Winkling out Winnie the Pooh

“Kate will love it. I will love it! We can see the actual locations she has read about!”
Truth be told, Winnie the Pooh was an adult enthusiasm I had come to recently, with my daughter. As a boy, I knew nothing of Christopher Robin or, for that matter, the Railway Children, or Billy Bunter or the Famous Five, or Just William, or Narnia, or Mister Toad and the other river bankers. In fact, I hardly knew any children’s books at all.
My parents bought me toys and I had lots of stuffed animals, but books rarely made it onto my list. After baby books, I didn’t know interesting kids books existed and I don’t think my parents did either. Yet all the books I read to Kate were in the library at my old school, and at the children’s public library in Dagenham. All I needed was a library card. And to get a library card, all I had to do was recite the alphabet. Easy peasy. Anyone could do that. Anyone, that is, except me. Absurdly, I always fumbled the test. The annoying thing was, by the time I was seven, I could read quite well but still could not memorize the alphabet.
I took the test every other week, and every other week I failed. Finally it happened. Despite a few pauses and the odd stutter or two, I made it through to zed and got my library card. I was ten years old by then, and too old for whimsical tales of river creatures and bears with a fondness for hunny. So, along with Kate, I had recently discovered a pantheon of children’s literature. I loved those stories as much as she did. And now, on a sunny Sunday in June, we had a chance to visit Pooh Corner, find the Enchanted Place. Quite impossible to pass up.

For whom the school bell tolls

“You weren’t much for school,” said Lew.
“Out when I was fifteen.”
“Not much older than when I left school.”
“You didn’t want me to stay on,” I said, wanting to know why.
“Wasn’t like that in my day. I got this lovely job, I did, at a bank. On account of me being tall. They gave me a uniform, with a lovely thick overcoat. And all I had to do was stand outside. But Mum found me another job that paid sixpence more a week. So that was that. I had to give up my job at the bank and give back that overcoat, all for sixpence more a week.”
“You could’ve said no,” I said.
“No? Naaaw! Didn’t say ‘no’ in those days. What your mother told you to do, you did. Gawd help you if you didn’t.”
“I never did what you wanted me to.” I said.
“You passed that exam, you got in the print. You did what I wanted you to do.”
“I think I really wanted to stay on at school.”
“Well, you weren’t much for it. Told you at the time. You weren’t good at maths.”
“Not much cop at algebra. Physics. The teachers...they weren’t bothered.”
“Gawd’s truth! You should’ve seen the teacher we ‘ad. The headmaster tried to cane me once. I broke his cane for him. Got me expelled. But,” Lew said expansively, “I was leaving anyway—”

Variation on an East End symphony

My elementary school did have something the Weald schoolroom did not possess. Electrical equipment! Once a week, two teachers wheeled in a large gray box covered in stretched cloth. In the box was a gramophone – without a wind-up handle! Through this mysterious contraption, we heard Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Of course, I did not know it was Britten at the time. I found out years later, when I heard it again, without the school version’s patronizing narration. Back then, the energy and excitement of the music was lost on us. We stared into space, trying to fathom why our teachers were so happy. They beamed at each other, rocked back and forth on their feet, and nodded sagely over something or other. One teacher conducted an imaginary orchestra with his hands in his trouser pockets. A little provocative, even to our innocent eyes. Occasionally, and with less gyrations, he conducted by gripping the lapels of his tweed sports jacket; then only his folded arms would flap about, like stunted wings. He tried hard not to betray the passion he so fervently felt and we hopelessly lacked.