Return To The Hundred Acre Wood

"Always be on the look out for the presence of wonder." E.B. White

(art by E.H. Shepard)

It was on this day in 1882 that the author A.A. Milne was born. He’s best known for writing the timeless Winnie-the-Pooh, which is filled with gentleness, whimsy and profound wisdom. These were stories that I first encountered when my Mother ushered me into the Hundred Acre Wood as she read them to me before bed. Like many, I instantly fell in love with these stories.

Years later, I would read them to my own sons.

During the Pandemic, like many, I found myself struggling to focus. Every novel I began, I didn’t finish. I had great difficulty finding pleasure in something I had always loved and it added to the dismay of being unable to do things like go on walks in the park or visit the local library. In desperation, I found myself taking my copy of The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh down from the shelf.

I opened to Chapter One entitled “In Which” subtitled: We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin. It’s always a bit startling to read and remember that his real name is Edward Bear. I loved how it begins with a dialogue between the narrator, most like a version of Milne himself, and a boy, Christoper Robin.

There is such a charm to these tales that I found myself at peace. It should be no surprise that it’s author created the Hundreds Acre Wood as an escape from the horrors he saw while fighting in World War I. As an officer, he saw sixty of his men killed in an instant and he, himself, was badly wounded in the ambush that he was invalided home.

It was from this trauma that he began what he would describe as a “welcome sanctuary from the horrors of the Western Front.” Both because of his own son, Christopher Robin, and his desire to return to the innocence of childhood, an idyllic and enchanted wood with a group of animals based on his child’s stuffed animals and set in a version of Ashdown Forest near his home in Sussex.