IN MAY 1911, Mouse ‘made the great plunge’.1 Two years later than Kenneth, he embarked on boarding school life.
The Old Malthouse was at Langton Matravers, ‘a nice place in Dorsetshire, near the coast, with beautiful bathing and surroundings’, a new school run by Rex Corbett who, in 1903, had captained the England football team.2 From experience Kenneth knew enough of boys’ schools to be apprehensive on Mouse’s behalf. At first his fears proved groundless. Used to protracted separations from his parents, Mouse settled quickly. Despite Corbett’s own sporting prowess, the school was not excessively hearty and Mrs Corbett was a benign, motherly figure. As at every previous juncture of his life, Kenneth and Elspeth did not press to see Mouse often. A month after term began, he wrote to his parents that ‘nearly every boy in the school is going home for the corination [sic] [of George V on 22 June 1911] so there will be only 5 left here including myself.’3 If it was a request that they take him away, it fell on deaf ears. Instead Kenneth contributed to the cost of Blewbury’s coronation decorations and lamented that ‘owing to the coronation… all the village fetes and fairs have been fixed for as late in the summer as possible, to give us a chance of saving a few more pennies for shows and roundabouts’.4 Mouse’s reward was to be a summer at home of sweltering heat, two months without rain and ‘crops burnt to a fierce tawny red’.5
Before term began, Kenneth and Elspeth had taken him to Cornwall. Over a number of weeks they visited the Lizard, then Fowey. The idea was Kenneth’s. ‘I want Mouse to make the acquaintance of my Cornish haunts, and friends, before he goes to school – then he may like to go back there,’ he explained.6 Kenneth’s letters offer no indication that he any longer associated Cornwall with his wedding to Elspeth. His concern was to introduce Mouse to Rat’s joy of ‘messing about in boats’. He wanted him to meet Atky and Q, and Q’s son Bevill, at the age of eight page boy at Kenneth and Elspeth’s wedding, known as ‘The Boy’, an archetype of handsome, affable, athletic young manhood, an unrealistic object of emulation for the clumsy, short-sighted Mouse. Atky’s house, with its crowded collections of nautical instruments and bibelots, its gramophone records and ‘“special” luncheons’, and Q’s peacock manner of dress, impressed Mouse suitably. The Boy was mostly absent sailing. Mouse made friends with his younger sister, Foy. He delighted in the Lizard’s ‘sparkling air… and he liked the simple, friendly people who were all so nice to him and let him run in and out of their places, and had him to tea’.7 In Cornwall he discovered the fascination of the sea. ‘I think a stormy sea is one of the finest sights one can see anywhere,’ he wrote to Kenneth later.8 Kenneth’s version of the holiday, preserved in a handful of letters, omits any mention of Elspeth. His focus was Mouse and his determination that Mouse share his attachment to Cornish places and people.
His time with the boy continued to throw up its challenges. Wittingly or otherwise, Elspeth had coloured Mouse’s view of his father. Mouse’s letters from school referred to Kenneth as ‘Inferiority’ or, less contemptuously, ‘the Artful and Extravagant One’. In the autumn of 1911, Kenneth and Elspeth travelled to Brittany. Mouse directed at Kenneth, not Elspeth, his resentment at being left behind again. ‘I hear that you have taken advantage of my absence to make a bolt for France, and I have no doubt that before long you will be in Gay Paris or Mòntécârló [sic]. I am at present staying in a little island known as England, of which you may have heard. You will find it on the map of Europe, to the west of France. Nothing doing here at present, England is a dull little place!’9 As Christmas approached, Kenneth was still the target of Mouse’s exactions: ‘A warning to Inferiority. If he does not take me to the pantomime, and to Montecarlo, and give me three helpings of Xmas pudding and mince pies and otherwise show his paternal affection, well – I’ll let him know it.’10
There were less combative interludes, too. Father and son shared a taste for adventure stories. Kenneth sent Mouse copies of Dumas’s novels. Mouse read The Prisoner of Zenda and, inspired by Hope’s novel, indulged in extravagant Edward and Harold-style games in which he was Dirk Lawless ‘the Bloody Buccaneer’, while a friend called Jennings played Rupert of Hentzau. With evident forethought, his Christmas present to Kenneth in 1912 was a brass candlestick that he had found himself, ‘said to be old, according to the shopkeeper’.11
Even the kindly regime at the Old Malthouse could not disguise Mouse’s limitations. At their best, his letters display charm, lively curiosity, a buoyant sense of humour and, occasionally, irony. He loved acting and swimming and poetry, choosing Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ for his final recitations competition. Academically, the prodigy nurtured by Elspeth proved to be anything but. The Grahames had selected Rugby for Mouse’s public school, a surprising choice given the handicap of his partial-sightedness, his ungainly lack of athleticism, his mixture of self-consciousness and the preciousness instilled by Elspeth, his ‘strongly introspective mind’ focused on himself, his disdain for his peers.12 Instinctively Mouse recognized Common Entrance as a challenge and dared look no further. Cloud-like, it overshadowed his final year at prep school. The examinations fulfilled his misgivings. He described them as ‘a most strenuous time… afterwards I was as limp as a wet rag. I know I did not do myself justice, and feel certain I shall not pass.’13 His fears went unrealized, though his performance, as he suspected, was middling. ‘It was good of you to telegraph about the exam,’ he wrote to Elspeth. ‘I was so thankful to pass at all, that I did not mind passing so near the bottom. So long as you are satisfied with the result, I am sure I am.’14 As his parents surely realized, Mouse was growing up. No trace of the Toad-style triumphalism that had armoured him hitherto colours this sad little note. For Alastair Grahame at thirteen, beginning to apprehend a gulf between his parents’ admiration and outsiders’ verdicts, there was trouble on the horizon.
*
As Mouse braced himself for gathering storms, Kenneth retreated into childhood. In a letter of 19 March 1913, A. R. Waller of the Cambridge University Press wrote ‘to ask if you would be disposed to compile two small books of really good poetry for young children’.15 He defined ‘young children’ as below ‘lower forms of secondary school’. Kenneth’s acceptance was swift but conditional. He rejected Waller’s offer of £50 for the two volumes, requesting instead royalty payments of 10 per cent of the published price of a shilling, to which Waller agreed. He then worked on the project for more than two years, by turns enthusiastic and dilatory. Determinedly he fought John Lane over fees for poems published by The Bodley Head. To the man who had turned down The Wind in the Willows, despite a successful association of author and publisher spanning two decades, Kenneth’s letters were polite but firm. In place of Lane’s requested twelve guinea fee for a dozen poems, Kenneth negotiated a single payment of £7 7s. ‘You shall have the poems at the price you name… You always get your way with me!’ Lane replied, not quite truthfully.16
One way or another, Q hovered in the background. The previous year he had been appointed Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. In the last decade he had published nine novels and edited a clutch of well-received anthologies, including the Oxford Book of Ballads. It may have been Q who suggested to the university press Kenneth as anthologist. Alternatively, Kenneth’s acceptance was quickened by professional face-saving or a simple desire for occupation, and it was the thought of Q – so happily busy and successful – that stirred his inertia. Belatedly, The Wind in the Willows had won the plaudits denied it on publication. On both sides of the Atlantic it had achieved a tardy critical and commercial success that has continued ever since. But its buoyant fortunes did not inspire Kenneth further. He had described himself once as a tap, not a spring, and so it continued. ‘He wrote what he wished when he wished and he wrote no more than he wished,’ Grahame Robertson claimed, an assessment that is mostly accurate.17 His writing was not the source of Kenneth’s depression, although the right project, like Highways and Hedges, might have offered him respite. He had
not shaken off the lassitude of the previous decade and his career foundered on inactivity. Measuring himself against the yardstick of energetic Austin Purves or Q, he felt his shortcomings acutely. His acceptance of Waller’s invitation may have included a measure of relief.
He approached the task with something of his former high spirits. ‘It is a bit of a score to get any Swinburne into a school book,’ he told Waller, in an oblique reference to the poet’s fruity reputation.18 By December he could report, ‘I have got my two little vols about three-quarters done, but am rather stuck for a little more matter, which I can’t find to my liking, so I have been rather letting the thing slide.’19 It slid for another year before the selection was complete and, in October 1915, Kenneth wrote his preface. With hindsight, it appears an overwhelmingly personal selection. He includes work by the poets he had first learned himself: Macaulay, Tennyson and Shakespeare; Robert Herrick, whose poems he had noted in the ledger he stole from the Bank of England, and Wordsworth, whose view of a child’s insight – at the heart of his Olympians stories – so closely resembled his own. On the shores of Loch Fyne, Cunningham had introduced him to Longfellow; Cunningham or Mrs Inglis or Annie Grahame may have drawn his attention to the Scottish author James Hogg. He also included two poems by Graham Robertson. His preface reiterates sentiments he had explored a lifetime ago in ‘Stevensonettes’ for Henley. He describes his selection as a ‘wicket gate’ into poetry’s ‘domain’: this domain, of course, resembles an idyllic English landscape, ‘with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walled and scented gardens here and there… its sunlit, and sometimes misty, mountain-tops’. In a decision that reveals his attitude to his own childhood bereavements as well as the book’s wartime context, he explains his exclusion of poems about death. ‘Dead fathers and mothers, dead brothers and sisters, dead uncles and aunts, dead puppies and kittens, dead birds, dead flowers, dead dolls… I have turned off this mournful tap of tears… preferring that children should read of the joy of life.’ It was the spirit of optimistic denial that had shaped his fantasies at The Mount and which ripples through his stories in The Golden Age and Dream Days. For Kenneth, as for generations of readers since, ‘the joy of life’ was the message of The Wind in the Willows.
*
It proved a commodity in short supply for Mouse, who left Rugby after six intensely miserable weeks. Kenneth blamed his fellow new boys, ‘a roughish lot’.20 Q blamed Elspeth and recommended instead home tutoring or a day school. No one blamed Kenneth, though he had ignored Q’s coded warnings and, in the character of Toad (public property since publication of The Wind in the Willows) provided grounds for ragging of the son who inspired and resembled him. Elspeth set her sights on Eton. ‘It is useless to conceal that, to persons of the rather indeterminate age of Mouse and myself,’ wrote Old Etonian Graham Robertson, ‘boys between twelve and sixteen are a little trying as companions.’21 In Robertson’s letter was an inference Kenneth chose to ignore: that Mouse was unsuited to the company of his contemporaries. He concluded lamely, ‘any boy can have a passable time at Eton if he has a good temper’.22 It was encouragement enough for Elspeth, who subsequently précised his letter as ‘everyone was so eager we should try Eton as affording the greatest contrast to Rugby’.23 If Kenneth challenged his wife, he was overruled. To Eton Mouse was dispatched, in January 1915. He took with him pictures for his room drawn for him by Graham Robertson, including an illustration of parachuting mice, and ‘everything in [Kenneth’s] power to buck him up… & anything that could hearken & help him’, chiefly pocket money and tuck.24 A year later he left, after what was probably a nervous breakdown. Elspeth switched tack and found a tutor, a Mr Dall, in Surrey. She told her brother ‘he is they say really a gentleman & very particular whom he takes’.25 But it would be a year before Mouse was well enough to leave Boham’s or contemplate further study.
In the meantime, husband and wife occupied themselves with war work and the privations of wartime living. They had lost their ex-soldier servant and his wife. Six months elapsed before replacements could be found. Interim village help was of the ‘rough and untrained’ variety with predictable results: ‘the garden of course had gone to pot, and the house was dirty and disordered’.26 With his work on the Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children complete, Kenneth, a veteran of the London Scottish, joined Blewbury’s Volunteer Defence Corps. In the last letter he wrote to Austin Purves, who died in February 1915, he described evening drill practice ‘in a beautiful great timber-framed thatched barn – like my own, only three times as big. The rats run in and out of the thatch along the rafters, and the barn cat, who ought to be attending to them, sits on wheat sacks and reviews us with great delight.’ Kenneth was elected commanding officer, apparently on the strength of his moustache: ‘they said I was the most martial-looking of the crowd, and there I agree with them; they were careful to add, however, that it wasn’t for any other reason whatever, and that also I can fully understand.’27
Mouse took riding lessons on the Downs, although his sight was deteriorating further. He kept up the lessons during his time with Mr Dall in Surrey, which suited him. On holiday in Somerset with his parents in the summer of 1917, he spent hours swimming on his own. He decided to join a volunteer regiment; the Oxford Cadet Corps was closer to home than a Surrey equivalent. For training purposes, the officer in charge overlooked the handicap of Mouse’s vision. Kenneth discussed Mouse’s future with Roland’s stepson Keith Fieling, a don at Christ Church, Oxford. Their decision that he give up Mr Dall’s tutoring and begin undergraduate studies at Christ Church in the Lent term of 1918 sped him to his third unhappy experience of institutional academia.
With Mouse absent again, Kenneth sank back into aimless days of fireside reading and long walks across the Downs. He replied to a handful of the letters about The Wind in the Willows that reached him from across the globe; Elspeth dealt with the remainder. Repeatedly he parried suggestions of a sequel. He knew that there could be no return to the riverbank now. Mouse’s collapse, cast loose of the careful fictions of Boham’s, and the muddy carnage of the war mocked his earlier vision. When, like Mole, Kenneth placed his ear to the reed-stems and ‘caught something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them’, the song he heard was a new song. In 1913, he had offered the St Edward’s School Chronicle an essay called ‘The Fellow That Walks Alone’, inspired by Caxton’s legend of Edward the Confessor, ‘the patron saint of all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone’.28 The essay celebrated the ‘emancipation… only attained in solitude’ and complete withdrawal into ‘the country of the mind’. It denied the camaraderie at the heart of the earlier book. Instead Kenneth raised funds for the French Red Cross; he gave letters by Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Martineau to a Red Cross charity auction at Christie’s; he wrote quatrains for engraving on the lych gate that villagers erected in memory of Blewbury men killed in the fighting. To the French he attributed an appreciation of fellowship that he himself had passed beyond. ‘There is no people in the world so quick and ready as the French to appreciate a word of spoken sympathy, a word of friendliness, a word of good cheer and encouragement.’29 On his walks beside the river he looked out for water rats, whistling when he reached a spot where he expected to find one. Often there was no response.
*
Mouse’s decapitated body was discovered early in the morning of 8 May 1920 on railway lines close to a level crossing near Oxford’s Port Meadow. A coroner’s inquest five days later delivered a verdict of accidental death. The position of the body and the nature of its injuries suggest suicide. After two years, his university career – the lodestar of Kenneth’s life – ended in tragedy. He had failed examinations in Greek and Latin literature and Holy Scripture three times; he had failed to make friends; he had failed to resolve an introverted preoccupation with his own agnosticism and his pockets were stuffed with religious tracts.
He was buried on his twentieth birthday in Holywell cemetery, and the headstone
erected by his parents celebrates in perpetuity the ‘noble ideals, steadfast purposes and rare promise’ that they had decided long ago were his defining qualities. On his coffin lid Kenneth scattered lilies of the valley.
• 15 •
‘The Fellow That Walks Alone’
KENNETH WROTE TO Curtis Brown on 29 April 1926 to quash suggestions that he embark on an autobiography. ‘I have kept no diaries or memoranda at all, and since the War my memory seems to have gone all to pot. I doubt much if I could ever get as much as a bookfull together.’1 Three months later, he was unable to answer questions about the bindings of early editions of his books sent to him by A. J. A. Symons, compiling a bibliography of the 1890s: ‘I have to speak from memory, for my own library doesn’t help me at all. I cannot find any early editions – I suppose I gave them away or they were given away for me.’2
The process of forgetting and discarding began in the wake of Mouse’s death. For once, Kenneth and Elspeth’s response to devastation aligned. Elspeth drew up a list of ‘Articles for Disposal, the Property of Mr and Mrs Kenneth Grahame’ for a firm of auctioneers. It included the ‘collection of Bristol, Sunderland and Nailsea Glass of the Glass rollers known as “Sailors’ Farewells”, forty in number’ that Kenneth had begun in Fowey in the weeks before their wedding. To local jumble sales she consigned Mouse’s clothes. Boham’s was let for eighteen months. On 30 October 1920, Kenneth and Elspeth left England for Italy and their first journey together to Kenneth’s inspiring, restorative South.
Neither left any record of the next four years, spent mostly abroad, of their thoughts of Mouse, their feelings for one another, or the nature of their companionship in grief. ‘If no earthly kingdom will our wistful hearts in peace unite,’ Elspeth had written years before in a poem called ‘Constancy’.3 Intense unhappiness united their hearts more than any fumbling after love or even fondness ever had. They settled themselves comfortably in the Hotel des Princes, in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, their first destination, for a year. It was the Golden City of Kenneth’s Golden Age stories and it offered him the only things his numbness craved: macaroni, fettuccini, porchetta, fresh anchovies and sardines, sweet potatoes, mortadella sausage, white Parmesan cheese, ice cream, marrons glacés, baskets of sweet biscuits, and omelettes cooked by an exiled Russian princess wearing diamond earrings and served by an archduke in a squalid side street of Mussolini’s capital where ‘socialists and soldiers continually shot at each other’.4 Fountains everywhere charmed him with the sound of running water: the Fontana delle Tartarughe, with its carvings of tortoises, and the Trevi Fountain, where he sat at night alone, beguiled by reflections of moonlight in the splash and spray.
Eternal Boy Page 14
