Halfway Down The Stairs (A.A. Milne in general)

Name: jillmurphy

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Product:	A.A. Milne in general
Date:	12/09/00 (182 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You don't have to sing.

Disadvantages: They don't sing.

A A Milne made his name BEFORE ‘Winnie the Pooh’ you know. A couple of years before the Bear with Little Brain found his way into print ‘When We Were Very Young’ took the nineteen-twenties bookshops by storm. It’s the first of two volumes of poems for children, the second being ‘Now We Are Six’.

Being completely tone-deaf and having the most dreadful singing voice that you’ve ever heard (truly) I love to recite poems to my children rather than attempt much in the way of songs, especially unaccompanied. I can do it on the bus, or at the park, or indeed anywhere, and no one laughs! Even poor old tuneless me can do rhythm!

Both these volumes of children’s poetry are absolute classics. I loved them when I was ‘Very Young’ and my own children love them now. They may be over seventy years old and as such sometimes reflect a bygone world full of anachronisms but somehow they capture the essence of childhood perfectly.

As all parents are doubtless painfully aware a child is the centre of his own universe. Galileo and Copernicus are irrelevancies to them – for a small girl or boy the sun, moon and stars certainly revolve around their earth! A A Milne captures this childish self-centredness perfectly.

To Christopher Robin the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace is all very well but all he wants to know is ‘Do you think the King knows about ME?’ Who cannot imagine that to be their own child’s reaction? My children certainly identify with it, it makes them laugh because they can see themselves and recognise the reactions and feelings.

The poems are long and short, funny and sad, musing and uplifting, but above all rhythmic and easy to read aloud. My family’s favourites are ‘Disobedience’ about James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree (it does scan and has to be the best name going) about a yo
ung boy whose mother is presumptuous enough to go for a walk without him, and ‘Halfway Down’. I’ll give you the first few lines:-

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other Stair
Quite like
It

Have your children got a favourite stair? Do they collect up their precious belongings; the dummy, the teddy, the blanket, and forget where they’re going halfway up and just sit? Have you watched through the crack in the door, amused and entranced at the same time? If they don’t do that I’ll bet they do something just like it. You’ll enjoy these poems as much as they will!

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