Ever since I was a child, I have loved the stories of Winnie the Pooh, the hapless yet courageous bear of very little brain, and his friends. I grew up reading Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and having them read to me, and like many people, the stories are so familiar to me that I feel a personal attachment to them (although I have never taken to the Disney films of their adventures; to me, they are a pale imitation of the original). I still consider the ending of The House at Pooh Corner to be one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful conclusions to a book ever written.
The true story behind Pooh and Christopher Robin is reasonably well known (and is shortly to be the subject of a new film, Goodbye Christopher Robin); in the 1920s, writer AA Milne wrote the tales based around his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and his toys, and his charming poems and adventures soon became world famous. The real 100 Acre Wood, where the stories are set, is Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, was also somewhere I was taken several times as a child, and have visited again as an adult. Even today, the locations from the books are all accessible, and most are immediately recognisable.
For me, the 100 Acre Wood remains an Enchanted Place, and the characters in the books are so fundamental a part of my childhood, that the realisation that, on my first visit to New York, I had walked within just a few feet of their current home without going to see them was a sad one. Returning to New York last December, however, I rectified this omission, and the experience was as moving and as magical as I could have hoped.
How the New York Public Library come to be the curators of some of English literature's most famous toys has, over the years, been a sometimes acrimonious one, and I have no desire to revisit the debate. When I visited them, in their own glass case in the New York Public Library Children's Center, they had only recently returned, having been beautifully restored. I had seen earlier pictures of the toys, and the patchwork nature of earlier restoration was all too painfully apparent. Now, the toys look like themselves, by which I mean that they look like the illustrations by EH Shepard (with the exception of Pooh, whose fictional likeness was based on Growler, the teddy bear owned by Shepard's own young son Graham), and my heart filled with joy at being in their presence.
My favourite of the animals from the stores was always Eeyore, the eternally pessimistic, gloomy grey donkey. My affection for him might be down to a beautiful audiobook of the stories that I owned as a child, read by Lionel Jeffries. Jeffries gave Eeyore a lugubrious baratone voice of noble desolation, making the donkey sound like a long-suffering yet ultimately self-aware observer of the actions of the other animals. In New York, I was delightfully surprised to discover that Eeyore, the real physical Eeyore, actually has a smile on his face. This is not immediately obvious, because of the downward tilt of his head, which doubtlessly suggests dejection, but if you peek up at him, you will find that, underneath it all, Eeyore is actually happy. This made me happier still.
Before I left New York, I visited the toys one more time, to bid them farewell. I feel pleased that I got to meet them, and that they are in the hands of people who have treated them to the very best of care, bringing them back to life, so they can be adored by more generations of fans.
