‘We thought we might call it Rosemary,’ wrote A. A. Milne in his autobiography, published in 1939. The ‘it’ turned out to be not the little girl he and his wife had longed for, but a boy they called Christopher who, as he grew up during the 1920s, would become possibly the most famous little boy in the world, immortalized for ever as ‘Christopher Robin’ in the bestselling children’s books his father wrote.
But were Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and Now We are Six really books about Christopher at all? Though his mother tried to ignore the inconvenient fact that he was a boy by dressing him as a girl, he grew into a practical little chap, good with his hands, who by the age of 7 had become the family’s Chief Mender. As Christopher tells the story in The Enchanted Places, it was easy for readers to confuse the two – the idealized little boy, with his bobbed hair and girlish smock, the ultimate symbol of an idyllically safe and happy middle-class childhood depicted in E. H. Shephard’s airy drawings, and the real flesh-and-blood Christopher, who did indeed own a toy bear to whom he was attached, who was looked after by a much-loved Nanny, and who played in the unspoiled woods around the East Sussex farmhouse where the family spent holidays and weekends.
For the young Christopher these early years were a time of enchantment, when he and Nanny spent busy and happy days alone together, and his father was a charming and amusing figure who read him stories and visited the nursery from time to time. When he was 9 he went to prep school, Nanny left to get married, and he and his father grew even closer. It was not until Christopher went to boarding school, where he was mercilessly bullied as ‘Christopher Robin’, that bitterness began to creep in. Later, when he was trying angrily and unsuccessfully to make his own way in the world, it seemed to him, as he writes in an epilogue, ‘almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders’.
In this memoir, written when Christopher was in his fifties, he makes peace with the past, giving us a tender and thoughtful picture of an unusual childhood and of A. A. Milne, the complicated man at its centre.
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