Christopher Robin Milne was born on August 21, 1920, and was so registered. However, in the Milne household he was known as Billy, and soon as Moon (from his own mispronunciation of Milne). "We did rather want a Rosemary," Alan confessed to Biddie Warren a few days after Christopher's birth, "but I expect we shall be just as happy with this gentleman" (Thwaite, pp. 214-215).

One of the most famous blonds in modern times (at least until Disney Pooh got done with his fictional namesake, many years later), Christopher was actually born with "lots of curly brown hair" and brown eyes. Later drawings, descriptions and (sometimes colorized) photos show Christopher's hair turned blond and stayed blond (as did his father's) for most of his life.

Like his father before him, Christopher waited a long time before his first haircut. "His long hair reminded his mother of the girl she'd wanted and the father of the boy he himself had been" (p. 217). There were also the girlish clothes young Christopher wore, and which appear noticeably and fairly frequently in the Pooh Books. If Alan himself had the sense as a boy of "battling against the wrong makeup" -- of looking girlish when he really wasn't -- his son battled less against a similar outward appearance. He was content to be gentle, shy and quiet (though he became an enthusiastic boxer, rope climber and explorer of the countryside as he grew older).

N.B.: Christopher Milne was most probably an INFP (as compared to the ENFP personality type of the Webmaster).

Christopher's closest childhood friend was Anne Darlington, who was eight months or so older and a tougher character (as even the photo on the left suggests). They were devoted and almost inseparable. Anne had a toy monkey, Jumbo, as dear to her as Pooh was to Christopher. (One can only imagine what might have happened had Alan chosen to immortalize Jumbo in the Pooh Books, as he did Anne herself in his dedication to Now We Are Six.)

Several poems by Milne, and several illustrations by Shepard, feature Anne and Christopher -- notably "Buttercup Days", in which their relative hair colors (brown and golden blond) and their mutual affection are noted. (The illustration to this latter poem, from Now We Are Six, also features the cottage at Cotchford Farm.) To Alan and Dorothy Milne, Anne was and remained to her death the Rosemary that Christopher wasn't, and Dorothy long held fond hopes that Anne and Christopher would marry.

Though Alan had long since lost any interest in orthodox Christianity, and never had Christopher christened, he allowed the family nanny, Olive Rand (later Brockwell), to have charge of young Christopher's religious upbringing. It was by such grace and Olive's good personal example that Christopher actually felt much closer to God in his childhood than he did later. (One wonders if his later resistance to organized religion had anything to do with his constantly being teased at boarding school about the actually-intended-to-be-ironic poem "Vespers", with its famous line, "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.")

Until he went to boarding school, Christopher (in his own words) "quite liked being Christopher Robin and being famous." There were many interviews of his parents in those years, of course, as well as of Christopher himself; and they give a delightful portrait of the boy behind the character. Some of Alan's poems about Christopher, as well as Christopher's own memoirs, intimate that Christopher had inherited his father's brains and his mother's hands -- a fact that would eventually serve Christopher well at critical times in his life.

Christopher's portrait of himself as a child may be summed up thus (The Enchanted Places, pp. 37-41):

Height: Small for his age.
Weight: Underweight. Needs fattening up.
Appearance: Girlish.
General Intelligence: Not very bright.
General Interests: Good with his hands.

From all indications, though, Christopher underestimated (at least in his memoirs) his own childhood and boyhood intelligence. ("Not very bright", as he noted, stemmed from his "odd" ability to do hard mathematical sums but not easy ones -- something I can relate to, as I had the same problem.) Alan's own accounts of Christopher's achievements show a child, and then a boy, who was consistently precocious, indeed in scholarship form -- and in time, like Alan at the same age, a mathematician and a cricketer. (Alas, Christopher's shyness affected many things, including his confidence at cricket; and his undoubted keenness at cricket in his younger days withered as he grew older.) He was also competent with tools (especially woodworking tools) as early as age seven (when he was already the family's Chief Mender).

Christopher (as we may see from his self-image) could be cited as a victim, as have been so many others, of the modern world's profound misunderstanding (for all its psychological tests and sometimes precisely because of them) of what "intelligence" really is. It is a combination of nine factors, not just one to three. Alan's particular brand of blending is one of those valued by our modern world. Christopher's brand generally is not, and the world is poorer because of this prejudice. Christopher's real life is the story of his efforts to compensate for this prejudice as well as for the rare circumstances in which he found himself as the template for a successful author's most successful human literary creation.

To the left is a sample frame from the film footage, as featured in the BBC's original story published on November 27, 2001. The documentary "The Real World of Winnie-the-Pooh" was presented on that date by 10-year-old Joel Pitts, who navigated his way around Ashdown Forest using the map E.H. Shepard drew of the Hundred Acre Wood. Along the way, Joel found that Roo's Sandy Pit, Galleon's Lap and other landmarks in the stories still exist.

At Gibbs Christopher was still living in the nursery, and his Nanny was still very much a part of his life. Going to Boxgrove in 1930 put an end to Olive's role in his life; and it also marked the beginning of his love-hate relationship with his fictional namesake. As with introspective boys at boarding schools generally, Christopher had to assume a dual identity: one for home, another for school. Thanks to the fictional Christopher Robin, in the real-life Christopher's case the split was particularly deep. On the other hand, as he grew older Christopher became increasingly close to his father, and remained so until well into his twenties. This may explain (as Christopher himself wrote much later) why when his departure from his father's orbit finally came, it was a farther departure than usual.

It is often said that A.A. Milne was not particularly "good with children". Christopher opined so himself, in his own writings. Certainly the formal photos taken of Alan and Christopher together, even in later years (such as the above), have a decided awkwardness about them. Yet Alan was always keenly observant of and delighted in his son; and as Christopher grew into his teens, he and his father could share many things that Alan used to share with his brother Ken. One might say that Alan's relationship with Christopher as a teenager was a blend of affection and nostalgia - which dynamic would be fully consistent with a father/son relationship of INTP/INFP (referencing the famous Myers-Briggs Type Instrument grid).

Christopher's natural shyness notwithstanding, he and Hedda hit it off very well. Their months together were happy and innocent, leaving no regrets. If Hedda learned English the more readily thanks to Christopher's help, Christopher learned about Italian -- and about Italians in their many varieties, especially Hedda (who was herself part Austrian). In the end, Christopher declared his love for Hedda and promised to return for her after he was decommissioned.

In the end, though, Hedda needed a more masterful husband than Christopher could be. He began to realize this himself, when he did return for a visit; and six months later, "without too much heartbreak and with no ill-feeling, [the relationship] came to an end" (TPTTT, p. 113). Hedda's last letter to him (in 1948) was to congratulate him on his engagement to Lesley de Selincourt, his first cousin.

Christopher and Lesley had a great deal in common -- not least of which was enjoyment in doing "nothing much together". If this echoed young Christopher Robin's love of "doing Nothing", it was all the more ironic that Lesley seemed to despise Pooh and add to the real-life Christopher's resentment of him. Lesley was not Anne Darlington, and Alan could not help but compare the two unfavorably,. There was also the "instinctive antipathy" between Lesley and Christopher's mother Dorothy; and there was Alan's fear for his future grandchildren, born of the fact that Christopher and Lesley were so closely related (Thwaite, p. 471). Nevertheless, on April 7, 1948, Christopher and Lesley were engaged, and on July 24, 1948, married.

Christopher had earned only a Third Class degree in English Literature at Cambridge, and was ill-equipped to make his way in the world by traditional means. Like his father, he wanted to be a writer, but times for writers were very difficult after the war. On top of this, there was the burden of "the empty fame" of being A.A. Milne's son on the one hand and being unwanted and unappreciated for what he really was on the other. There had been a deepening rift between father and son after the latter's return from the war; and this was only compounded by Christopher's difficulties in finding employment and his eventual marriage to Lesley.

In 1951 Christopher and Lesley left London to start the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, Devonshire. Dorothy thought the decision very odd, inasmuch as Christopher didn't seem to like "business" and would have to meet Pooh fans all the time. While both of these factors would cause their frustrations, Christopher and Lesley successfully established and ran their bookshop for many years -- and that without any help from royalties derived from sales of the Pooh Books. Much of Christopher's The Path Through The Trees describes those years and the years of retirement following: the details of running a bookshop, and the causes (education, then civic development) that finally enabled Christopher to overcome his public shyness and find his voice.

Then there was the birth of Clara Milne, a few months after Alan's death in 1956. Alan's fears for Christopher's and Lesley's future offspring had proven justified; Clara was born severely palsied. And yet, in devising means to gave her as much independence as possible, Christopher's rather unusual combination of a mathematician's brain and a woodworker's hands finally shone.

Another cause fired Christopher's efforts in later years: the preservation of the Ashdown Forest country from oil exploration. It was not only the inspiration for much of the Pooh Books; it was one of the few nearby places Londoners could go to breathe fresh air. Naturally, Christopher was involved in the dedication of monuments to his father's work and other preservation efforts related to it.

At the relatively early age of 52, Christopher handed over the keys of the Harbour Bookshop to Lesley and began his career as a professional writer. His first two autobiographical books, The Enchanted Places and The Path Through The Trees, enabled him to look both his father and his literary namesake in the eye and established his own literary reputation. In his third volume, The Hollow On The Hill, he explored his search for a personal philosophy, a sort of pantheistic humanism similar to that of his father.

Alan had never had Christopher christened; and while he allowed the Church to seek to persuade his son, he never allowed it to apply force to him. While Christopher was abroad during the war (he was then twenty-four), Alan sent him two books: Renan's The Life of Jesus and Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man. Upon comparing the two philosophies described by the two authors, Christopher chose the latter for himself, as Alan had before him. To him, as to Alan, God had not created Man, but quite the other way around. (Christopher takes some little space defending his beliefs on this point, in his first two volumes.) Yet with Christopher, as with Alan, the witness of nature concerning God could not be completely ignored; and in Christopher's third volume, he showed a somewhat greater willingness to listen to it, and even to certain traditional Christian teachings, than is evident in his earlier volumes.

And now we come to further news (August 18, 2011). The Harbour Bookstore which Christopher and Lesley Milne opened, and which has long since gone to other owners, is most regrettably closing. An article by the BBC is featured here. Another, earlier article on the Bookstore contains the only live footage of the adult Christopher Milne I have ever seen.

"SMAOINTE..." BY ENYA