The Enchanted Places

Millions of readers throughout the world have grown up with the stories and verses of A. A. Milne about his son Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh and the other toy animals. What was it like to be the small boy about whom they were written - with the long hair, the smock and the Wellington boots?

At the age of 54 Christopher Milne looks back and comes to terms with Christopher Robin, the child who never grows old, who has always followed him about, and who has often made his life a misery. For as he grew older and he and his prep school contemporaries began to put away childish things, he became increasingly aware of his burden and of his desire to escape from Christopher Robin.

The book is about the life of the real Christopher Robin. It is therefore about the background of the poems and stories -the animals, the woods and river-and shows how much the real world and the fictional world corresponded.

In spite of the problems of being Christopher Robin, Christopher Milne has written a happy book about a happy childhood in the twenties and thirties in London and in Sussex. He describes the life of a moderately well-off family that has now almost vanished. Not the least interesting pages are those in which he "discovers" his parents and learns to love them for their very different qualities. The portrait of his father is memorable for the skill and sympathy with which he evokes a character at once shy and resolute, tactful and determined, and the rituals by which he lived. It is a story told with humour, modesty and good sense, whose interest will not be confined to lovers of his father's books.

Christopher Milne was born in 1920. He went to Stowe School with a scholarship in 1934, and to Trinity College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in Mathematics in 1939. He was defending the village of Hartfield in Sussex with the Local Defence Volunteers in 1940, then joined the Royal Engineers and served in the Middle East and Italy with 56 Division from 1942-46. He returned to Cambridge after the war and took a degree in English in 1947. After a series of unsatisfactory jobs in London, he opened the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth with his wife in 1951, and they have been bookselling happily ever since.

The drawing by E. H. Shepard reproduced on the jacket is from Now We Are Six. It shows Cotchford Farm in the distance.

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