PLAYWRIGHT

In 1922, the year A. A. Milne was forty and two years before the first of the famous children's books was published, a caption to his photograph in a London newspaper carried the words: 'Milne came to Fleet Street years ago in search of a fortune. As a dramatist, his income at times ranges from £200 to £500 a week.' This really was a fortune in 1922; it was more in a week than most people earned in a year. That joking boast, 'England's premier playwright', which Alan Milne had used when signing a letter to his brother Ken in 1917, was never exactly justified. But he was certainly one of England's most successful, prolific and best-known playwrights for a brief period, a fact that now seems almost incredible, when so many people who know his name and love his books have no idea that he ever wrote plays.

It was in 1919 that A. A. Milne had joined the Garrick Club. The club was to give him a great deal of pleasure (a refuge, another home, particularly in the thirties) – pleasure he would reward on his death with a share of the Pooh royalties. The Garrick was the appropriate club for a playwright. The Garrick was full of actors; it was full of writers too.

Milne in 1919 was ambitious, and not just to make a lot of money. Towards the end of his life, he summed up his feelings like this:

Of all the foolish things which Dr Johnson said, the most foolish was: 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' What he should have said was that a writer, having written what pleased him, was a blockhead if he did not sell it in the best market. But a writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence ... He yearns for the immortality, even if only in the British Museum, of stiff covers.

Milne made sure that most of his plays were published in an attractive uniform edition from Chatto and Windus, in a stylish brown cloth with a well-designed label on the spine. 'It is very jolly indeed,' he told his novelist friend and editor Frank Swinnerton, when he saw the proofs of First Plays. Twenty of Milne's plays survive in this form, and not only in the British Museum. But the true immortality was to come, of course, from the children's books, a fact he would live to realise and regret.

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The play that was Milne's first real success was Mr Pim Passes By, which opened at the New Theatre in London on 5 January 1920. It was a hard audience to woo. The great successes of the 1920s were Chu Chin Chow and Hassan, glamorous and specifically exotic musical shows, which fulfilled to perfection people's need for a good night out. In the straight theatre, the playwright's best hope was to make people laugh. He also had to remember all sorts of practical things. Theatres were less well-disciplined places than they usually are today. 'If yours is an 8.15 play, you may be sure that the stalls will not fill up till 8.30 and you should therefore let loose the lesser-paid members of the cast in the opening scene.' You should be careful not to waste your jokes 'on the first five pages of dialogue'. There would be a crackle of stiff white shirtfronts, a jingle of beaded evening bags, a shuffle of programmes as the audience settled themselves into their seats. And at the end of the evening the playwright had to remember that many people, living for instance in Chislehurst, would be catching last trains and missing thefinal five minutes of every play they ever saw, together, of course, with countless renderings of the national anthem.

There was a more personal problem. The Milnes were becoming worried at Daphne's failure to conceive. They both wanted children. They had now been married for nearly six years; the war had not kept them apart for any great periods of time. There were consultations with a gynaecologist. In May 1919, Daphne went into a nursing home. 'I fly there in all my spare minutes,' Milne wrote to Swinnerton, adding that he was trying to write a novel called Nocturne, but kept putting it aside. The operation Daphne underwent was 'officially' for the removal of her appendix, but it seems likely that something else was done at the same time; perhaps the fallopian tubes were insufflated. Whatever happened, in April 1920 J. M. Barrie would be able to congratulate Milne: 'By far the choicest lines (the best you have ever written) are about your wife and I rejoice with exceeding joy over that news.' Daphne was expecting a child in August.

The nursery was ready. They had moved into 'the prettiest little house in London', Milne wrote to Frank Swinnerton in August 1919, describing 11 Mallord Street, Chelsea, SW3. It is a short, quiet street just a few minutes' walk from the King's Road.

The house is narrow, in a terrace, and had been built not long before the war. It has three storeys and a basement and is much bigger than it looks from outside, having been designed rather cleverly round a well for light. The house was much described in the late 1920s, when hordes of journalists traipsed through it on their way to Christopher Robin's nursery. 'Originally Mallord Street had been done in colours influenced by the Russian Ballet, black carpets, bright cushions, very impractical as the carpets showed every bit of cigarette ash,' a friend of Daphne's remembered her saying. 'She told me that the thing to be at that time was – different.' The house had to be 'an artistic whole, a showplace'.

Some of Milne's own exuberant pleasure in his new house comes across in a piece he published in the Sphere on 9 August 1919, soon after they moved in. It was the first time, he said, that he had had the chance to go upstairs to bed and come downstairs to breakfast for nineteen years – in other words since he had left home for Cambridge.

Of course I have done these things in other people's houses from time to time, but what we do in other people's houses does not count ... Now, however, for the first time in nineteen years, I am actually living in a house. I have (imagine my excitement) a staircase of my own.

Flats may be convenient (I thought so myself when I lived in one some days ago), but they have their disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that you are never in complete possession of the flat. You may think that the drawing-room floor (to take a case) is your very own, but it isn't; you share it with a man below who uses it as a ceiling. If you want to dance a step-dance, you have to consider his plaster. I was always ready enough to accommodate myself in this matter to his prejudices, but I could not put up with his old-fashioned ideas about bathroom ceilings. It is very cramping to one's style in the bath to reflect that the slightest splash may call attention to itself on the ceiling of the gentleman below. This is to share a bathroom with a stranger – an intolerable position for a proud man. Today I have a bathroom of my...