I have often been asked how I came to write about A. A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin. After my second biography, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, won a prize, I was approached by a number of publishers and A. A. Milne was one of the suggestions. He seemed particularly appropriate for a biographer who had just written about another complex father–son relationship; and before that about Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose son, Vivian, had inspired Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1974 the Observer called Christopher Robin ‘the most famous of all tiny boys (by comparison Little Lord Fauntleroy was a mere starlet)’.
It was also relevant that I had myself been brought up on A. A. Milne. My father had given Winnie-the-Pooh to my mother when it first came out in 1926, six years before I was born. I knew many of the poems and stories by heart. My own London childhood had been a slightly downmarket version of Christopher Robin’s. We did not have a country cottage, but we did have a stream, the Dollis Brook, at the bottom of our north London garden. Even my double name (I was always called Ann Barbara as a child) had more to do with Christopher Robin than with Princess Margaret Rose.
When A. A. Milne came up as a possible subject for me, I felt it likely that Christopher Milne would turn me down, as I knew he had rejected others. He had himself written two memoirs and had actually said in the second one, The Path Through the Trees, that the first one, The Enchanted Places, was written to forestall strangers. But I knew I could only write about this father and son if I had his approval and permission to quote any relevant material.
I was elated when Christopher said not only that he was prepared to let me write the book, but that I must write it as if he were not going to read it. When, after the long years of research and writing, I gave him his copy of the finished book, he eventually wrote to tell me that ‘if I had any doubts and reluctance at the beginning, they have all been swept away and I am left with nothing but admiration and happiness.’ His reaction was a great relief to both of us.
A. A. Milne: His Life was published in 1990, on both sides of the Atlantic, and won the Whitbread Prize for the best biography of the year. It went into a number of editions and is now available from Pan Macmillan as an ebook and as a print-on-demand paperback. Goodbye Christopher Robin is not just a cut version of the biography. It is the full story of how A. A. Milne came to write the four great children’s books and how Christopher Robin became one of the most famous children in the world. It is a story of celebrity and of the joys and pains of success.
Christopher Milne died in 1996 after what he himself called a happy life. I don’t know whether he would have been surprised at the new twenty-first-century surge of interest in Winnie-the-Pooh. Recently the book came top in a BBC poll to find the best children’s book ever. In 2017 there is a grand exhibition devoted to Winnie-the-Pooh at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And best of all, because it can be seen all over the world, in all the countries where the books have been translated, there will be the remarkable film produced by Damian Jones, directed by Simon Curtis and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. This is the story behind that film.
May, 2017