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– HAPPY HALF-HOURS – – a phrase that was coined by H. G. Wells, who sometimes played for the same cricket team as Milne. The Great War did not end all wars. But he learned that early on. In The Honour of Your Country he said that after the Somme ‘all the talk in the Mess was of afterthe-war’. He goes on to describe a conversation with a colonel whose ‘idea of Reconstruction included a large army of conscripts’. The more Milne debates with him the more it becomes clear that nothing that happened on the Somme discredited the idea of war as a tool of diplomacy. The wittier Milne’s responses become, the more obvious it is that war will continue to be part of the way we do things. That cricket team he was in with Wells also included – at various times – J. M. Barrie, Kipling, Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, and G. K. Chesterton. It was Barrie who formed the team and named it the Allahakbarries, thinking he was playing with a phrase that meant ‘God Help Us’ – because he himself was such a bad player. So bad, in fact, that he banned the team from warming up at away grounds because the sight of them in action would only add to the opposition’s confidence. In fact the phrase means ‘God is Great’ as you’ll know from its appearance in various terrorist atrocities. The kind of violence Milne had witnessed does not go away. In fact, Milne’s ‘after-the-war’ was a streak of enormous luck. Despite seeing active and highly dangerous service as a signals officer, his later posting – on the xii
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– Introduction – Isle of Wight – somehow left him time to start writing plays. His first was for the children of his colonel. He wanted to give them something amusing ‘at a time when life was not very amusing’. Which is a decent enough mission for any writer. Certainly a better one than stirring up jingoistic sentiment (Milne’s definition of a patriot was, someone who accuses other people of being unpatriotic). He moved away from Punch, ready to hit the West End running. As a successful playwright he would often earn £500 a week at a time when the average wage was about £4. He’d been lucky and he knew it. The American edition of his auto­biography was actually called What Luck. The sense of being lucky gives the pieces he wrote about domestic life – about sorting out his books or redecorating the bathroom – the glow of unstated gratitude. He was lucky to have books to sort out. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have got through the war without ever having to fire a shot in anger. Lucky therefore not to have had to compromise his pacificism. Luck carries with it a sense of responsibility. Lucky survivors often feel they’ve been saved for some great purpose, or at least that they should make the most of their opportunity. You can sense this in how hard Milne worked to give those pieces their hospitable ease. Nothing is harder than making things look easy. If you read ‘On Writing for Children’ you’ll see he had no patience for any writer who was ‘not bothering’. Of a poem that was then a nursery favourite – xiii

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– HAPPY HALF-HOURS –

– a phrase that was coined by H. G. Wells, who sometimes played for the same cricket team as Milne. The Great War did not end all wars. But he learned that early on. In The Honour of Your Country he said that after the Somme ‘all the talk in the Mess was of afterthe-war’. He goes on to describe a conversation with a colonel whose ‘idea of Reconstruction included a large army of conscripts’. The more Milne debates with him the more it becomes clear that nothing that happened on the Somme discredited the idea of war as a tool of diplomacy. The wittier Milne’s responses become, the more obvious it is that war will continue to be part of the way we do things.

That cricket team he was in with Wells also included – at various times – J. M. Barrie, Kipling, Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, and G. K. Chesterton. It was Barrie who formed the team and named it the Allahakbarries, thinking he was playing with a phrase that meant ‘God Help Us’ – because he himself was such a bad player. So bad, in fact, that he banned the team from warming up at away grounds because the sight of them in action would only add to the opposition’s confidence. In fact the phrase means ‘God is Great’ as you’ll know from its appearance in various terrorist atrocities. The kind of violence Milne had witnessed does not go away.

In fact, Milne’s ‘after-the-war’ was a streak of enormous luck. Despite seeing active and highly dangerous service as a signals officer, his later posting – on the xii

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