A. A. MILNE
1882-1956
Lived and wrote in Hartfield
AUTHOR OF WINNIE-THE-POOH
Happy childhood holidays in Sussex began on the train. As a grown-up he bought a house here and devised
Poohsticks with his son, Christopher Robin
“I stand at the door of my carriage feeling very happy. It is good to get out of London. I have nothing to
read, but then I want to think. It is the ideal place in which to think, a railway carriage; the ideal place in
which to be happy.”
A.A.Milne
As a child, living in Kilburn in London, young Alan Alexander Milne and his brother were often brought
out by train from Victoria station into the woods, valleys and fields of Sussex by their father for countryside
walks and adventures. Alan recalled that as an 8 year old they once walked 19 miles in a day – fuelled by
nuts, ginger beer and ham and eggs – they took in Edenbridge, Hever, Chiddingstone and Cowden station
where they took a train to Tunbridge Wells. And before going away to Cambridge University around 1901 he
spent time in Hastings where his uncle Alexander was teaching.
By now Alan was writing humourous verse for Punch magazine, and went on to write plays and novels. He
married Daphne in 1913, joining the British Army for World War I – as a signals officer at the Somme – but
was invalided out. Eventually he was recruited into intelligence to write propaganda.
He and Daphne had a son Christopher Robin in 1920. They left the bustle of the metropolis for the serenity
of Cotchford Farm in Hartfield in Alan’s beloved Sussex. It was here that a five acre wood in Ashdown
Forest became the fictional Hundred Acre Wood where he would set the stories about a young boy who
befriends a bear and other characters. Inspired by a real life bear, the tamest army mascot named Winnie,
who had been deposited at London zoo by an army officer from Winnipeg. Christopher Robin was able to
befriend Winnie at the zoo, and this inspired his father’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh books.
On National Poetry Day 2017 Tony Knight, a South West train announcer in Wokingham, read AA Milne
poems to waiting commuters.
Although he didn’t put Winnie-the-Pooh on a train he’s clearly a fan. “Nowhere can I think so happily as
in a train” he wrote “I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden
idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly
reflective. I think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when these give out) of all the good deeds I
am going to do. I look out of the window and say lazily to myself, “How jolly to live there”; and a little
farther on, “How jolly not to live there.” I see a cow, and I wonder what it is like to be a cow, and I wonder
whether the cow wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by this time, we have passed on to a sheep,
and I wonder if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders on in a way which would annoy Pelman
a good deal, but it wanders on quite happily, and the “clankety-clank” of the train adds a very soothing
accompaniment. So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close my eyes and pass into a pleasant state
of sleep.”
AA Milne’s autobiography online: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.234747
The fascinating real bear story behind Winnie-the-Pooh
https://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/winnie-the-pooh-real-story-AA-Milnes/index.html
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