But Mrs Parker doesn’t give up. She goes on and on and on, just like the tail of Christopher Robin’s dormouse. She says if anyone had addressed her, as Morley does, as ‘dear my urchin’, when she was a little one, she would have doubled her dimpled fist ‘and socked him one right on the button’, and we can well believe it. Morley’s book ‘set new standards of whimsy, plumbed new depths of quaintness’. Unlike Now We Are Six, it has sunk without trace and was hardly worth Mrs Parker wasting her typewriter ribbon. When she finally leaves Morley and gets to Milne, it goes like this:
While we are on the subject of whimsies, how about taking up Mr A. A. Milne? There is a strong feeling, I know, that to speak against Mr Milne puts one immediately in the ranks of those who set fire to orphanages, strike crippled newsboys, and lure little curly-heads off into corners to explain to them that Santa Claus is only Daddy making a fool of himself. But I too have a very strong feeling about the Whimsicality of Milne. I’m feeling it right this minute. It’s in my stomach.
Time was when A. A. Milne was my only hero. Weekly I pounced on Punch for the bits signed ‘A. A. M.’ I kept ‘Once a Week’ and ‘Half Hours’ [she means ‘Happy Days’ presumably] practically under my pillow. I read ‘The Red House Mystery’ threadbare. I thought ‘The Truth about Blayds’ a fine and merciless and honest play. But when Mr Milne went quaint, all was over. Now he leads his life and I lead mine.
‘Now We Are Six’, the successor to ‘When We Were Very Young’, is Mr Milne gone completely Winnie-the-Pooh. Not since Fay Bainter played ‘East is West’ have I seen such sedulous cuteness. I give you, for example, the postscript to the preface: ‘Pooh wants us to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won’t mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.’ That one sentence may well make Christopher Morley stamp on his pen in despair. A. A. Milne still remains the Master.
Of Milne’s recent verse, I speak in a minority amounting to solitude. I think it is affected, commonplace, bad. I did so, too, say bad. And now I must stop, to get ready for being ridden out of town on a rail.
CONSTANT READER
Anne Darlington could be numbered among those unspeakable characters who reveal the awful fact that Father Christmas does not exist; Christopher Milne could still point out the exact place where one morning on the way to the kindergarten in Tite Street with their nannies, Anne made her revelation. Now We Are Six is dedicated to Anne:
TO
ANNE DARLINGTON
NOW SHE IS SEVEN
AND
BECAUSE SHE IS
SO
SPESHAL
That spelling of ‘special’ has made other gorges rise besides Mrs Parker’s. Somehow it seems all right when Christopher Robin can’t spell and leaves his famous note:
GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
When Milne himself pretends he can’t spell, there is a good deal of revulsion from even his most dedicated admirers. But his inscription in Anne Darlington’s own copy of the book is beautifully turned and shows clearly his special devotion to the child:
This book of songs
Dear Anne, belongs to you.
It carries much
Of love and such from Blue.
And for the rest
It says as best it can
‘Be never far
From Moon, my darling Anne.’
Her father, W. A. Darlington, would remember the children playing on the nursery floor in Mallord Street with Daphne who ‘helped to bring the toy animals to life and give them their character’. He said that Alan Milne ‘never joined in their games but watched them with delight’. Christopher’s nanny, as we saw, remembered Milne himself entering into the games; he ‘spoke to the toys as if they were real people’. Both could be right. Other days, other moods. Christopher would remember that he and his mother and the toys played together, ‘and gradually more life, more character flowed into them, until they reached a point at which my father could take over. Then, as the first stories were written, the cycle was repeated. The Pooh in my arms, the Pooh sitting opposite me at the breakfast table was a Pooh who had climbed trees in search of honey, who had got stuck in a rabbit hole . . .’
Certainly, from Milne’s letters one would imagine that all the ideas for the stories came entirely from Milne’s head (together with Owl and Rabbit) and that it was only the toy animals themselves which came from the nursery – their characters and voices certainly owing a good deal to Christopher himself and Daphne. Daphne was undoubtedly obsessed by the pretence that Pooh and the others were alive. There is a rather rebarbative glimpse of her in a gushing article by the American May Lamberton Becker, who had first met the Milnes a few years earlier and had sent Christopher a marvellous Indian headdress as a present. Daphne’s ecstatic thanks perhaps gives a flavour of her talk: ‘Christopher Robin was simply too enchanted . . . It was really lovely of you to remember him and he does thank you ever so much . . . I do wish you could see him going out in it, he does look such a duck.’ Gushing seemed to be the flavour of the time . . . In 1928 Miss Becker came more as a friend than a reporter. When she arrived, Christopher was attacking his father with boxing gloves:
A long nursery with walls the colour of sunshine; an eminent author crouched in the window-seat, clutching to his breast a fat yellow sofa-cushion; facing him at a convenient distance for attack, a little boy in boxing-gloves, his golden hair tossed back from the brightest and brownest eyes in London, his feet tapping back and forth in the proper professional preparations.
The real Christopher Robin still looks like Mr Shepard’s pictures; that is, in moments of comparative repose, and when completing a particularly good tea at the round table in the yellow nursery. But only a cinema, an earnest one up to its business, could deal with Christopher Robin’s boxing. It is the real thing and no mistake. Besides his school, he now goes to a famous gymnasium – oh yes, he’s still a little boy, but when you say he is, you should stress the second word instead of the first.