allowed to worry about the water. Water is always a worry as well as a pleasure. Its habits are quite unpredictable. There was a sort of ditch at the bottom of the garden, which tended to dry up in the summer. Later Milne would discover a spring and form a pond, which caused endless problems. It was perhaps something to do with chalybeate, the iron in the soil, or perhaps it was oil. Milne lived long enough to worry about the first explorations in the area by Sir Henri Deterding of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company.
Across the ditch there was a meadow and beyond the meadow the river, a tributary of the Medway. They called it a river, though it was really only a stream, to distinguish it from the stream which was really a sort of ditch. The river was deep in a channel lined with alders. ‘It was just the right width: too wide to jump, but where a kindly tree reached out a branch to another kindly tree on the opposite shore, it was possible to swing yourself over. It was just the right depth: too deep to paddle across but often shallow enough to paddle in and in places deep enough to swim.’ It is of course the river, only Milne calls it a stream, in which Roo will squeak ‘Look at me swimming!’ and be rescued with the North Pole. Upstream, a short walk south-west of Cotchford, was the bridge, the scene of games of what would be called Poohsticks, and beyond the bridge was the forest.
‘It is difficult to be sure which came first,’ Christopher would write. Did they play the game Poohsticks before the story or only afterwards? It’s such a natural sort of game, throwing sticks into a river and watching them come out on the other side of the bridge, seeing which one had won, that no one really needed to invent it. Probably there were already people playing it all over the world. But there would soon be many more.
And what was Winnie-the-Pooh, the teddy bear himself, doing all this time? He was certainly travelling the hour and a quarter each way, down with the others from Mallord Street to Cotchford and back in the new car driven by Burnside, the chauffeur. (Milne himself would drive, but on the whole he preferred to be driven. He drove ‘terribly slowly and terribly badly’, one of his nieces said, and he would later claim to be ‘the only man in Sussex for whom cars did not start’.) And sometime about now – it is difficult to fix the exact moment – the bear acquired his highly individual name. He had already acquired a voice – ‘Pooh’s gruff voice as inspired by Moon’, as Milne described it to Ken in 1928 when Billy had become Moon. Ten years or so later Milne said it was Daphne who had given the animals their voices. It was probably a bit of both. ‘He and his mother gave them life,’ Milne said. The child and his toy bear ‘indulged in lengthy conversations’, according to Daphne, ‘Christopher interpolating fierce growls for the bear, feeling thoroughly convinced about it’. There was also some suggestion that the child would say things in a gruff Pooh voice which he knew would hardly be acceptable if he said them in his own.
The teddy bear himself played a very small part in the first book. Apart from his leading role in ‘Teddy Bear’, he makes only two very minor appearances in the illustrations. He had certainly not yet come into his own. If in physical form he was based on Graham Shepard’s bear, in habits and domicile Teddy Bear (or more formally Mr Edward Bear) was certainly the Milne bear:
He gets what exercise he can
By falling off the ottoman,
But generally seems to lack
The energy to clamber back.
The ottoman was in Billy Moon’s nursery on the top floor at Mallord Street, and the toys slept in there at night. The bear was the absolute favourite, the child’s inseparable companion. Eeyore was already around (a present for Christmas 1921); he was a donkey with a drooping neck which naturally gave him a gloomy disposition. (Soon there would be a real donkey called Jessica in the thistly field beyond the Cotchford garden where later, after the animal’s death, they planted a wood.) There was Piglet too, a present from a neighbour in Chelsea.