Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  “Even now as an adult I’m shivering a bit at these stealthy little faces that peer out from the trees – first one, then two, then hundreds – and the eerie whistling and pattering.”

  Another way of celebrating home is to set up its opposite not as horror, but as succubus. I’d completely erased from my memory a chapter called ‘Wayfarers All’ where Rat, restless at the sight of the migrating creatures at the end of summer, runs into a seafaring rat with earrings, an ancient mariner’s piercing eye and tales of exotic climes that literally hypnotise poor Rat into hitting the road himself, until Mole brings him back to his senses. It’s like Snufkin tempting Moomintroll to go off wandering with him. The travellers’ tales probably worked their magic at the time they were written, but now they go on a bit and don’t seduce me at all: since 1908 we’ve been saturated with the clichés of mass tourism, and we’ve seen it all on television, so this chapter doesn’t wear as well as the rest of the book. It finishes with Mole coaxing Rat to write some therapeutic verses, and I wonder if there’s a bit of Grahame’s own experience here: was he a frustrated wayfarer?

  “I wonder if there’s a bit of Grahame’s own experience here: was he a frustrated wayfarer?”

  Far more seductive to me is the chapter ‘Dulce Domum’ (good for little Latin scholars in 1908, perhaps, but I’m sure I never knew the title meant Sweet Home) where Mole, having rushed so heedlessly from his home at the dawn of spring at the beginning of the book, is suddenly seized midwinter with a passionate longing to return. It’s the smell of the place that draws him, the ever-obliging Rat comes with him, and I fall in love with the little courtyard at the entrance to modest Mole End, as described by Grahame and drawn by Shepard. I’ve always remembered this courtyard, so charming because it’s entirely underground, but I’d forgotten which book it came from, and it’s such a joy to discover it again. By the light of Mole’s lantern we see a garden seat, a roller, baskets of ferns, plaster statues of Garibaldi and the infant Samuel and Queen Victoria, a skittle alley, a goldfish pond and a ‘large silvered glass ball that reflected everything all wrong and had a very pleasing effect.’

  “I fall in love with the little courtyard at the entrance to modest Mole End, as described by Grahame and drawn by Shepard.”

  Another threat to home is to be deprived of it, to be sent into exile. This happens to Toad – largely through the consequences of his own selfishness and folly, but still the punishment seems way in excess of the crime as the poor creature is sent down into a Monty Pythonesque medieval dungeon by a policeman who mumbles ‘oddsbodikins!’. Toad’s heroic adventures, easily the most action-packed chapters of the book, are recounted with affectionate parody and tremendous brio. He escapes from jail, survives several hair-raising escapades with a Keystone Cops feel, only to return to the riverbank and discover that the stoats and weasels have risen en masse from the Wild Wood and taken over Toad Hall.

  At this point, I suspect some political allegory: or am I being too clever, as my English teacher would have said? Are the stoats and weasels the oppressed workers missing from this story, the revolutionaries wresting control from the bloated capitalist ruling class, which could surely be no better portrayed than as a toad? Unfortunately if I take this view, I have to believe that Grahame is on the side of the bloated capitalists. Toad has inherited his pile from his late father, an old friend of Badger’s, and even though he would be a grave disappointment to that noble and industrious parent, he must be allowed to keep his home, and the status quo must be restored. So Ratty, Mole and Badger devise a bold plan to win back Toad Hall… and as all the budding little classics scholars in 1908 might have divined by the title of the last chapter, ‘The Return of Ulysses’, they are dazzlingly successful. By this time the terrors of the Wild Wood have been reduced (disappointingly, I think) to cowardly buffoons who are easily routed by four fine fellows with stout sticks. It’s a very jolly battle, though. Nobody is badly hurt.

  Much as I love the warm and decorous friendship between the Rat and the Mole, the gregarious Otter and the gruff Badger, the book would not work without Toad. Although he’s the most flawed character, the kind of incorrigible braggart who would drive you mad if he were human, and a menace to life and limb on the road, he is also by some strange chemistry the most endearing character. His boasting is so outrageous, his ploys so transparent, his contrition so spectacular and short-lived. And yet, as Shepard’s drawings show us, he’s so small. I’m reassured again and again by various characters and by Grahame himself that Toad has a good heart, though sometimes it seems buried very deep under all that puffed-up toad flesh. He’s very funny with his serial fads, and the prose lights up when Toad is at the wheel of a motor car: ‘he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way, or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.’

  “Do you believe in the chastened, modest Toad at the end of the story? I can’t help thinking that sooner or later the old Toad will arise and do a bit of smiting.”

  Do you believe in the chastened, modest Toad at the end of the story? I can’t help thinking that sooner or later the old Toad will arise and do a bit of smiting.

  At five, it was the much-maligned Enid Blyton’s Noddy, for the language and the joy of being able to read. I copied out all the songs and if the exercise didn’t make me a poet, it gave me a lifelong sense of rhyme and rhythm.

  At seven, it was all science and no fiction. Exploring the Planets by Roy A. Gallant, heralding a thirty-five-year career in science and technology.

  At nine, it was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, read aloud by the teacher, that brought me back to fiction. I didn’t know I’d one day be a novelist but I was doing the most important preparation.

  At eleven, it was The Radio Amateur’s Handbook for the knowledge; Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars as the beginning of a five-year science-fiction habit; and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead for the promise of naked, which it signally failed to deliver on.

  Graeme Simsion

  As for that mysterious piper, the second time around, it’s obvious who he is. A demigod from Greek mythology, half man, half beast, probably Pan, whose role is to protect and help animals. There’s no going through any gates, as I remembered, but there is still heavenly music and intensely numinous prose, trembling on the edge of being too much but not quite tipping over, and about as different from the robust adventures of Toad as you can get. It’s no coincidence that it’s Rat who hears the music of the pipes – he’s the poet and the songwriter, the dreamer. Perhaps we should all read this chapter with the 1967 Pink Floyd album of the same name playing in the background.

  “it’s astonishing to see a writer break all those rules with impunity and expect the kids to go along with him (as I undoubtedly did, in my puzzled and slightly queasy way)”

  Although there are moments throughout the book where I’m still not sure that Grahame has entirely successfully melded the two parts of his story together, this chapter is so extraordinary I can do nothing but admire it. The nerve of the man! From the perspective of our own age, where writers for children are urged to keep their prose short, sweet, simple, action-packed and preferably funny, it’s astonishing to see a writer break all those rules with impunity and expect the kids to go along with him (as I undoubtedly did, in my puzzled and slightly queasy way). I love his confidence, his ambition, without any hint of preachiness – indeed, this is pagan territory. And I also love how these straightforward, practical, earthy creatures have a huge capacity for awe. Yet the only path forward for them after this experience is for Pan to take away their memory of it, so only a faint sense of something entirely outside the everyday remains with them: the wind in the reeds.

  The Wind in the Reeds was indeed the original title for the book, as I learn when I start to look up a few things. (‘The wind in the willows’ has a more pleasing ring to it
as a phrase, but it’s not such an accurate reflection of the landscape and the theme.) After all the pleasure I’ve had from this story, first as a child and now as an adult, along with millions of other readers, it perturbs me to discover that not only did Grahame have a lot of trouble finding a publisher; his first reviews were almost uniformly terrible. According to an article in the The Telegraph by John Preston, published in the book’s centenary year in 2008, it seems that the mix of styles that worked for me just confused and irritated the reviewers. ‘Grown-up readers will find it monstrous and elusive,’ wrote the Times critic. ‘Children will hope, in vain, for more fun.’ Arthur Ransome judged it to be an out-and-out failure – ‘like a speech to Hottentots made in Chinese.’ Only Arnold Bennett appreciated it, and it languished unloved… until a stroke of luck in the shape of the then President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who took up the book and urged publication in America. Curious that such an intensely English book should need an American Teddy’s support to find its feet and gradually grow into an international children’s classic. By 1951, there were 100 UK editions alone, and there have been many dramatic adaptations, from A.A. Milne’s Toad of Toad Hall to a much-revived 1990s version scripted by Alan Bennett (I’m not sure which adaptation it was that scared me so, but it must have been staged in London in the 1950s). Clearly generations of children have seen no need to hope for more fun.

  “it perturbs me to discover that not only did Grahame have a lot of trouble finding a publisher; his first reviews were almost uniformly terrible”

  Today, most critics are highly enthusiastic. Witness Robert McCrum, in The Guardian in 2014, when The Wind in the Willows made it to number 38 in the newspaper’s 100 Best Novels list. It is, he says, ‘a far more interesting book than its popular and often juvenile audience might suggest’ (I don’t know why a popular and juvenile audience wouldn’t suggest an interesting book, but let that pass). McCrum makes the point that the lyrical elements of the story are usually ‘ruthlessly subordinated to the demands of the plot’ in theatrical adaptations, which is surely a good argument for reading the book; and he concludes The Wind in the Willows ‘makes a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England not only through its evocation of the turning seasons of the English countryside, from the riverbank in summer to the rolling open road, but also through its hints of an imminent class struggle from the inhabitants (stoats and weasels) of the Wild Wood.’ Aha, so I wasn’t being too clever in picking that up! And indeed, I discover there’s a 1981 story, Wild Wood, by English writer Jan Needle, which retells the story from the viewpoint of the residents of the Wild Wood. ‘Much as I had always loved Toad,’ she writes, ‘it occurred to me one Sunday afternoon that if you looked at him through jaundiced left-wing eyes (God forbid!) he might turn out somewhat less lovable. I did, and he did too. A fat and jolly plutocrat, more money than sense, with friends who lived lives of idleness and eternal pleasure. From there, it was a small step to redreaming the villains of the Wild Wood as sturdy, starving heroes of the rural proletariat.’

  “Today, most critics are highly enthusiastic.”

  I’ve been valiantly trying to keep my last hypothesis going, but at this point I must concede defeat. The Wind in The Willows has moral messages, and just because they aren’t as obvious as the ones in Little Women doesn’t mean they aren’t felt by the reader. And I’m afraid this reader doesn’t always like those messages. This is a hymn to the status quo of Edwardian England, with the rich man in his baronial hall and the poor folk in the wild wood, and the decent chaps supporting the baron, and the poor folk demonised or ridiculed. And yet acknowledging this society is reactionary still doesn’t make me love it less. As for young Jane, the child of socialists, she gleefully drank it all in and was terrified by the sight of the working class revolting on stage. Hardly Les Misérables. There’s a moral message, and it’s a wrong one; but still, I needed this book.

  “The Wind in The Willows has moral messages, and just because they aren’t as obvious as the ones in Little Women doesn’t mean they aren’t felt by the reader.”

  So what new hypothesis can I put up? Fortunately, it’s obvious. I needed lovable characters. Not necessarily good, quite possibly flawed, even maddening; but essentially lovable.

  But another discovery looms, and it’s overwhelming me so much that I almost wish I hadn’t started to look. It is the life of Kenneth Grahame, which I expected to be comfortable and pleasant, in the style of his animals; but though there must have been many varied and sometimes happy and triumphant moments in his seventy-three years, I cannot think of his existence as anything but grotesque and tragic.

  What was so disastrous? Where do I start? Born in Scotland. Mother dead from scarlet fever when he was five. Father a hopeless alcoholic. Little Kenneth and his sister and two brothers entrusted to the care of Granny Ingles in an old house, The Mount, in the village of Cookham Dean in Berkshire. A good scholar at St Edwards School in Oxford, where he won prizes in Latin (hence Ulysses and Dulce Domum, no doubt), but no money for university. Some early success with literary magazines as a writer of stories and essays, later collected in two books, The Golden Age and Dream Days. Work at the Bank of England, rising from clerk to secretary. So far, so good, perhaps. But then he took premature retirement because of a bizarre and traumatic event in 1903. He came out of his office to see a man who had come into the bank demanding to see the governor. The man, later described as a ‘Socialist lunatic’, was carrying a gun, and fired three shots at Grahame; they all missed.

  Meanwhile, his private life was also marked by trauma. At the age of thirty-eight, and apparently still a virgin (how do they know that?), he met Elspeth Thomson (the lovers exchanged letters in baby language it is kinder not to repeat). The couple settled into a long and unhappy marriage. By all accounts, Elspeth was eccentric and demanding, to put it mildly; a typical story about her was that she made her husband wear a special kind of underwear she claimed needed changing only once a year. Their only child, Alastair, was born in 1900. Poor Alastair seems to have been both inspiration for The Wind in the Willows and the bane of his father’s life. Blind in one eye and sickly, known as ‘Mouse’, hailed as a genius, he was loved, admired and vastly overindulged. The adventures of Toad, Rat and Mole began as bedtime stories Grahame told his son, and Mouse’s wildly boastful character was probably the prototype for Toad. Grahame began to write his masterpiece in 1904, the year after he was shot at, when Mouse was four.

  The landscape for the stories came from the countryside around the Thames near The Mount at Cookham Dean, where young Kenneth grew up with his Granny Ingles: it was always his haven from a turbulent world, and the family returned to live in The Mount when he retired. After only two years in his idyll, a chimney collapsed in a gale and they had to move out. But there were worse things than collapsing chimneys. Mouse ensured that his father’s life would never stay tranquil. Ejected from several schools, the young and increasingly erratic Alastair eventually made his way to Christ Church, Oxford. In 1920, in his second year at Oxford, when he was twenty, Grahame’s beloved boy took a walk on the railway line, and probably lay down on it. A train hit him and cut off his head. His father wrote very little afterwards. He fled to Italy, returned to Oxford, died in 1932 and was buried in his son’s grave.

  These facts are recorded in all the biographies and articles; sometimes dispassionately, sometimes with a faintly sardonic air, hinting at Grahame’s apparent hopelessness with women. There is a recent theory that Grahame was homosexual, and the convivial all-male world of his book was his ‘gay manifesto’ for the life he yearned for. In 2018 The Daily Mail quoted the emeritus professor in English and children’s literature at Cardiff University, Peter Hunt, that once you considered a gay subtext to the story, it was impossible to read the book in any other way. While the Grahame family lived at Cookham Dean, Grahame himself spent much of his time during the week at his London home, which he shared with a theatre set designer and friend of O
scar Wilde, Walford Graham Robertson; and possibly he was sacked from his bank job because he was ‘outed’. Whether true or not, Hunt did no more than hint at the theory in his book The Making of the Wind in the Willows.

  “There is a recent theory that Grahame was homosexual, and the convivial all-male world of his book was his ‘gay manifesto’ for the life he yearned for.”

  Other reports have a tendency to blame the man for his fate (‘Author was a failure as a father’ said a head-line in the Daily Mail in 2010). And yes, it’s a complicated business working out who is to blame for what; it seems that Grahame grew colder towards Mouse, and probably he should have visited his anguished son more often at school when he cried out for help. But when I read what Mouse did in the end, I cried out myself, a child’s protest: It’s not fair! How could life be so cruel to the creator of Mole, Ratty and Toad?

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to be dispassionate.

  “The question remains, as it does with all literature, of how much, if anything, we should read what we know about the author’s life into the author’s creation.”

  The question remains, as it does with all literature, of how much, if anything, we should read what we know about the author’s life into the author’s creation. Reviewing an annotated version of The Wind in the Willows edited by Annie Gauger, English professor Alan Jacobs said it is ‘prone to see characters and events as transmuted versions of Grahame’s own experiences.’ Though he admires much of Gauger’s work, he seems to disapprove of this tendency, and I know what he means. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so is a lot of knowledge; it is all too easy to jump to conclusions, and even if these conclusions are accurate they can be annoyingly reductive, and may colour one’s reading of the text beyond all repair.