Scriptwriters love to feast on the lives of children’s authors. The themes tend not to vary: they may have brought happiness to millions of children but their stories — sob — were fertilised by unhappiness. Saving Mr Banks: Mary Poppins author was a bossy shrew because her alcoholic father died young. Miss Potter: Peter Rabbit creator never found love. Finding Neverland: Peter Pan playwright cheered up grieving family. Enid (made for BBC Four): Miss Blyton was a monster traumatised by her upbringing.
And so it will presumably go on. We can probably not expect a family film about Charles Dodgson taking cute snaps of little Alice Liddell, but one day, years from now, skint single mother Jo Rowling, played by an as yet unborn actress, will chew once again on a Biro in an Edinburgh café and conjure magic. For now, there’s Goodbye Christopher Robin.
It’s the same sort of story. In this iteration, A.A. Milne was a cold father defrosted by his young son’s imagination, but whose tales and poems would eventually make the boy’s life a misery. Dark shadows presage naught but ill from the start. In 1941 a long-faced postwoman delivers a brown envelope to the Milnes’ leafy cottage in Sussex, which can mean only one thing. We duly flash back to the Somme, the bad show which convinces shellshocked playwright Alan Milne that no good can come of conflict.
‘Blue’ by nickname, blue by nature, Milne flinches when corks or balloons go pop. Then his wife Daphne (whose actual name was Dorothy) gives birth to little Christopher Robin, whom they call Billy Moon because he can’t pronounce his surname. They’re not the best of parents, but back then who was? Milne carries the infant as if he’s a tea tray, and Daphne styles the boy in girly smocks and a Louise Brooks bob before handing him over to Nanny (aka Noo) for years and years.
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