LONDON OUTINGS FOR Anne and Moon, usually with skipping ropes or hoops and always with Pooh and Jumbo, would be either to the Peter Pan statue or the Albert Memorial, in Kensington Gardens. Sometimes they would turn right from Mallord Street into Church Street, then down towards the Embankment and over the Albert Bridge to Battersea Park. They would hold hands and talk about all the things they would do when they were grown up.
One of the children’s favourite outings was to watch Changing the Guard outside Buckingham Palace.
Buckingham Palace is the first poem in When We Were Very Young. Vespers is the last and these two verses were to rip four-year-old Moon from his untroubled,
After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, the distraught Queen Victoria ordered that a competition be held for a suitable memorial to his life. The winner was George Gilbert Scott, who was later knighted for his magnificent design. The elaborate Gothic memorial was to be 175 feet high topped with a bronze gilded figure of the Prince Consort by Marochetti. The aim was that the 150 life-sized figures and surrounding friezes and mosaics should represent not only Albert’s wide interests in the arts, commerce, agriculture, engineering and science but also offer a unique opportunity for British artistic talent.
The Memorial was finally inaugurated in 1872. It cost £120,000 and subscriptions were collected from all over the country.
The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, which had been erected in the middle of the night, was never formally unveiled because Barrie wished to preserve the sense of magic surrounding his story. The Times announced on May Day 1912 that there would be a gift from J.M. Barrie for children going to feed the ducks, down by the little bay on the south-western side of the Serpentine. This was the very spot where Peter flew in to Kensington Gardens.
Sure enough the children found the figure of Peter Pan blowing his pipe on the stump of a tree surrounded by animals of the English countryside and delicate winged fairies.
anonymous childhood on to the pages of newspapers and magazines world-wide. Everyone was chanting ‘Christopher Robin went down with Alice’. Nou was saved from unwanted publicity as even Blue could not find a rhyme for Olive. Alice rhymed with Palace.
This was not Blue’s only use of poetic licence. The Guards outside the Palace do not wear busbies but readers weren’t worried about all that. When in the poem, At Home, Blue described Moon’s childish longing for a soldier – a soldier in a busby, to come and play with him – he made the mistake of many grown ups then and now. The soldiers outside Buckingham Palace wear bearskins, a rather unfortunate fact in view of the proximity of Pooh, since these were then made from animal fur!
Busby is the English name for the Hungarian prémes csákó or kucsma, a military head-dress made of fur, worn by Hungarian hussars. Those worn by the Hussars and the Royal Artillery are cylindrical in shape. The rifle busby is a folding cap of astrakhan (curly lambs wool) formerly worn by rifle regiments. It looks like a Glengarry but is taller and has straight plumes in the front.
The bearskin cap is much taller and is worn most notably by the five regiments of foot guards of the Household Division (Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Irish and Welsh Guards) who parade outside the Palace.
One day a soldier did come to play in Mallord Street. He was an actor, Louis Goodrich, who Blue knew at the Garrick Club. He was invited round by Blue and to everyone’s delight arrived in full regalia – scarlet tunic and tall furry bearskin. It didn’t matter if Moon thought it was a busby – the little boy was quite overcome with excitement.
‘Soldier’ came many times after that – always to nursery tea because he came to see Pooh and Moon and not the grown-ups. Anne was allowed to join in and sometimes after tea Soldier got everyone busy cooking. Nou collected bowls and jugs, icing sugar, egg white, cochineal and peppermint essence and the children started pouring, mixing, tasting, rolling and tasting again. It was blissfully noisy fun with a great deal of shrieking and giggling.
Moon adored him and certainly did not understand why his shy father couldn’t possibly compete with the extrovert Soldier or how hurt he must have secretly been by Soldier’s popularity.
There was even more military excitement at this time, for every Thursday, on his drill night, Nou’s young man, Alf, called. He was really good fun and was excellent at playing, too. He arrived in Territorial Army dress which was not spectacular like Soldier’s. Even so, Moon was all over him, Nou recalled.
Alf admitted later that he grew quite fond of ‘the little fellow’ and almost understood why Nou was loath to abandon him.
After her charge went off to boarding school when he was nine, she and the long-suffering Alf were finally married. They lived first in Croydon and then in the village of Three Oaks in the countryside near Bexhill. Their cottage was renamed ‘Vespers’ and furnished as a wedding present by the Milnes. They grew vegetables and filled the garden with statues of the children they were too late to have themselves, as well as reproductions of Pooh and other toys.
They also offered Bed and Breakfast holidays for select families.
One of these were the Pitt-Paynes. Today, musician Dr. James Pitt-Payne remembers all too well their visit when he was three years old.
‘The cottage was quite dark and creepy to a young child and I thought she was a bit of a grim old thing who rather put me in my place. She told me that Christopher Robin was always a very good boy, whereas I left rather a lot to be desired. I was not allowed to handle the much-treasured first editions of A.A. Milne’s work as I was somewhat grubby in those days’.
In 1965, Olive Brockwell looked back on her happy days with the Milnes in the Sunday Times – the only newspaper interview she ever gave.
She and Alfred talked to the reporter over tea, served from a special edition Pooh and Christopher Robin tea set which had been given to her as a birthday present. ‘I believe this is the second service. The very first service was given to the Queen, when she was little Princess Elizabeth’, she said. ‘She was a great lover of Pooh’.
Her own memories of Blue did not echo those of his grown-up son. She saw him as a devoted parent who entered the boy’s world of make-believe and gave voices to the toys, long before he gave them life in the books.
Olive died in 1978 and is buried alongside Alf in the graveyard of the Church of St. Lawrence in Guestling.
Occasionally, after breakfast in London, Moon and his father would leave Nou behind and take a stroll together round the neighbouring streets towards Fulham wearing their indoor shoes and no hats. ‘Quite informal. Not party at all’. Every time they passed the same postman and on one occasion Blue asked Moon to say ‘How do you do’ – which he did, of course. But the postman did not acknowledge him and the little boy explained rather sadly, ‘He doesn’t know me’.
It would not be long before the whole world would know the family. Moon would become the public’s Christopher Robin and fingers would point wherever he went. At first, he rather enjoyed his celebrity but this excitement was not to survive his growing-up.