Is The Stepmother by A.A. Milne the shortest possible thing I could have chosen to start The 1920 Club off with? Very possibly and I love it for that; it means I was able to sneak something in on Sunday afternoon to start the week with. And it’s a suitable way to start: for me, this week is going to be devoted not just to 1920 but even more specifically to the works of A.A. Milne. 1920 fell during his most prolific period and, remarkably, I still have a few things left by him I haven’t read or reviewed yet, like this short one-act play.
The Stepmother premiered in November 1920, just a few days after the second anniversary of the armistice. The war’s legacy is felt in the story, which is brief and rather sentimental – far from the more substantial and far more polished works Milne premiered both the year before (Mr Pim Passes By) and the year after (The Dover Road). It’s a slight work and, yes, an inferior one but still enjoyable.
We open at the London home of Sir John Pembury, MP where a young man – the Stranger – has arrived and demanded to speak with Sir John. He will not give his name and refuses to say what his business is, insisting the butler tell Sir John only that “someone from Lambeth” is here to speak with him, confident Sir John will know what that means. The Stranger warrants one of Milne’s typically detailed introductory notes:
[The butler] has already placed him as “one of the lower classes,” but the intelligent person in the pit perceives that he is something better than that, though whether he is in the process of falling from a higher estate, or of rising to it, is not so clear. He is thirty odd, shabbily dressed (but then, so are most of us nowadays), and ill at ease; not because he is shabby, but because he is ashamed of himself. To make up for this, he adopts a blustering manner, as if to persuade himself that he is a fine fellow after all. There is a touch of commonness about his voice, but he is not uneducated.
With the butler gone to fetch Sir John, the Stranger is not left alone long before Lady Pembury comes in. She is, as Milne makes clear in another introductory note, just the right person for a disgruntled young man to meet:
In twenty-eight years of happy married life, she has mothered one husband and five daughters, but she has never had a son–her only sorrow. Her motto might be, “It is just as easy to be kind”; and whether you go to her for comfort or congratulation, you will come away feeling that she is the only person who really understands.
The Stranger quickly (it is a one-act play after all with an obvious title) quickly reveals his reason for coming. Lady Pembury, faced with the knowledge that not only does her husband have an illegitimate son whom he knew about but that this son, having lost his job, has now come to demand money, steels herself magnificently and in a few short moments mothers the boy in a way he has been missing since the death of his own mother two years before. Alone in the world and down on his luck, he has become something he is embarrassed by, pride destroyed to the point where he is preparing to blackmail his own father for money. Lady Pembury, she who has always wanted a son to mother, teases out the best parts of him, finding the man who wants to stand on his own, to take responsibility for himself and to one day present himself to his father not as a beggar but as a son to be accepted.
The Stranger’s meeting with Sir John is not at all the one he’d planned, in the end, and he goes off with a much-needed sense of optimism about the future. Lady Pembury, on the other hand, goes on with her life quietly and calmly but with its foundations shaken.
For a writer who was excelling at artful waffling – pages of his plays from this era consistent of charmingly light dialogue that bubbles along like champagne – this is a melancholy piece. It is sentimental and gives you hope that the young man will piece his life together, as so many young men were trying to do. He will do it alone and be honorable and keep his pride. But he will struggle, as he has been struggling for years, and the tiredness and loneliness will not leave him any time soon. In comparison, Lady Pembury’s disillusionment with her husband is mild but something, some innocence, has been taken from her as well.
