More and more, Milne found himself looking back, not ahead. In 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, this was understandable. He was writing his Autobiography, published under that title in America and as It’s Too Late Now in Britain. In it, Milne devoted more than half to his own beginnings – child, schoolboy, undergraduate – and only a few pages to the four famous children’s books, though he must have realised that that was the section that would most interest people. Of Christopher, he said little beyond the fact that they had intended to call their child Rosemary, but decided later that Billy would be more suitable. In the end, he was registered as Christopher Robin, ‘names wasted on him who called himself Billy Moon as soon as he could talk, and has been Moon to his family and friends ever since. I mention this because it explains why the publicity attached to “Christopher Robin” never seemed to affect us personally, but rather to concern a character in a book.’
The boy had certainly shown no signs of any normal adolescent rebellion. What he had begun to show were the signs of nervous tension, of an increasing shyness, the outward expression, presumably, of a subconscious worry that he could never fulfil his father’s deepest ambitions for him, that he could never be the sort of debonair young man readers expected that charming, competent child, Christopher Robin, to become – if, indeed, they imagined him growing up at all. The schoolboy Christopher Milne both trembled and stammered and remained anxious in all he did to please his father.
In 1939, in that last beautiful summer before war was declared, on holiday together on Dartmoor, father and son were still extremely close and would remain so throughout the war. This was in spite of the fact that for much of that time they were separated by many hundreds of miles. Christopher went up to Milne’s old college, Trinity, Cambridge, in the autumn that year.
Milne found solace in practising his long-neglected talent for light verse in a sort of rhyming war diary that appeared in Punch in the first year of the war. When it was published in October 1940 as Behind the Lines, the book was dedicated:
To my affinity:
C. R. Milne: Mathematical scholar of Trinity:
And: By the time this appears:
With any luck Private in the Royal Engineers.
Christopher had failed his first medical through trembling with nervous excitement, but his father’s intervention had given him another chance. The boy was keen to go and managed to pass a trade test and in July 1942 he was finally commissioned and sailed for the Middle East with a battalion of the Royal Engineers.
It was the war that would eventually allow him to make the necessary escape from his father, to be himself, to put his childhood finally behind him. Those five years, he would say, ‘provided me with a foundation stone, strong and lasting, on which to build my adult life.’
Milne was writing letters to destinations all over the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. Christopher was in Lombardy when, on 7 October 1944, the dreaded telegram arrived in Cotchford. It was not that the boy was missing, but rather, and equally frightening, that he had suffered ‘a penetrating shell wound in the right occipital region and was seriously ill.’ In fact the head wound, it turned out, was not very serious. Milne wrote a letter to The Times, objecting to the way the War Office had alarmed them.
There was no further occasion for similar suffering. But there would be other suffering to come for which Milne was hardly prepared. There was a girl in Trieste who ‘helped to loosen the bond that tied’ the boy to his father. Milne had often said he wanted his son to stand on his own two feet and make his own name for himself. But when Christopher at last started out on that path, his father found it extremely difficult.
It was the period after the war that caused the final rift. The young man, like so many returned soldiers, found it difficult to get work. He had gone back to Cambridge to finish his degree, had switched to English and finished with a mere Third:
In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.
Now it seems they had only one thing in common: ‘If I wanted to escape from Christopher Robin, so, too, did he.’
The strength of the bond that there had been between father and son made the breaking of it all the more painful. Almost the last time they were in the same room was when Christopher married his cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt. They had been introduced by their shared step-grandmother, sorry that they did not know each other. Lesley’s father, Aubrey, had been estranged from Christopher’s mother, Daphne, for many years. The marriage would not ‘bury their parents’ strife’. Christopher was joining Lesley in the opposing camp. Lesley had no time at all for Winnie-the-Pooh.
In 1951, Christopher and Lesley set up their own bookshop in Dartmouth in Devon. Their story together went on for nearly fifty years and enabled Christopher to say in the preface to his second memoir The Path Through the Trees that he had had a happy life. He never completely got over his dislike of being the real live Christopher Robin, but when he looked at the four famous books in his shop, he admitted finally he could not help being proud of his father. He was proud himself of the fact that he and his wife were self-supporting at the Harbour Bookshop. His share of his father’s fortune went into a Trust for his disabled daughter, a Trust that continues after Clare’s death in 2012, to support disabled people in south-west England.
A. A. Milne’s last years were not happy, though he and Daphne lived amicably in their home on the edge of Ashdown Forest and he had come to terms at last with his claim to immortality, and his most famous creation, Winnie-the-Pooh. He wrote to a young fan: ‘There was a period when any reference to him was infuriating, but now such a “nice comfortable feeling” envelops him that I can almost regard him impersonally as the creation of one of my own favourite authors.’
It was an odd remark. Perhaps at last he was seeing that his four books deserved to be on the same special shelf as The Wind in the Willows.
In 1926, just after Winnie-the-Pooh was published, A. A. Milne had written: ‘I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live for ever in this world, whatever he may be doing himself in the next.’ There is no doubt that he had achieved – though not in the way he had wished – that certain immortality.
A. A. Milne died after a long illness in 1956. Christopher Robin Milne died forty years later.