But Milne was not to be persuaded – ‘not even for the sake of the Little Ones’. No money was mentioned, and Miss Hawkins had to be content with the promise of another contribution to Pears’ Annual. She left ‘glowing because he was so nice. I had absolutely forgotten that he hadn’t done a thing I’d asked him to do.’
Milne was also approached by the makers of Wolsey children’s underwear. ‘The story would of course be left entirely to Mr Milne, subject only to there being included in it some, so to speak, fatherly remarks upon the warmth and wisdom of children being under-clothed in wool.’ But Milne was no more inclined to promote underwear than soap.
Christopher Robin had made a fleeting appearance during Miss Hawkins’s visit – sucking his thumb and sitting on the stairs. Miss Hawkins had seen him as the three-year-old she had wanted to see, but in fact he was a schoolboy now. He had started at Miss Walters’ School in Tite Street, in Chelsea. He went with Anne Darlington and the daughters of another neighbour, who had also become a friend – Denis Mackail, grandson of Burne-Jones, brother of Angela Thirkell, whose mother’s first cousins included Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling. Milne had written to him after Greenery Street – they had met before the war, in J. M. Barrie’s cricket team – and Milne had found him decidedly interesting as a person, with his ‘special fits of depression’, his ‘special brand of nightmares’ and his occasional ‘flickers of sunshine’, as he tried to support with his pen an extravagant household in another Chelsea house. They had a lot of friends in common – not only Barrie (Mackail would write his first biography), but P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Hay, the Darlingtons. The new friendship survived a disastrous first lunch party. Mackail wrote:
It was as near a complete failure as anything could well be. I was desperately shy, but so was my host. Moreover the Milnes had a refectory table in those days, which when four people are seated at it means that two are much too close together, while the other two are much too far apart. Yet though I should like to blame the table entirely, I know that I was dull and tongue-tied and that Alan . . . must bitterly have regretted ever having posted his letter.
Later they would laugh at that first occasion as they dined with each other over and over again. (There was one particularly memorable evening in November 1927 when a taxi went through a wall on the other side of the road and no one heard it because they were all listening to Barrie – ‘There was always considerable anxiety beforehand as to whether he were going to lift the whole party to glorious heights or plunge it into silence and gloom.’) Milnes and Mackails went to theatres together (‘Every outing concluded by our being deposited, in their bright blue car, at our own front door’), visited each other’s country cottages in the summers and each other’s children’s parties at Christmas. Mary was a year older than Christopher Robin and Anne was two years younger than both Christopher and Anne Darlington. The Milne children’s party was always an outing to the theatre, combined with some sort of splendid meal. Milne and Wodehouse together put Mackail up for the Garrick and, though Wodehouse resigned almost immediately afterwards (‘I loathe clubs . . . I hated the Garrick more than any of them’), Mackail would often go in Milne’s car for lunch in Garrick Street.
Milne described the Tite Street school in a letter to Ken in June 1926:
Billy loves his school, though I never quite know what he is doing. He brings home weird works of art from time to time, hand-painted pottery and what not, which has to be disposed of by Daff. They also teach him to catch. (This is really rather a good school.) Yesterday he bounced the ball on the ground and caught it with the right hand 20 times running, thus earning a penny from his gratified papa. He says he’s done 10 times with the left hand, but not visibly.
The boy was also giving some thought to the future. One afternoon when Daphne and Nanny were both out, father and son had some serious talk on their own. ‘Do parents and children understand each other better than they did?’ an interviewer would ask A. A. Milne, who replied: ‘I think they try more and they certainly should . . . But there is still a kind of shyness between the child and the parent.’ On this occasion Milne told his son that when he was about ten he would go to a boarding school. The boy said, a little wistfully, ‘Do I ever come back to you after that?’ They talked about careers too, and after the boy had rejected various suggestions the idea of elephant hunting came up. ‘As long as I wasn’t eaten,’ he said, and then, after a moment’s thought, ‘Or trodden on.’ (‘I can’t bear to think of him being trodden on by an elephant,’ Milne wrote to Ken.) When he was grown up, Christopher said that he had never told anybody that it was an elephant, a real live elephant, that he had most wanted. What he had at Cotchford (on a count in 1927, when he was seven) were ‘two bantams, two rabbits, several kittens, six snails, a lot of caterpillars and a horrible collection of beetles’.
Milne also reported a walk when he was beginning to get irritated because his son was continually lagging behind:
ME: Come on, Moon.
MOON: I’m just looking at something, Blue. [That was what Christopher normally called his father, as did many other people.]
ME: (rather impatiently): Oh, do come on!
MOON: (running up, terribly respectfully): Yes, father. Yes, father. Yes, father!
Which makes all parental sternness simply impossible.
Milne once said that he thought it impossible for anyone with a sense of humour to be a good father. ‘The necessary assumption of authority and wisdom seems so ridiculous.’ ‘It is the old conflict of duty and affection, and correction is still a difficulty . . . Over and over again you hear the threat “If you do that again I’ll punish you . . .” and, if he does it again, how can we help admiring his pluck, seeing how small he is and how big we are.’
Christopher, when adult, would have some interesting things to say about this; he thought that his father ‘had inherited some of his own father’s gifts as a teacher’, but that he could never have been one himself. ‘He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could never impose discipline.’ His ‘relationships were always between equals, however old or young, distinguished or undistinguished the other person’. Christopher remembered how, at about this time, his father had chided him gently for sitting at the lunch table, between mouthfuls, with his hands on the table, knife and fork pointing upwards. ‘You oughtn’t really to sit like that,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ the boy asked, surprised.