Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (20 page)

‘If you let me in your gang, you can 'ave a go on the float.'

‘What? I mean, pardon?'

‘You can drive it up Winchmore Crescent and back.'

‘Oh.'

‘You can blow the 'ooter and rattle the crates, and everything.'

‘Can I wear your cap?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the satchel with the change in?'

‘Yes.'

‘Super!'

‘Can Dennis come to play again, then, Reginald?'

‘Well – only if he's very, very good.'

‘He is.'

‘All right, then.'

25
The Hell at Pooh Corner

From Christopher Robin Milne's recent autobiography,
it turns out that life in the Milne household was very
different from what millions of little readers have been
led to believe. But if it was grim for him, what must it
have been like for some of the others involved? I went
down to Pooh Corner – it is now a tower block, above
a discount warehouse – for this exclusive interview.

W
innie-the-Pooh is sixty now, but looks far older. His eyes dangle, and he suffers from terminal moth. He walks into things a lot. I asked him about that, as we sat in the pitiful dinginess which has surrounded him for almost half a century.

‘Punchy,' said Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘is what I am. I've been to some of the best people, Hamley's, Mothercare, they all say the same thing: there's nothing you can do about it, it's all that hammering you took in the old days.'

Bitterly, he flicked open a well-thumbed copy of
Winnie-the-
Pooh
, and read the opening lines aloud:

‘“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs.”' He looked at me. ‘The hell it was!' he muttered. ‘You think I didn't want to walk down, like normal people? But what chance did I stand? Every morning, it was the same story, this brat comes in and grabs me and next thing I know the old skull is bouncing on the lousy lino. Also,' he barked a short bitter laugh, ‘that was the last time anyone called me Edward Bear. A distinguished name, Edward. A name with
class
. After the king, you know.'

I nodded. ‘I know,' I said.

‘But did it suit the Milnes?' Pooh hurled the book into the grate, savagely. ‘Did it suit the itsy-bitsy, mumsy-wumsy, ooze-daddy's-ickle-boy-den Milnes? So I was Winnie-the-Pooh. You want to know what it was like when the Milnes hit the sack and I got chucked in the toy-cupboard for the night?'

‘What?' I said.

‘It was “Hello, sailor!” and “Give us a kiss, Winifred!” and “Watch out, Golly, I think he fancies you!”, not to mention,' and here he clenched his sad, mangy little fists, ‘the standard “Oy, anyone else notice there's a peculiar poo in here, ha, ha, ha!”'

‘I sympathise,' I said, ‘but surely there were compensations? Your other life, in the wood, the wonderful stories of . . .'

‘Yeah,' said Pooh, heavily, ‘the wood, the stories. The tales of Winnie-the-Schmuck, you mean? Which is your favourite? The one where I fall in the gorse bush? The one where I go up in the balloon and the kid shoots me down? Or maybe you prefer where I get stuck in the rabbit hole?'

‘Well, I—'

‘Hanging from a bloody balloon,' muttered Pooh, ‘singing the kind of song you get put in the funny farm for! Remember?

“How sweet to be a cloud,

Floating in the blue!

Every little cloud

Always
sings aloud.”

That kind of junk,' said Pooh, ‘may suit Rolf Harris. Not me.'

‘Did you never sing it, then?' I enquired.

‘Oh, I sang it,' said Pooh. ‘I sang it all right. It was in the script.
Dumb bear comes on and sings
. It was in the big Milne scenario. But you know what
I
wanted to sing?'

‘I have no idea,' I said.

His little asymmetrical eyes grew even glassier, with a sadness that made me look away.

‘
Body and Soul
,' murmured Pooh, ‘is what I wanted to sing.
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
. Or play the trumpet, possibly. It was,' he sighed, ‘1926. Jazz, short skirts, nightingales singing in Berkeley Square, angels dancing at the Ritz, know what I mean? A world full of excitement, sex, fun, Frazer-Nash two-seaters and everyone going to Le Touquet! And where was I? Hanging around with Piglet and passing my wild evenings in the heady company of Eeyore!
The Great Gatsby
came out that year,' said Pooh, bitterly. ‘The same year as
Winnie-the-Pooh
.'

‘I begin to understand,' I said.

‘Why couldn't he write that kind of thing about
me
?' cried the anguished Pooh. ‘Why didn't I get the breaks? Why wasn't I a great tragic hero, gazing at the green light on the end of Daisy's dock? Why didn't Fitzgerald write
Gatsby Meets A
Heffelump
and Milne
The Great Pooh
?'

‘But surely it was fun, if nothing else?' I said. ‘Wasn't the Milne household full of laughter and gaiety and—'

‘A.A. Milne,' Pooh interrupted, ‘was an Assistant Editor of
Punch
. He used to come home like Bela Lugosi. I tell you, if we wanted a laugh, we used to take a stroll round Hampstead cemetery.'

Desperately, for the heartbreak of seeing this tattered toy slumped among his emotional debris was becoming unendurable, I sought an alternative tack.

‘But think,' I said cheerily, ‘of all the millions of children you have made happy!'

He was not to be shaken from his gloom.

‘I'd rather,' he grunted, ‘think of all the bears I've made miserable. After the Pooh books, the industry went mad. My people came off the assembly line like sausages. Millions of little bears marching towards the exact same fate as my own, into the hands of kids who'd digested the Milne rubbish, millions of nursery tea-parties where they were forced to sit around propped against a stuffed piglet in front of a little plastic plate and have some lousy infant smear their faces with jam. “O look, nurse, Pooh's ate up all his cake!” Have you any idea what it's like,' he said, ‘having marmalade on your fur? It never,' and his voice dropped an octave, ‘happened to Bulldog Drummond.'

‘I'm sorry?'

Pooh reached for a grubby notebook, and flipped it open.

‘“Suddenly the door burst from its hinges, and the doorway filled with a huge and terrible shape.

‘“Get away from that girl, you filthy Hun swine!” it cried.

‘“The black-hearted fiend who had been crouched over the lovely Phyllis turned and thrust a fist into his evil mouth.

‘“Mein Gott!” he shrieked, “Es ist Edward Bear, MC, DSO!”

‘“With one bound, our hero . . .”'

Pooh snapped the notebook shut.

‘What's the use?' he said. ‘
I
wrote that, you know. After Milne packed it in, I said to myself, it's not too late, I know where the pencil-box is, I shall come back like Sherlock Holmes, a new image, a . . . I took it to every publisher in London. “Yes, very interesting,” they said, “what about putting in a bit where he gets his paw stuck in a honey jar, how would it be if he went off with Roo and fell in a swamp, and while you're at it, could he sing a couple of songs about bath-night?”'

He fell silent. I cleared my throat a couple of times. Far off, a dog barked, a lift clanged. I stood up, at last, since there seemed nothing more to say.

‘Is there anything you need?' I said, somewhat lamely.

‘That's all right,' said Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘I get by. No slice of the royalties, of course, oh dear me no, well, I'm only the bloody bear, aren't I? Tell you what, though, if you're going past an off-license, you might have them send up a bottle of gin.'

‘I'd be delighted to,' I said.

He saw me to the door.

‘Funny thing,' he said, ‘I could never stand honey.'

26
And Though They Do Their Best To
Bring Me Aggravation . . .

‘Did you bring back something special from your holiday?
Why not enter our Grand Souvenir Competition?'

Daily Telegraph

W
hen Sir Henry Souvenir (1526–1587) at last returned to the court of Queen Elizabeth from his ten-year tour of the Orient, he little thought that their opening exchange would pass into history.

‘What have you brought for me?' asked his queen.

‘It's a box made from the liver of an elephant, your majesty,' replied Sir Henry, ‘wrought in strange fashion by the natives and covered in sea-shells. You can keep fags in it.'

‘Where did you get it?' she inquired.

‘I can't remember,' he said.

And thus it was that the pattern of the next four hundred years was firmly laid. Ever since that fateful day in 1570, people have been coming back from distant parts carrying things to put cigarettes in, which they give to other people to remind them of places that neither of them can recall. The word “souvenir” has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

Some people don't actually give their souvenirs away, preferring instead to build up a vast collection with which to decorate lofts; it is not immediately clear why they do this, but a strong ritualistic element is clearly involved, no doubt because the objects are themselves closely associated with the passing of time and take on a totemistic quality from this association. Souvenirs, for example, can never be thrown away, probably because to do so would be to wipe out the past of which they are the only extant record. They are, however, moved around the loft every five years or so, when their lids tend to fall off or, in the case of clocks, when their cuckoos fall out.

The cuckoo clock, in fact, may be said to be the quintessential souvenir, in that it exists purely to be bought, sold, wrapped, carried home, unwrapped, and put in lofts. It never hangs on walls. It is usually purchased in Switzerland, where it never hangs on walls either. How it became involved with Switzerland is a horological mystery of a high order, but experts have suggested that since Switzerland has nothing else to identify it (i.e., Eiffel Towers, Taj Mahals, castanets, lederhosen, chopsticks), and since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by. The undeniable success of the cuckoo clock has led the Swiss to branch out with typically cautious adventurousness: removing the tiny house from which the cuckoo emerges, they have enlarged it in recent years and inserted a music-box inside it, which, when you lift the lid, starts to play ‘O Mine Papa' and breaks.

It's for keeping cigarettes in.

Mention of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal lead me naturally to point out an important secondary characteristic of the souvenir. It is invariably an imitation of something else. Even when it's original. Inventiveness of a remarkable kind often goes into this imitation, and accusations of vulgarity by citizens like Lord Snowdon (who has himself been called a vulgar imitation, though not by me) do not detract from the brilliance of the minds that, for example, saw in the Eiffel Tower not a thousand feet of iron, but six inches of saltcellar with a nude in the base and a thermometer up one side. Not that our own English craftsmen have been left behind in the race for international kudos: a mere mile from where I am writing this, you can buy a midget guardsman with ten fags in his busby and a gas lighter on his rifle, or a pygmy beefeater out of whose cunningly constructed mouth twenty different scenes of London may be pulled, in full colour. All over Kansas, at this very moment, recent visitors to Britain will be trying to glue its head back on.

Souvenirs also have an invaluable role to play as conversation pieces, even though there will usually be more pieces than conversation. The talk is often quite fascinating, viz:

‘Yes, we bought that in Brussels, ha-ha-ha, amusing isn't it? When you switch it on, it pees. Oh. Well, it did. Perhaps it needs a new batt— now look what you've done, it's come off in your hand. We'll never get the cigarettes out of it now.' Or;

‘This nut-dish is constructed entirely out of a single piece of elkhorn, by the way, and the crackers are made from the ribs of an okapi. Yes. O-K-A-P-I. And now, if you care to pick up that pin-cushion in the shape of the Great Pyramid, you will find— oh, really? But it's only nine o'clock, and of course you haven't even seen our Nefertiti door-step yet, THAT CARPET YOU'RE RUNNING DOWN IS AN EXTREMELY FASCINATING EXAMPLE OF VERY EARLY SUDANESE . . .'

It's not always easy to choose souvenirs, of course, and many people swear by clothes. I myself have sworn by a suit I bought in Hong Kong some years ago, and hope one day to bring out the oaths in book form, as soon as permissiveness establishes itself a little more securely. As everyone knows, Hong Kong has some of the finest tailors in the world, but what they actually do there is open to question, since all the clothes are made by some of the worst. My own suit, hacked from a wonderfully dirt-absorbent length of, I think, Kleenex, is loosely piled on the floor of the loft, being unable to stay on its hanger. It was, of course, cheap – less than four times as much as a similar article picked up in Savile Row when, due to a light shower in Piccadilly, the Hong Kong item started gripping my flesh with all the enthusiasm of an undernourished vampire – and this probably accounts for the way in which it was cut, since malformed Oriental dwarfs do not, I'm sure, carry much ready cash upon their persons. It's a wonderful conversation-piece, mind. People I'd known intimately for years suddenly began pointing out that they'd never realised I had one shoulder five inches lower than the other or that my inside leg measured fourteen inches. Osteopaths would approach me in the street and offer their services free in the interest of science.