The nursery was ready. They had moved into ‘the prettiest little house in London’, Milne wrote to Frank Swinnerton in August 1919, describing 11 Mallord Street, Chelsea, SW3. It is a short, quiet street just a few minutes’ walk from the King’s Road.
The house is narrow, in a terrace, and had been built not long before the war. It has three storeys and a basement and is much bigger than it looks from outside, having been designed rather cleverly round a well for light. The house was much described in the late 1920s, when hordes of journalists traipsed through it on their way to Christopher Robin’s nursery. ‘Originally Mallord Street had been done in colours influenced by the Russian Ballet, black carpets, bright cushions, very impractical as the carpets showed every bit of cigarette ash,’ a friend of Daphne’s remembered her saying. ‘She told me that the thing to be at that time was – different.’ The house had to be ‘an artistic whole, a showplace’.
Some of Milne’s own exuberant pleasure in his new house comes across in a piece he published in the Sphere on 9 August 1919, soon after they moved in. It was the first time, he said, that he had had the chance to go upstairs to bed and come downstairs to breakfast for nineteen years – in other words since he had left home for Cambridge.
Of course I have done these things in other people’s houses from time to time, but what we do in other people’s houses does not count . . . Now, however, for the first time in nineteen years, I am actually living in a house. I have (imagine my excitement) a staircase of my own.
Flats may be convenient (I thought so myself when I lived in one some days ago), but they have their disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that you are never in complete possession of the flat. You may think that the drawing-room floor (to take a case) is your very own, but it isn’t; you share it with a man below who uses it as a ceiling. If you want to dance a step-dance, you have to consider his plaster. I was always ready enough to accommodate myself in this matter to his prejudices, but I could not put up with his old-fashioned ideas about bathroom ceilings. It is very cramping to one’s style in the bath to reflect that the slightest splash may call attention to itself on the ceiling of the gentleman below. This is to share a bathroom with a stranger – an intolerable position for a proud man. Today I have a bathroom of my own for the first time in my life.
I can see already that living in a house is going to be extraordinarily healthy both for mind and body. At present I go upstairs to my bedroom (and downstairs again) about once in every half-hour. No such exercise as this was possible in a flat, and even after two or three days I feel the better for it.
But the best of a house is that it has an outside personality as well as an inside one. Any of you may find himself some day in our quiet street, and stop a moment to look at our house; at the blue door with its jolly knocker, at the little trees in their blue tubs standing within a ring of blue posts linked by chains, at the bright-coloured curtains. We have the pleasure of feeling that we are contributing something to London. We are part of a street now, and can take pride in that street.
That being ‘part of a street’ was not quite as community-minded a remark as it suggests, although Milne would become friends with some people who lived nearby. Harold Fraser-Simson, the composer, had a house across the street and belonged to the Garrick Club. W. A. Darlington and his family lived only a few minutes’ walk away. They would all see each other from time to time. Darlington described his first visit:
As I rang the bell of his house in Mallord Street I was attacked by a fit of shyness. I had admired his work so deeply and for so long that I had a sudden absurd feeling that I was a fag in the lower fourth who had been sent for by a member of the upper sixth. This vanished the moment I met him. Milne in the flesh was all I had hoped to find him, warm, friendly and amusing.
Milne had invited Darlington to call. Darlington’s review of Mr Pim Passes By was written on the night of the confirmation of his appointment as drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, a job he was to hold for the rest of his career. The Milnes were not callers. ‘We don’t call very well,’ Milne said. ‘My fault, I suppose. I hate knowing people for geographical reasons.’ Their neighbours felt the same. When the Milnes were burgled, the people next door sent a note of sympathy. Even then they did not speak to each other. ‘Suburban chumminess’ never appealed to Milne. Already he felt it necessary to protect his privacy. But he was not always consistent. Milne once said to Swinnerton: ‘Does any person think so consecutively and business-likely as novelists make them think?’ Real people are never as consistent as the characters in fiction. Milne could be said, at some points, to have been someone who kept himself to himself. On other days, in other moods, he would welcome the warm curiosity, the genuine interest of a fellow human being.
The one generalisation which always does seem to be true of Milne – unfashionable and indeed repugnant as some people find it – can best be left in Frank Swinnerton’s own words, the words of someone who knew him really well. ‘He loves goodness . . . He stands for virtue.’ He had been brought up to believe that, without virtue, nothing is worth anything. This does not mean, of course, that he always himself did the right thing but rather that he had a strong moral sense. Swinnerton saw this as a problem for Milne professionally. ‘He combined with a gift for persiflage the sternness of a Covenanter, which I think restricted the range of his dramatic performance. Any writer of imaginative work who cannot give the Devil his due . . . becomes moral-bound. He dare not let sinners have a flutter.’ ‘Rectitude is fatal to humour,’ Graham Greene would say, hitting Milne when he was already down, in the 1930s. The redeeming fact was that Milne’s admiration was for real goodness, not for those Victorian virtues, or indeed ‘the prevailing social codes’ which so often pass as such. But it would, as we shall see, earn him some dislike. Those who stand for goodness risk being called prudish, priggish and proud. ‘I felt uncomfortable in his company,’ one of his publishers told me. ‘Those who disagree with him complain of his rigidity in argument and severity in outlook,’ Swinnerton said, adding, ‘That is not my experience. I have always found him overflowing with good spirits.’
Alan Milne’s parents, who had now sold their school and retired, were living in the war years and just after in a house called St Andrews at Burgess Hill in Sussex. One of Alan’s nieces, Angela, remembered: ‘To a child from suburbia, St Andrews was heaven.’ It was ‘a compact Victorian country house, brick, gabled, with a squat tower’, standing in its own grounds. There was Pears’ soap in the bathroom, a grandfather clock in the hall, stone lions and passion-flowers at the front door. Maria by now was ailing, moving only slowly round the house, with a stick, a shawl and a lace cap. She taught her grandchildren a moral verse, as she must have taught her own children, thirty years before.