Somewhere a boy and a be.., p.4
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, page 4
There is a pathway, I think, that leads directly from the Forest of Arden and ‘the wood near Athens’ to Ashdown Forest and the Hundred Acre Wood. It is very much an English pathway, but it seems to have a universal appeal. A. A. Milne’s children’s books have been global bestsellers for a hundred years. Winnie-the-Pooh has been translated into more than eighty languages, including Esperanto and Latin. In France they call him Winnie l’Ourson; in Poland he’s Kubus Puchatek; in Japan he’s Kuma no Pooh-san.
Today, 18 January, is International Winnie-the-Pooh Day, because today marks the birthday of A. A. Milne.
I want to know more about Milne – I want to get beneath the facade – because I am intrigued by how he knows so much about us. In the Forest and the One Hundred Acre Wood he has created an enchanted place that felt totally real to me as a child (and feels real to me still), and then he peopled it with a boy and a bear and an unlikely assortment of animals, each of whom has a very distinct personality. I believe it is because we recognize them – and we recognize ourselves and people we know in them – that his children’s books are among the most successful children’s books of all time.
Whatever you are like, you can find yourself in the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. I am one of life’s Tiggers. If you know me, you will know that. And sometimes, you might find me quite annoying.
‘Tigger’s getting so Bouncy nowadays that it’s time we taught him a lesson. Don’t you think so, Piglet?’
Piglet said that Tigger was very Bouncy, and that if they could think of a way of unbouncing him, it would be a Very Good Idea.
But, of course, there is more to me than Tigger. You won’t know it, but there are days when I am not bouncy at all, days when I am cowed and frightened.
‘Hush!’ said Eeyore in a terrible voice to all Rabbit’s friends-and-relations, and ‘Hush!’ they said hastily to each other all down the line, until it got to the last one of all. And the last and smallest friend-and-relation was so upset to find that the whole Expotition was saying ‘Hush!’ to him, that he buried himself head downwards in a crack in the ground, and stayed there for two days until the danger was over, and then went home in a great hurry, and lived quietly with his Aunt ever-afterwards. His name was Alexander Beetle.
Alan Alexander Milne was born a long time ago – on this day, 18 January, in 1882 – but we are reading him still because he was a beautiful writer with uncanny access to the secrets of the human heart.
Chapter One
in which we first meet the parents and grandparents of A. A. Milne
A childhood lasts a lifetime
If a childhood lasts a lifetime, John Vine Milne was a fortunate man. He was born in Jamaica, to missionary parents, and imbued with sunshine and missionary zeal from a very young age. He led a good life, doing good work. He was a good man – according to A. A. Milne, his third child and youngest son, ‘the best man I have ever known … the most truly good, the most completely to be trusted, the most incapable of wrong’.
Alan Alexander Milne, and his older brothers David Barrett Milne, known as Barry, and Kenneth John Milne, known as Ken, saw their father as an almost God-like figure. ‘He differed from our conception of God,’ said Alan, ‘only because he was shy, which one imagined God not to be, and was funny, which one knew God was not.’
JV, as John Vine Milne was generally known, was a God-fearing man, with a straightforward, uncomplicated faith, the eldest son of a clergyman and the grandson of an Aberdeenshire stonemason.
Or not, as the case may be. Grandfather Milne had possibly been a freemason, but had he been a stonemason, too? When it came to the detail of the Milne family history, Alan was a bit hazy. JV was probably born in 1845 (or a little earlier; he was alive by then, for sure; and there is a death certificate to show he died in 1932), but whether his missionary father was a Presbyterian minister, as Alan maintained in his autobiography, or a Congregational minister, as his wedding certificate suggests, is difficult to establish. His name was definitely William Milne (1815–74) and he was certainly a Christian missionary in the West Indies – though not to be confused with another, more celebrated, missionary by the name of William Milne (1785–1822) who did his missionary work in China and may or may not have been a distant kinsman of our missionary Milne.
Alan wasn’t sure his grandfather had been a stonemason, and if he had been, whether he had been a craftsman who wielded a chisel and a hammer or an entrepreneur who owned a quarry. Alan was clear that there had once been some money in the family, but equally clear that there wasn’t much evidence of it in his day. ‘A second cousin of Father’s died intestate in 1892,’ he recalled, leaving £٣٠,٠٠٠, the equivalent, in today’s money, of something approaching £5 million. ‘Unfortunately,’ according to Alan, ‘she also left thirty second-cousins.’ A first cousin of Alan’s father died at around the same time, leaving, ‘more characteristically’, three silver teaspoons, two of which went to JV and the third to his younger brother.
When telling stories about his family, and writing his autobiography, A. A. Milne focused, understandably, on the heroic and the eccentric. His paternal grandmother had an uncle who had served as one of Nelson’s captains at the Battle of Trafalgar and is commemorated with a monument in Bath Abbey. His paternal grandfather, William Milne, married a fellow missionary in Jamaica, fathering the first of their ten children there, before returning to England, giving up the ministry and starting a school – the first of a dozen schools he founded around the country. None of the schools prospered and six of his children died, but William Milne had a faith that was profound: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.’ The children who died in infancy were going to a better place, and what was money for but to give to the poor – or to secure new pews for the chapel?
Alan said of Grandfather Milne, ‘He was the world’s most unworldly muddler … neither sanctimonious nor fanatical. He just believed quite simply that nothing which happened in this world mattered to a good man; to a man, that is, who believed in God and would return to Him.’
Alan felt for Grandmother Milne. She had been a young missionary herself. Also born in Jamaica, she was christened Harriet Newell Barrett in honour of Harriet Newell (1793–1812), the first American missionary to die overseas in the service of the Lord and a heroine and role model to many young Christian women following the posthumous publication of her journals. Harriet Barrett (1820–78) married William Milne in Jamaica in 1843 and accepted her lot in life with Christian fortitude. It was not easy living with a man who never earned more than £80 a year, bearing his ten children and bringing up the four who survived virtually single-handed and in such a way as made them feel both loved and truly to be living their best life.
Only one female character features in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories: Roo’s loving, caring, calm, dutiful, devoted mother, Kanga. A conscientious housekeeper and a protective parent, she is wise and kindly, but firm and forthright, too. She is a single mother, as Harriet Milne became in her widowhood. Is Kanga based on A. A. Milne’s grandmother Harriet? Milne, of course, would have pooh-poohed the idea (if you’ll forgive the phrase); he did not personally know his grandparents (they died before he was born, so all he knew of them was what his father told him), but there is no doubt that the similarities between the character of Kanga and the long-suffering, good-hearted, traditional-minded Grandma Milne are striking.
While Harriet and Kanga are comparable, old-fashioned, reassuring mother figures, JV cannot for a moment be mistaken for Roo. For those who like playing this game, JV is not Roo: he is Owl. He has to be Owl because JV became a schoolmaster, and JV, like Owl, ‘knew everything’, though, according to Alan, ‘even if Father knew everything, he knew most of it wrong.’
‘… if anyone knows anything about anything,’ says Pooh when we first meet Owl in Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘it’s Owl who knows something about something … or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh … Which it is … So there you are.’
Owl, of course, knows much of everything wrong: ‘for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.’
The truth is Owl cannot spell; Owl cannot read. Owl thinks himself very knowledgeable, when he isn’t. He uses long words unnecessarily and believes himself to be always in the right. When he sneezes, he denies it:
‘I didn’t sneeze.’
‘Yes, you did, Owl.’
‘Excuse me, Pooh, I didn’t. You can’t sneeze without knowing it.’
Owl is obstinate, pretentious, pedantic. Owl has no sense of humour and rarely, if ever, admits to being in the wrong. JV was nothing like Owl. JV could laugh at himself and made others laugh, too. A. A. Milne liked to tell the story of his father, the headmaster, reprimanding a boy for arriving late in the school dining room:
‘Henry,’ says my father, ‘you’re late again.’
‘Yes, sir. Please, sir, it wasn’t my fault—’
‘No excuses, Henry. You must put your chair away and stand.’
So Henry eats his first course standing.
‘All right, Henry, you may take your chair now.’
‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Please, sir, Matron sent me upstairs for her spectacles just as I was coming in.’
Awed silence. ‘Sucks for JV,’ the boys are thinking, ‘he’ll have to apologize.’ The younger assistant masters look up anxiously. Do schoolmasters ever apologize? Isn’t it bad for discipline?
‘Then in that case,’ says my father, wishing to get it quite clear, ‘it wasn’t your fault you were late?’
‘Please, sir, no, sir.’
‘Oh!’ (Everybody is waiting.) ‘Oh, well, then, you’d better take two chairs.’
And everybody laughs and is happy.
When William Milne, missionary and unworldly muddler, died in 1874, John Vine Milne was in his late twenties and working for his Bachelor of Arts degree at London University. JV had long wanted to be a teacher – and a different kind of teacher – but it took him time to achieve his goal because his family, while wholly respectable, was always pressed for money and he needed to contribute what he could to the household’s expenses. According to his son Alan, JV worked variously as a clerk in the counting-house of a biscuit factory and an apprentice in an engineering firm, but his ‘over-mastering concern’ was with education – his own and that of others. ‘After twelve hours in the engineering shop,’ reported Alan, ‘he would walk back to his room, spend an hour getting clean, and then settle down to the real work of the day, the achievement of a degree.’
He achieved his degree and soon discovered, said his son, ‘that he really had the gift of teaching for which he had longed, and with it the gift of preserving discipline among boys bigger, and little younger, than himself.’ His build was slight; his manner was mild; he wore pince-nez; to add to his authority, he grew a beard. Alan reckoned his father had both a sense of humour and courage, qualities essential for a successful schoolmaster. J. V. Milne also had something we don’t necessarily expect from a Victorian schoolmaster: a love of his work and of his charges. ‘Without affection, the schoolroom is a hard, forbidding place,’ he said. ‘With love, it becomes the next best place to home.’
JV believed in a God of love. At one of the schools where he taught early on in his career, the headmaster one Sunday preached a fire-and-brimstone sermon to the boys, warning them that they were destined for an eternity in Hell unless they pulled up their socks and concentrated in class. JV was given permission to preach to the boys the following Sunday and told them there was no such place as Hell and no such thing as Everlasting Fire, but encouraged them to work all the same because work was worthwhile and working hard now meant you wouldn’t have to work so hard later. After delivering his sermon, he offered the headmaster his resignation, but the headmaster wouldn’t have it. JV was too good a teacher to lose.
JV taught in a number of schools before he arrived at the establishment that changed his life. In 1874, he was teaching at a school in Braintree in Essex and looking for advancement. He applied for two posts, each offering £100 salary a year. One was to be a private tutor to a family in Tottenham. The other was to be assistant master at a boys’ school at Wellington in Shropshire. He was offered both. He opted to move away from London. ‘It was,’ said his son Alan, more than sixty years later, ‘the decisive moment of his life.’ ‘And,’ he added, ‘of mine. For at Wellington, Shropshire, he met my mother.’
‘Loving is misery for women always,’ is one of the haunting lines from Thomas Hardy’s first major literary success, Far from the Madding Crowd, published that same year, 1874. Sarah Maria Heginbotham had been unlucky in love and, apparently, was wary of romantic entanglement because of past, unhappy experience. Originally from the High Peak in Derbyshire, she was now thirty-four, still unmarried, and earning a modest living keeping a ‘School for Young Ladies’ not far from the boys’ school where JV was appointed assistant master.
JV and Sarah met at the musical soirées held at the girls’ school on Thursday evenings during term-time. JV was musical. He played the flute. Sarah liked that. He was shy, but amusing. She liked that, too. He was gently droll, passionate about his work, serious about his faith, and quite quickly smitten. One Thursday evening, when the music was done and it was time to go home, he pressed a note into her hand, asking her to marry him.
He did not have the courage (or perhaps simply the confidence) to ask her to her face. Finding difficulty in openly expressing your feelings is a recurring theme in the story of the Milne family across several generations.
‘I just said “Oh!”’ said Piglet nervously. And so as to seem quite at ease he hummed Tiddely-pom once or twice in a what-shall-we-do-now kind of way.
The House at Pooh Corner
By letter, Sarah Maria gave JV his answer. It was a firm but gentle ‘no’, and it continued to be ‘no’ on quite a regular basis for more than a year. Sarah Maria was wary of men. She had been hurt before. But JV was different. He persisted, as others had done, yet he did so shyly, charmingly, amusingly, with respect, affection, Christian courtesy and Christian fortitude. Their faith mattered to them both. Eventually, Sarah Maria said ‘yes’. They were married in Buxton in Derbyshire, near her birthplace, on 27 August 1878. The groom was thirty-three. The bride was thirty-eight.
‘All romances end at marriage,’ said Thomas Hardy in Far from the Madding Crowd. Not so. John Vine and Sarah Maria Milne lived happily together until she died, aged eighty-one, in 1921 – the year after Christopher Robin was born. And theirs was a lifelong romance. A friend wrote to JV after Sarah Maria’s death to express her delight in ‘seeing what sweethearts you were to the very end’. Christopher Milne showed me the reply his grandfather had sent back: ‘In my wife I had a wonderful gift.’
Chapter Two
in which we meet three brothers: Barry, Ken and Alan Milne
A child’s world
‘One writes in a certain sort of way,’ said A. A. Milne, ‘because one is a certain sort of person; one is a certain sort of person because one has led a certain sort of life.’
Alan Milne’s childhood was his enchanted place. It was where he was happiest. When he came to publish it in 1939, aged fifty-seven, he devoted more than half of his autobiography to his childhood years, and made no apology for doing so. ‘When I read the biography of a well-known man,’ he said crisply, ‘I find that it is the first half of it which holds my attention.’ He explained: ‘I watch with fascinated surprise the baby, finger in mouth, grow into the politician, tongue in cheek; but I find nothing either fascinating or surprising in the discovery that the cynicism of the politician has matured into the pomposity of the Cabinet Minister. It was inevitable.’
It is inevitable, too, that we are especially intrigued by Milne’s childhood. He is one of the most successful children’s authors of all time. It is only because of his four children’s books – amounting to less than 1 per cent of his lifetime’s creative output – that you are reading this book now. The world he created – the enchanted place he made for Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh to visit and play in – has touched the childhoods of millions of children. What was his own childhood like? How did it make him the certain sort of person who could write the certain kind of books he wrote?
JV and Sarah Maria were married in the summer of 1878 and within three and a half years all three of their sons had been born. Alan was the last to arrive, on 18 January 1882. We do not have a picture of him as a baby, finger in mouth. The first pictorial record we have of him is a family photograph taken in 1886: the four male members of the Milne family in their Sunday best, pictured close together, out of doors, with a fine brick wall as a backdrop. JV is seated in the centre, the forty-one-year-old pater familias, bearded and bespectacled, watchchain across his waistcoat, holding hands with his two older sons, who are perched on either side of him. Alan, aged four, is seated on a pouffe by his father’s knees, looking knowingly at the camera. Everyone in the picture has a serious demeanour.
All three little boys in the photograph look like little girls to us, of course, because that was the fashion of the era. Their thick hair falls down to their shoulders. Alan’s is blond and curly. He looks very like the five-year-old boy in the famous painting by Sir John Everett Millais, titled ‘A Child’s World’ and first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in that same year, 1886. The painting of Millais’s grandson blowing bubbles was bought by Thomas J. Barratt, the managing director of A. & F. Pears, and used for many years to advertise the company’s bars of soap. The older Milne boys look a tad tougher than Millais’s cherubic grandson, but all the children are dressed in similar outfits, with full lace ruffs around their necks. It was the look made famous by Little Lord Fauntleroy, the eponymous hero of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s bestselling novel, also published in that same year, 1886. Fauntleroy and Burnett were as internationally successful in their day as Pooh and Milne were in his and Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling became in ours. For a generation from 1886, every small boy whose parents could afford one was in possession of what became known as a Fauntleroy suit.
