Alan Milne arrived on the Somme in the summer of 1916, at a time when, after the initial slaughter (nearly 20,000 British soldiers killed and 40,000 wounded on the first day alone), 10,000 more were killed or wounded every day that passed. The young subaltern with whom Milne had travelled out was killed within a week. It was horrific. Even in July they were fighting in a field of mud, among smashed and leafless trees and half-buried bodies. The stench and the flies were appalling. Milne ran out his first wire on 11 August. It was dangerous work trying to keep the lines of communication open.
There were few breaks in the horror. Milne longed for ‘a nice cushy wound’ to take him away from it. In the end, it was a serious case of trench fever, with a temperature soaring to 105°F, that took him back to England, to a hospital in Oxford and eventually to a convalescent home at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. It has been said that Milne had a quiet war. No one who spent any time on the Somme had a quiet war. On the Somme it was only quiet if you were dead. The bombardment and the buzzing flies, feeding on the dead, sounded in his ears for years. But he knew how lucky he was to be alive and, having been in it, have a greater right to speak out against the lunacy of war.
A medical board recommended sedentary work. Milne was still not well when he started in Intelligence, based at the War Office. The work was secret and included in 1918 a mysterious visit to France, but most of the time he was in London, living with Daphne again. Every moment now that the Army left him alone, Milne was writing plays. After Wurzel Flummery came Belinda, The Boy Comes Home, Make-Believe (for children), The Camberley Triangle and The Lucky One. These are plays that are now forgotten, though they attracted much attention and gave a good deal of pleasure at the time. All were written, astonishingly, while Milne was still in the Army.
Belinda opened on 8 April 1918. On the day it was reviewed in The Times, a leader reported the renewal of the German offensive. Four hundred thousand more men died in three weeks. Belinda survived London’s worst air raid of the war and was taken off after nine weeks. ‘It was difficult,’ Milne said, ‘to regard its ill fortune as a matter of much importance.’
Milne was finally demobilised on Valentine’s Day in 1919. He had always expected to return to Punch after the war. Daphne had dreamed that Alan would succeed Sir Owen Seaman, her godfather, as editor and be knighted like him. It was a shock that he was not wanted back as assistant editor. It was presumed he would much prefer to write plays. The fact was that to Sir Owen, Milne was, as he had always been, too liberal, too ‘radical’. Milne found it hard, some hurt would remain, but he was getting tired of London and he was optimistic that the play he was writing would be the one to make his fortune.
NOW READ ON . . .
1
PLAYWRIGHT
In 1922, the year A. A. Milne was forty and two years before the first of the famous children’s books was published, a caption to his photograph in a London newspaper carried the words: ‘Milne came to Fleet Street years ago in search of a fortune. As a dramatist, his income at times ranges from ￡200 to ￡500 a week.’ This really was a fortune in 1922; it was more in a week than most people earned in a year. That joking boast, ‘England’s premier playwright’, which Alan Milne had used when signing a letter to his brother Ken in 1917, was never exactly justified. But he was certainly one of England’s most successful, prolific and best-known playwrights for a brief period, a fact that now seems almost incredible, when so many people who know his name and love his books have no idea that he ever wrote plays.
It was in 1919 that A. A. Milne had joined the Garrick Club. The club was to give him a great deal of pleasure (a refuge, another home, particularly in the thirties) – pleasure he would reward on his death with a share of the Pooh royalties. The Garrick was the appropriate club for a playwright. The Garrick was full of actors; it was full of writers too.
Milne in 1919 was ambitious, and not just to make a lot of money. Towards the end of his life, he summed up his feelings like this:
Of all the foolish things which Dr Johnson said, the most foolish was: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ What he should have said was that a writer, having written what pleased him, was a blockhead if he did not sell it in the best market. But a writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence . . . He yearns for the immortality, even if only in the British Museum, of stiff covers.
Milne made sure that most of his plays were published in an attractive uniform edition from Chatto and Windus, in a stylish brown cloth with a well-designed label on the spine. ‘It is very jolly indeed,’ he told his novelist friend and editor Frank Swinnerton, when he saw the proofs of First Plays. Twenty of Milne’s plays survive in this form, and not only in the British Museum. But the true immortality was to come, of course, from the children’s books, a fact he would live to realise and regret.
The play that was Milne’s first real success was Mr Pim Passes By, which opened at the New Theatre in London on 5 January 1920. It was a hard audience to woo. The great successes of the 1920s were Chu Chin Chow and Hassan, glamorous and specifically exotic musical shows, which fulfilled to perfection people’s need for a good night out. In the straight theatre, the playwright’s best hope was to make people laugh. He also had to remember all sorts of practical things. Theatres were less well-disciplined places than they usually are today. ‘If yours is an 8.15 play, you may be sure that the stalls will not fill up till 8.30 and you should therefore let loose the lesser-paid members of the cast in the opening scene.’ You should be careful not to waste your jokes ‘on the first five pages of dialogue’. There would be a crackle of stiff white shirtfronts, a jingle of beaded evening bags, a shuffle of programmes as the audience settled themselves into their seats. And at the end of the evening the playwright had to remember that many people, living for instance in Chislehurst, would be catching last trains and missing the final five minutes of every play they ever saw, together, of course, with countless renderings of the national anthem.
There was a more personal problem. The Milnes were becoming worried at Daphne’s failure to conceive. They both wanted children. They had now been married for nearly six years; the war had not kept them apart for any great periods of time. There were consultations with a gynaecologist. In May 1919, Daphne went into a nursing home. ‘I fly there in all my spare minutes,’ Milne wrote to Swinnerton, adding that he was trying to write a novel called Nocturne, but kept putting it aside. The operation Daphne underwent was ‘officially’ for the removal of her appendix, but it seems likely that something else was done at the same time; perhaps the fallopian tubes were insufflated. Whatever happened, in April 1920 J. M. Barrie would be able to congratulate Milne: ‘By far the choicest lines (the best you have ever written) are about your wife and I rejoice with exceeding joy over that news.’ Daphne was expecting a child in August.