Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  The Grahames’ westerly migration was the result of a new job for Cunningham. In the late spring of 1860, he was appointed sheriff-substitute for Argyll – a judge with responsibility for the county’s civil and criminal courts. In worldly terms, it was almost certainly a demotion for a man so recently among the rising stars of Edinburgh’s Parliament House. Inveraray’s remoteness, the more meagre distractions of the west coast and escape from the Grahames’ busy social life offered hope that Cunningham would avoid further downward spiralling, and in the short term this may indeed have been the case. He seems to have set about his new duties without regret for the legal life of the capital.

  Yet his state of mind was ambivalent. Kenneth remembered walks with his father along the loch shore. On good days Cunningham beguiled the minutes in storytelling, the children entranced, like Kenneth’s description in The Wind in the Willows of Mole’s first experience of the river, the bewitched Mole trotting along the banks ‘as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories’.27 At other times his father recited Longfellow.

  To Helen, Willie and Kenneth, Cunningham’s choice must have seemed appropriate:

  I remember the black wharves and the slips,

  And the sea-tides tossing free;

  And Spanish sailors with bearded lips

  And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

  And the magic of the sea.

  They did not know the poem’s title, ‘My Lost Youth’. Nor could a very young child, as Kenneth was, absorb the verses’ full poignancy or identify what it was that drew Cunningham to them – self-absorption, unhappiness or, possibly, straightforward poetic enjoyment. The poem’s refrain would become for Kenneth a mission statement: ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/ And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’ Like the poem’s narrator, for the rest of his life daydreaming Kenneth would conjure from air ‘islands that were the Hesperides/ Of all my boyish dreams.’

  Cunningham Grahame’s new posting brought the family within the orbit of George Campbell, 8th duke of Argyll. The shadow of the duke’s iron-grey Gothick castle hovered over Inveraray. At the end of the previous century his grandfather had rebuilt the small town. In the wake of Cunningham’s appointment, the duke offered him land on which to build a house, which Cunningham declined. The duke’s response, considered by locals surprisingly liberal, was an agreement early in 1862 that he himself would ‘build a large and handsome house for the Sheriff’.28

  It was completed the following year: a substantial granite building, the work of the duke’s architect George Devey. In the early stages of her fourth pregnancy, Bessie Grahame oversaw its furnishing; in the garden she planted cuttings of roses and white broom sent from her parents’ house at Lasswade in Midlothian. Only the roses flourished. Three years had passed since the Grahames’ departure from Edinburgh. For Kenneth, who was too young to remember that earlier life, there had been delights in the family’s lochside nomadism. The tang of sea kelp that spiked the salt air along the loch shore; a model wooden boat, The Canty Queen, given to him by its maker, Rory McGilp the fisherman; outdoor games with Bhodach and Cailliach the terriers, and a large black dog of unidentified breed called Don; sticky gingerbread sold in the children’s favourite of Ardrishaig’s shops; the cockatoo belonging to a Mrs Jenkins that shrieked from its cage at passers-by; nests of water voles, which Kenneth called ‘water rats’, along the banks of the Crinan Canal; ‘a splash of white foam over the brim/ Of a dusty pool… / A flood of ripples and sunlit spray’29; and ‘the ever recurrent throb of [the steamer’s] paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles, splash of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry and scurry’ of the pierside.30 Only some continued in Inveraray.

  In Inveraray, nursery life followed routines established by Ferguson in Castle Street and Ardrishaig. From the nursery windows, Helen, Willie and Kenneth gazed out over broad expanses of the loch, busy with boats and birds, the sounds of the water ever present. The garden was big enough for adventure, for secret places and solitariness. And downstairs, Cunningham and Bessie’s lives resumed something of their former buoyant roundelay. In the autumn, they were invited to dine at Inveraray Castle with the duke and duchess and the duke’s unmarried sister, Lady Emma. Bessie beguiled the duchess with her easy vivacity and good looks that corresponded nearly enough to contemporary ideals: dark hair, a limpid gaze, rosebud lips. The duke’s heir, Lord Lorne, expressed delight at meeting the twin sister of his Eton rowing hero, David Inglis. The following day, by invitation, Bessie returned to the Castle with Helen. Neither Helen nor the duke’s daughters appear to have taken pains to forge anything resembling friendly acquaintance. The duchess loaned Bessie one of the Castle’s gardeners – too late for the cuttings of white broom, which had died already.

  This ducal imprimatur marked the beginning of a new life for the Grahames. It proved of short duration. On 16 March 1864, Bessie gave birth to her third son. Within days, she had succumbed to scarlet fever. For a fortnight her life hung in the balance. She died on 4 April at the age of twenty-seven, and her last words, no more than a whisper, were the simple but affecting, ‘It’s all been so lovely.’

  • 2 •

  ‘Happy, heedless victims’

  ‘I LIKE BEST the wanderings of little George and his indomitable father on the open road with its ale-houses and toll-gates, over commons or on wayside strips of grass,’ wrote a wistful Kenneth Grahame late in life, in a preface he contributed to the life of circus impresario George Sanger.1 He last walked with his own father when he was five years old, listening to Longfellow on the banks of Loch Fyne.

  For some time Kenneth knew nothing of his mother’s death; he too fell victim to scarlet fever. Like Bessie, he oscillated for days between collapse and recovery. Cunningham’s mother sat at his bedside, summoned from Edinburgh, and distracted him with memories of her girlhood: the long, slow journey half a century earlier of the Edinburgh mail coach to London; the thrill of opening for the first time the latest novel by Walter Scott.

  ‘Why does a coming bereavement project no thin faint voice, no shadow of its woe to warn its happy, heedless victims?’ Kenneth wrote in 1898 in a story called ‘A Departure’.2 In 1864 he was too young for such thoughts. He had lost two parents at once. The death of his mother was the easier to comprehend. In its wake, despair, unhappiness and an unalterable self-pity overwhelmed his brooding father: so, too, an alcoholic torpor he was powerless to shrug off.

  Cunningham collapsed into angry befuddlement. As in 1860, the Grahames acted quickly. A family conference decided to remove Helen, Willie, Kenneth and baby Roland from their father’s doubtful care. They were sent to England with Ferguson the nurse, to their maternal grandmother and another new beginning on the green banks of the Thames – in Kenneth’s case, taking with him his kilt and a rubber ball bought en route in a toyshop in Stirling, the temporary comforter of this lost little child. Perhaps the station porter noticed his misery. Long afterwards he described a ‘good-natured’ railwayman, who tells a rhyme to a child boarding a train: ‘This is the tree that never grew, this is the bird that never flew; this is the fish that never swam, this is the bell that never rang.’3 The only evidence that Cunningham, punch-drunk with grief, resisted family diaspora is his request two years later that his motherless children return to him.

  For Kenneth and his siblings there were to be no more untroubled mornings of low mist across the loch, the swoop of gulls, the echoing percussion of boats at anchor or the thrum of steamers. No more would they hear soft Gaelic music in fishermen’s mouths, the coarse ribaldry of the fisher girls who threaded lug worms for bait onto hooks or emptied the cold, shining, stinking catch into baskets. For Kenneth the backdrop of cloud-shrugged hills would recede into a dim past, those shadowy slopes spotted with sturdy trees. Bar a single disastrous return to his father’s house in Inveraray and subsequent sojourns on the Continent, for the remainder of his life Ken
neth Grahame lived in England – a life of mostly conventional middle-class Englishness. ‘The gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, [a train] crept by headland and bay,’ were consigned to memory – or imagining.4

  Unconsulted, Helen, Willie, Kenneth and Roland acquired a new home. It lay in the Berkshire village of Cookham Dean, at the furthest reach of old Windsor Forest – as Kenneth described it, ‘King Alfred’s country, probably much as it was 1,000 years ago’, a ‘sequestered reach of the quiet Thames’.5 Surrounded by ‘crowding laurels’, copper beeches and ‘high-standing elms’, The Mount had grown with the centuries, a higgledy-piggledy house with leaded windows and half-timbering and its roof of clay tiles well weathered. Outside there were lily ponds, an orchard, rows of raspberry canes, meadow grass thick with buttercups.6 The garden was terraced over several levels. Beyond unfurled a broad ribbon of river, slowed by weirs and overhung by willow trees and alders – quite different from the sea-like expanse of Loch Fyne – and dense, dark, thickly carpeted Quarry Wood. How any of the children felt on arrival is matter for conjecture. Kenneth referred once to the child’s ‘readiness to welcome a perfect miracle at any hour of the day or night’.7

  The guardian chosen for the young Grahames was Bessie’s mother, Mary Inglis, a sternly competent widow of sixty encased in black silk moiré, autocratic in temperament, with the same hooded eyes and long, straight nose she had bequeathed her daughter; only the lines of her mouth had settled into a dour grimace. The youngest of her five sons, Bessie’s rowing twin David, newly appointed to the curacy of Cookham Dean, lived with her. His modest stipend failed to relieve her persistent anxiety about money.

  By family decree it was Cunningham’s brother John, another widower, who took financial responsibility for his nephews and niece. Like Mrs Inglis, John Grahame had left his native Scotland for the south of England and employment as a parliamentary agent; he became a partner in the firm of Grahame, Currie and Spens. In their different ways grandmother and uncle imbued the Grahames’ childhood with distinctively Scots values. Mrs Inglis’s Presbyterianism was of an unassertive variety; her kindness, Kenneth claimed, extended no further than ‘the needs of the flesh’ and he mistrusted lifelong ‘the shadow of Scotch-Calvinist devil-worship’.8 ‘I don’t suppose she could be described as a child lover,’ was Helen’s terse verdict.9 She was predictably strict over table manners. Her storytelling included folklore and Scottish ballads; the children surely missed their mother’s levity, her laughter like ‘an irreverent angel’.10 Instead, kindness was the province of David Inglis. He introduced the children to the river and, as Helen remembered, ‘made a great deal of us’; to Mrs Inglis’s matriarchal fiefdom he introduced the vicar of Cookham Dean, George Hewitt Hodson, a classicist and editor of a volume of letters from India – like the rector in Kenneth’s story ‘A Harvesting’, who ‘was alleged to have written a real book’.11 For his part, Uncle John Grahame took pains that liberality never overmastered prudence. With some bitterness Kenneth would identify indifference as the keynote of this stand-in parenting. He attributed it to stupidity.

  He responded by withdrawing into imaginary relationships and imaginary worlds. ‘Whenever a child is set down in a situation that is distasteful, out of harmony, jarring,’ his adult self theorized, ‘that very moment he begins without conscious effort to throw out and to build up an environment really suitable to his soul, and to transport himself thereto.’12 ‘Dreams are but re-action from life,’ he told an audience in 1921, ‘and the easiest, the most accessible form of healing re-action that there is.’13 As a result the influence on him of grandmother and uncles was less than that of The Mount itself. In his stubborn, floundering loneliness, the uneven old house, with its heavy wooden beams and broad hearths and gardens close to the river, exercised a kind of enchantment. Best of all was the attic. The children christened it the ‘Gallery’: large enough for games, distant from Mrs Inglis, a holiday world of misrule and topsy-turvydom.

  For the remainder of his life, The Mount set the perimeters for Kenneth’s dreaming. In the stories he published to considerable acclaim in The Golden Age and Dream Days, the memories he plundered are of this childhood home: the garden, the ‘Gallery’, the neighbouring village, fields and the river, their reality greater than the grief he never mentioned. These stories – for adults – relate episodes in the life of a family of five children: Edward, Selina, Charlotte, Harold and a narrator who is not named. The children have neither mother nor father, but inhabit a parentless house, in which authority is exercised by a repeatedly worsted camarilla of aunts and visiting uncles – mostly regarded by the narrator with disdain – and a governess who inspires more complex emotions. The children devote their leisure hours to vigorous play-acting or dreamy escapism. On his own, the narrator communes with nature ‘by instinct’, hearing ‘the grass-blades thrust and sprout’, or kneels on the hearthrug, ‘soft and wide, with the thickest of pile’, flicking greedily through picture books that thrill him ‘with a vision of blues and reds… pictures all highly coloured’ or, alternatively, images of ‘a tiger seized by a crocodile while drinking’.14 The adult Kenneth acknowledged an autobiographical aspect to these ‘fictions’.15 It was at The Mount that he became a doodler and a dreamer. There his fancy was ignited by the natural world of the garden and, beyond it, Quarry Wood and the Thames: there, like Rat in The Wind in the Willows, he became, as he would remain, ‘a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land’. At The Mount he learned that ‘if you lay down your nose an inch or two from the water, it was not long ere the old sense of proportion vanished clean away. The glittering insects that darted to and fro on its surface became sea-monsters dire, the gnats that hung above them swelled to albatrosses, and the pond itself stretched out into a vast inland sea’.16 At The Mount he dreamed, like ‘most other boys of my own age and period, the mighty mid-Victorian’, of longed-for presents, aligning his rootless orphaned childhood hankerings with those of his contemporaries. One dream recurred. ‘On some wonderful morning one would be awakened by the sound of a pawing and crunching of the gravel outside… one would spring from bed with beating heart, would fling wide the lattice-window and looking down would see on the carriage-drive a neatly attired groom holding the bridle of a peerless pony, a cream-coloured pony – it was always cream-coloured – with a long flowing tail (it always had a long flowing tail).’17 Of course that morning never came.

  Mrs Inglis was not at pains to staunch her grandchildren’s grief. Ferguson’s presence and a household of female servants notwithstanding, she was an old woman to take on the care of three small children and a baby. Her precarious financial position troubled her. With rigid logic John Grahame repeatedly urged upon her the soundness of leaving The Mount for somewhere smaller and more manageable. She had exerted herself in pulling strings wherever possible on her sons’ behalf: by the time of Bessie’s death, her energies were depleted. The Golden Age and Dream Days suggest that the children were cast on their own resources. In Kenneth’s case he burrowed ever deeper into that make-believe world more real and more compelling to him than the incomprehensible misery of parental loss and lovelessness, from which he never recovered: mentally he turned his back on a ‘life… so rough to him, so full of pricks and jogs, and smartings’.18 This solution was his own. Brisk, unimaginative Helen and gentler Willie, whose health was poor, were equally unhappy. All three were too young to help one another. ‘In moments of mental depression, nothing is quite so consoling as the honest smell of a painted animal,’ Kenneth offered later, recalling his attachment in childhood to his toys, a statement of bleak isolation.19 At first he had the rubber ball from the toyshop in Stirling. The kilt was quickly outgrown.

  The rudderless trauma underlying Kenneth’s childhood addiction to fantasy inspired his love of circuses and country fairs, with their invitation ‘in imagination to swim in golden lagoons and wander through parrot-haunted jungles’.20 Realms of spectacle and sensation, the
circus and the fair offered excitement and dramatic escape; both possessed the power to make him dizzy with happiness throughout his life. Emotions were mostly excluded from his adventure games, displaced by action, ‘excitement and mystery, curiosity and suspense’.21 The appeal of the circus was a superficial thing, plumbing no more depths than a pancake.

  And Kenneth’s springboard into happy unreality was consistently The Mount. Lacking mother or father, his sibling fellowship only partly congenial, at The Mount this thoughtful orphan did achieve a measure of febrile happiness. The golden interlude lasted two years. Until his death Kenneth remembered it, and his reactions to it, with absolute clarity. ‘I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner,’ he speculated in 1907. ‘I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain I used from four till about seven can never have altered… After that time I don’t remember anything particularly.’22

  The years of intensest feeling were those in his grandmother’s house in Cookham Dean, although Mrs Inglis herself impacts not at all on future reminiscence. His experiences at The Mount fixed a habit of engaging with places above people. Ever after, Kenneth’s recorded memories are dominated by descriptions of setting: landscape, townscape, buildings, nature. He approached the world from a position of self-containment, as a watchful observer, albeit not always a detached observer – like the protagonist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay ‘An Apology for Idlers’, which he read later: ‘As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils.’23 In Kenneth’s case the smile came and went, for there would be no return to The Mount.