In 1921 they were able to leave Billy and enjoy a month in Italy without worrying, for they now had the perfect nurse for him – Olive Rand – whom her charge would always call ‘Nou’, but who would become known to the world as Alice, because of a happy rhyme with Palace. (‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace / Christopher Robin went down with Alice . . .’) ‘The English mother is fortunate,’ said Daphne Milne in an interview in New York in 1931, forgetting all the English mothers who weren’t. ‘The English mother is fortunate in being able to place such full confidence in her children’s nurse. Often the trusted and beloved “Nanny” remains in the employ of the family for years . . . She is especially trained for her work, which she regards as a real profession, worthy of her pride and deepest interest.’
Olive Rand would remain with the Milnes until Christopher went to boarding school in 1930. The two of them lived mainly on the top floor of the house in Mallord Street, in the adjoining day and night nurseries. Christopher said: ‘So much were we together that Nanny became almost a part of me . . . Other people hovered round the edges, but they meant little. My total loyalty was to her.’ He said his father’s picture of her in ‘Buckingham Palace’ was entirely inaccurate. She was not the sort of person who would brush off a child’s question with a meaningless ‘Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea’. And writing of ‘Disobedience’, the ‘James James Morrison Morrison’ poem, Christopher Milne maintained that, although he could not be sure how he felt about anything at the age of three, ‘I can only guess that, though I might not have missed my mother, and would certainly not have missed my father, I would have missed Nanny – most desolately.’
Olive Rand was no ordinary nanny; she had had a far more challenging experience than most. She had been nanny to the Chilean ambassador’s children in London and had travelled widely with them. Indeed, in 1914 they had been stranded in France for a while at the beginning of the war and she had then gone with them to America and Chile. She spoke to the Sunday Times about A. A. Milne in 1965, with the air of one who had been asked the questions many times before but was still not tired of the subject: ‘He never scorned Christopher Robin’s fancies and if the boy wanted his nursery pets to be included in conversations and games, Mr Milne always entered into the spirit of the thing and spoke to the toys as if they were real people.’ Olive Rand had a fiancé who worked as a Post Office engineer after his discharge from the Army and who kept hoping Olive would leave Christopher and get married, but she could not bring herself to leave the child until he no longer had need of her.
By the summer of 1921 A. A. Milne had finished two plays, The Truth about Blayds and The Dover Road, which were to become, like Mr Pim Passes By, not only successes in London and New York, but staples of amateur dramatic societies and repertory companies all over the world. The success of his plays in that heyday of amateur dramatics was such that he could tell John Drinkwater in 1924 that he was making ￡2,000 a year from amateur rights alone. ‘He is going ahead at a tremendous rate,’ his father said on 6 June. If one wonders what he did with the rather staggering results of his popular success, it is obvious that he realised, like any writer, that it could not last. He lived well – but most of his money he invested against an uncertain future.
On 26 June, J. V. Milne wrote again and told his friend that the child’s aunt reported Billy to be adorable, which suggests that his grandparents had not been seeing much of him, if indeed they had seen him at all. In June, Alan promised to motor down in August, but it was September before they got there, though it was hardly a difficult journey. Billy was thirteen months old. ‘So his grandmother saw him to her great happiness.’ She was already ‘deaf, too blind to read or work, and not able to cross the room without a stick.’ She died not long afterwards.
It is not unreasonable to imagine that the child’s teddy bear (a present from Harrods on his first birthday the month before) made the journey to Burgess Hill too, in September 1921. He was not yet called Winnie-the-Pooh, but he was already a palpable presence in the household as Christopher Robin tried out his first words. He managed an impressive ‘Owdyerdo’ at eighteen months, when his father said he was ‘in tremendous form now, just walking and talking and trying to do both without stopping all day’. His bear was simply Bear or Teddy or more grandly, to his elders, Edward Bear. ‘A row of teddy-bears sitting in a toy-shop, all one size, all one price. Yet how different each is from the next. Some look stand-offish, some look loveable. And one in particular, the one over there, has a specially endearing expression. Yes, that’s the one we would like, please.’ So Christopher Milne in his autobiography, imagining the purchasing of Winnie-the-Pooh. What he does not admit is that the bear we know, the bear who would become familiar to millions from E. H. Shepard’s drawings, is not really his bear at all, but another bear from an earlier nursery, of quite different shape and already with a pronounced character of his own: Graham Shepard’s Growler.
Growler was, according to Shepard, ‘a magnificent bear. I have never seen his like.’ In 1915, when Shepard had been at home and the family away, he had written to his son, seven-year-old Graham: ‘Growler and Puck have been an awful nuisance; they talk and jabber all night.’ Puck was a mere ‘cork-filled gnome’ and not part of our story, but it is obvious that Growler was a real character and would play an important part in the forming of our image of Winnie-the-Pooh.
In the same month, September 1921, the Milne family paid the first of several visits to a thatched cottage called the Decoy at Poling, near Arundel and Littlehampton in Sussex. It was at the Decoy that Christopher Robin fed the swan on the lake and called him Pooh. ‘This is a very fine name for a swan, because if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying “Pooh!” to show how little you wanted him.’ There were cows who came down to drink at this lake and Milne couldn’t help thinking: ‘Moo rhymes with Pooh! Surely there is a bit of poetry to be got out of that . . .’ And there would eventually be one poem with a swan and another with cows, but with neither a Moo nor a Pooh in either of them, because that is the way it often happens with poems.