This is one of the sadder stories I know from the world of letters. It is made sadder because reading has been my whole life and so many good things have been associated with reading and literature. To begin, because of circumstance within my family and being an only child for the first half dozen years or so of my life, I learned to read before I ever went to school. My mom taught me. In those days, which was the late 1940s, there was no Kindergarten. School started with Grade 1 so I would have been seven before I sat to a desk. In reality, I had a home schooling first. Reading gave me a head start to everything and, as Christopher Robin might say in the Winnie The Pooh books, it was wonderful.

Now you know things are never quite as they seem in this old world. Lurking in the reeds of the most idyllic of popular stories there often lies a darker realty. Like many children my age I grew up with the marvellous world of the Winnie the Pooh books. Not the cartoons but instead the gentle children’s world painted by the stories and poems of A.A. Milne in books. They were part of my childhood. They were stories written by Milne for his only son Christopher Robin whom you will know.

My childhood background was such that the home life of Christopher Robin seemed to be a wooded paradise. It seemed a world where all problems were solved and characters like Winnie the Pooh and Kanga and Roo played in The Hundred Acre Wood through an eternity of warm, care-free summer days. Winnie the Pooh was funny, but he also represented innocence and a time in childhood when all things were possible.  I still have my copy of The World of Pooh from the 1950’s.  Stories from a perfect world written by a perfect father for perfect son.

“Hush Hush Whisper who dares.

Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”

They are lines in those books that convey a softness and ‘end of day’ peace in which A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin lived at Cochford Farm in Sussex, England. That “peace” I can tell you is a fiction so brace yourself.  Milne himself was saddened by the fact his children’s books had overshadowed his earlier work as a playwright. As for Christopher Robin, “little boy kneels by the foot of his bed” – he became estranged from his parents and life became difficult. He was an only child who became famous by virtue of being a character in his father’s works.

A.A. Milne and his wife grew completely apart from their son in later years which was a real tragedy. Christopher Robin Milne grew to resent what he saw as an exploitation of his childhood committed upon him by his father. Christopher Robin came to actually hate the books that made him famous. He got his revenge by marrying his first cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt. Christopher’s mother and Leslie’s father, who were brother and sister, didn’t speak after that for three decades.

“God bless Mummy. I know that’s right.

Wasn’t it fun in the bath to-night?

The cold’s so cold, and the hot’s so hot.

Oh! God bless Daddy – I quite forgot.”

Christopher Robin finally came to some form of truce and an accord with his father. Christopher visited him during A.A. Milne’s long illness and the rift between them was healed. When Milne died Christopher Robin had absolutely nothing further to do with his mother. Such was the great gulf in the family. His mother lived for another 15 years and even on her death bed refused to speak with him.

Christopher Robin himself grew to manhood and opened a bookstore in a small town in England. His friends knew him as Christopher and not Christopher Robin. He did some writing, including The Enchanted Places, that let him come to terms with his own role in the history of children’s literature. Christopher wrote “(it) combined to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin.”

Christopher Robin Milne lived until 1996 and died quietly in his sleep at the age of 75. Thus, unhappily ends the story of one of the central characters from the world of children’s literature.  

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]