Milne and Shepard walked up to Gills Lap across open country that is more heathland than forest, over dry golden grass, between bent dead bracken (with no sign yet of the new season’s growth), tangled gorse and heather. They saw, as Pooh and Christopher Robin did, ‘the whole world spread out until it reached the sky’. Now, in a secluded spot, a ‘warm and sunny spot’, if it’s that sort of day, you can find, if you look hard enough, a memorial to the two men, writer and artist.
On that spring day they walked down the hill to the river in the valley and saw under the trees in Posingford Wood clumps of yellow primroses, sheets of white anemones (‘like driven snow against the trees’), patches of bluebells and the buds of marsh marigolds just beginning to show a little gold. They crossed the wooden bridge and returned along the lane in time for tea. Mary, Shepard’s daughter, would remember Christopher Robin’s delight when her big brother, Graham (soon to go up to Oxford), played with the child in the stream, ‘with an old log floating there that became a battleship, an alligator.’ She thought Christopher Robin reacted as one who had never known ‘anyone older than himself actually playing games with him’. In fact, the only child spent a good deal of time playing what he called ‘dog games’ with his father – running after balls, hitting balls, catching balls – but there were also messier, less structured games: scooping mud and scum and weed from the stream, looking for lost golf balls, and landing instead grass snakes and nobbly newts. He had a number of companions nearer his own age too – Anne Darlington, when she was visiting, as she did very often; Brenda Tasker, the gardener’s daughter, who would remember building huts out of bracken, playing cricket and riding Jessica, the donkey; and Hannah, who lived only half a mile away, and was good at climbing trees. It was in the apple orchard up the lane – full of excellent trees for climbing – that Roo was lost and never found again. Olive Brockwell remembered the heartache of that search all her life.
Part of the strength and charm of the stories comes from the juxtaposition of toy animal and forest. Milne writes something simple, such as Pooh was ‘walking through the forest one day, humming proudly to himself’, and Shepard shows a jaunty toy bear walking through real Ashdown Forest over real rough grass with real trees in the background; or Milne writes: ‘One fine winter’s day when Piglet was brushing away the snow in front of his house’, and Shepard shows a diminutive toy piglet making a tiny path with a tiny broom away from the trunk of a fine beech tree. Trees dominate the books. Rabbit lives in a burrow, which has some relationship to Badger’s house in the middle of the Wild Wood (but there are no stoats and weasels, no cudgels or pistols in Milne’s forest); nearly everyone else lives in trees, including Christopher Robin himself.
It had all started in a tree in the garden at Cotchford – an ancient walnut tree (now long gone). ‘The tree was hollow inside and a great gash in its trunk had opened up to make a door.’ It was the perfect tree-house for a five-year-old. ‘There was plenty of room for a boy and his bear.’ They could sit on the soft crumbly floor and see, high above them, ‘a green and blue ceiling of leaves and sky’. And even if Nanny could hear him if he called, it was a sort of independence and he was getting more adventurous every day. Christopher would recall: ‘So if anyone wonders why in the stories so much time seems to be spent in trees or up trees, the answer is that this, in real life, was how it was.’ Milne wrote in 1927, just after Christopher’s seventh birthday: ‘At the moment he is mad on tree-climbing, which he really does rather well and pluckily, even after doing the last eight feet (downwards) on his head the other day.’ This is the sort of boy behind the stories, not the long-ago kneeling child with the little gold head.
There have been critics who have found Christopher Robin, even in the Pooh books, a stumbling block to their full enjoyment. ‘Was there ever a more insufferable child than Christopher Robin?’ wrote the critic Chris Powling on the sixtieth birthday of the book. Like Geoffrey Grigson on the poems, again he seems to let sociology and class-consciousness get in the way:
Every inch of him exudes smugness – from the top of that curious, bobbed haircut to the tip of those tiny-tot sandals (and the smock and shorts in between are just as irritating). Okay, so we shouldn’t take him at face value. Maybe there is deep irony in this twentieth-century version of the Victorian Beautiful Child. In Christopher Robin’s case, however, we must certainly heed the wise advice of Oscar Wilde that it’s only a superficial person who does not judge by appearances. With Milne’s prose [his ‘sheer literary craftsmanship’] reinforced by E. H. Shepard’s superb line-drawings, Christopher Robin must surely be what he seems. And what he seems is a serious affront to anyone who believes children are simply people who haven’t lived very long.
Powling, in fact, comes round to knowing that the stories can survive even the ‘insufferable’ too-perfect child:
The permanence of the Pooh books has nothing whatever to do with their psychological depth or the sharpness of their social comment or their status as morality. These don’t matter a jot. What’s important, through and through, is their success as storytelling. And this is a triumph. It survives shifts in fashion. It survives Christopher Robin. It even survives that odd tone-of-voice which, for all Milne’s simple language, never quite settles for a child audience. The world Pooh creates is completely unique and utterly self-sustaining. Yes, it is a world that’s very like ours . . . but much, much more like itself.