Long before Christopher was born, there is plenty of evidence that Milne, unlike Daphne, really knew about babies. There was a child-centred series in Punch called ‘The Heir’, at the time of the birth of his brother Ken’s first son, which again shows Milne in his most characteristic attitude to children: fascinated but totally unsentimental.
Dahlia gushes about her infant. He is the living image of his father: ‘I looked closely at Archie and then at the baby. “I should always know them apart,” I said at last.’ Milne shows a confident superiority when Samuel, a godfather, who knows nothing about children, bestows an enormous teddy on his tiny godson, saying ‘I’ve been calling it Duncan on the train, but of course he will want to choose his own name for it.’ He expects a ridiculous amount from the child. ‘Is he tall for his age?’ he asks. ‘Samuel, pull yourself together. He isn’t tall at all; if he is anything he is long but how long only those can say who have seen him in his bath. You do realise that he is only a month old?’ ‘My dear old boy, of course . . . I suppose he isn’t even toddling?’ ‘No, no,’ Milne says, ‘Not actually toddling.’
‘We did rather want a Rosemary,’ Milne said in that early letter. One of his son’s earliest memories would be of a time when he was still small enough to be in a pram. Relaxing outside a grocer’s shop in Chelsea, he heard someone say, ‘Oh what a pretty little girl!’ Like his father before him, he would have to wait a long time for his first haircut. His long hair reminded his mother of the girl she’d wanted and his father of the boy he himself had been. Christopher Milne would remember: ‘I had long hair at a time when boys didn’t have long hair . . . I used to wear girlish clothes, too, smocks and things. And in my very earliest dreams I even used to dream I was a girl.’ The child’s image was ‘surely Daff, not Alan’, one of his cousins commented. Milne himself, looking at the long-haired child in the pretty clothes, must have remembered his own childish feelings of ‘battling against the wrong make-up’. Perhaps he thought if it hadn’t done him much harm (and indeed, as he suggested, had made him the sort of person he was, the sort of writer he was) then it would not do Billy much harm either.
Alan had felt himself bold and brave under his girlish disguise. His son, on the other hand, suggests image and reality were more closely related in his case. There was not much battling going on. He was content to be gentle, shy and quiet. W. A. Darlington remembers ‘a nice little boy . . . being brought up on rather soft and effeminate lines’. His own daughter, Anne, eight months or so older, a tougher character, became the boy’s closest friend. They were ‘devoted and almost inseparable – Anne with a slight touch about her of the elder sister.’ And Alan and Daphne were equally devoted to Anne: ‘Anne was and remained to her death the Rosemary that I wasn’t,’ Christopher Milne would write.
At least with a boy there is the chance to dream of him playing cricket for England. Years before, Milne had said that ‘the important thing in christening a future first-class cricketer is to get the initials right’. Christopher Robin was, in fact, never christened, but his names were undoubtedly something to do with having the right sort of initials. ‘What could be better than W. G. as a nickname for Grace? But if W. G.’s initials had been Z. Z. where would you have been?’ Years later Milne wrote:
When Christopher Robin was born, he had to have a name. We had already decided to call him something else and later on he decided to call himself something still else, so that the two names for which we were now looking were to be no more than an excuse for giving him two initials for use in later life. I had decided on two initials rather than one or none, because I wanted him to play cricket for England, like W. G. Grace and C. B. Fry, and if he was to play as an amateur, two initials would give him a more hopeful appearance on the score-card. A father has to think of these things. So, one of us liking the name Christopher, and the other maintaining that Robin was both pleasing and unusual, we decided that as C. R. Milne he should be encouraged to make his name in the sporting world.
There was no idea yet, of course, that it would be his father who would make his name for him, by using those names which he never used himself and which seemed to have so little to do with him – so that there would come a time when, not C. R. Milne, but Christopher Robin, could be described as one of the ‘five most famous children in the world’. Long afterwards the child himself would write of the fairy who must have pronounced over his cradle ‘one of those cryptic spells that fairies had always been good at: “And his name shall be famous throughout the world.” It was one of those spells that sound like a blessing but turn out to be more like a curse.’
In the meantime, his father pondered on the fact that there were still four years to go before Billy could possibly have his first cricket lesson, and got on with his next play. This stage of Milne’s life would undoubtedly become tedious to the reader if all sixteen of A. A. Milne’s plays, short and long, which were produced in the 1920s, were examined in detail. But there were landmarks and highlights which cannot be ignored. There were recurrent excitements and recurrent disappointments. ‘Plays always go well on a first night,’ Milne would suggest in his novel Two People, ‘and then the critics tell you why you didn’t really enjoy it as much as you thought you did, and how much nicer it would have been if someone else had written quite a different one.’