'He was desperate to escape': Why the real Christopher Robin resented being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh
Getty ImagesAA Milne's first Pooh book was published a century ago in October 1926. Generations of children loved it, but its inspiration, the author's own son, told the BBC that he took to "running away when people bring up the subject".
"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." This is the plaintive cry made by Christopher Robin to his teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, in the final chapter of The House in Pooh Corner.
British novelist and playwright AA Milne needn't have worried. The first Winnie-the-Book was published 100 years ago in October 1926, and introduced a cast of characters modelled on the author's son and the soft toys he played with: lovably dim Pooh Bear, nervy Piglet, hyperactive Tigger, pessimistic Eeyore. Far from being forgotten, in the century since then the characters have taken on a life far beyond the parameters of their idyllic home, the Hundred Acre Wood.
From 1966, they became the subject of animated and live-action Disney films, in what is now one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. Pooh Bear has even courted controversy in Poland for being "inappropriate", sparked memes mocking the Chinese president Xi Jinping, and prompted tongue-in-cheek pop-culture theories in which the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood have been "diagnosed" with different psychological conditions.
Yet the reality of Pooh's inception and following success was not easy for Milne's son, who appeared in the books as Christopher Robin. On the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1976, he said that he was "excited and proud" when the books were first published, but that the thrill of being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh "began to pall when I grew a bit older".
He then came to resent his father's literary use of the childhood games he played in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, the inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood. "It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places.
As portrayed in the 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin, his was not quite the carefree childhood of Milne's books. "People like myself were in those days brought up by nanny. And really all my childhood up to the age of 10 was nanny-dominated," he told the BBC in 1971.
He revealed that he didn't know his parents in his early years. "Both my parents were fairly remote up to the age of about nine… I only saw them at particular periods during the day." He also claimed that the books weren't intended for him. "[My father] wasn't concerned with me. He was writing for himself."
Shyness and jealousy
In his memoir, Christopher recalled how, when a journalist told his father that his books "seemed to show a great understanding and love of children", his response was that "I am not inordinately fond of them… and I've certainly never felt in the least sentimental about them".
In the same interview, when asked how being a household name had affected his son, AA Milne replied, more slowly, that he hoped "it had done him no harm".
That hope wasn't quite realised. In Christopher's memoir, he explained: "Unfortunately the fictional Christopher Robin refused to die, and he and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms." As a schoolboy, his association with the character had been "a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up", due to his crippling shyness.
Then, once he became an adult and was struggling to find work, jealousy caused more problems. Although his father had appeared to have succeeded by his own efforts, Christopher asked, "Were they entirely his own efforts? Hadn't I come into it somewhere?"
He was desperate to escape from forever being known as Christopher Robin. The owner of his childhood home, where the Pooh stories were set, told the BBC in 2002 that he had invited Christopher to visit a few decades earlier. "He wrote back a rather unpleasant letter saying nothing would induce him to cross the threshold of this house ever again."
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Christopher did return to Ashdown Forest in 1979 to throw his own Pooh Sticks (a game he'd played that was made famous in the books). But eight years later, after he'd helped the local council buy the woods in order to preserve them, he still acknowledged that being known as the boy with the bear had been a burden – saying he dealt with it "mainly by avoiding it and running away when people bring up the subject".
Yet by the end of his life, Christopher had reconciled himself to his father's work, if not to the discomfort of his unwanted fame. "He came to accept that his father, in fact, had been devoted to him and that he had had no idea of what was going to happen," AA Milne's biographer Ann Thwaite told the BBC in 2002.
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Christopher was able to see that the Pooh books might have been a way for his father to bridge the gap between them in his early years, allowing him to express the things he couldn't say otherwise. "My father's heart remained buttoned up all through his life," Christopher wrote in his memoir. "He felt deeply, but he kept his feelings to himself – or rather, being a writer, he let them escape in his writing. But even here he disguised them… and so, such sadnesses as there were put on cap and bells and emerged as Eeyore."
Christopher agreed that he'd come to see Winnie-the-Pooh as a way for his father to find a connection with him. "People sometimes say to me today, 'How lucky you were to have had such a wonderful father,' imagining that, because he wrote about me with much affection and understanding, he must have played with me with equal affection and understanding."
Yet, Christopher wrote, "My father was a creative writer, and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longing sought and found satisfaction in another direction – he wrote about him instead."
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