by Dennis Butts
But this is bestseller-land, and in order to manufacture an iconic scene, authors frequently have to manipulate characters and fact: in the case of the train, most readers would probably accept the scene at face value. However, manufacturing the big climax to the book also required a manipulation of the character of Bobbie that rather undermines her.
Critics (especially male critics) of the film were reduced to tears by Bobbie’s dramatic reunion with her father, recently released from prison; on the station platform the steam from the train drifts away to show him standing there, and she runs down the platform and flings herself into his arms, crying ‘Daddy, Oh my Daddy.’ The book is no less affecting:
Only three people got out of the 11.54. The first was a countryman with two baskety boxes full of live chickens who stuck their russet heads out anxiously through the wicker bars; the second was Miss Peckitt, the grocer’s wife’s cousin, with a tin box and three brown-paper parcels; and the third –
‘Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy! That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly around her.
How did Bobbie find herself in that scene?
The book, it has often been noted, is about imprisonment (the Dreyfus case, a notorious miscarriage of justice, was in the news when it was being written) – and the core of the plot is that Bobbie’s father has been unjustly imprisoned. When they find a Russian émigré who ‘was three years in a horrible dungeon’, the children’s mother asks them in their prayers to ‘ask God to show His pity upon all prisoners and captives’. When Bobbie finds out about her father she appeals to the deus ex machina of the book, the Old Gentleman, who is director of the railway. (The children not only saved one of his trains from being wrecked, but saved his grandson from being run over in a tunnel.) In due course he brings justice – but to orchestrate the final, climactic scene, somehow Nesbit has to get Bobbie down to the station without knowing what is going to happen. First the children, as they always do, wave to the 9.15; and instead of just their old gentleman waving, ‘from every window handkerchiefs fluttered, newspapers signalled, hands waved wildly . . . ’ Now, Bobbie, who has been the most intelligent character in the book, is required to be stupid. What does the waving mean? ‘Perhaps the old gentleman told the people at his station to look out for us and wave. He knew we should like it!’ And then: ‘I thought he was trying to explain something to us with his newspaper . . . I do feel most awfully funny. I feel just exactly as if something was going to happen.’ She walks down to the station and everyone is nice to her – even the Blacksmith, with his newspaper in his hand:
He grinned broadly, though, as a rule, he was a man not given to smiles, and waved his newspaper long before he came up to her. And as he passed her, he said, in answer to her ‘Good morning: –
‘Good morning to you, Missie, and many of them! I wish you joy, that I do’
‘Oh!’ said Bobbie to herself, and her heart quickened its beats, ‘something is going to happen! I know it is – everyone is so odd, like people are in dreams.’
Mr Perks is overwhelmed: ‘Well, God bless you, my dear! I see it in the paper, and I don’t think I was ever so glad of anything in all my born days!’ and he begs the liberty of kissing her on her cheeks, ‘On a day like this, you know . . . ’ to which Bobbie replies ‘On a day like what?’ – at which point the train steams into the station, and the narrator comments: ‘Of course you know already exactly what was going to happen. Bobbie was not so clever. . . . ’
Perhaps the sacrifice of Bobbie’s character to the dramatic moment is justified – or perhaps the emotional dynamics of the bestseller mean that we willingly suspend our disbelief, colluding in the illusion of a neat and satisfying world.
11. Did Isabel Archer Meet Mr Toad?
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Let us consider three houses:
It stood upon a low hill, above the river – the river being the Thames at some forty miles from London. A long gabled front of red brick, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only however, to improve and refine it, presented to the lawn its patches of ivy, its clustered chimneys, its windows smothered in creepers.
And,
Rounding a bend in the river, they came in sight of a handsome, dignified old house of mellowed red brick, with well-kept lawns reaching down to the water’s edge . . . ‘That creek on the left leads to the boat-house . . . The stables are over there to the right. That’s the banqueting hall . . . you know . . . This is really one of the nicest houses in these parts.’
And,
Situated on a grassy slope leading down to the river . . . its exterior presents a crowd of picturesque gables, surmounted by the quaint clock-tower, rising from mellowed red walls, adorned with stone-mullioned windows.
Actually, one house; for these are all pen-portraits of Hardwick House on the bank of the River Thames at Whitchurch-on-Thames, just across the river from Pangbourne on the Oxfordshire bank. Among the House’s notable visitors were King Charles I, Henry James, and Kenneth Grahame.
The first extract is from the first page of James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the second is the description of Toad Hall from The Wind in the Willows, and the third from an account by one of its mistresses, Mrs Philip Lybbe Powers. James I is reputed to have stayed at the house, and Grahame was a friend of Charles Day Rose, a remarkable figure whose interests included (apart from being an MP and a banker) breeding race-horses, sailing, motoring and aviation. He was a member of the jockey club, a challenger for the Americas cup, president of the RAC, and Chairman of the Royal Aero Club – although he died of a heart attack on his way home from his first flight at Hendon airfield in 1913 (in a Farman biplane, designed by the French aviatoir Henri Farman and used extensively in the First World War). He was also a major exponent of real tennis, building two courts at Hardwick, and others at Newmarket, Queens, Holyport, and Newcastle.
He was also, very probably, Mr Toad.
Jocelyn Dimbleby, in her memoir A Profound Secret, explains this connection:
Kenneth Grahame often came to Hardwick [where] he used to lie on his tummy on the river bank, with his head over the side, watching the water rats . . . Certainly the image of Hardwick at that time is echoed in The Wind in the Willows: the river bank with its animals, the large, rather crazy host who was mad keen on motor cars, and even the Wild Wood just nearby . . . Sir Charles Day Rose was an entertaining, passionate man, who was always having crazes for unusual activities . . . He was extremely proud of his large open car, a 1904 Mercedes Simplex Tourer. It had a six-cylinder engine and a very long bonnet. Because of Sir Charles’s life by the river, his dynamic personality and his great attachment to his motor car, it is thought that his fellow banker and friend Kenneth Grahame based Mr Toad on him.
There comes a point in a literary detective story like this when someone says, ‘but the books are fiction! Surely it doesn’t matter who the characters were based on, in reality, or what the place was where fictional characters walked around.’ Common sense might agree, but the evidence of coach- loads of tourists visiting Herriot or Brontë or Austen Country, or riding the Tarka line, or walking the Waverley route suggests otherwise. Fiction has a curious grasp on us – but that is not surprising. A book – especially a well-loved book – leads us (as the popularity of literary biography attests) to want to know how the book was generated. After all, literature is only a game played with reality, and if the authors played it, why shouldn’t the readers?
For some reason it is fascinating to know that there was a real Mr McGregor – the tenant who sub-let Eastwood, a dower house on the Tay near Dunkeld to the Potters in 1893; that Treebeard was modelled on C.S. Lewis (at least, the booming voice); or t
hat Peter Pan was Peter Llewelyn Davis. That M’Turk (in Stalky and Co) was one George Beresford; that Cock-Robin, of the nursery rhyme, was Sir Robert Walpole; and that Sherlock Holmes was Dr Joseph Bell (or, come to that, that the real Ophelia was called Katherine Hamlet, Buck Mulligan was Oliver St John Gogarty, Malvolio, Sir William Knollys.) Why is this fascinating (to some)? Possibly for the same reason that fiction is – it is a way of calming, comprehending the immeasurable world.
The Wind in the Willows is particularly rich in references to real people and places because Grahame, not the most industrious of authors, assembled the book from affectionate portraits of his friends, and equally affectionate parodies of popular genres: the river book, the caravan book, the motor-car thriller, and the pseudo-mystic pastoral.
Boating was one of Grahame’s favourite pastimes and he was, for a short time, a neighbour of the journalist and playwright Jerome K. Jerome; so it is perhaps not surprising that The Wind in the Willows contains echoes of the Jerome’s humourous masterpiece Three Men in a Boat (1889). The three men are a bank clerk, George; the rather dreamy poetic narrator, J.; and Harris, a man of ‘number one size’ who sings comic songs – characters very close to Mole, Rat, and Toad.
George, who ‘goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two’ was based on Jerome’s friend George Wingrave, who eventually became the manager of Barclay’s Strand branch. The Mole’s clerkly nature seems to have echoes of George, and of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Mr Pooter from The Diary of a Nobody (1892). He almost stands for every under-dog (or under-mole, possibly). Grahame may have had in mind a ballad by the Scottish poet John Davidson (1857-1909, whose most famous poem is probably ‘A Runnable Stag’), ‘Thirty Bob A Week’, when writing his tale. The third stanza begins, ‘For like a mole I journey in the dark,/ A-travelling along the underground/ . . . To come the daily dull official, round.’ Davidson lived in London from 1889, and Grahame, who hovered on the fringes of the literary circles of the day, may well have known him.
Kenneth Grahame, John Singer Sargent
J. is clearly an ironic self-portrait of Jerome; and just as the Water Rat dreamily steers his boat into the river bank, J. is not to be relied on either as the three men proceed down river towards a punt.
As we drew nearer, we could see that the three men fishing seemed old and solemn-looking men. They sat on three chairs in the punt, and watched intently their lines. And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night.
We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.
We didn’t go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing . . .
George said he would steer, after that. He said a mind like mine ought not to be expected to give itself away in steering boats – better let a more commonplace human being see after that boat, before we jolly well all got drowned; and he took the lines and brought is up to Marlow.
The Water Rat is also an individual who, despite his devotion to the English countryside, yearns for escape. As the tempter, in the shape of the Sea Rat puts it: ‘Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but the banging of the door behind you . . . Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will . . . and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company . . . ’ There are several passages on escape in Grahame’s earlier work, notably in ‘Orion’ in Pagan Papers, which describes a reputable stockbroker (‘a goodly, portly man, i’faith’) who suddenly disappears and is found,
ragged, sun-burnt [and] tickling trout with godless native urchins . . . he answered but with a babble of green fields . . . He is back in his wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet – let the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm south, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay, truly: and next time he will not be caught.
Harris – and eventually some aspects of Toad, one suspects – was modelled on another of Jerome’s friends, Carl Hentschel, who was a co-founder of The Playgoer’s Club, and whose father invented half-tone photographic printing blocks. (And, who despite Harris’s character, was in real life a teetotaller.)
The first of Toad’s adventures concerns a ‘gypsy caravan . . . painted a canary yellow picked out with green, and red wheels.’ So we should not be too surprised to find, knowing Grahame’s magpie-like methods of composition (or compilation), that the founder of the Caravan Club, Gordon Stables, a prolific writer for children and adults, describes the caravan that inspired him thus: ‘It was a caravan of an old-fashioned shape . . . painted bright yellow, the wheels picked out in vermilion, the gypsies have ever an eye for the brightest of colours.’ (In Leaves from the Log of a Gentleman Gypsy, c.1891.) Later on, Toad encounters a genuine gypsy with a genuine caravan, who offers to buy the horse that Toad has just stolen. Toad demurs:
‘You don’t seem to see,’ continued Toad, ‘that this fine horse of mine is a cut above you all together. He’s a blood horse, he is, partly; not the part you can see, of course – that was the time before you knew him, but you can still tell it on him at a glance if you understand anything about horses. No, it’s not to be thought of for a moment. All the same, how much might you be disposed to offer me for this beautiful young horse of mine?’
The gipsy looked the horse over, and then he looked Toad over with equal care. ‘Shillin’ a leg,’ he said briefly, and turned away, continuing to smoke and try to stare the wide world out of countenance.
This scene may be an affectionate parody of the horse-dealing between the ‘gyptian’ Mr Petulengro and the narrator in chapter 18 of George Borrow’s The Romany Rye (1857): ‘He’s to be sold for fifty pounds . . . and is worth four times that sum . . . ” ’ The Gypsy Lore Society was founded in 1888. In ‘The Romance of the Road’ (National Observer, 14 Feb 1891) Grahame noted, ‘Surely you seem to cover vaster spaces with Lavengro, footing it with gypsies or driving his tinker’s cart across lonely commons, than with many a globe-trotter or steam-yachtsman with diary or log?’
When the caravan is consigned to the ditch by the motor-car, Grahame changes genre to the ‘motoring thriller’, of which there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, in the early years of the twentieth century. The most obvious source of (or a parallel to) Toad’s motoring adventures can be found in a book that Grahame might well have read to his son, Alastair – The Golliwog’s Auto-Go-Cart by Florence and Bertha Upton (1901). This mother and daughter team had considerable success with their ‘Golliwog’ series, and in this example, the heroic Golliwog not only crashes his car into a pond, and sails through the air to a soft grassy landing, but escapes from prison on a rope made of sheets.
It is sometimes (romantically) said that classics are timeless. It is perhaps more entertaining and enlightening to see them as being of their time – of a very precise time, so that we can trace their fabric, and see how they grew.
Of course, the answer to our original question is that the fictional Isabel was long gone by the time that the fictional Mr Toad occupied the same house – although it is pleasant to imagine some literary Valhalla, where they wander on the lawns together, while Ralph Touchett and Ratty share a punt on the peaceful river.
12. How Did Mary Get to Misslethwaite Manor?
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)
At the beginning of The Secret Garden, the orphaned Mary Lennox, ‘the most disagreeable-looking chil
d’ that anyone had ever seen, returns to England from colonial India to live at her uncle’s house. The world she has left – that of the Raj, seen sceptically through the eyes of an author who, though born in England had lived much of her life in America – has spoiled her; ruined her, it would seem: ‘She did not cry because her nurse had died. She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for anyone.’ Can the world she arrives in save her?
At first, the prospect looks rather unpromising. She is collected from the boat by her uncle’s housekeeper, Mrs Medlock: ‘Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people, there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs Medlock did not think much of her.’ Mrs Medlock gives her a dour lecture about what to expect at Misslethwaite Manor. Her uncle is a bitter, widowed recluse with a crooked back, who has no interest in children, and who lives in a huge, gloomy house on the Yorkshire moors. (‘[I]t sounded,’ the narrator notes, perhaps a little incautiously, ‘like something in a book’.) Mrs Medlock adds, ‘You’ll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you’re to keep out of. There’s gardens enough.’