Christopher Milne
Famous Sons and Daughters No 2: Christoper Milne
“And by and by Christopher Robin came to an end of things, and he was silent, and he sat there, looking out over the world.” From The House At Pooh Corner, one of AA Milne’s enchanting stories about his son, Christopher Robin, and his teddy Winnie The Pooh.
But it could also describe the peace that Christopher Robin Milne felt when he replanted his life in Dartmouth in 1951 – a new home and escape.
Christopher Milne came to Dartmouth aged 31 with his wife, Lesley, after failing to find a job in London. He was unhappy at being known as the boy from his father’s famous stories. The couple left everything and opened the Harbour Bookshop in Fairfax Place. They never looked back.
Publisher Richard Webb, who lives in Dartmouth, knew the very private Christopher Milne fairly well and remembers: “My first ever job was part-time summer holiday work in his shop.
“He was very shy and I remember him telling me that if I ever heard an American accent from anyone looking like a student entering the shop to immediately go back to his office and warn him so that he could rush upstairs and escape! The reason was that he was being constantly hassled at the time by American students who wanted to interview him for their theses on Winnie the Pooh!”
With friends like Richard around them, Christopher and Lesley settled into Dartmouth life. But in his own writings, Christopher reflected: “There were two things that were then overshadowing my life and that I needed to escape from: my father’s fame and ‘Christopher Robin.’”
Dartmouth became their haven. The couple first lived above the shop, and moved to a larger house when their daughter, Clare, was born in 1956. Clare had cerebral palsy and Christopher made her toys and tools specially designed to be easy for her to hold.
Quietly accepted by the town, Christopher Milne was a founder of the Dartmouth and Kingswear Society and took an active interest in the community, pushing for better libraries in the schools.
It is widely reported that Christopher Milne was angry with his father for taking his childhood and parading it in his stories. His own written works, Enchanted Places and The Path Through The Trees, explain his feelings.
He describes a happy but solitary existence as the only child of Alan Alexander Milne and his wife Dorothy de Sélincourt. They nick-named him Billy Moon. Christopher wrote of his father: “Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t—not with children, that is.”
As Christopher grew up, his parents each spent more time with him. From his mother he inherited the ability to work with his hands, gardening or making tools (which he used to dismantle his bedroom lock and adapt a cap gun to take real bullets!) From his father he learned the fun of making up stories.
In The Enchanted Places, he wrote: “It is difficult to say which came first. Did I do something and did my father then write a story around it? Or was it the other way about, and did the story come first? Certainly my father was on the look-out for ideas; but so too was I. He wanted ideas for his stories, I wanted them for my games, and each looked towards the other for inspiration. But in the end it was all the same: the stories became a part of our lives; we lived them, thought them, spoke them.”
Christopher spent his early years with his nanny, whom he adored. Besides her he had just two friends – both little girls. So when he went to boarding school aged 10, he was unprepared for his boisterous school mates – and the teasing. By now the books were hugely popular and he began to hate his association with Christopher Robin. He described the teasing as “intensely painful.”
Christopher went to university but when World War II broke out he left to join the army. He served in Iraq, Tunisia and Italy, contracted malaria, had shrapnel removed, received the Africa Star, and became a confirmed pacifist.
Eventually Christopher graduated from Cambridge and tried to be a writer, but there wasn’t the market for light stories as there had been for his father. He began to resent him, and wrote: “It seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son… there seemed to be only one thing to do: to escape from it all, to keep out of the limelight...”
By now Christopher had married Lesley. They decided to leave London and head for Devon. Christopher wrote: “In 1956 my father died… Selfishly I was glad that I lived in Devon and had a bookshop that I could not easily leave… I saw my father on two occasions during his illness…and although my mother survived him by fifteen years I saw her only once.”
Christopher Milne realised the irony of writing about his life: “Many sons follow their fathers; but mine had never wanted this and I had only wanted it only at odd moments in my life. He had feared that, whatever I wrote, comparisons would be made and one of us judged less good than the other. Jealous by nature—as I was too—more than anything he hated rivalry. Yet here I was, not just writing a book but writing one which, whether I liked it or not, was going to be put alongside the Pooh books and tested by its ability to hold its own in such company. Not only that but one of my purposes was to show the extent to which the son was a product of his parents—thus tacitly inviting the all-too-inevitable comparison”.
Christopher Milne died in 1996, aged 75.
First published July 2009 By the Dart
