Let’s Bofe

When he was very young, Alan Alexander Milne fell out of a tree. He had been looking, with his brother Ken, for a toad and thought he might strike lucky up in the branches. He had already had great success with a mouse, found by his Gordon setter Brownie in a field off London’s Finchley Road. This was in the 1880s when there were still fields off the Finchley Road.

Two little girls who had been playing in the field ran up. They stood hand in hand and dared each other to check that the fallen boy was all right. ‘You ask him,’ said one. ‘No, you.’ Then the first said to the second: ‘Let’s bofe,’ and together they said, ‘Have you hurt yourself?’ ‘From then on,’ Alan remembers in his autobiography It’s Too Late Now, written when he was 59, famous and rich as a result of Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘whenever Ken and I wanted to do a thing together we said, “Let’s bofe,” and giggled.’ They must have said it often. They shared beds (six holiday weeks of waking cold in the morning because the other had stolen the sheets) and baths and bikes. The bike was a tandem tricycle, which they rode up and down the Surrey hills in the summer holidays – Alan in front, Ken, being sixteen months older and stronger, behind. At home in term-time, in the house next door to their father’s boys’ prep school, they would wake at five in the morning, steal down to the kitchen where Davis, the cook, kept a large bin of oatmeal, and stick their tongues in to lift a few flakes of porridge to keep them going until breakfast proper. Thus fuelled, they would take their hoop and bowl it through the streets of London, from Mortimer Road in Kilburn all the way to the Bayswater Road and back. They were 6 and 8 at the time. One morning, at 5.30, they took two bamboo poles, each twelve feet long, a present from their father’s cousin in Jamaica, and carried them out into the playground and were Robin Hood and Will Scarlet fighting long staffs. At six o’clock, one of the masters put his head out of the window and shouted: ‘What the deuce do you think you’re doing?’ That was the end of long staffs. If the end of the world were to come and they were the only survivors, Alan and Ken would not have mourned. They made plans for what they would do: a dash to Kilburn High Road, darting from sweet shop to sweet shop, then across to West End Lane for marzipan potatoes, over the footbridge to the Finchley Road for jumbles – sweet ring-shaped biscuits – then up Fitzjohn’s Avenue to the Heath, stopping for ice creams. ‘Heaven.’ They never had a serious disagreement, but Ken mutinied once over Alan’s passion for ham and eggs. On one of their country walks Alan and Ken had a ‘lovely’ lunch of ham and eggs. Later, they had a ‘tremendous’ tea of ham and eggs, and the next day a ‘terrific’ breakfast of ham and eggs.

I could have gone on doing this for years, but Ken lacked something of my feeling for ham and eggs, and when at Mayfield on that second day there was nothing to be had for our midday meal but – well, as soon as he heard the unlovely words, he was (as I kindly put it) ‘bilious’. So we had to go home.

When Ken bowled, Alan batted. When Ken learnt to read, he read Alan Reynard the Fox. When Ken was given brandy for seasickness, Alan, who had kept his composure (but only just), was given a dose too. The great crisis of their childhood was Ken’s going – curse those sixteen months – to Westminster School before Alan. They lived for the weekends when Ken came home and they bought ice creams from a shop in Brondesbury. Never has a younger brother worked so hard for his place at a school: Algebra, Euclid, Trigonometry, Geometrical Conics, Analytical Conics, Statics, Dynamics, Greek, Latin and Divinity. They were put in the same set for maths and would write on each other’s books: ‘SWGUSIB?’ – ‘Shall we go up-Sutts in break?’ Up-Sutts meant ‘to the tuck shop’. There they emptied their pockets and at the end of term they fiddled the accounts they showed Papa. Much of this brought back memories. I too had been at primary school off the Finchley Road, had bought sweets on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, had a bicycling younger brother who went to Westminster Under School and who stole bedclothes when forced to share on summer holidays. I searched out It’s Too Late Now to fill a gap. As a child I’d loved Winnie-the-Pooh and later I’d come across The Enchanted Places, a memoir by Christopher Milne – the boy who was Christopher Robin. It was sad to read of his sense of betrayal when his childhood – gingham smock, toys, bedtime prayers – was sold by his father to Punch. It made me curious to know more about the man who did it and why he had turned his son’s childhood into fiction rather than his own. There are certainly no forerunners of Pooh Bear in It’s Too Late Now. Milne never mentions a favourite toy. Christopher Robin, an only child, needed the company of Piglet and Tigger and Roo and the rest. As for Milne, who needed a teddy bear when there was Ken? And, oh, I have forgotten Barry. Poor Barry. Fifteen months older than Ken, as Ken was sixteen months older than Alan. Ken, the middle of the three sons, might have been friends with either, but it was Alan’s fortune that Ken chose him. ‘Whatever sort of writer I am,’ observes Milne in It’s Too Late Now, ‘I am not (alas!) a “born writer”.’ That was Ken. But Ken, being Ken, couldn’t write without wanting Alan to write with him. They signed their verse contributions to The Elizabethan, the Westminster school paper, ‘A. K. M.’ – Alan Kenneth Milne. When Ken went to be a solicitor and Alan went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read maths, they kept it up. They honed their poems in letters back and forth and submitted them to The Granta, as Cambridge’s Granta magazine was then called. ‘Did you see those awfully good verses in The Granta this week – a new sort of limerick by somebody called A. K. M?’ said the Captain of the Trinity, Cambridge football team to a ‘blue’ from Trinity, Oxford. Eavesdropping Alan blushed into his ginger beer. At the end of the summer term, Ken withdrew from the partnership. He wanted to write serious things for the Cornhill magazine, not limericks. A. K. M. became A. A. M. Alan was made editor of The Granta, and R. C. Lehmann, founder and ex-editor of Punch, admiring the short pieces by ‘A. A. M.’, invited him to contribute. Ken, generous Ken, was rueful but glad.

Whatever I did, you did a little better or a little sooner . . . And so it went on. Even after all this, I could still tell myself that I had one thing left. I should always be the writer of the family. And now you have taken that too. Well damn you, I suppose I must forgive you. My head is bloody but unbowed. I have got a new frock coat and you can go to the devil. Yours stiffly, Ken

When Alan came to London in 1903 to be a freelance writer (at first, a freelance thrower of drafts into the wastepaper basket) he took lodgings in Temple Chambers. Ken was working for the Civil Service in the Estate Duty Office and every day, at one o’clock, Alan walked up Fleet Street towards the Strand and Ken walked up from Somerset House towards Fleet Street and together they had lunch at an ABC café. When Ken married, Alan, far from being piqued or left out, took Mrs Maud Milne to his heart. She was the sister he had never had. He would go to dinner, and, to give Maud the evening off, Alan and Ken would buy themselves the foods they’d dreamed of at Westminster: sardines, tongue, tinned fruit, cherry brandy. They cooked beef and two veg with Mrs Beeton propped on top of the oven. When Ken had his children, four in all, Alan told stories, remembered birthdays, consoled. Maud would send Christopher Robin a special pencil for Christmas with his name on it. That was how they should have gone on all their lives. Bofe together. But here is the dedication in It’s Too Late Now.

1880‒1929 TO THE MEMORY OF KENNETH JOHN MILNE WHO BORE THE WORST OF ME AND MADE THE BEST OF ME

Only 48. Alan would live to be 74. Ken had lived his first sixteen months without Alan; Alan had twenty-seven years without Ken. In his autobiography, Milne gives 185 pages to Alan’n’Ken and their adventures; just 65 to life after Ken’s death. Ken is there, doing battle with Mrs Beeton, and then suddenly he is not there. ‘In the War, and afterwards, he worked himself to his death’ – that is all we are told. A. A. Milne could write a thousand words for Punch on any subject, five times a week, could write a play, a book, a poem in an evening. But he could not write about what it was to be without Ken. Tuber-culosis doesn’t rhyme, grief doesn’t lend itself to light verse. Without Ken, the writing loses its bounce, the elation of the early chapters drains away. Milne rushes through his career as a journalist and playwright. His relationship with Daphne de Sélincourt, who he had married in 1913, could never fill the gap. He called her ‘my collaborator’, but he was only allowed to borrow her between the hairdresser and the dressmaker, and though she laughed at his jokes, they were apart for long periods of the marriage. His attempt to make his son into another Ken was a damaging failure. Christopher was not as gung-ho, not such a giggler, not so good at cricket. In the school holidays, Milne would take Christopher to the London ABCs where he and Ken had met for lunch. ‘And when the holidays were over and I was back at school,’ wrote Christopher in The Enchanted Places, ‘his first letter to me would recall that happy lunch that he and I had had together. He and I – and the ghost of Ken . . .’ Christopher felt his failings keenly: ‘How nice if, when my turn came, I could have been another Ken. How sad that I wasn’t.’ What we expect from Milne is lightness. Pooh carried up by his balloon. Piglet blowing dandelion seeds. Bounding Tigger. The depth of missing, of emptiness when Ken is gone from It’s Too Late Now, comes as a shock. Deeper than the Very Deep Pit that Pooh and Piglet dig to catch a Heffalump. More desolate than Eeyore without his tail. What can it have been like to lose a brother? No one to look for a toad. No one to fight long staffs. No one to blame for not pulling their weight on the hill climbs. No one to share ices or go up-Sutts. No letters done in rhyming couplets. No one to say: ‘Let’s bofe.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Laura Freeman 2018