SADNESS IN THE WILLOWS
As the much loved classic comes to the stage, we look at the life of the man who wrote The Wind In The Willows
THE Wind In The Willows has just opened as a major West End musical. The show features (of course) Toad, Ratty, Mole and Badger and maybe even a chorus of weasels. If it’s worth its salt the adaptation for the stage – by Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes – should be a riverbank tale that feels deeply English.
Yet the original book was written by a Scot and for all its innocence, behind it is a tale of tragedy and marital despair.
Peter Pan author J M Barrie once said that nothing that happens to us after the age of 12 matters very much. Well, Kenneth Grahame, born in 1859, had – like so many famous children’s writers – a hard childhood.
His mother died of a fever when he was five. Unable to cope, his father, a well-to-do Scottish lawyer, hit the bottle, shut up the house and sent Kenneth and his three siblings south to live with their frosty maternal grandmother in Berkshire. He would die, a hopeless alcoholic, in a boarding house in Le Havre when Kenneth was 27.
Living near the Thames in a large house in Cookham Dean, Grahame loved the riverbank as much as Ratty. He went to a private school in Oxford but his guardian wouldn’t pay Oxford University fees, to Kenneth’s life-long regret. Instead he joined the Bank of England as a gentleman-clerk.
Into this solid marble environment, life in all its randomness came calling. A madman walked into the bank, introduced himself to Grahame (by then a senior figure), pulled out a pistol and fired three shots at him. All missed.
The man was bundled off to an asylum but Grahame was left with an impression that London, like life, was something to be escaped from – preferably way upstream.
According to his biographers, Grahame seems to have been a reserved but agreeable Edwardian bachelor who found women utterly inexplicable creatures – which is perhaps why he kept female animals largely out of his famous book. Mrs Otter, to be played by Denise Welch, is the only female lead in the new musical.
His life changed when he met Elspeth Thomson, an airy-fairy amateur poet but with a laser eye for suitable men. She collected artistic types – Sir John Tenniel, for example, the Alice In Wonderland illustrator, who sent her Valentines and regretted it. Grahame was a sitting duck.
IN SOME ways they were both children. The pair indulged in embarrassing “mockney” baby talk. He wrote to her about his house: “We’ve a drore full of toys wot wind up.”
Before he knew it, Grahame had done the decent thing. Asked if it was really true that he had proposed, he is said to have gloomily mumbled, “I suppose; I suppose.”
The marriage was a disaster from the off, physically and emotionally. On honeymoon in Cornwall, he went off boating with friends. The new Mrs Grahame wrote for guidance to Mrs Thomas Hardy, who was stuck in a dead marriage to the romantic writer. Mrs H bleakly advised her to keep separate and expect little.
For Grahame, writing was his escape route out of the union. Like Mole with his pencil: “He sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was a joy to the mole to know that the cure had at least begun.”
The mismatched newlyweds did, however, produce one child – Alastair, nicknamed Mouse. He was born blind in one eye and with a heavy squint in the other and other physical problems. When he was little his doting parents, as if to compensate for his serious affliction, decided he was a genius.
Spoilt rotten, dressed in fancy clothes, coddled but never punished, Alastair seems to have grown up rather twisted. He loved lying in the road in front of approaching cars – a trick that proved sadly prophetic.
When Alastair was little his father started to make up bedtime stories. One evening his wife was waiting to go out to dinner and asked the maid where her husband was. “He’s with Master Mouse, madam,” she said. “He’s telling him some ditty about a toad.”
The toad was discreetly based on his son’s boastful character and these bedtime stories would eventually be expanded into his riverbank masterpiece.
The Wind In The Willows came out in 1908. Despite poor reviews, the public instantly adored the book whose overseas sales were given a huge boost when the American president Teddy Roosevelt declared himself a great fan.
Alastair grew up in the shadow of the book’s success. In letters he referred to his father as “Inferiority”. Yet he only just scraped into Oxford, following an unwise decision to send him to Eton where his bragging caused him grief.
As a desperately struggling undergraduate it had become painfully obvious even to poor Alastair that he was no great guns academically. One evening after dinner in Oxford, he walked to the nearby railway, laid his neck on a rail and waited for a train. He was only 19. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death. It was obviously not.
By grim coincidence, nearby, a year later, another Oxford student, theboy on whom Barrie’s Peter Pan had been based, was found drowned in a pond. Suicide was suspected.
Devastated, the Grahames travelled abroad but nothing could ease the pain of their loss. Mrs Grahame lay on a sofa, mute. The success of Wind In The Willows was hollow consolation.
In the late 1920s, the illustrator Ernest Shepard knocked on Grahame’s door with a proposal for illustrating the work.
Grahame said to him, “I love these little people, be kind to them.” Shepard’s definitive drawings, through which you can almost feel the breeze blowing, further enhanced the book’s magical ability to transport its readers.
WINNIE the Pooh author A A Milne adapted the book for the stage in 1930, though he made the characters more like his own. The show was by all accounts more Poohishly “tiddely-pom” than Toad-ishly “poop poop!”. Alan Bennett produced a hit stage version in the 1990s with the late Jeremy Sinden deliciously smug as Toad. Bennett added his own black humour. “See that rabbit?” Ratty casually remarks about a sad little bunny. “His dad just got turned into a pie.” Kenneth Grahame, like his son, was never to feel the carefree happiness his book. He died in 1932 aged 73 and was buried in the same grave as Alastair. Elspeth lived until 1946. Acres of paper have been wasted trying to explain how the riverbank is a sexless paradise while the wild wood represents the modern adult world, a world overtaken by weasels (in the last stage outing spivvy estate agents). But in the end the book needs no explaining. The Wind In The Willows is no less addictive today than it ever was. Perhaps that’s because in its magical riverbank world, friendship and happiness are really all that matter. Wind In The Willows the musical is previewing at The London Palladium