Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  The ironies are dreadful: the river-bank, setting of the father’s idyll, scene of the son’s death; the train, Mr Toad’s deliverer, the instrument of the real-life Mr Toad’s destruction. Though these tragic events were made the substance of an excellent radio play – The Killing of Toad, by David Gooderson – I found it impossible to imagine them incorporated in The Wind in the Willows without casting a dark shadow over that earthly paradise, and so the project lapsed.

  In March 1990, at the suggestion of Nicholas Hytner, the National revived the idea of an adaptation of Grahame’s book, only this time in the form of a Christmas show that would be virtually all sunlight and would display to advantage the technical capabilities of the Olivier stage.

  My theatrical imagination is pretty limited; it is all I can do to get characters on to the stage and once they are there, I can never think of a compelling reason for them to leave – ‘I think I’ll go now’ being the nearest I get to dramatic urgency. So I was too set in my ways to be instantly liberated by the technological challenges of the commission.

  ‘But there’s a caravan in it,’ I remember complaining, ‘what do we do about that?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s possible,’ comforted Nicholas Hytner, who is accustomed to launching 747s from the stage. ‘Just write it in.’

  ‘But it’s drawn by a horse,’ I persisted. ‘We can’t have a real horse and we can’t have a pantomime horse or else we’ll have to have a pantomime Rat and Mole and Badger.’

  ‘Who is this idiot?’ would have been a permissible response, but Nicholas Hytner patiently explained that there were several actors who looked like carthorses and who would take the part very well. It was all so simple, just as long as one used the imagination.

  I set this down more or less as it happened, in case there should be any budding playwrights more tentative than I am. It’s unlikely. I’ve been at it now for twenty-five years, and if I still can’t stretch my mind to envisage a man playing a horse what have I learned?

  After that, though, it all came much easier. When the motor car appeared, I just wrote ‘A motor car comes on’, and likewise with the barge. The only thing the designer Mark Thompson was dubious about – on grounds of expense – was the railway train, but by that time I had got the bit between my teeth and wrote the scene in which Toad is rescued by the train with the note ‘I think you can suggest a train with clouds of steam, hooters, etc.’ Etcetera.

  These props, and particularly the car and the train, were splendidly done and handsomely finished. As Griff Rhys Jones (who played Toad) remarked, most stage props look worse the closer you get to them, whereas these stood up to the actors’ closest scrutiny, being beautifully detailed in places (such as the dashboard of the car) that the audience can scarcely hope to see.

  To understand the technical side of the production, one needs to know that the stage of the Olivier comprises an inner circle and an outer circle. The meadow on which much of the action takes place was built on the inner circle; round and slightly crumpled in appearance, it was generally referred to by the crew as ‘The Poppadum’. Around this, the outer circle – a rim about six and a half feet wide – did duty as river or road. Both inner and outer circles can revolve in either direction, and the inner circle can rise or fall, either one half at a time or in one piece, when it resembles a huge hollow drum. Thus when the scene changed to Rat’s house the inner circle revolved and the drum rose at the same time, to reveal the interior of the house beneath the meadow, the combination of the stage rising and revolving making the scene appear to spiral up into view. A similar transformation took place when Rat and Mole were taken into Badger’s house, with the bonus that, while Badger, Rat and Mole were sitting cosily by the fire on a level with the audience, one could still see, up above, the Chief Weasel and Weasel Norman keeping their chilly watch in the Wild Wood.

  Mark Thompson’s costumes incorporated some of the animals ‘natural appearance – Rat’s tail, for instance, and his outsize ears – but not so as to obliterate the actors’ human features. Jane Gibson taught the cast the movements of the various creatures they were representing: the linear shufflings of the hedgehogs, the dozy lollopings of the rabbits, the sinuous dartings of the weasel and so on.

  Younger actors take to this kind of thing more readily than their seniors. Michael Bryant, playing Badger, was initially sceptical and avoided the movement classes; then, in an apparent access of enthusiasm, he asked if he could take home the various videos depicting badger activity. When he came in the next day, he handed back the videos, saying, ‘I’ve studied all these films of the way badgers move, and I’ve discovered an extraordinary thing: they move exactly like Michael Bryant.’ But to most of the actors, some of whom were doubling as different creatures, the animal-movement classes were of great value. For example, one could see in David Bamber’s Mole that his get-up as an old-fashioned northern schoolboy did not entirely displace the shy, scuttling creature with splayed hands and feet, who people were always after for a waistcoat.

  I have tried to do a faithful adaptation of the book while, at the same time, not being sure what a faithful adaptation is. One that remains true to the spirit of the book, most people would say. Well, The Wind in the Willows is a lyrical book, and the first casualties, for the book to work on the stage, were those descriptive passages that give it its lyrical flavour. The splendid music Jeremy Sams wrote helped to compensate for this loss and his lyrics too – which he dashed off with such speed that I felt, had he had a couple of hours to spare, he could have adapted the whole thing.

  Still, the play is nowhere near as gentle and atmospheric as the book. No matter, other people would say: its special charm lies in the characters. But to adapt the text on that principle is not straightforward either, as the tale is very episodic. Rat and Mole disappear for long stretches, as does Badger, and it is not until Toad’s adventures get under way that there is anything like a continuous narrative. It was for this reason, I imagine, that A. A. Milne called his adaptation Toad of Toad Hall, whereas to many readers of the book it is Rat and Mole who hold the story together.

  The most substantial cut I made had been made by Milne too – namely the chapter entitled ‘Wayfarers All’, in which Rat encounters a sea-going cousin. Milne also omitted the mystical chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, but this I did include, though I’m not sure what children made of it in the play – or made of it in the book, for that matter. In the play, Pan was heard but not seen, which is just as well: Grahame’s description – ‘the rippling muscles, on the arm that lay across the broad chest … the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward’ – makes him sound too much like Mellors the gamekeeper. Both chapters, incorporated into The Wind in the Willows at a late stage, recall the kind of pieces Grahame began writing when he worked at the Bank, and which were collected in his first book, Pagan Papers.

  I ended up making the play the story of a group of friends, with the emphasis on Mole. He is the newcomer who takes us into this world of water and woods and weasels, and whose education is the thread that runs through it all. The Wind in the Willows is Mole’s Bildungsroman. Mole is the only one of the characters I have allowed to have doubts. He doubts if he is having a good time, doubts if he is happy with Rat. He likes Toad as he is, and when the old show-off reforms it all seems rather dull – have they done the right thing by taking him in hand? Rat and Badger have no doubts, but at the finish, Mole is still wondering.

  Jokes apart, the only element in the production that I brought up to date was the Wild Wooders. In the book, they are an occasional presence, but for the play Nicholas Hytner felt that they should be a constant threat, lurking in the background even at the most idyllic moments, and at one point going so far as to carry off a baby rabbit for their supper – an incident that shocked adults in the audience more than it did children.

  In Grahame’s day the Wild Wooders were taken to represent the threat to property posed by the militant proletari
at – a view, whatever one’s political persuasion, that it would be hard to maintain today. Our Wild Wooders ended up as property speculators and estate agents, spivs and ex-bovver-boys, who put Toad Hall through a programme of ‘calculated decrepitude’ in the hope of depressing its market value. Their plan is to turn it into a nice mix of executive dwellings and office accommodation, shove in a marina and a café or two, and market it as the ‘Toad Hall Park and Leisure Centre’ – ‘The horror! The horror!’ groans Badger. But the reformed Toad’s vision of his ancestral home as a venue for opera, chamber concerts and even actors’ one-man shows does not commend itself to Badger either. ‘Actors!’ he moans, and we know that, before long, he will be loping back to the Wild Wood.

  Albert the horse is a nod in the direction of A. A. Milne. Grahame has a horse in the book to pull Toad’s caravan, but he does not give him a name or a voice. In Toad of Toad Hall, the horse is called Alfred and is a bit of a pedant. I have made him, in another nod to Milne, extremely lugubrious – Eeyore’s Wolverhampton cousin. Toad can never remember his name and keeps calling him Alfred, which is not surprising as he is probably remembering him from the other play.

  In the blurb written for his publishers, Grahame said that his book was ‘clean of the clash of sex’. What this means is that women do not get a look in. There are only three of them to speak of – the washerwoman, the bargewoman and the gaoler’s daughter – and only the last is seen in a kindly light. One reviewer of the play described these three as ‘coarse human females, coarsely characterized; they seem to come from another production.’ No, just from the text, much as Grahame wrote it, where the female sex is generally rubbished. One of the indictments against Toad is that, owing to his car crashes, he had to spend weeks in hospital ‘being ordered about by female nurses’. In addition, he has been ‘jeered at, and ignominiously flung in the water – by a woman, too!’ Even Toad, who rather fancies the gaoler’s daughter, joins in the game. ‘You know what girls are, ma’am,’ he says to the bargewoman. ‘Nasty little hussies, that’s what I call ’em.’

  Toad is pretending, but not so Rat, Mole and Badger, all of them confirmed bachelors. Bachelordom is a status that had more respect (and fewer undertones) in Grahame’s day than it has now, and certainly he seems to have regarded it as the ideal state from which he had disastrously fallen. Of course, some bachelors are more confirmed than others, and the bachelor-doms of Mole, Rat and Badger differ – or I have made them differ. Mole is a bachelor by circumstances, taking his cue from his surroundings. Rat is a single creature and so Mole is happy to be single, too, and set up home with his new friend – though as properly as Morecambe with Wise or Abbott with Costello. But had Mole popped up on that spring morning and found Rat in a cosy family set-up he could have fitted in there just as well. Judging by the way he makes himself readily at home at Rat’s and then at Badger’s, Mole is a natural ami de maison.

  Rat is solitary by circumstance but also by temperament. He could be played like Field Marshal Montgomery, and, as with Monty, there may once have been a great love in his life that he has had to bury. He is certainly a romantic, but his rules and rigidities protect him – have perhaps been devised to protect him – from his own feelings. He’s not quite a Crocker-Harris, but certainly a Mr Chips.

  Badger has something of the old schoolmaster about him, too. He’s less buttoned up than Ratty and, because not repressed at all, more innocent. All he gets up to is pinching Mole’s cheek and rubbing his little toes – behaviour that was quite commonplace in old gentlemen when I was a boy, when such things were not thought to matter much and were shrugged off by the recipient as just another of the ways that grown-ups were boring.

  To fans of the book, even to discuss these well-loved characters in such terms might seem, if not sacrilege, at any rate silly. But an adapter has to ask questions and speculate about the characters in order to make the play work. If presented on stage in the same way as in the book, Rat, Mole and Badger would find it hard to retain an audience’s attention, because they are so relentlessly nice. Badger is a bit gruff, and Rat can be a little tetchy, but that is as far as it goes; all the faults that make for an interesting character are reserved for Toad.

  I felt that the atmosphere of the River Bank had to be less serene, and that, while retaining their innocence and lack of insight into themselves, Rat and Mole – and to a lesser extent Badger – should be prey to more complicated feelings, particularly jealousy. Thus Mole’s arrival on the River Bank to become Rat’s new friend is not quite the untroubled idyll it is in the book. It is not long before Mole wants to meet Badger, and of course he turns out to be a big hit there too. So now Mole is Badger’s friend as well as Rat’s, and we go into a routine of ‘He’s more my friend than he is yours – and anyway, I met him first!’ It is a routine children are accustomed to, and it is not unknown to grown-ups, particularly in some of life’s backwaters – and the River Bank, despite Rat’s protestations, can be a bit on the dull side. Newcomers there are eagerly gobbled up, as newcomers always have been in novels of provincial life, from Jane Austen to Barbara Pym.

  Toad presents a different problem, and as much for the actor as for the dramatist. It is not that, like Mole and Rat, he is too nice, though Grahame is at pains to emphasize that he is nice and, for all his boasting, a good fellow underneath. It is just that we are told before he appears that he is conceited, a show-off and a creature of crazes; then, when he does arrive, he is all these things and goes on being all these things, with none of his disastrous adventures resulting in any disillusionment at all, still less self-knowledge. Finally, and suddenly, at the end of the book he is confronted by the trio of friends and overnight becomes a changed character.

  Now this is no use to the dramatist at all, and no pushover for the actor either. Characters in a play need to go on a journey, even if it’s only from A to B. Mole’s journey is a graduated schooling at the hands of Rat in the ways of the River Bank; Rat’s journey (in my adaptation) is an emotional schooling at the hands of Mole; Badger’s journey is from solitude to society. But Toad does not go on a journey at all – he goes on his travels, but he does not go on a journey. Until his transformation, he is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning; life has taught him nothing. But, unchanging as he is and in defiance of all the rules of drama, children love him, and, since Toad has so much of the action, even adults don’t mind, until by the end, nobody – adults or children – wants him to change. Nor does he in my version – he just learns to keep it under.

  ‘Keeping it under’ is partly what The Wind in the Willows is about. There is a Toad in all of us, or certainly in all men, our social acceptability dependent on how much of our Toad we can keep hidden. Mole, by nature shy and humble, has no trouble fitting in; Toad, with neither of these virtues, must learn to counterfeit them before he is accepted. It is one of the useful dishonesties he might have learned at public school (where it is known as ‘having the corners knocked off’). Humphrey Carpenter says of Toad that one could imagine him having a brief spell at Eton or Harrow before being expelled – too soon to have learned the social lie that the play teaches him.

  TOAD: I say, Ratty, why didn’t you tell me before?

  RAT: Tell you what?

  TOAD: About not showing off, being humble and shy and nice.

  RAT: I did tell you.

  TOAD: Yes, but what you didn’t say was that this way I get more attention than ever. Everybody loves me! It’s wonderful!

  When I first read the book it seemed to me that Grahame meant Toad to be Jewish. He had endowed him with all the faults that genteel Edwardian anti-Semitism attributed to nouveaux-riches Jews. He is loud and shows off; he has too much money for his own good and no sense of social responsibility to go with it, and this sense of social responsibility is another lesson he has to learn. The fact that whenever Grahame has the animals discuss Toad’s character they end up saying what a decent fellow he is underneath it all only seemed to confirm this
analysis, and I thought that Grahame must have been thinking of characters like Sir Ernest Cassel and the Sassoons, the friends and financiers of Edward VII, who moved at the highest levels of society but were still regarded as outsiders. So when I read The Wind in the Willows for the BBC I gave Toad something of a flavour which if not Jewish, was at least exotic – trying to make his r’s sound like Tom Stoppard’s, for instance. I expected some criticism for this (not from Tom Stoppard), but none came, and now, having adapted the book for the stage, I am less sure anyway. The text is so full of inconsistencies. Grahame himself may not have known – ‘He is and he isn’t’ as so often the proper answer to such questions.

  The nearest Oscar Wilde got to the River Bank was his remark about ducks. ‘You will never be in the best society,’ he had a mother say to her ducklings, ‘unless you can learn to stand on your heads.’ In Toad there are echoes of Wilde, and not only in his disgrace and imprisonment. Many of Wilde’s epigrams would not be out of place at Toad Hall – ‘If the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?’ or ‘I live wholly for pleasure; pleasure is the only thing one should live for.’ I am not sure that Toad thinks of himself as an artist (though he has been told that he ought to have a salon), but if he did, it would only be as a motorist (‘Is motoring an art?’ ‘The way I do it, yes.’) Occasionally he manages an epigram of his own that is worthy of Wilde. ‘I have an aunt who is a washerwoman,’ says the gaoler’s daughter. ‘Think no more about it,’ replies Toad consolingly. ‘I have several aunts who ought to be washerwomen.’ But then Toad’s gaol cannot have been far from Reading.

  At the finish I have the gaoler’s daughter kiss Toad, who does not turn into a prince but straightaway wants Rat to taste the joys of kissing, just as he had once wanted him to share the joys of caravanning. Rat, of course, is reluctant, but finds to his surprise there may be something in this kissing business after all, and, generous animal that he is, he wants Mole initiated too. So the play ends with a hint of new horizons. It is a large departure from the text, of course, where all four of our heroes are left in bachelor bliss, but this alteration is not entirely without justification, echoing as it does the course of Grahame’s own life. Courtship and marriage were late joys for him, too – and not such joys either – but that’s another story and, as I said at the start, not one that I managed to tell.