Milne was much in the public eye at the end of 1925, as a result of the continually bestselling, continually reprinting When We Were Very Young. There was a large supplement to the Christmas Bookman – eight pages entirely devoted to Milne’s life, his family and his work, with lots of compliments and lots of photographs. The writer concluded: ‘If you look back at his early sketches, and over the lengthening line of his plays, you will feel that from the first to the latest, they are linked up and related to each other by a charm of personality which gives colour to them all . . . The dominant note in everything he has written, for mature people or little folk, is a joy in all life and a spirit of youth that never survives in the foolish.’ There was a photograph of Milne offering a toy penguin to a dubious three-year-old with the teddy bear standing on the sidelines; there was one by Marcus Adams of a rather cool five-year-old, ‘Christopher Robin Milne, to whom When We Were Very Young is dedicated’; one of Shepard’s illustrations to ‘Little Bo-Peep and the Little Boy Blue’ ‘from the original drawing which now hangs in the nursery of Christopher Robin’ – and an extremely striking portrait of ‘Mrs Milne’ in profile, by E. O. Hoppé.
Milne wrote to Ken on the day that Daphne had been to the studio. She had been there with him once or twice before, and on her return said:
D: I didn’t know he was so French. He used not to be.
ME: Well, of course he has got an accent on the ‘e’.
D: Yes – well, it was very acute this morning.
Daphne was actually revelling in all the fuss. She wrote at the end of one of Alan’s letters to Irene Vanbrugh: ‘We are all very well and happy and pleased with each other and everything else!’ Alan wrote to Ken:
There is a new paper (for ‘Mothers’) coming out next month with a special feature, ‘Nurseries of the Highly Nourished’ or some such title – anyway, Billy leads the way in the first number. He and his nursery were photographed all ways up, and Daff was interviewed, and explained how important it was to combine firmness with kindness, and I said nothing, and – well, get it. I wish I could remember the title for you.
Milne could not get away from his fame – and he did not really want to – even when that month he had to do four days’ jury service. (‘I ’ate the Law’ was his only comment on the case.) The day before he had signed five hundred copies of A Gallery of Children – a limited edition in England. He was glad to have the hundred guineas for the signing, not because he needed it, but because it was certainly rankling that he had been so stupid in accepting the lump-sum payment from the American publisher. The day after the case he had to sign a hundred copies of a special edition of The King’s Breakfast, and when the jury retired to consider its verdict a fellow jurywoman produced Not That It Matters – a collection of his essays that had just gone into a ‘new popular edition’ – and she asked him to sign that.
A few days later Christopher – still Billy – and Daphne were involved in a theatrical occasion. Milne wrote to Ken on 11 December:
Billy is being a Holy Innocent (with 20 other children and Gladys Cooper) at a matinée on Tuesday. At a sort of committee meeting, attended by parents of Innocents (Holy) to consider costumes, Daff said ‘Oh, no!’ in a loud voice from the back of the room when somebody suggested dark-grey flannelette (or whatever it was) – whereupon she was immediately elected Managing Director or Wardrobe Mistress of the whole scene. The result is that every ten minutes the telephone bell rings, and some anxious if aristocratic mother is heard imploring Mrs Milne to let her little darling wear blue. Two of them have already been here – ‘any time Mrs Milne would see me,’ they say humbly to me – and throw themselves at Daff’s feet. Even a father – the Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, no less – took up an insignificant position in the drawing-room, while Daff issued orders. What snobs parents are about their children!
As all the preparations for the matinée went ahead, Milne was racking his brains to think of a children’s story for the Christmas number of the Evening News. Daphne, preoccupied with the Holy Innocents, assured him it was easy and that all he had to do was to write down ‘any one of those bedtime stories’. Milne assured her it was not easy and that they weren’t really stories at all – all that stuff about ‘dragons and giants and magic rings’.
‘Wasn’t even one of them any good?’ she pleaded. And then Milne remembered ‘that there was just one which was a real story, about his bear’. He sat down and started writing:
This is Big Bear, coming downstairs now, bump-bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-pooh.
That was the first time he had written the words Winnie-the-pooh. (The ‘p’ is definitely small in the manuscript.) He went on writing until he got to the point where Christopher Robin asks, ‘Is that the end of the story?’
‘That’s the end of the story.’
Christopher Robin gave a deep sigh, picked his bear up by the leg and walked off to the door, trailing Winnie-the-pooh behind him. At the door he turned and said,
‘Coming to see me have my bath?’
‘I might,’ I said.
‘I didn’t hurt him when I shot him, did I?’
‘Not a bit.’
He nodded and went out . . . and in a moment I heard Winnie-the-pooh – bump, bump, bump – going up the stairs behind him.
It was indeed a real story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In the book, after Christopher asks, ‘Is that the end of the story?’ Milne says, ‘That’s the end of that one. There are others.’ In December 1925 there weren’t, but the first story ‘became Chap I. The rest inevitably followed.’
Explaining all this he would say that he never wrote anything ‘without thought of publication’. After all, he was a professional writer. He would also say that he was lazy, and needed ‘somebody or something to set me off’. If Milne had not had such a keen sense of what would make a publishable story, it is easy to imagine (so great was his fame the Evening News would have printed anything) that the next children’s book after When We Were Very Young might have been about yet more knights and ‘dragons and giants and magic rings’, rather than the entirely original adventures of one boy’s bear.
On Thursday 24 December 1925 the main news headline in the Evening News, stretching right across the front page of the paper, read A CHILDREN’S STORY BY A. A. MILNE and under, in only slightly smaller letters, the two words CHRISTOPHER ROBIN. And then:
Page 7 To-night – Tomorrow Night’s Broadcast.
A new story for children, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’, about Christopher Robin and his Teddy Bear, written by Mr. A. A. Milne specially for ‘The Evening News’, appears to-night on Page Seven. It will be broadcast from all stations by Mr. Donald Calthrop, as part of the Christmas Day wireless programme, at 7.45 p.m. tomorrow.
The headline was above and in far larger print than GREAT STORM SWEEPS OVER DERBYSHIRE (WHITE CHRISTMAS OVER TWO THIRDS OF BRITAIN), LORD COBHAM’S MANSION ON FIRE and WHITES’ DANGER IN TIENTSIN. On page seven there was another enormous banner headline right across the page, simply
WINNIE-THE-POOH.
The illustrations were not by Shepard, who had presumably been too busy. He had managed to do a rather splendid version of Milne’s poem ‘Binker’, with a girl in the main role, which appeared the same month in Pears’ Annual. The Evening News illustrations for the story were by J. H. Dowd. Winnie-the-Pooh, not yet looking quite himself, had started his public life. He was on his way to becoming ‘the most famous and loved bear in literature’.
5
WINNIE-THE-POOH
In January 1926, Milne wrote to Ken with a long list of ‘things which ought to be done’. They included: