The only person I’ve ever come across who didn’t like Pooh
“And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”
The poet in Parker particularly objected to Pooh’s “cadenced whimsy”, as in:
” And nobody
Knows-tiddely-pom
How cold my
Toes-tiddely-pom
How cold my
Toes-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing ”
Of course everyone else who has grown up in this world since 1928 has moments when they identify only too strongly with “The Bear of Little Brain”. As I go through life, I still meet gloomy characters, and think “Oh, You Eeyore.” Somebody with annoying ammounts of energy and bounce will always be “Tiggerish” , and those who think they know more than they really do will be “Wols”. There are many English mothers up to this very day who are just like Kanga.
Pooh was perhaps the very first Storynory. The author AA Milne read stories from “The House at Pooh Corner” for the BBC around Christmas 1928. But for me, and I suppose for many people, the only real reader of Pooh will be my own parent, in my case, my father, who used to read Pooh stories to me when I was very small. It’s the memory of my father reading “Pooh”, “The Wind in the Willows”, “Kidnapped”, and other stories that convinces me to this day that there is something very special about story telling. Reading is terribly important, but so is an appreciation of the spoken word. Some stories are meant to be told.
