An introduction to an Italian edition of The Wind in the Willows, which I was writing anyway but which it seemed a shame not to include here.

I read very few storybooks as a child. Mostly I read books about space, and fossil man, and ocean exploration. Even when I was writing for children, I avoided reading the classics of children’s literature. It seemed more important to remember my childhood in vivid detail, rather than investigating the books other children might have been reading at the time.

Consequently I didn’t read Winnie the Pooh or Where the Wilds Things Are until I had children of my own. It’s an embarrassing admission for a writer, but it does mean that I came to these books without any preconceptions. They carried no rosy glow of nostaligia. Nor were they old friends whose faults I was tempted to overlook.

So, when I say that The Wind in the Willows is one of my favourite books, I mean precisely that. It is in the same category as Great Expectations or Tom Jones, because despite its brevity and its simplicity it has a deep strangeness which is never dulled by successive readings. It also happens to be one of the very few books that have made me cry, for reasons which have nothing to do with sadness, and which I still don’t entirely understand.

Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece has been a literary institution for so long that it’s hard for the modern reader to understand profoundly odd a book it was, and is. But when it was published in 1908, most reviewers were baffled. This is The Times:

Grown-up readers will find it monstrous and elusive, children will hope, in vain, for more fun. Beneath the allegory ordinary life is depicted more or less closely, but certainly not very amusingly or searchingly. As a contribution to natural history the work is negligible.

Was it a book for children about animals? Or a book for adults about children disguised as animals? Or a book for children about adults disguised as animals? Only Richard Middleton, writing in Vanity Fair, saw it for what it was:

The book for me is notable for its intimate sympathy with Nature and for its delicate expressions of emotions which I, probably, in common with most people, had previously believed to be my exclusive property.

Even the passage of a hundred years and the presence of a thousand imitations cannot dispel the oddity entirely. The book’s main characters are a mole, a water rat, a badger and a toad. Their names are ‘Mole’, ‘Rat’, ‘Badger’ and ‘Toad’. We rarely pause to wonder what other moles, water rats, badgers and toads might be called because no other moles, water rats, badgers and toads seem to exist (though we meet many rabbits, weasels and swallows).

The story begins with Mole doing his spring-cleaning. Bored by his household chores and infected with the restlessness of the season he decides to take a walk above ground. He sees a river for the first time in his life and is enchanted. The Water Rat, who lives in the river’s bank, recognises him instantly, despite having never met him before.

The oddness continues. Sometimes the animals are animals. They dig tunnels and hibernate and feel the pull of the South during the summer. At other times they are quite clearly human beings in animal form. Toad, for example, is tried for his crimes in a court and locked up in prison.

There is hardly a page in the book that does not contain some logical flaw. Famously, the animals seem to expand and contract in size from chapter to chapter. Toad is small enough to be comfortable in the Rat’s burrow but large enough to borrow a washerwoman’s clothing. And one of the achievements of E H. Shephard’s wonderful illustrations (added more than twenty years after the original publication largely because two previous illustrators had failed to capture the spirit of the book) is that they solve this problem with a gracefulness which renders it almost invisible[1].

Readers who first encountered the book as children in an abridged version will also be perplexed by the chapter headed, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ in which the Mole and the Water Rat come upon the figure of the great god Pan and are transported into a religious ecstasy:

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror – indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy – but it was an awe that smote and held him, and without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some August presence was very, very near […] And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

It is easy to see why Pink Floyd borrowed the title of this chapter for the title of their first album, but slightly harder to square it with our idea of The Wind in the Willows as a children’s book.

Amazingly, none of these inconsistencies matter in the slightest. It is not a book that succeeds by creating a workable parallel universe or a watertight plot. The inconsistencies are irrelevant because the engine which drives the story is a great well of strong, universal and contradictory emotions, and the book works because it stays true to these emotions and refuses to conform to any rational scheme.

At its heart, The Wind in the Willows is about our yearning for the safety of home and how this wars with our need for adventure. It is about the beauty of and harshness of nature. It is about the pleasures of being a child and the dangers this can lead us into without the guiding hand of an adult. It is about friendship and loyalty and the shortcomings of those friends to whom we are loyal. And all of these themes come together in the central character of Toad, who remains lovable - and loved - despite his appalling selfishness, his overpowering obsessions and his complete lack of common sense.

You do not have to look very far into Kenneth Grahame’s biography to understand why these subjects were so important to him, and why he was able to dramatise them with such feeling.

(Readers who are coming to The Wind in the Willows for the first time might want pause here, read the book itself, then return to the introduction to hear the darker story which lay behind it).

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh 1859. His father, Cunningham Grahame, was a successful lawyer who came from an aristocratic family. Despite his Calvinist upbringing he wrote poetry, spent money lavishly and was known for his theatrical performances in court. He was also an alcoholic, and by the time Kenneth was born, his clients were dwindling and he was heading towards a financial crisis that was averted only by taking a job in Argyll and moving his family to the isolated (and cheaper) West coast of Scotland where the young Kenneth acquired his lifelong love of everything connected with boating.

A few days after he turned five, Kenneth’s mother, Bessie, gave birth to his brother Roland and came down with Scarlet fever. She died two weeks later. On the day she died Kenneth fell ill with the same disease. Overcome with grief, his father hardly noticed, and Kenneth’s grandmother had to come from Edinburgh to nurse him slowly back to health.

Cunningham coped with his wife’s death by retreating into an alcoholic stupor. It was clear to everyone that he could no longer support his family. So the children were sent to live with Bessie’s mother, ‘Grannie Ingles’, at Cookham Dene in the South of England, the expense being borne by Cunningham’s brother, John.

‘The Mount’ was a house straight out of a storybook: a wild orchard, a terraced garden, ponds, a vaulted attic. The four children had few toys and were expected to meet the adults only at meals. The rest of the time they were free to play together. They were in the house for only two years, but the happiness he felt during this period shone like a beacon through the rest of Grahame’s life.

I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain I used from four till about seven can never be altered.

Then a chimney collapsed and the parsimonious Uncle John moved Grannie Ingles and the children into a smaller, rented house with no garden.

Hearing of their discontentment, Cunningham Grahame offered to take his children back and they travelled excitedly up to Scotland for the reunion. It was a disaster. Kenneth left no record of what happened, except to write that, ‘Return, indeed, was bitter’. While his children were still in the house, Cunningham resigned from his job, fled to France and spent the rest of his life in a boarding house in Le Havre.

The experience cemented Kenneth’s belief that adult human beings were fickle and incomprehensible and could not be relied upon. It was a belief that never really left him.

At nine, he was sent away to St Edward’s School in Oxford. It was a place lifted from a very different kind of storybook. The teaching was done by unqualified undergraduates from the university. The boys were fed on beer, fatty meat and porridge and the rat-infested building was falling down. One of the few consolations was that, in his free time, he was allowed to wander by the ‘remote and dragonfly-haunted’ reaches of the nearby river Thames.

When his schooling was over, Grahame wanted to attend the university in the city he had come to love. But an Oxford degree was too expensive an option for Uncle John and, despite Kenneth’s pleading, he was forced to accept a job working for his uncle in London for two years until he was able to take up a post as a ‘gentleman clerk’ in the Bank of England.

From this point on, Kenneth Grahame’s life splits in two. During office hours he led an existence of bourgeois respectability, rising steadily through the echelons until he was finally appointed secretary to the bank. Outside office hours, and during long periods of sick leave, he lead a more bohemian existence, writing anonymously, making literary friends and travelling, notably to Cornwall and Italy, places to which he would return repeatedly during his life.

Ten years after joining the Bank of England Grahame’s father died in Le Havre. Grahame’s dairies describe the funeral with no emotion whatsoever. But the event seems to have lifted a weight from him, because there was a new ease and honesty to his writing from this point on. His first signed piece, ‘By a Northern Furrow’, was accepted by the St James’s Gazette the same year.

He began writing a series of essays and stories for London magazines. Some of them affect an urbane, gentlemanly humour which seems laboured now. The better ones deal with the romance of travel and the beauties of the English countryside, all underpinned by a mystical neo-paganism which was always his true religion.

He found his true calling, however, with a story called, ‘The Olympians’ in 1891. Drawing on his two idyllic years in Cookham Dene, it told of the adventures of five children, Selina, Charlotte, Harold, Edward and the unnamed narrator, who have lost their ‘proper equipment of parents’ and are spending an endless summer playing lions and bears and pirates in the garden of their uncle’s country house. Most of all it is a celebration of the superiority of childhood imagination over the joylessness of adults:

These elders, our betters by chance, commanded no respect, but only a certain blend of envy – of their good luck – and pity – for their inability to make use of it. Indeed it was one of the most hopeless features in their character […] that, having absolute licence to indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good of it. They might dabble in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in the most uncompromising Sunday clothes; they were free to issue forth and buy gunpowder in the full eye of the sun – fee to fire cannons and explode mines on the lawn: yet they never did any one of these things.

It seems unexceptional now, but only because so many children’s stories have been written using the template Grahame created. In a small way he had invented a new way of looking at the world.

The Golden Age (a collection containing “The Olympians’ and seventeen other stories about the five children published in 1893) made him famous. President Theodore Roosevelt was fan. So was Kaiser Wilhelm.

And Grahame himself had become a member of the avant-garde circle behind the fearsomely modern literary magazine The Yellow Book. He fitted in well, if only because he was kind and considerate and always tried to fit into any company in which he found himself. Almost everyone who met him liked him. Many remarked upon his complete lack of the affectation which characterised everyone else in the same literary circles.

In 1897 he met Elspeth Thomson, daughter of the inventor of the pneumatic tyre. She was a friend to Alfred Tennyson and Sir John Tenniel (the illustrator of Alice in Wonderland). She had written a pseudonymous novel and would continue to write a great deal of bad poetry. Kenneth was gracious, she fell in love with him, he was flattered by the attention and they began a very strange courtship, carried out mostly through letters written in babytalk, she signing herself, ‘Minkie’, Grahame signing himself, ‘Dino’.

They were badly mismatched. She was needy and fragile and used to living her life through others. He was a solitary man who was good at friendship but frightened by genuine intimacy.

It is clear from his letters that Grahame wanted to sustain a weekend relationship. But neither Elspeth nor her step-father were going to let this happen and the two of them were eventually married in Cornwall, mostly because Grahame couldn’t bring himself to end the relationship and because Elspeth believed marriage would turn him into a husband.

It didn’t. Within days of the ceremony Kenneth was out walking the coast-path and messing about in boats, while Elspeth was left at home deeply unhappy, a pattern that was to continue for many years.

Their only son, Alistair, known as Mouse, was born prematurely in 1900. He was blind in one eye and had a squint in the other. He was an intelligent, articulate child, but Elspeth treated him like a prodigy and both parents indulged him so hugely that he soon became a very difficult and badly behaved boy indeed, kicking and slapping other children and lying down in front of cars when he did not get his own way.

The stories that eventually became The Wind in the Willows were originally told to Mouse by his father, both in person and in letters. Whether Toad really is a portrait of Mouse is neither here nor there. The similarities are obvious and they must surely have been obvious to Kenneth and Alistair at the time.

While Badger, Rat and Mole are clearly adults (albeit stripped of the adult characteristics Grahame found so troubling - sexuality, violence, deceit…) Toad is an ill-disciplined child. He lies, he cheats, he steals. He seems incapable of seeing the world from other people’s point of view and is utterly convinced of his own brilliance. But his enthusiasms are infectious, he is never cruel and his friends treat him in much the same way that Grahame treated his own son, endlessly forgiving his transgressions, then keeping his distance for periods to maintain his own sanity.

After a second book of stories about the five children of The Golden Age Grahame wrote nothing for nine years, despite regular requests from his publishers. The stories he told to Mouse were never intended for publication and it was only after being prompted by the literary agent Constance Smedley that he agreed to turn them into a book.

His publisher, The Bodley Head, rejected the manuscript. Very reluctantly Methuen agreed to publish the book but refused to pay an advance. And an American edition was guaranteed only when Grahame sent a copy to Theodore Roosevelt and the president wrote to Scribner insisting that they publish it.

Four months before publication, and assuming that his book was going to be a failure, Grahame resigned from the Bank of England. A new and ruthlessly efficient Governor had been appointed the previous year and he took a dim view of Grahame’s short hours, long holidays and regular sick leave. Grahame was sent packing with an ostentatiously low pension and a stern reminder that his material circumstances would be regularly checked in case the amount could be further reduced.

Despite the reviewers’ puzzlement and his publisher’s complete lack of faith, The Wind in the Willows was an unexpected success. Grahame was soon financially secure, which was a welcome relief, and famous, something he neither sought or particularly enjoyed.

He and Elspeth began to travel regularly throughout Europe, leaving their son in England. Mouse was sent to board at Rugby school but his disability and his arrogance made him the victim of much bullying. He lasted six weeks. His parents sent him to Eton instead. He lasted a year. Eventually, it was decided that he should be educated by a private tutor. Throughout all of this Elspeth continued to boast of her son’s genius.

Mouse was thirteen when the First World War broke out and he was adamant that he should go and fight for his country. It was a fantasy. His blindness meant that he would never pass an army medical. But his father went along with Mouse’s self-delusion, pulling strings to get him a place at Oxford University and a position in the university’s Cadet Corps, where he could play at soldiers without the risk of being turned down for actual military service.

Mouse’s university career was an academic and social disaster. He either failed or scraped through his exams, and made no effort to become involved in university life. He was also undergoing a crisis about his religious beliefs, exacerbated by the impending Holy Scriptures exam which he had to pass if he was to remain at the university.

He never took the exam. On Friday 7th May, 1920, he was killed by a train on the edge of Portmeadow. Railway workers found him the following morning, his head severed and his pockets full of religious pamphlets. The family maintained that it was an accident, but he was not on a level crossing, his hearing was good and he seems to have been lying on the track when he was struck.

He was buried nearby in Oxford’s Holy well cemetery. The gravestone maintained the family myth to the end:

Here was laid to rest on his twentieth birthday, 12th of May 1920, Alistair, only child of Kenneth and Elspeth Grahame, of whose noble ideals, steadfast purposes and rare promise remains only a loved and honoured memory.

A few years before Mouse’s death, Grahame was visited by an American academic, Clayton Hamilton who asked how long the world would have to wait for a sequel to The Wind in the Willows. Grahame replied:

I doubt very much if I shall ever write another book. A certain amount of […] life must go into the making of any page of prose. The effort is enormous.

Hamilton reminded him of the thousands of readers who had loved his stories of Mole, Rat, Badger and the inimitable Mr Toad. Grahame brushed the compliment aside.

They liked the subject matter. They did not even notice the source of all the agony, and all the joy.

At least on paper Grahame was able to give Toad a happy ending.

[1]The Bodleian Library has a wonderful online exhibition which contains not only some of E H Shephard’s illustrations, but parts of the original manuscript and many of the letters and postcards Grahame wrote to his son which became the germ of the book.