Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  With its education ‘of the fine old crusted order, with all the classics in the top bin’, St Edward’s inspired Kenneth academically only as a means to an end – his determination, with school over, to remain in Oxford as an undergraduate.31 To the stately measure of Milton’s verse, for example, he responded in a spirit of daydreaming distractedness. His doodles in the margins of Paradise Lost included griffins and their traditional enemy, the one-eyed Scythians called Arimaspians. ‘What a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil!’ he wrote unrepentantly. As with his decorations of Macaulay’s Lays, doodles remained more firmly in his mind than anything he read: ‘And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful Gryphon.’32

  Instead what Kenneth learned at school was an ability to accommodate himself to prevailing mores, a knack of visible conformity and lip service to majority shibboleths that he would retain: later accounts all commend his solidness of character. So successful was he that he ended as head of school. He acquired a measure of sporting proficiency: captain of the rugby XV, secretary of the cricket 2nd XI. In October 1873, the year the school moved from crumbling Mackworth House to new buildings on Woodstock Road, the St Edward’s School Chronicle printed his prize-winning essay on the subject of rivalry, a cumbersome rehash of clichés about gentlemanly sportsmanship and Christian kindness, in which he commended ‘one of the chief duties of a Christian, to love one another’ and the importance of ‘contest[ing] with good nature and pleasantness’. Anonymously he submitted livelier, wittier contributions. In the Debating Society he was contrivedly outspoken. There was nothing to choose between Mary I and Elizabeth I, he offered, since ‘one was a bigoted Catholic, the other a spiteful Protestant’.33 He won the sixth form class prize. He won prizes for Latin and divinity, though the school’s vigorous Christianity made no more impression than nursery prayers, with the soppy angels he dismissed as ‘anaemic, night-gowned nonentities that hovered over the bed of the Sunday-school child in the pages of the Sabbath Improver’; he referred to the ‘too familiar dowdiness of common places of worship’.34 He attributed to his time at St Edward’s the ‘pagan germ’ he explored in the rural pantheism of The Wind in the Willows.

  Kenneth left behind no record of his feelings on leaving school: much later he referred to ‘that far-away glow (mingled with self-satisfaction) which I used to feel when I won a prize at school’.35 He could be forgiven a degree of complacency. His career had outstripped that of his classmates. Reasonably he could claim that he had repaid Uncle John Grahame’s modest investment in him. Optimistically he looked to the future and the dream of three more years in Oxford as an undergraduate that had become his lodestar.

  It was not to be. John Grahame’s plans were quite different. His decision about Kenneth’s future countered every assumption his portionless nephew had made. There would be consternation, stinging words – and disappointment from which Kenneth never recovered fully. ‘Bitter it is to stumble out of an opalescent dream into the cold daylight,’ he stated feelingly.36 Later he described ‘schoolboy hopes… comically misshapen, tawdry and crude in colour’. In the same essay his tone is equivocal. ‘Let the pit receive them, and a good riddance!… Let them go. Who cares?… It is time to have done with fancies and get back to a world of facts. If only one could!’37 Kenneth Grahame’s expulsion from Oxford at the hands of his sensible, practical Scottish uncle proved a turning point in his life.

  • 4 •

  ‘The huge world that roars hard by’

  WILLIE GRAHAME DIED on the last day of 1874 of pneumonia brought on by bronchial fever. He was sixteen. For Kenneth, it was one more instance of the impermanence of bonds of love and the fragility of family.

  His childhood had been shaped by severed relationships: he had lost mother, father and now the sibling closest to him in age. In addition, during his time at St Edward’s, Ferguson left Fern Hill Cottage for a situation nearby with a couple called Lidderdale, the daughter and son-in-law of a friend of Mrs Inglis. More than anyone, Ferguson had occupied a parent’s role for the Grahame children and invested their upbringing with permanence and continuity. By the time Kenneth left school in the summer of 1875, of the household briefly in the sheriff’s house in Inveraray only he, Helen and Roland remained. Helen Grahame had grown into a difficult, exacting young woman, all corners and hard edges. The relationship of brother and sister included its tensions.

  Kenneth had no means of rebutting Uncle John Grahame’s devastating decision that in place of university he should find employment as soon as possible. Mrs Inglis lived in straitened circumstances: she could offer her grandson no financial assistance, even had she wished to, which is by no means evident. Kenneth was aware of the extent of his dependency. His was a mindset of its time, in which the duty of children towards their elders was a potent force for compliance. Certainly he challenged his uncle. In the face of implacable opposition on the part of this hard-headed Calvinist, Kenneth gave way, as he knew he must.

  A decade before, a family council had determined the fate of Bessie Grahame’s four motherless children. In 1875, Kenneth’s future was decided by the combined efforts of three uncles and his grandmother. It was almost certainly David Inglis’s well-meant suggestion that the children continue to visit Ferguson at Ascot Place, which brought Kenneth into contact with his nurse’s new employer William Lidderdale – a director, and future governor, of the Bank of England. At some point either Uncle David or Mrs Inglis consulted William Lidderdale about Kenneth’s future; Kenneth’s quarrel with his favourite uncle many years later probably had its roots in this particular undertaking.1 Their enquiries elicited an offer of a position at the bank as ‘gentleman clerk’, as soon as the waiting list permitted. For John Grahame it was the very solution to his dilemma, and he seized upon it. To make good the wait, he offered Kenneth interim employment in the Westminster office of Grahame, Currie and Spens. A third uncle, Robert Grahame, provided accommodation. Draycott Lodge – afterwards home to the pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt – was a large, old-fashioned, pale-stuccoed villa, with tall windows and urns along the parapet, in still-leafy Fulham. John Grahame also extended a fortnightly invitation to dine in Sussex Gardens on alternate Sundays. Kenneth accepted job, waiting list, new home and invitation. With no alternative he accepted his role as ‘palefaced quilldriver’.2 His uncles’ combined efforts had penned him within the family fold, an assertion of Grahame values of respectability, solvency, sobriety. On the surface his childhood was over. In a society that made no concessions to adolescence, at Grahame, Currie and Spens, and despite his overwhelming inexperience, Kenneth would be expected to conduct himself as an adult.

  After his death, Kenneth’s widow claimed that he was ‘always too big for less than a philosophical view of life’: his reading at school or shortly after of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, sweetened his acquiescence in this avuncular legerdemain concerning his future.3 He frequently cited the Roman’s maxims, his emphasis on ‘mental tranquillity, in which alone… lieth the perfection of moral character’.4 In his published essays Kenneth included quotations from the Meditations, including, in ‘The Romance of the Road’, this striking statement of outward acceptance: ‘A man ought to be seen by the gods neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.’5 An essay called ‘Justifiable Homicide’ indicates that his own efforts were only partly successful. The essay celebrates an unnamed subject who forestalls the urge to complain by murdering family members. It includes its portion of what looks like wishful thinking. ‘Uncles were his special line – (he had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an orphan)… He possessed (at the beginning of his career) a large number of these connections, and… he always protested (and I believed him) that [pecuniary] gain with him was a secondary consideration.’6 In a story called ‘Dies Irae’, written long after disappointment cooled, resignation tempers equanim
ity: ‘Life may be said to be composed of things that come off and things that don’t come off.’7

  Advocacy and accountancy had occupied generations of Grahame men: nothing in the prospect of becoming a gentleman clerk at the Bank of England appealed to sixteen-year-old Kenneth. Although too young to understand it fully, he had witnessed his father’s failure in the Argyll judiciary. It was clear to Kenneth, nevertheless, that his own affinities with Cunningham and even Sepulchral Grahame, whom he had not read, were closer than any kinship he felt with steady, sensible, pinchpenny Uncle John. Yet rebellion was impossible. As instinctively conservative as his uncle, Kenneth acknowledged the debt of respect and obedience he owed him. He attributed John Grahame’s opposition to miserliness and was correspondingly angry, but he never seriously considered rejecting his decision. Kenneth’s habit of withdrawal from ugly realities – escape into his ‘fourth dimension’ of imagination, ‘this blessed faculty of… a water-tight skin – nay, an armour plating’ – was already well developed, his chief emotional defence.8 With no money of his own and no word from Cunningham Grahame in a decade, he was financially reliant on the uncle with whom he was so badly out of sympathy. His writing suggests that ‘the herb called self-heal’ – of which he claimed he had ‘always a shred or two in his wallet’ – offered sustenance of sorts.9

  He internalized disappointment and revolt. The nature of his feelings emerges in the following decade in the preoccupation in his writing with ideas of avoidance and escape. The university retained its siren allure for Kenneth, but he was entirely powerless to turn dream into reality. In The Wind in the Willows, the seafaring rat encourages Rat to run away: ‘“Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!”’10 In Rat’s case, Mole intervenes to stop him. In Kenneth’s case, adventure was snatched from his grasp: the door that banged behind him excluded him from the Oxford of his youthful fantasies, with its Gothic spires and calling jackdaws and the slow-moving river he had chartered in a borrowed canoe. Again Kenneth found himself expelled from a private Eden, Uncle John Grahame once more the architect of his unhappiness. ‘As a rule… grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek,’ he wrote, bitterly rational, in 1893.11

  In the autumn of 1875, he departed Cranbourne for London, distant again from the siblings who were his nearest emotional anchor, and entirely friendless. His feelings are not too difficult to conceive.

  *

  Over time Kenneth’s dislike of London grew. In his sixties, he would claim that the ideal London was that sketched by Daisy Ashford in The Young Visiters, ‘mainly a compound of the Crystal Palace’ – which Kenneth loved and visited repeatedly – ‘and the private apartments at Hampton Court, lightly tricked out with an hotel, a hansom-cab and a policeman’.12 His mistrust of urban life, with its squalor and poverty and the sooty drudgery of mechanization, was a commonplace of the age: it inspired, among others, William Morris and his vision of a rural paradise. Kenneth’s response, characteristically, was not a craving for reform but detachment and a longing for absence. Among his jottings from his first years in the capital was a single stanza of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Lines Written in Kensington Garden’:

  In the huge world, which roars hard by,

  Be others happy if they can!

  But in my helpless cradle I

  Was breathed on by the rural Pan.13

  Later he borrowed from Arnold’s verse the title of an essay, ‘The Rural Pan’, in which he explored a schism between man and nature that he attributed to industrialization and the growth of towns. He described first exposure to London, ‘the clatter and roar of its ceaseless wheels’, as ‘portentous, terrifying, nay, not to be endured’.14

  He found crumbs of comfort at Draycott Lodge. A generation earlier, market gardens, nut trees and fruit growing had dominated swathes of Fulham, Kensington and Earl’s Court. In Uncle Robert Grahame’s house, whispers of this semi-rural past lingered. Robert’s wife Georgina shared Kenneth’s engagement with landscape. The couple had lived until recently in Manila; they leased ‘a little old farm-house’ in Italy. Georgina Grahame’s descriptions of her garden at the Villino Landau near Florence, published anonymously in In a Tuscan Garden in 1902, are sensuously picturesque. Kenneth walked to the offices of Grahame, Currie and Spens along the banks of the Thames or through the crowded, shabby streets of Soho, where, like Georgina Grahame’s Tuscan reminiscences, cheap Italian restaurants hinted at the rich, earthy, pungent pleasures of the South, inveigling Kenneth into solitary suppers and another line of escapist reverie. He made detours via Trafalgar Square to the National Gallery, attracted by ‘a little “St Catherine” by Pinturicchio that possessed my undivided affections’, a picture hung so low on the gallery walls ‘that those who would worship’ – Kenneth among them – ‘must grovel’.15 He looked at paintings by father and son Filippo and Filippino Lippi and the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece attributed to Fra Angelico, influenced in his appreciation by John Ruskin’s writing on Italian Primitives. He recycled the experience in ‘The Iniquity of Oblivion’, his story of a stockbroker ‘steeping his soul’ in early Italian art and exchanging commercial London for ‘the full sunlight that steeps the Lombard plain’.16 In the square outside the gallery Kenneth delighted in the street artist ‘portraying [in chalks] with passionate absorption, the half of a salmon on a plate; with special attention to the flesh-tints at the divided part’. Contentedly he watched the flocks of ‘pigeons flash and circle, joyous as if they sped their morris over some remote little farmstead, lapped round by quiet hills… the sunlight fall[ing] off their wings in glancing drops of opal sheen’.17 His descriptions reduce the life of the city to a series of vivid magic lantern slides. Kenneth is an observer. He admires the spectacle that he edits visually, even as he watches it, and his chief admiration is reserved for reflections of the country.

  Also in Draycott Lodge lived Robert and Georgina Grahame’s only daughter Annie. Close in age, the cousins would gradually become friends, hampered at first by Kenneth’s diffidence and reserve and his absences from Fulham during working hours, but drawn together by shared interests. In June 1877, at Kenneth’s suggestion, both became members of the New Shakspere Society (sic). Three months later, they holidayed in Pitlochry with Uncle John Grahame, his children Agnes and Walter, and Helen and Roland. Annie ‘had been reared on old Scotch ballads and stories and folklore’, the very stuff of Mrs Inglis’s mothering. In Pitlochry, as summer gave way to autumn’s shortening days, ballads and stories and folklore played their part in the fireside home entertainment these mid-Victorians relished. This ‘appealed to Kenneth’, Annie remembered, as indeed it would.18 ‘Later on at any rate [it] formed a bond of union between us,’ she added, vague about the nature of that union. All his life Kenneth appreciated the colour and vim of fairy tales: their turbulent narratives preserved a connection with that vibrant world of boyhood he would not relinquish. In Pitlochry, in the stuccoed villa in Fulham, in the soot and grime of London, Annie’s Scottish stories, complete with fairies and magic, recalled Kenneth to his west coast infancy and the trouble-free years on the banks of Loch Fyne before his mother’s death and the awful shadow of his father’s weakness; they forged a link with the best years at The Mount and his grandmother’s storytelling.

  On a young man in imaginative retreat from disappointment, Annie’s Scottish folklore doubtless made a strong impression. Communicated much later to Kenneth’s first biographer, Patrick Chalmers, Annie’s memories seem to point to affection between the cousins, and it is possible that, at Draycott Lodge, chastely and tentatively, Annie Grahame became Kenneth’s first love. Suggestively, Kenneth’s widow Elspeth excluded any mention of Annie from Chalmers’s biography written during her own lifetime.19 For her part, Annie never married. Meanwhile Kenneth inventoried the onset of love in c
onventional fashion. His description reveals no more than a generalized familiarity with the tremors of obsession: ‘There is the first sight of the Object, accompanied by a catching of the breath, a trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a habit of melancholy in secret places.’20

  With apparent equanimity, Kenneth applied himself to office life. The exact nature of his work at Grahame, Currie and Spens was vague, even to his family. Outside the office, he began teaching himself shorthand. Uncle John Grahame commended his diligence as ‘pluck and steadiness’ and discouraged the shorthand. Inspired by office talk of politics and politicians, Kenneth briefly aspired to political journalism. John Grahame scented danger. He suggested the equivalent of the Territorial Army. Once again Kenneth did not demur. He joined a recently formed volunteer infantry regiment, the London Scottish. Drill, boxing and fencing took the place of shorthand. St Edward’s had served to institutionalize him. It would be a mistake to consider this sort of toy-soldiering anathema to him, but in the surviving photograph of Kenneth in his London Scottish uniform, his expression is more than usually guarded, his recoil from the camera more than usually striking.