In the summer of 1920 Daphne Milne gave birth to their first and only son in the house in Chelsea. It was not an easy birth. Daphne told a friend long afterwards about it. ‘It’s difficult to believe,’ the friend said to me, ‘but until she was actually giving birth, she had no idea of the mechanics of it. It came as a thoroughly traumatising shock and made her absolutely determined never to repeat the performance.’ It is not so difficult to believe. In Milne’s novel Two People, the wife says her mother had told her absolutely nothing before she was married – nothing about anything. Not many young women had yet read Married Love by Marie Stopes, published only two years earlier.
It seems likely, from clues in his fiction, that Alan Milne was the traditional anguished husband, pacing up and down through the hours of labour, in a room not far away, pulling on his pipe. ‘Because his son had been so long in coming, he had been more than usually frightened,’ Milne wrote in a late short story. ‘He looked at his son, and felt as other husbands have felt looking at their first-born, “All that for this; so small, so ugly; and yet what a burden to have borne.”’ Another of his characters says, ‘When my boy was born, we lived in two rooms. Mary was in one; I was in the other.’ He heard the birth. ‘It was not for me to say how many children we should have.’ ‘“I can’t bear to think of your being frightened and ill and so terribly hurt,” he cried out, in sudden shame of himself, of his sex, of all that women have suffered from men.’ And in his own voice, A. A. Milne said clearly: ‘To me, the miracle of Human Birth is more worthy of awe than the miracle of Virgin Birth . . . What a piece of work is a man!’
Christopher Robin Milne was born on 21 August 1920 and so registered, but he was to be known immediately as Billy and later Moon – from his own pronunciation of Milne. On the 22nd, his father wrote to Frank Swinnerton:
A tremendous event has happened, unrecked of by the minor novelist. THERE IS A JUNIOR MILNE! This is a creation of my wife’s (Daff – short for Daphne or, as some say, Daffodil) and before it the trumpery creations of the aforesaid minor novelists pale their ineffectual fires. (Shakespeare, or one of those people.) Locally this creation is known as Billy.
Sir, if you never grovelled before, grovel now in the presence of this miracle. When women can do these things, why do we go on writing, you and I? (You observe that I put us both on one level, but I am in a generous mood this evening.) Why do we continue to call ourselves lords of creation when we so obviously are not? Why – but I must not overtax your brain!
Salute Chatto for me, slap Windus on the back. Tell them to mark August 21st in letters of blood on their calendars. And believe me to be, Sir,
Your mental superior
A. A. Milne
who shines equally as Husband, Father, Citizen and Author.
He wrote rather more soberly a few days later to Biddie Warren, a friend of his parents, in reply to her congratulations: ‘Daff and Billy (to be Christopher Robin but called Billy) are both extremely well. He weighed ten pounds or so the Nurse said, but I suspect that Nurses are rather like fishermen, and he has lots of curly brown hair, and not a bad little face for his age. We did rather want a Rosemary, but I expect we shall be just as happy with this gentleman.’ J. M. Barrie wrote: ‘All my heartiest congratulations to you both, or strictly speaking to the three of you. May Billy be an everlasting joy to you. From what you say I gather he is already a marvel, but I shall decide about this for myself when I see him, which I hope will be soon.’
There has grown up a definite idea, encouraged by Milne’s own need to distance himself from his children’s books, that A. A. Milne was not particularly interested in children or good with them. He wrote in his autobiography in 1939, at a time when he most wanted to remind his readers that he was a writer, not just a children’s writer: ‘I am not inordinately fond of or interested in children; their appeal to me is a physical appeal such as the young of other animals make. I have never felt in the least sentimental about them, or no more sentimental than one becomes for a moment over a puppy or a kitten. In as far as I understand their minds the understanding is based on the observation, casual enough and mostly unconscious, which I give to people generally: on memories of my own childhood: and on the imagination which every writer must bring to the memory and observation.’ He had both remembered and observed, he said, ‘the uncharming part of a child’s nature: the egotism and the heartlessness’.
The idea of the children’s writer who does not like children is a paradox that seems to lodge in people’s minds – minds that are nowadays often rather suspicious of Lewis Carroll’s delight in little girls. Peter Green gave wide circulation to the idea that Milne was uneasy with children in his biography of Kenneth Grahame, though all the evidence is that Milne did not share Grahame’s habit of ignoring them. People often say: ‘Oh, A. A. Milne? He didn’t like children, did he?’ It is the thing they think they ‘know’ about him. Christopher Milne’s own memoir of his childhood is presumably largely responsible. He wrote: ‘Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t – not with children, that is. Later on it was different, very different. But I am thinking of nursery days.’
It is certainly difficult to dispute the evidence of the child himself. But all the letters of those nursery years suggest that Milne, if not in the simplest sense ‘good with children’, was always intensely interested in his son and not just far more observant (a natural corollary of the fact of being a writer who had always drawn on the world around him), but much more involved in his son’s life than the great majority of fathers of the period.
There is hardly a letter of Milne’s surviving from his son’s childhood which does not mention the child, and very often he sent photographs as well. (‘Which one is Billy?’ asked J. M. Barrie, looking at two unidentified babies in October 1921. ‘I’ll come and find out. Don’t tell me.’) The reviews of Christopher’s autobiography all picked up the same impression as the Daily Mail: ‘The Christopher Robin of the stories scarcely knew the busy writer who was his father.’ That was what Christopher himself thought, looking back fifty years later: ‘If I cannot say that I loved my parents, it is only because, in those early days, I just didn’t know them well enough.’ Christopher may not think he knew his father, but his father certainly knew him. From the very beginning the child dominated the household. Inviting Edward Marsh to lunch to meet him (and ‘that great actress Athene Seyler’), Milne names the time as one-thirty. ‘It has to be 1.30, because Billy insists on his lunch at 1.’ He was then two months old. The following June J. V. Milne, the child’s grandfather, wrote to a friend: ‘Alan says he spends too much time with Billy, seeing all the work before him.’