DAFF: It will be a Wonderful Thing to Have!
ME: Who is Moon? . . . I’m the only important person in this house. Christopher Robin doesn’t exist. He is a pigment-figment of the imagination. Why should a small unimportant boy—
DAFF: It would be a Wonderful Thing to Have – Afterwards.
ME: After what?
DAFF: I mean—
ME: Now if they’d asked Me—
DAFF: I thought you said they did?
ME: Oh! I didn’t know I’d told you that.
DAFF: I wish you would! It would be a Wonderful Thing to Have – Afterwards.
ME: After what?
DAFF: I mean—
ME: I think the Whole thing is Perfectly Disgusting; I’ll have Nothing to do with it. You can do what you like about it. I wash my hands of it. (Exit to bathroom.) So Daff went to the Gramophone Co., they all fell on her neck—
and the record was the result. Whether the whole idea was Daphne’s own, as this suggests, we don’t know for certain.
One of Christopher’s cousins remembered the record well and thought it ‘the unacceptable face of Poohdom’. That was not so much ‘the sound of the record as the idea’. As for the record itself, ‘it was the voice of a small boy who was obviously musical – dead in tune and sweet of tone – and who was obviously giving the performance all he’d got. (Perhaps this added to my feeling that the poor child was being exploited.) There were four songs – “Vespers”, “Buckingham Palace”, “Fishing” and the one about the train brake that didn’t work.’
There were preliminary rehearsals in the first-floor drawing-room at Mallord Street (the room with the golden walls), a final practice in the Fraser-Simsons’ house round the corner (with some coaching from Cicely Fraser-Simson, to whom The Hums of Pooh would be dedicated in 1929) – and then to the HMV studio. In fact, there must have been two records, for the one that Christopher remembered included ‘The Friend’. He had to put on a Poohish voice when he sang: ‘Well, I say sixpence, but I don’t suppose I’m right.’ Rather a difficult thing to do.
It was ‘Vespers’, however, that returned to haunt him years later when boys in the next study at Stowe would play it over and over again, remorselessly. It was ‘intensely painful’ for the singer. ‘Eventually the joke, if not the record, wore out, they handed it to me’ (the record not the joke) ‘and I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.’ Years later, his cousin Angela allowed her children to hang the record on a tree, a string through the hole in the middle, and to throw things at it. One wonders how many copies remain in attics along with Ernest Lush singing ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’ and Harry Lauder’s ‘I Love a Lassie’.
Christopher had another important part in the spring of 1928. Milne wrote to Ken:
Daff is terribly busy, and so am I up to a point, in arranging this Pooh party. Beginning with no more than a kindly interest in the proceedings, and a gracious permission to certain performers to sing certain songs, we have got more and more dragged into it, until now we provide the whole programme, company, organisation and everything else. Moon makes three appearances – besides acting as host and shaking hands with the 350 odd guests! (We have told him to ooze away at about the 50th.) He sings The Friend with Pooh by his side – delightfully and really funnily. He recites with another small boy (W. G. Stevens’ son) Us Two, and he plays in Eeyore’s Birthday the part which is Owl’s in the book, but has been made Christopher Robin’s in the play. He loves it, is quite unshy, and speaks beautifully. Piglet is played by a darling little fat girl, Veronica, aged 4, with a very deep voice which comes out loudly and suddenly on all the unimportant words – ‘Many happy returns OF the day’ – ‘Perhaps EEYORE doesn’t like BALLOONS so very VERY much’ – it’s frightfully funny, and she looks superb. Eeyore is Anne Hastings Turner – terribly bad, but from sheer vanity may pull it off on the afternoon – and Pooh is the Stevens boy, also quite unshy and intelligent, but unfortunately with rather a niminy-piminy voice, quite unlike Pooh’s gruff voice as inspired by Moon. Anne Darlington, alas, wasn’t allowed to appear, as she gets too excited and upsets herself. Dress rehearsal this afternoon. We burst two balloons at every rehearsal, which seems rather a pity.
And in July 1929 there would be a pageant in Ashdown Forest twice a day for four days. The Mackails would go down with the Milnes (‘the sun nearly roasted us to death,’ Mackail foolishly complained) to see Christopher Robin (afternoons only) playing himself and the children of Park House School playing ‘Winnie-the-Pooh and the other toys’. There would be a procession as the finale of the pageant – which included practically every historical character you could think of: Earl Godwin, Queen Elizabeth, Nell Gwynn, Cromwell, Lady Hamilton, Wellington . . . And then, in among them, there was Christopher Robin and the children representing ‘Ashdown Forest today where a boy and his bear will always be playing’. Christopher enjoyed it: ‘Exciting without being frightening. For there was nothing to be nervous about, nothing to go wrong. It was not like acting in a play or making a gramophone record when your voice might go funny.’ There was nothing to go wrong. But for Milne himself, by July 1929, everything had gone wrong.
We have leapt ahead, following the boy in his starring roles, enjoying for the last time his part as Christopher Robin. Now we must go back and look further at the children’s books – Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner – which were keeping them all so firmly in the public eye, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America, 90,000 copies of Now We Are Six had already been ordered on publication day in October 1927. The Retail Bookseller said it was ‘another unquestionable bullseye’. It was top of the general bestseller list during its first month on sale. ‘For the third time A. A. Milne has demonstrated that a book for children can outsell all other books in the country.’
One strong voice stood out against the general murmur of pleasure. Dorothy Parker, disguised as ‘Constant Reader’, mounted her first attack. In the New Yorker on 12 November 1927 she had great fun with two new children’s books – Now We Are Six and Christopher Morley’s I Know a Secret, which the publishers had claimed to be fit to stand in the company of Alice, Peter Pan and When We Were Very Young. Mrs Parker said she found it difficult not to confuse Christopher Morley with Christopher Robin. Indeed, she found that:
during those fretful hours when I am tossing and turning at my typewriter, during the mellow evenings, during the dim, drowsy watches of the night, my mind goes crooning:
Christopher Morley goes hippety, hoppety
Hippety, hippety, hop.
Whenever I ask him politely to stop it, he
Says he can’t possibly stop . . .
The thing is too much for me. I am about to give it all up. I cannot get those two quaint kiddies straightened out.