WILD PEOPLE: KENNETH GRAHAME
The Wind in the Willows is an escape into adventure, joyous camaraderie and the ordered beauty of the English countryside – things the author Kenneth Grahame yearned for all his life, says Matthew Dennison
Where The Wind in the Willows author found inspiration for his famous novel.
Ilove these little people; be kind to them,” was the single instruction author Kenneth Grahame gave to Ernest Shepard when Shepard agreed, with some misgivings, to illustrate a new edition of The Wind
in the Willows, Grahame’s story of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad.
It was 1930. Grahame was 71, all but a recluse, suffering from arteriosclerosis and fatty deterioration of the heart. He was confined to an armchair in Church Cottage, Pangbourne – the Thamesside house in which he would die two years later – a pretty, brick-built, irregular structure, with tall chimneys, a ship’s bell beside the front door and, in the garden, a grassy amphitheatre.
Shepard was impressed by Grahame’s deep attachment to his fictional creatures. In the 110 years since the book’s first publication, countless thousands of readers have felt the same affection for these walking, talking anthropomorphised British wild animals.
Like the Beatrix Potter tales and AA Milne’s stories of Winnie the Pooh (also illustrated by Shepard), Grahame’s novel of riverbankers “messing about in boats” has become a cornerstone of childhood reading across the Englishspeaking world and beyond. Adults re-read it for its joyous comedy, its celebration of the camaraderie of good friends, its lyrical descriptions of unspoilt landscape and the tug of home, and its reminders of a vanished Edwardian world of wicker picnic baskets, horse-drawn gypsy caravans and velvety lawns of country houses.
For Kenneth Grahame himself, although the rural idyll he described had yet to disappear, The Wind in the
Willows was every bit as escapist and exhilarating. A reviewer in The Times
Literary Supplement in 1908 dismissed the book curtly: “As a contribution to natural history the work is negligible.” More accurately, the critic of the
Saturday Review of Literature noted that “Rat, Toad and Mole are very human in their behaviour, and remind us of undergraduates of sporting proclivities”. Grahame had little interest in painstaking realism. Beatrix Potter’s criticism of Toad combing his hair – an impossibility for any toad – bothered him not a jot.
ESCAPE TO AN IDYLLIC PAST
Grahame first embarked on his novel to entertain his son Alastair – whom he called Mouse – beginning when Alastair was only three, but his motives were more complex than simply amusing a precocious toddler. Grahame wrote to entertain himself. He wrote to recapture childhood memories of the house and garden in which he had grown up, The Mount at Cookham Dean in Berkshire. The large garden terraced over several levels, and was surrounded by copper beeches, ancient elms and laurels, with an orchard, a lily pond, rows of raspberry canes, a meadow thick