Where Is Baby Roo's Dad?

I didn't come into Winnie the Pooh till I was a young adult.  Yes, I had an impoverished childhood.  When I was a kid I think I saw one of the Disney versions, in a movie theatre, in grade five with my American cousins and aunt who was just divorcing her husband, their father and my uncle by marriage.  I found it treacly and insipid and was thus put off of Pooh until a friend introduced me to the actual books by A A Milne.

I was given the books and what a world reading them opened for me.  Eventually a favourite pastime of mine was, especially on a cold damp Sunday evening, making a batch of chocolate chip cookies (always with whole wheat flower, brown sugar and usually real butter), and I would eat them from a pretty vintage plate with a glass of milk, while reading Winnie the Pooh stories. 

They were wonderful.  The Pooh books as well as the cookies.  It was like being introduced to an English country village of the early Twentieth Century, peopled by stuffed animals and one honorary human child. 

I have often wondered after whom Mr. Milne has drawn his characters.  What kind of person would have inspired Winnie the Pooh?  I mean of course the human and not the Winnipeg zoo bear after which he was affectionately named by Milne's son, Christopher Robin, the real Christopher Robin.  Who would have been Eeyore?  Did he actually suffer from clinical depression?  Nowadays would he have been diagnosed and medicated?  Was he perhaps suicidal? And Piglet, the delightful little loquacious neurasthenic porcine.  Who might have been his human progenitor?  Owl might have been a beloved teacher or professor, and Rabbit some ridiculous village busybody.  Tigger must have had a human origin that was bipolar, or at least manic.

Which brings us to Kanga.  And Baby Roo.  How did a single mother get in the picture?  These stories were written in  1920 or so in Great Britain and single mothers who were not widows were not exactly popular as role models in popular literature.  She might be a widow.  She certainly comes across very proper and sensible.  She carries none of the edge or disdain or self-hatred of a fallen woman.  Nor of a rape survivor.

Perhaps she is a broken marsupial, abandoned by her only love but for little Roo the fruit of their passion and will carry forever hidden deep in her pouch the secret of their furtive and forbidden romance.