by Olivia Laing
Instead of being allowed to try for Oxford, Kenneth was ordered by one of the hated uncles who controlled the children’s finances to take a job in the City. He served an apprenticeship in the family firm and on New Year’s Day 1879 started as a clerk in the Bank of England. In the late nineteenth century the Bank was, by all accounts, an exceedingly eccentric place. According to Alison Prince, Grahame’s most recent biographer, it wasn’t unusual to come across a clerk in the lavatory butchering the carcass of a sheep bought wholesale in the local market. The lavatories were also used for dogfights, which were so much a part of Bank culture that some of the rougher clerks kept fighting dogs chained in readiness at their desks. Drunkenness was rife, hours were short, and behaviour in general seems to have been every bit as louche and riotous as that of today’s hedge fund managers and currency traders.
One might have expected such a sensitive young man to flail in this environment, but Grahame had been to public school and was accustomed to roaring boys. He kept his head down, drifted up the hierarchy, and in his free time began to write. His early pieces seem sentimental now, but they appealed to the Victorian obsession with innocence and were increasingly rapturously received. He wrote about nature, about wanderers and wayfarers, about pig-headed uncles and men who abandoned the strife of the city to wander footloose through the sleepy valley of the Thames. There are altogether too many Autumns being carried forth in russet winding-sheets for contemporary tastes, but over time these affectations declined. As Grahame began to document the world of his own childhood his writing became more simple and intense. The Golden Age, his second collection of stories, was almost entirely autobiographical and it appealed so deeply to readers of the time that he became famous almost overnight.
As the century drew to a close, two things changed in Grahame’s life. He was appointed Secretary of the Bank of England and he met Elspeth Thomson, the woman who would become his wife. In 1897 she was thirty-five; a strangely fey orphan who despite her girlish manner ran her stepfather’s house with considerable efficiency. Kenneth was frequently ill during this period, and much of the courtship was carried out by letter from the various haunts in which he was convalescing. Of what appears to have been a torrent of correspondence only one of Elspeth’s letters has survived, but there are hundreds from Kenneth, almost all written in a baby language that is as difficult to decode as it is maddening to read.
‘Darling Minkie,’ an early specimen begins: ‘Ope youre makin steddy progress beginning ter think of oppin outer your nest & facing a short fly round.’ Another, unusually romantic, example ends: ‘I’m agoin’ ter be pashnt my pet & go on dreemin a you till youre a solid reality to the arms of im oo the world corls your luvin Dino.’ Marriage proposals, wedding plans and negotiations around living arrangements were all carried out in this nursery prattle, which allowed both participants to play at being children adrift in a mystifyingly adult world. The sweet talk also served to conceal for a time the glaring differences between the two participants, for Dino had no real interest in intimacy, preferring boats and rivers to human company, while Minkie was scarcely educated and burdened with limitless romantic expectations.
Despite the violent objections of Elspeth’s stepfather and the dismay of Kenneth’s family, friends and even housekeeper, the marriage went ahead. The bride drifted up the aisle dressed like a self-conscious sprite in dew-damp muslin, a chain of daisies strung wiltingly around her neck. The honeymoon was spent in Cornwall, where Kenneth proved himself deeply unsuited to the solid reality of a wife by disappearing on solitary boating excursions at every available opportunity. Back in London, the benign neglect continued, much to Elspeth’s distress. Nonetheless, she managed to become pregnant and at the turn of the century the Grahame’s only child, Alistair, was born.
The tragedy of Kenneth Grahame’s obsession with childhood is encapsulated in the purblind figure of his son, who he swiftly skewered with the diminutive Mouse. If Kenneth never quite grew up emotionally, Mouse would refuse the sordid business of adulthood altogether, and his story can be read as one of the more distressing examples of that strange region in literary history which deals with the real children who inspire or are otherwise caught up in classic books, from Christopher Robin to Alice Liddell and the Lost Boys of J.M. Barrie.
Mouse was born blind in one eye and with a painful-looking squint in the other. From the start he was an unusual child and his parents became convinced that he was a genius, though he was prone to wild tantrums and had an unpleasant habit of attacking servants and stray children in the street, a tendency Kenneth found amusing and did little to discourage. The Wind in the Willows started life as a way of entertaining Mouse, who according to the custom of the time was brought up largely by servants and spent frequent holidays away from his parents. It began, as Kenneth explained in a note to Elspeth, as a bedtime ‘tory in which a mole, a beever a badjer & a water-rat was characters’ – the baby talk was evidently surviving the couple’s growing separation – and was developed further via letters. The tory was initially a very private business and it was only much later that Kenneth was persuaded it might be fattened into a book. During the writing process he inserted the more mystical elements, including ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, that strange and wistful chapter in which a lost otter cub is discovered, in a moment of rapturous pantheism, at the feet of the Horned God himself. The resultant blend of childish romp and distinctly pagan nature worship confused early reviewers, but the clarity and humour of Grahame’s writing has proved unusually resistant to the attritions of time and his riparian world remains beguiling a century after it was first confined to print.
The character of Toad, that hapless blusterer, is said to owe a great deal to Alistair, but while Toad’s wildness was given firm limits by his faithful friends Rat and Mole, Mouse was alternately spoiled and ignored. After the years of alternate coddling and solitude, public school came as a terrible shock. Mouse seems to have had a rough time of it at Rugby, leaving after only six weeks, while a brief stint at Eton precipitated a nervous breakdown. Contrary to his parents’ fantasies, the boy was neither especially academic nor easy with his fellows, though his letters possess a pleasantly cocky charm and he looks attractively built in the few surviving photographs. In the end he was packed off to a private tutor, where he managed to disport himself with sufficient success that his father, after some string-pulling, won him a place at Christ Church, one of Oxford’s larger and more prestigious colleges.
Oxford had been Kenneth’s dream, but Mouse foundered there from the start. He couldn’t keep up with the work, botched his exams and failed to make friends among the other undergraduates. At last, in May 1920, he walked one evening from his college to Port Meadow, a pretty 400-acre area of grazing land bordered by the Isis, the young Thames, the same river his father had immortalised in his famous book. Oddly enough, another great work of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland, had its origins in Port Meadow. Decades before Mouse took his walk, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, who is better known as Lewis Carroll, rowed up the river there one July afternoon with the three young Liddell sisters, who persuaded him to make up a tale about a strange world beneath the ground. Mouse, whose private childhood story had also been parcelled up and sold off to the public, walked through the meadowsweet and buttercups to the railway track, lay down across it with his head over the line and at some point before dawn was decapitated by a train. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death, but the coroner’s report leaves very little doubt that Mouse had taken his own life.
In the wake of Alistair’s death the Grahames left the rural farmhouse they’d inhabited for years, sold off most of their possessions, including the vast collection of toys Kenneth had lovingly collected, and ran away to Rome. They spent the next decade drifting around Europe and didn’t return permanently to the heartland of the Thames until 1930. Two years after his homecoming Kenneth died of a brain haemorrhage in their cottage by the river, and was buried in a grave l
ined with so many thousands of sweet peas that the air was steeped with their elusive scent.
Later his body was disinterred and shifted to Holywell in Oxford, where Alistair was also buried. I’d visited this place with Matthew, quite by chance, a few years back. The graveyard was half-wild, the grass uncut, and beneath a lilac bush we came across a sleeping fox curled nose to tail in the shade. Kenneth was buried there beside his son and on the front of their joint headstone was carved: To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alistair, who passed the river on 6th of July 1932, leaving childhood & literature through him the more blest for all time.
That spring I’d been reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, which is set at the beginning of the last century, during the great flowering of Edwardian culture and art. The novel is populated by all sorts of children’s authors, among them J.M. Barrie and Grahame himself, and it exposes the inadvertent, almost collateral, damage they seemed compelled to cause by dint of their obsessive interest in the young. Among the cast is a fictional writer, Olive Wellwood, who spins an ongoing private story for each of her own children. All of them find their stories subtly oppressive, but one, Tom, is destroyed by his, and I thought he might stand in some way as a tribute to Alistair Grahame.
Tom is a wild boy, happiest in the woods, and he is maimed by the entrapping experience of being sent away to school. ‘His’ story involves a boy whose shadow is stolen and who must pass into fairyland to claim it back. When his mother later turns it into a popular play he feels unbearably exposed and sets out on a long maddened walk from London to Kent, where he reaches the sea at Dungeness, waits for the sun to go down, and then walks into the waves. ‘He had sensed,’ Byatt writes at some point in this troubled, troubling story, ‘that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up.’ It is impossible to know whether this was what Mouse intended, but as an epitaph for Kenneth Grahame it seems uncannily precise.
I was recalled to the world abruptly then. I’d been walking up a long, sloping ride and as I turned a corner a golden dog and what looked like a deerhound came racing down the path. I must have jumped, for the man who followed them greeted me kindly, observing, You were walking in a dream and then these dogs came from nowhere, which added to the suspicion that I might have been talking out loud.
I’d come clean through the woods, and I found myself now in a snaggle of private lanes between beautiful old houses. It was a hidden world of a different sort, the spell cast this time by money. The houses – Pegden, Pilstyes, Little Grebe – were set back behind curling drives, the gardens edged by box the everlasting and rusty stands of beech. Fragments of conversation lifted over the hedges, accompanied by the sound of lawnmowers and running taps. I could see beds and borders through gates; attic rooms and gables; eaves and chimneypots.
According to the map there was a pub a mile or two further on, down in the valley where the river crossed Sloop Lane. The houses gave way to a plateau of horse pastures and fields of blue-furled wheat, the Weald spread out far beneath. It was the last high ground I’d cross, 230 feet above sea level, and I stopped at the top of the ridge to photograph my shadow pinned against the buttercups, startling four horses into a circling canter as the shutter clicked. At the bottom of the hill there was a hornbeam grove, the trunks hard and carved as bone, unbranching to the sky. Someone had been building jumps out of fallen logs, the sort of scruffy brush and bale affairs that a friend and I used to spend whole summers bodging together in Southleigh Forest, which now I stopped to think about it must also be a remnant of the Andredesleage. And then, Lord have mercy, there was the pub, and ginger beer and a plate of ham and mustard sandwiches that I wolfed right down to the crust.
The heat had not abated. Oh, you never help, an old woman with a dog said to her husband. The barman wouldn’t fill my water bottle, but gave me complicated directions to a standpipe in the yard. Just down the lane by the old mill the Ouse was running milky in the shadows and brown as beer in the sunlight, almost silent where it used to clap and twist. I stood on the bridge and peered down into it, riffling shallowly beneath the willows. There was a line from Grahame’s book that caught it. ‘The river still chattered on . . . a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.’
There was one last wood to cross before I’d join it, down on the once vast estate of Sheffield Park, which Henry VIII stole from the Duke of Norfolk and Bloody Queen Mary gave back. As soon as I entered Wapsbourne Wood, I could hear a nagging whine that I thought at first was a chainsaw, and then a choir of flies. There were signs nailed to the trees explaining the environmental benefits of coppicing, but the scene I came upon was on a far grander scale than any coppice I’d ever seen. The wood was mainly chestnut, and for an acre or more each one had been slashed a foot from the ground, aslant so they wouldn’t rot. Huge spindly oaks and hollies stood like masts amid the wreckage. The brush was piled here and there into heaps, though whether to mulch or be hauled away I couldn’t tell. Coppicing produces a variety of habitats on which many plants and animals now depend, the sign read. It was true enough. The foxgloves grew in profusion, as rosebay willowherb will grow where bombs have fallen or fires burned, rising in quick flames across the spoiled ground.
It was very still. Tyre tracks had wrenched the mud into waves, and over them the soft ripples of birdsong passed back and forth. Sometimes the lone walker feels that he is moving backwards in time, and sometimes that he stands at the threshold of a different world, though whether it is heaven or hell is anybody’s guess. The landscape hasn’t changed, not in any way that can be articulated, but a sense of strangeness seeps up from all around. At other times, it is what has been done to a landscape that curdles it, so it becomes a place in which one does not like to linger, for fear of something that cannot be expressed.
I had a dream as a child that I was going to hell. Judging from the bedroom in which I woke, pooled in sweat, I must have been six. We had just moved house for the fourth time and I was in my second year at the convent that had once, girls used to say, been the home of Hanging Judge Jeffries, whose bloody Assizes were notorious for their brutality. In the summer holidays the nuns used to come to our house to pick the grapes for their communion wine, and it seemed they’d picked also the lock to my dreams.
A child raised Catholic knows the world is not all it seems; knows that other realms exist above the clouds or thousands of miles beneath the floor. Though these beliefs may in their detail be discarded, the sense remains: that the earth is porous; that the eyes are not to be trusted. Flimsy, that’s how I was taught the earth is, straw-walled, so that one good huff will bring it down. The books I read as a child didn’t help. They were obsessed with Neverlands and Narnias, places reached by rabbit holes or wardrobes, by lingering near woods and rivers or plunging through a mirror. The notion of a world within our world, set deep, a world that can be entered only with difficulty by mortals, is not of course the sole possession of Catholicism, and nor does it belong exclusively to those escapist stories that Kenneth Grahame and his ilk used to spin in the innocent endless days before the First World War. There are older sources for these ideas, and in that spoiled wood they seemed very near.
The word hell comes from the Anglo-Saxon helan, meaning to hide; it is related to hole and hollow. Hel, the afterlife of the Norse, was a concealed place, as the land of the dead by its nature must be. Its analogy for the Greeks was Hades – which itself means unseen – and for the Romans Dis. Nor were these realms always freighted with connotations of punishment and damnation. The older hells seem closer to vast waiting rooms where the dead, unsleeping, bide their time.
Whatever names they go by, these places weren’t often visited by the living. Perhaps six or seven mortals made the journey to the underworld in classical mythology. Aeneas, the founder of Rome,
went to visit his dead father, descending through the entrance in the marsh of Cumea. Odysseus, slick Odysseus, went only to the brink, sailing to the edge of Persephone’s realm and summoning the dead to visit him by the banks of the river Acheron. He wanted blind Tiresias to guide him home to Ithaca but the ghosts of heroes also came, drawn by the blood he poured, and he saw among them the hunter Orion driving a crowd of all the wild beasts he’d ever slain. Orpheus went down to reclaim Eurydice, who’d been bitten by a snake, and Hercules to steal the dog Cerberus, who guarded the gates to Hades. And then there was Psyche, who in order to win back her lover Eros had to carry out three tasks, the third of which was to bring home in a box some of the beauty of Proserpine, queen of the underworld.
The translation of this last story by Robert Graves offers helpful advice for finding one’s way into Hades, which is linked to the mortal realm by means of all sorts of riddling tunnels and shafts:
The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out-of-the-way place to find. It’s on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you’ll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through and you’ll see a road running downhill, but there’ll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto’s palace. But don’t forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.