Books Without Covers: Stories My Kids Loved to Pieces
MISSY ANDREWS | November 18, 2024
The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne, with Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard
Those who visit the Andrews’ family library may find themselves somewhat disappointed. Few first-edition, signed copies of the great works of the Western canon grace our shelves. Though our bookshelves burgeon with classics, our books bespeak a different kind of collection. Many were gathered painstakingly by treasure hunting at used bookstores, thrift stores, and garage sales. Some were gifts from friends and family. Others were acquired through liquidation sales at public libraries. Tattered and torn, the Andrews Library houses books our family has discovered, shared, read, and re-read through the changing years and seasons of our lives.
In truth, the stories nestled between the covers of these books are not the only tales this collection of tomes can tell. Inscribed on their very corpuses are the stories of my family – the fingerprints of my children, who have touched them and been touched by them. Their broken spines and dog-eared pages, each mark left by a loving reader, divulge their many fabled lives. This one still curls a bit from that time that Ian rolled it up and shoved it in his pocket to climb the tall pine on our hillside, up to the crook of the big, cradling branch, his favorite place to read and dream, the valley below him and the lake beyond. That one falls open naturally to the poem Charlie loved best; when I see it, his delighted smile and his bright eyes, dancing in time with the verse’s musical meter, peer up at me:
John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof Mackintosh—
And that
(Said John)
Is
That. (356)
I read such “Happiness” there. Still another book bears that coffee stain from the day that Aaron surprised me from behind while I read for class, my annotations merging with the coffee that clarified the thoughts I poured into the margins of the page.
These books keep more than the stories of their authors. They keep the history of our family journeys— our relational journeys and our intellectual journeys. They mark the seasons and the changes through which we have traveled better than scrapbooks or photo albums.
Among them, the most blighted eyesores of the bunch are those most cherished. Their tattered appearance testifies to the high regard in which our brood has held them. They are “Books Without Covers; Books My Children Have Loved to Pieces.”
In this repeating blog series, I’ll visit them in turn, giving them the honor their beleaguered faces might not engender. Here, they’ll receive their rightful due.
This week, it’s the works of A. A. Milne, master and creator of The Complete Tales & Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh, with delightful decorations by the notable illustrator Ernest H. Shepard. Our family plowed through two separate copies of this collection. The first copy was consumed so completely by our children that in time, it could no longer hold together. Its binding succumbed to little hands that pressed and pulled it into comfortable shapes for reading in bed or reclining on sofas or “sharing” aloud with siblings. Its replacement, I fear, has fared little better. When I finger it, it falls open to Pooh’s “Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others”:
The More it snows
(Tiddly pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddly pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddly pom),
On snowing.
And nobody knows
(Tiddly pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddly pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddly pom),
Are growing. (168)
As I read this, I imagine my own children, pondering the snow that fell outside our living room window and inching ever closer to the fire to warm their own small toes.
Another page, pulled clean out and tucked into the center of the volume, sings, “The King’s Breakfast”:
The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
“Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?”
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, “Certainly,
I’ll go and tell
The cow
Now
Before she goes to bed.” (405)
As I read this, I feel the gentle pressure of my children still, leaning in to see the pictures, one on either side of me, two crowding on my lap, and two more perched on the sofa back looking over my shoulder, wondering what marmalade must be and how it would taste on truly Royal bread. Can we bake some? Make some? Have it for tea? Please, Mommy, please?
Another dog-eared page asks:
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s crying with all her might and main,
And she won’t eat her dinner—
rice pudding again—
What is the matter with Mary Jane? (398)
I imagine the wonder of my own dear ones, surprised by recognition and strangely comforted by Mary Jane’s perversity and the very real question of its source. “What is the matter” indeed?
On another page, I see my Calvin, his boyhood mirrored in Milne’s caricatured James, stern concern on his face and pudgy hand grasping mine, asking where I was going and when I’d return:
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,
If you don’t go down with me.”
Like James, Calvin practiced his protective masculine instincts with me for years before maturing to forge his own life of service to community and family. Childishly expressed impulses yield bountiful harvests when nurtured to maturity.
Yet another page recalls my daughters, Megan and Molly Kate, poring over these pages, rapt in wonder over “Daffodowndilly,” who, though she neither toils nor spins, wears a most lovely dress and bonnet:
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
“Winter is dead.” (380)
Ghosts of the past parade across the well-worn pages of this book, divulging an influence that helped to shape my young family.
My children have fledged now, grown to pursue their own lives and build their own nests. Christopher Robin anticipates his own such passage in the final pages of The House at Pooh Corner. Growing thoughtful about this transition, he shyly asks Pooh to please stay in the Hundred Acre Wood when he can himself no longer roam about, doing Nothing with the bear:
Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out “Pooh!”
“Yes?” said Pooh.
“When I’m—when—Pooh!”
“Yes, Christopher Robin?”
“I’m not going to do Nothing any more.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
“Yes, Christopher Robin?” said Pooh hopefully.
“Pooh, when I’m—you know—when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?”
“Just Me?”
“Yes, Pooh.”
“Will you be here too?”
“Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh.”
“That’s good,” said Pooh. (342)
As I thumb through these well-read pages, I find Pooh has kept his promise; he remains in the pages of Milne’s story. In a very real way, young Christopher has kept his promise, too. There, in the forested pages of the Hundred Acre Wood, his childhood is preserved. There, among Pooh and his friends, he will ever find the freedom, the wonder, and the joyful companions of his childhood romps. Milne’s stories and verses house a World, a Season, a Boy, an Ideal.
Moreover, the publication of Milne’s stories in 1924 opened Christopher’s Hundred Acre Wood to generations of children, whose own childhoods are hosted by these friends in this wonder-filled place. Though the world eventually requires that all leave the imaginative playground of childhood, Pooh remains at his post in the forest for them too.
“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.”
Pooh thought for a little.
“How old shall I be then?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Pooh nodded.
“I promise, he said.”
Indeed, 100 years after the initial publication of the first of Milne’s stories, Pooh and his friends remain, as promised. There, “…in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing” (344).
Likewise, this coverless book, shabby and worn, will keep a place of honor in the Andrews Family Library, in memory not only of Milne and his boy, but of my children — of the multitude of children — who have loved their stories. The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh guard within its pages the fleeting hours of childhood itself. Thank you, A. A. Milne.