AT THE OUTBREAK of World War II in 1939, before he left to join the army, my father gave me a set of four books by A.A. Milne. When We Were Very Young, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We are Six and The House at Pooh Corner were first published in the years between 1924–8. Those books, their covers now a fading blue, the pages yellow at the edges, have been with me, wherever I have been, all my life. I read them to my children, then to my grandchildren and now my great-grandchildren. They all laugh with me, even if they do not always appreciate the gentle humour, the wit and innocent but profoundly perceptive approach to life of Pooh and Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, Owl, Rabbit and Eeyore, just as I still do.
Embarrassing to recall that my friends and I even assumed their names and that I, being the oldest, was Christopher Robin. More embarrassing still, now in our sixties and seventies, when we greeted each other recently at my niece’s wedding the power of Pooh was undimmed. ‘Hi Piglet’, ‘Hi Tigger!’, ‘Oh Robin, how good to see you!’
By a twist of fate, in 1962 my late husband and I moved to the Sussex village of Hartfield on the fringes of Ashdown Forest. Looking back, it is hard to credit that, when we first moved in, I did not realise that Hartfield was the home of A.A. Milne, his wife Daphne, their son Christopher Robin and the teddy bear who eventually became Winnie-the-Pooh. Our Forest was the inspirational setting for the magical illustrations of E.H. Shepard. I was not alone, for although those books were loved by children and grown-ups all over the world very few knew, even then, that the stories were about real people, and real toys or that Pooh’s forest was a real forest.
Soon after we arrived in Hartfield, I learned that A.A. Milne had died, at Cotchford Farm in 1956, and that his widow was still living there. Christopher Robin himself was married and running a bookshop in Devon.
And Pooh? Well, with A.A. Milne’s agreement he had, surprisingly, emigrated to the united States at the end of World War II and was then living with Tigger, Kanga, Piglet and Eeyore in the New York offices of his American publisher, E.P. Dutton.
Despite growing international fame, in his homeland of Hartfield itself there were still no notices on the Forest, no mention of Pooh’s life in local history books, no signs recording that ‘A.A. Milne Lived Here’. The shop, known today as Pooh Corner, was still the village bakery where Christopher Robin bought his bulls eyes. And the remote and crumbling bridge where Pooh and his friends invented the game of Poohsticks was a peaceful haven known only to local folk and seldom visited by them. The ‘Enchanted Place’ on top of the Forest was still magical. Tourists were rare enough to be stared at. All this was about to change.
In 1961, after her husband’s death and because she admired Walt Disney’s work, Mrs Milne had astutely, if controversially, licensed the motion picture rights in Winnie-the-Pooh to the Disney Corporation.
Five years later the company produced its first cartoon – Winnie the Pooh And The Honey Tree – which began the transformation of the bear of not so little brain into the multi-billion pounds a year juggernaut that he eventually became.
English through and through, the cartoon bear that the original bear inspired is, today, the Disney Corporation’s hottest property. He has his very own place on Hollywood’s Pavement of the Stars. He is richer even than Queen Elizabeth II herself.
That year – 1966 – with a group of friends I started a pre-school playgroup in the village and not long afterwards Mrs Milne sold her lop-sided Tudor farmhouse to an American family. Before she left I went to interview her for the magazine Sussex Life, hoping, perhaps naively, that residents would like her to share with them the story of Winnie-the-Pooh, their furry local hero.
The elegant Mrs Milne was not particularly popular in the village. The Milnes were not churchgoers – quite the reverse – and Daphne appeared to be rather distant and somewhat snooty. Most of their friends had hailed from London’s literary scene and they did not mingle at village fetes or flower shows, although their gardener, George Tasker, had been very proud of the produce he exhibited from their garden.
We sat in the comfortable living room of Cotchford Farm, as she talked enthusiastically about her role as the voice of Piglet and of the hidden heartache the bitter-sweet success of the books had brought them all. Then we walked around the garden watching real-life rabbits lolloping on the lawns, and sauntered among the bluebells and little streams that fed the river itself, as she remembered those early days.
‘We had no idea when we first sat making Pooh and Piglet voices that those terribly English toys would amuse other families so far away’, she said. ‘But I suppose that my husband’s dream characters had the faults and foibles of all people, whether they live in igloos or wigwams’.
Then, in 1976, I heard that Christopher Robin’s teddy bear himself was coming to London for the 50th anniversary celebration of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. I wrote to his English publishers, Methuen, and asked them to allow him to return to Hartfield, so that we could photograph him with the children of the village playgroup in some of his favourite ‘warm and sunny spots’. Amazingly they agreed! Pooh was coming home.
There were to be two events that June. The first was with our playgroup, where Pooh was to be filmed by television. This was to be followed by a giant Teddy Bears’ picnic at Forstal Farm, in the next door hamlet of Withyham. The hosts were actress, Joan Wood, and her husband, Alan, who was a member of A.A. Milne’s favourite, Garrick Club.
Three years later, in 1979, children in Hartfield were queuing up to buy a special commemorative eleven pence stamp issued by the Post Office to mark The Year of the Child. It illustrated their very own Winnie-the-Pooh – the Pooh they had met and played with only a few years before.
The great Disney take-over created a new character that many of Pooh’s original devotees regarded as sacrilege. The animations did not look much like the original, innocent, rather wistful book illustrations by artist E.H. Shepard, who thought they were a travesty. They looked nothing like Christopher Robin’s toys and WORSE – they spoke American!
In truth, Pooh the film star has generated even greater fortunes for all who flocked to dip into his golden hunny pot. Much of this income from film, books and merchandise has today been diverted to charities raising funds for an impressive range of causes for both adults and children. Disney’s Pooh has also touched the hearts of a new generation who have come to love him and don’t much mind if he has strolled off the pages of a book or a cinema screen.
To A.A. Milne’s own great regret, the extraordinary acclaim accorded those four books totally overshadowed his literary work as an internationally respected and popular dramatist and author. He admitted ruefully, in a poem, that he had brought Winnie-the-Pooh to life little thinking that his prolific output would be eclipsed by these ‘four trifles for the young’. E.H. Shepard, too, lived to regret that much of his later work as a brilliant artist had been sabotaged by ‘that bear’.
Sadly the boy who grew up to be Christopher Milne, a Devonshire bookseller, also felt overshadowed as an adult by the fame of his once-loved teddy bear.
Recently Pooh was made an Icon of the World, yet few of his faithful followers, young and old across the globe, realise when or how, or even where, it all began. unlike Harry Potter, or any of the characters in the best loved children’s classics, such as Mole or Toad in The Wind in the Willows, Rupert Bear, Paddington or Babar the Elephant, Pooh is not fiction.
The rather threadbare Winnie-the-Pooh himself lives on, celebrating his 90th birthday in 2011 in the Donnell Children’s Centre of the magnificently ornate New York Public Library. Adults and children press their noses to the glass of his retirement home and write their thoughts in the visitors’ book. He has even been invited to witness the engagements of couples who love to be photographed in his company. They, at least, know that he is real, although very frail now and so none is privileged, as our Hartfield pre-school children were in 1976, to hold him by the paw.
Those children are grown-up, and package tourists – especially from Japan – pour into their village to pay homage and sometimes to do battle with residents, many of whom still resent the increased traffic and the crowds infesting their Forest.
On the final page of the last book, The House at Pooh Corner, as Christopher Robin prepares for boarding school, he and Pooh make a pilgrimage together to the Enchanted Place on top of the Forest. There, sitting under the trees among the pine needles, he breaks the news to Pooh that he won’t be able to do ‘Nothing any more’ because ‘they don’t let you’.
‘Pooh, promise you won’t forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.’ Pooh thought for a little. ‘I promise’, he said.
Despite the razzmatazz that has surrounded him, despite the happiness and the riches he has generated, despite the controversy and feuding behind the scenes, the true story of the real teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and of his life has never been told. After all he is just a stuffed toy in a book – or a cartoon – isn’t he? He cannot be found on Facebook, can he? He doesn’t breathe, does he? He was not really born, was he? He can’t really speak – and yet………
Once upon a time an anonymous teddy bear set off, from a factory in a north west London suburb with a van-load of similar bears and other toys. His spectacular journey was to take him into the hearts of people of all ages, around the world and that is where we will join him first – in Acton where it all began.