Milne’s own view of his American publisher was rather more astringent. ‘He is an old man with a beard, and he calls me “Sir” all the time. Not “Yes, sir” à la Americaine, but “Yessir”, like a Boy Scout. Very trying. He is always bowing to me, and telling me how I go straight to the hearts of the people.’ After all, there had never been anything quite like When We Were Very Young. ‘I also go straight to the heart of his banker, I should imagine,’ Milne wrote to Ken.
In the spring of 1926 Shepard was having to work against the clock, as the Royal Magazine had taken six of the stories, needed to go to press, according to Milne, ‘months in advance’ and was naturally anxious all the stories would appear before the book was published in October. At one stage, Miss Pearn, in the magazine department at Curtis Brown, wrote to Milne, ‘Will you be so kind as to pass this S.O.S. on to Mr Shepard’, and three days later wrote to Shepard to say, ‘Mr Milne has asked us to communicate direct with you in future in connection with the Winnie-the-Pooh drawings.’ In April, Shepard was in Rapallo and the Royal Magazine was getting a bit nervous about timing. ‘I am relieved to hear that you are now at work,’ Miss Pearn wrote.
Milne seemed to be acting as a financial middleman, as well as being closely concerned in the content of the illustrations. ‘They were going to pay you ￡12.10 a story’ (that was for one large and four to six small drawings). ‘I have told C.B. to try and raise them, as I didn’t think you would be satisfied with this; but in a way it is all extra, and I hope we shall get much more from America. The trouble is there is so little time.’
Dutton’s were very anxious to get the original two – Bees and Rabbit – out as soon as possible for their salesmen to take round to the bookshops. Frederick Muller at Methuen agreed to get those two stories (which had already appeared in the Evening News and Eve) ‘set up in galley proof . . . then we had all three better meet and try to arrange the make-up of it’ – that is Muller, Milne, Shepard. At the Royal Magazine they were making up the pages for their first story, actually the fourth in the book, called at that stage: ‘Winnie-the-Pooh finds a Tail’. In the magazine it was squashed into only four and a half pages, with Shepard providing thirteen pictures altogether, including nine of Eeyore in various odd positions – rather than the six or seven Milne had suggested would be called for. In the book itself, ‘In which Eeyore loses a tail and Pooh finds one’ takes up twelve pages. On 24 March, Daphne was able to write to Shepard (as A. A. Milne pp D. M. – having abandoned a fictitious ‘Celia Brice’, at least as far as Shepard was concerned) to tell him that ‘the Royal has gone up to 15 guineas’.
It was Milne’s idea that Shepard should have a share of his royalties this time, recognising his permanent share in the books. It was extremely unusual for an illustrator at this period. The agreed proportion seems to have been Milne’s own suggestion. The contracts remained primarily between Milne and the publishers, with subsidiary agreements made between Milne and Shepard. The contract for Winnie-the-Pooh, signed on 15 March 1926, said ‘that the publishers agree to publish the said work with illustrations by E. H. Shepard, to be provided by the author without cost to the publishers’. The contract for When We Were Very Young (10 April 1924) had said the publishers agreed the book should be ‘suitably illustrated at their own expense’. The two further children’s books would follow the pattern for Pooh – and when the rights to reproduce Shepard’s drawings as toys, wallpaper and so on were granted in both England and America, again it was ‘by agreement with the author’. The characters, both Christopher Robin and the toys themselves, adapted by Shepard from the reality, and Owl and Rabbit imagined by Shepard from Milne’s invention, were never, in any sense, Shepard’s property. Milne wrote to Shepard:
Brown has drawn up the agreements with Dutton and Methuen for Winnie-the-Pooh. In them you get ￡200 on account from M. and ￡100 from D. (less commission) – i.e. you get ￡270 anyway, if not a single copy is sold. Which is better than When We Were Very Young, for, I should imagine, fewer drawings. As regards royalties Dutton and Methuen were prepared to pay 20% and 25% (i.e. 4% and 5% for you) but protested that it wouldn’t leave them much margin for advertisement. So now D. pays 15% to 5,000, and then 20%, and Methuen pays 20% to 10,000, 22?% to 15,000 and then 25%. If it is the success we hope and expect it to be, we ought to do at least 50,000 in England and 100,000 in America – in fact there is really no limit to what we might do, and the sales will go on for a long time.
A little later, when presumably the advance had been increased, Milne wrote to Ken:
Shepard and I are having a joint agreement, dividing in the proportion of 80 to 20. Actually he did all the WWWVY illustrations for ￡200, and as on this book we are getting ￡1,000 in advance from England and ￡1,000 from America, he gets ￡400 straight off. And, of course, should eventually get much more. But when I told Daff of the suggested division, 80% to me, 20% to him, she said, ‘I am sure you make it sound all right to him, but it will want a lot of explaining to Mrs Shepard.’
The two women had met when the whole Shepard family went down to Cotchford for the day to give the artist a chance to sketch and explore the actual setting of the book, ‘all the spots where the things happened’. If Milne seemed reticent and rather stiff in Mallord Street, it was not so in Sussex that spring. ‘He was a different man,’ Shepard remembered many years later. ‘He was quite different, going over the ground and showing me the places.’ Milne had, in fact, had only just a year to get to know Ashdown Forest, but he already loved it, and as he wrote the stories, though the landscape is hardly mentioned, they are set firmly in a real place under a real sky.
Another good writer, Barbara Willard, who lived on the edge of the Forest and had used the place in her own books, said to me that the Pooh books, ‘could just as well have been set on Hampstead Heath’, but the stories have a much more rural feeling than that suggests and the illustrations are still recognisably of the Sussex background Milne showed to Shepard more than ninety years ago. The October 1987 hurricane did terrible damage in the Forest and devastated the wood the Milnes planted in the field along the lane from their house – but Gills Lap is still recognisable as ‘the enchanted place on the very top of the Forest’. New pines have grown to replace those that fell and there is now some undergrowth and not quite so much of the ‘close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green’, where you can sit down carelessly like Pooh.