Henley House was a good school and Alan flourished as his father’s pupil. He and his next brother, Ken, enjoyed an extraordinary amount of freedom when they were quite small. The wide open spaces of Hampstead Heath were not far away for boys with bicycles. It is no wonder that there are no nannies or nursery rules in the Enchanted Forest. Pooh and his friends are the children who explore a world where only friendship and hunger and the desire for adventure affect the pattern of their days and a boy called Christopher Robin plays the role of the wise and helpful parent with whom the listening or reading child identifies.
A very clever child, at eleven Alan Milne won a scholarship to Westminster School and joined Ken there. He would, in the far future, remember the school with gratitude, but, after one unjust, crushing report, he said that he ‘turned to the lighter side of life and abandoned work’.
Certainly he gave up any mathematical ambitions but he still managed to win a minor scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and, more importantly, had already developed a talent for light verse.
At Cambridge, Milne edited Granta, the university magazine. He began to hone the skills that, not long after leaving Cambridge, got him a place on the staff of Punch at a point when he said he had only ￡2 in his bank account. He was appointed assistant editor in 1906, aged twenty-four. He had already by then published one book (a collection of related stories he later disowned), a great deal of journalism and had written several unperformed plays. Now he had a good salary and 100,000 readers every week.
Even before the success of his plays, A. A. Milne was becoming something of a celebrity. Invitations poured in, often from people he didn’t really know. The Day’s Play, a collection of his Punch pieces, was a bestseller. The Daily Graphic painted a vivid picture of families up and down the land tearing Punch apart in their eagerness to read what Milne had written. He found himself being compared with Lewis Carroll, though children were hardly yet part of the picture.
In January 1913, he went to Switzerland on a skiing holiday, found Daphne de Sélincourt, god-daughter of his editor, was staying at the same hotel and returned to London engaged to marry her. They married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 4 June that same year. It was the day of the Derby when Emily Davis threw herself in front of the King’s horse and died. Daphne was not a suffragette, though she had agreed with Alan that the word ‘obey’ in the marriage service meant only that she would ‘write all my thank-you-very-much letters for me’.
Christopher Milne would one day explain why his parents married – a marriage that seems to need some explanation, as many marriages do – in a phrase his father had used himself: ‘She laughed at my jokes’.
Daphne, highly polished and glamorous as she was, came from a very different background – wealthy trade with yachts and fast cars. She had no interest in politics. The way things looked were always of more concern to her. Alan Milne himself was a passionate democrat who canvassed for the Liberals, street by street, in the close-run 1910 elections. He was a pacifist.
In a letter to his American publisher, he would one day write:
You have always told me that personally you have always thought more of Winnie-the-Pooh than any book I have ever written. Please let me tell you that I think more of Peace with Honour than any book I have ever written.
This bestselling pacifist tract was not published until 1934, but Milne had called himself a pacifist since 1910 and the seeds of this serious and important book were inevitably in his mind throughout the war and in the twenties, as he suffered from his ghastly experiences on the Somme.
The war shattered the world that Milne had written about in Punch, as it shattered so much else, and so many lives. In his autobiography, Milne wrote, ‘It makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.’ It is difficult for us to understand, after the killing of one Archduke had led to the deaths of ‘ten million men who were not archdukes’, just how widely the war was welcomed in 1914. Milne himself briefly felt it might be ‘the war that will end war’, in his friend H. G. Wells’ phrase that would become a sad cliché. He hoped that the war might make people realise the true futility of war, but on the Somme he came to know it as ‘a lunacy which would shame the madhouse’.
The talk of ‘shirkers’ and white feathers in the Punch office was intolerable. Milne finally volunteered in February 1915. ‘Life in wartime is hell anyway. And only in uniform can one escape thinking about it,’ he said, illogically. In March he was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment stationed at Golden Hill Fort on the Isle of Wight. Much later, Milne was able to record that in the entire war he had never fired a shot in anger or even in defence. The reason for this (which soothed his pacifist conscience) was that he had volunteered for a nine-week course at the Southern Command Signalling School at Wyke Regis, near Weymouth. On his return to the Isle of Wight he was registered as ‘Indispensable to the Training of the Battalion’. He was lucky, as so often in life. ‘Had I not been a Signals Officer, I should have gone out in July and the second battalion was wiped out to a man, or rather to an officer, in the advance.’ Daphne joined him on the island and they were able to rent a cottage in Sandown.
It was there in the winter of 1915–16 that Milne wrote the first play of his that was actually performed – written partly to give the five children of his Colonel something to do and partly to amuse himself and Daphne (who took it down from his dictation and appeared in it as the Wicked Countess) ‘at a time when life was not very amusing’. The script has not survived, but it was the germ of Milne’s first children’s book, Once on a Time. That was first published in 1917, with a later edition, illustrated by Charles Robinson, appearing five years later, not long before When We Were Very Young.
Daily expecting to be sent to France to replace a Signals officer who had been killed, Milne just had time, in the evenings of his days training new recruits, to write another play. It had to be a comedy, with nothing whatsoever to do with the war. This was the strangely named Wurzel Flummery. Reduced to two acts, it would eventually be his first West End production in a bill with two short plays by his friend J. M. Barrie.