Martha Gill: Why a famous author’s son pooh-poohed his alter-ego

There is a mysterious and inconvenient alchemy in Hollywood that means movies on the same subject always come out at once. The zeitgeist moves unpredictably — irrationally — but cannot be withstood. And right now, the zeitgeist is Christopher Robin.

The boy with the pudding-bowl haircut has inspired two films of late. In the second, out on August 17, Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) has grown up in the mould of Robin Williams’s Peter Pan — that is, he has responsibilities, goes to work and takes work vaguely seriously.

During the film, as in Hook, characters from his childhood return to teach him a lesson about this — and by the end he has thrown off the bonds of adulthood and learned how to play with toy animals again, much to the secret mortification, one imagines, of his actual children.

The film has generally been received as a bit of harmless fun — except in China, where pudgy leader Xi Jinping has for some reason taken exception to pudgy Pooh bear, and banned it. However, if President Xi doesn’t like it, one can only imagine what the real Christopher Robin would make of the film.

That’s because the real Christopher Robin hated his father A A Milne’s books. He struggled his whole life to escape them. He did not yearn to go back to a forest of lisping toy animals, he was already trapped there — forever a child with a big imagination and an unflattering haircut, unable to do the one thing he wanted to do: grow up.

He first learned to hate them when he was sent to boarding school, where he was — unsurprisingly — bullied. The verse: “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”, caused his tormentors to be particularly unkind.

Later, struggling to carve a path through life — start a career, find love, discover an identity — he found he could not escape his namesake.

“It seemed to me,” the real Christopher Robin said bitterly, “almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.”

He had seemed to have just about come to terms with it by the time he was 60. “Believe it or not, I can look at those four books without flinching,” he told a journalist who was interviewing him about — who else? — Winnie-the- Pooh.

However, by that stage he had for many years cut himself off from his parents. When his father died, his mother lived for a further 15 years He saw her once.