‘Is the house warm yet? Is the house warm yet?
It aye becomes the cosier the longer that we sit;
An’ though it’s like an oven we will never steer a fit
Though we ask at ane anither — Is the house warm yet?’
By right of birth and of official position the Grahames were accepted without question by a county society which valued itself above rubies. Bessie Grahame, writing to ‘My dear Mamma’ on the 2nd October 1863, mentions (a casual allusion) that she and her husband had dined the other evening ‘at the Castle’. The ducal condescension that, by dinner invitation, endorsed her, that set local seal upon her social status, is accepted as the matter of no importance. Mrs. Grahame mentions her fellow guests, ‘a lot of county people, the Malcolms, the MacNeils’. Among them is ‘a nice Lady Emma, the Duke’s sister’, and ‘a Mr. Arthur’ who, because he was very quiet’, she supposes to be in holy orders. She has however a complete success with Lord ‘Lorn’ not because of her own bright eyes but because, she modestly concludes, he learns that she is the sister of her brother David. And young Lord Lorne is ‘very enthusiastic about David’s boating achievements’ and is thrilled to know that Mrs. Grahame is sister to the Ingles he so admires at Eton. (David Ingles was in the Eton Eight and a mere marquis was less than the dust under David’s rowing-shoes.) Bessie Grahame moreover tells her Mamma that the young ladies at the Castle ‘are not yet of a flirtable age’ and that one of them ‘wears brown stockings’. And that, next day, she took ‘Nelly’ (doubtless her own little daughter Helen) up to the Castle to see the ‘little girls’. But, ‘of course they never spoke to each other’. The Duchess however promises that she would order her gardener ‘to help with the flower beds at the new house’. So the call was not entirely a vain civility. And ‘the new grates are coming in and Mr. Cleghorn has brought me such a pretty present from Germany for the house — an inkstand of black marble and bronze, also two candlesticks of the same’. But, alas, the white broom that came from Hilton (Bessie’s birthplace) is dead, but, on the other hand, the Hilton roses, which were cut down as dead too, ‘have all sprouted again’. A nice chatty letter this such as young ladies to-day have lost the art of.
Those who knew her said that Bessie Grahame’s laugh was one of her chiefest charms. She laughed joyously and made no secret of it. Mr. Saxmundham, in The Diary of a Sportsman, has told of a summer dinner-party at ‘the Castle In ‘bustles whiskers and the austere light of day the guests stood, with ceremony arrayed, in the drawingroom waiting a delayed announcement of dinner. There came a scamper of feet in the corridor (obviously not those of the butler) and there entered, with a door-bang and a pattering rush, a small and dishevelled child who squealed, in a passion of temper and tears, ‘Mamma, Mamma, forbid Henrietta to feed my rabbits with green food, she’ll give them (the squeal climbed the scale to crescendo and tailed out into a shrill and long-drawn agony) pot-bell-ee-e.’ There was a shocked silence. Then Bessie Grahame laughed, ringing-clear and joyful and as like ‘an irreverent angel’ as the diarist can imagine. But he does not say what ‘Mamma’ did about the rabbits.
Bessie Grahame’s new home, the home, clearly, so much in her mind, was a big granite house, swept about by green lawns, bright borders of posies, and ‘weel happit’ at the back of it, by fine trees. For the Campbells are the true tree-lovers and larch, spruce, silver-fir and pine, they tell you, will come at a crying of ‘Cruachan’ From his night-nursery window, in this intriguing new house, a little boy might see the sugar-loaf of Duniquoich, a high hill clouded upon, bottom to top, with the true and evergreen pine. And to front the day-nursery windows was blue Loch Fyne where the porpoises play and the hunting terns and herring-gulls stoop, the day long, cloop, at the herring. But better than the splashing gulls and the blue water were the red squirrels that scampered and scraped and, sitting up, sometimes six at a time, made the lawn a very kingdom of Puck.
But, early in 1864, tragedy came to the house without a name. Bessie Grahame took scarlet fever and presently the fever took her and she was gone, slipping out on the west wind of a mild spring day. ‘It’s all been lovely,’ she whispered, like a child home from a party.
And the day she went, Kenneth was down with a similar sickness. He beat it, but only by a hair’s breadth. His father and his grandmother, in the frantic futility of the distracted, heaped his cot with toys. Yet the child, already in the borderland, seemed to see and, responding to the call of childhood, wavered on his further way and finally turned back to life, to Life the Toyshop. To a world where on s’amuse. Or, in Kenneth’s case, to a world where one entertains other people.
But, with Bessie Grahame, went the day of the house without a name. The Grahame children were taken south to live with their grandmother who had left Midlothian for the middle Thames. Mrs. Ingles lived at The Mount, Cookham Dene. Little boys are fickle but, at Cookham, Kenneth gave his heart for all time to the river. But next summer the children went to Scotland, paying their father a long visit and returning, leisurely to Cookham, a year later.
On the way south, Stirling was visited. Among the attractions of Stirling was a toy-shop. In the window was a large bounce-y ball of many colours. During the days of the Grahames’ visit to Stirling that ball became the very moon to Kenneth. On any whither he would go by way of the window. One day a kindly relative, of his careless good nature, led the children within and bid them buy each a plaything. Kenneth’s choice was no choice at all, it was natural selection. But the relative, now he came to think of it, considered that a large bounce-y ball in a small room, in a railway carriage.... He pointed out the beauties of bricks and even of Mr. Noah. He offered this, he urged that. ‘Would you not like — ?’— ‘Oh, look, isn’t this nice, Kenneth?’ Kenneth gnawed the elastic of his Glengarry bonnet and remained adamant. The old lady who kept the shop, seeing how matters lay, coaxed diplomatically with, ‘See here, sir,’ and ‘It’s a bonny horsie this, is it no?’ Kenneth hardly heard her. At length the elder person acknowledged defeat. He nodded to the old lady who ‘raxed’ down the big bounce-y ball. She happ’t it up in ‘a bit paper’. She handed it to Kenneth saying as she did so, ‘I shall always honour you, sir, because you’ve a mind o’ your own.’
And Kenneth remembered and he, among many compliments, appreciated this one all his life.
And so south again to Cookham Dene and the summer Thames. At The Mount there was a big bare-empty room. It was known, for no remembered reason, as the Gallery. It became the children’s room, a Land of Youth. Within it was a world welded entirely to the heart’s desire. In that world, I am told, was ‘an imaginary City’. Who shall doubt that its walls were of jasper and that the glamour of it was to build the Golden Town at the end of the Knights’ Road? That its unforgettable pageantry was, afterwards, to awake anew the Boys of Heaven, their ‘tiny red caps upon their thick curls’ to walk in gay, in cobbled streets, for ever beneath a fleckless blue?
The City was meantime kept strictly, in the Gallery. Except on Sunday. On Sunday it became mentionable beyond the Gallery door, but only upon the way to church, but only if out of earshot of elder persons. Then, on the dusty churchward mile, the previous week passed under close review, then all mortals encountered, Sunday to Saturday, in a world of workaday, were weighed in the balance. Those found worthy were forthwith proposed and elected freemen of the City. Those found wanting — was there not a savage pleasure, in excluding them, in hearing the golden barriers clash to and those without a prey to all regrets?
But the Gallery had many mansions, had room for swifter moving, more mundane things, things closer to hand than the rose-tinted towers of the City. In the Gallery were read, elbows down on bare boards, Sir Samuel Baker on the sources of the Nile, and Mr. Ballantyne’s Dog Crusoe and His Master. The Nile, though no rival to the Thames, yet was inspiring in the art of whip-making, the sort of whip wherewith the faltering Bisharin is urged on through the sandstorm. And Crusoe, though no patch on Don, the curly-coat retriever, yet served a
s an introducer to the lassoing and ‘creasing’ of mustangs, to the thunderous stampede of the bison, to the wigwam and the war-path.
And the wigwams of the Grahames were again to be folded; for presently the family must move to Cranborne in the pinewoods of Windsor. Granny Ingles (she was affectionately called so) made a home there not only for her grandchildren but for her bachelor son who had been appointed to a curacy at Cranborne. For Bessie Grahame gone, James Grahame saw but little of his young family. He allowed his loss to crush him. He resigned his office in Argyllshire to live abroad and there bide his own time. But it was not for another twenty years that Time took him.
Meanwhile, at Cranborne, Kenneth became the pupil and friend of Cranborne’s scholarly vicar. There is a portrait, an impression perhaps is the better word, of the latter, in The Golden Age. He ‘brandishes an aorist’ over his pupil’s head and gives him tea in the garden.
In those schoolroom days Kenneth Grahame was a little boy of a grave and kindly courtesy, a courtesy beyond his years. He hated to give unnecessary trouble and to that end he was mindful to leave his bedroom tidy and to be as reasonable about his clothes and their neatness as could be expected. A contemporary letter says that ‘Kenneth is punctilious about brushing his teeth’. Another letter says that ‘Kenneth is a reasonable boy in everything except his unbounded generosity’. His grandmother’s servants adored him. And it was at Cranborne, so writes his sister, that Kenneth ‘began to spout poetry, first Shakespeare, then Macaulay’s Lays, then Tennyson’. The vicar, it seems, had been fortunate in the ground he sowed and sound in the rotation of his crops. Kenneth is remembered as marching through the sough of a pine-wood shouting down the voices of wood and wind with:
‘But hark, the cry is Auster
And lo, the ranks divide
And the great lord of Luna
Comes with his stately stride—’
One may fancy him, the ‘fourfold shield’ clanging upon ‘ample shoulders’ until it should please the wearer to discard it and recall, familiar to his mouth, ‘Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter’ or ‘Blow, bugle blow, set the wide echoes flying.’
And, at Cranborne, Kenneth being now nearly ten years old, it was decided that he must go to boarding-school. We may imagine, I think, that he accepted the situation as an Edward, as an optimist.
CHAPTER II. ‘TEDDY’S’
KENNETH entered St. Edward’s School, Oxford, in 1868. He was not ten years old and he and St. Edward’s began life almost together. He was among the first fifty of the Saint’s alumni and the school stood, when Kenneth came to it a new boy, in New-Inn-Hall Street. Shortly afterwards ‘Teddy’s’ was in occupation of the earlier of those fine buildings, in the Woodstock Road, where it has since flourished so exceedingly. Kenneth was one of a handful; to-day over three hundred boys answer the roll-call. St. Edward’s, each summer of nowadays, sends an ‘eight’ to Henley and in sport and scholarship she can bear comparison with any or all of the foundations.
Kenneth was an ‘Edwardian’ until 1875. He became head of the school, he became captain of the Rugby XV, he was in the eleven. With his love of boats and of blue-ruffled Thames water he must have regretted that, in 1870, say, no ‘eight’ existed for him to stroke to victory. In after years, recounting his school triumphs, he was careful, so he said, to mention ‘fact without frivolous detail’. If pressed as to the frivolity he would reply that he referred to the ‘almost Hobsonian’ poverty of choice, to which, doubtless (said he), was owing his youthful laurels and wild-parsleys.
One of Kenneth’s few ‘Edwardian’ contemporaries remembers ‘Grahame’, in his later schooldays, as a tall, good-looking lad, a dandy in his dress, and nobly simple in his choice of a phrase. When asked by a friend how he intended to be attired on the morrow—’ “Gaudy” Day’ — he replied, it is remembered, with a splendid simplicity, ‘To-morrow I shall be superb.’
As a schoolboy Kenneth had the same gifts of wit and repartee which made him, in later life and when in the, all too rare, mood, so brilliant a host, so diamond a guest and so spritely-dangerous an opponent in argument. I have a picture of Kenneth in debate. He is a hobbledehoy with a cracking voice. He creaks rather than speaks, but, as usual, to the point. A school Debating Society discuss whether ‘this house is justified in a belief in ghosts’. A visiting undergraduate, with a hyphened name the second syllable of which is Blood, has opened the debate in a windy and long-sustained justification of credulity. At length he sits down. But, or ever the leader of the opposition is up in answer, young Grahame, on the back benches, is upon his legs. ‘Mr. President, sir,’ he squeaks, ‘ghosts may not have flesh and bones on their side — they at least have Blood.’
And one more youthful mot, a holiday one, is remembered. Some dull family friends, kindly folk who, of their garden’s plenty, gave surplus vegetables to their neighbours, were on the agenda. ‘They have their points,’ declared some one at the dinner-table. ‘Have they?’ said Kenneth doubtfully. ‘Well, dear,’ he was told, ‘they gave us this excellent asparagus.’
‘Pointes d’asperges,’ Kenneth is said to have retorted as he helped himself.
But I have in his own handwriting, a story of his very early schooldays whereto are joined certain reflections, comforting to a boy who is habitually at the bottom of a form. I quote from a speech prepared, doubtless, for some occasion of prize-giving.
‘.... I cannot help noticing that when a distinguished general, a famous statesman, or other deservedly successful and popular personage, honours a school by consenting to give away the Prizes, he is fond of informing his admiring audience that he, for his part, strange to say, never reached any giddy pre-eminence in his school lists, was rather an idle dog than otherwise, and ranked very low in the opinion of all the masters. “And look at me now!” he seems to say, though of course he does not use those actual words. For my part, I have always thought this mental attitude of the Distinguished Person not exactly a prudent one, to put it mildly. Dr. Johnson, who was a very sensible man, says somewhere or other — at least I think it was Dr. Johnson — that a man should never tell a story, however witty and amusing it may be, of which the point, the ultimate point, is against himself. Because, he adds shrewdly, though people may be greatly amused, and laugh heartily, at the time, yet — yet — they remember it against you. Now, how would it be, just as an experiment, next time such a person addresses you on those lines, telling you perhaps that, for his part, he never rose beyond the Lower Third, you were to remark blandly, “Why, of course not!” or “What about it? Where did you expect to be?” or words to that effect. This would not exactly please the general or statesman, of course, in fact it would probably annoy him very much. But what of that? You are not there to amuse him. It’s his business to amuse you — if he can. And it might do him good.
‘Those of you who are determined to become great generals or statesmen, by the sheer process of remaining doggedly in the Junior Second, should pause and remember that we cannot all be great statesmen or generals. There aren’t enough of such jobs to go round. Turn your thoughts elsewhere. There is many a hard-working, honest — at least fairly honest — millionaire, many a fashionable physician, prominent barrister, or successful dramatist, who is only waiting to resign his position to you as soon as you have gently but firmly signified your intention of occupying it. And of course the first question he will ask you will be, whether you ever succeeded in getting out of the Fourth Form. Moreover, strange as it may seem, it is not so easy as you may think for the most ambitious youth to attain his ends by sticking to the bottom of the form. Let me give you a little reminiscence of my own, which dates from the first few days of my arrival at this school — the old school, I mean, of New-Inn-Hall Street days. The Junior form, or class, was in session, so to speak, and I was modestly occupying that position, at the very bottom, which seemed to me natural enough, when the then Headmaster entered — a man who had somehow formed an erroneous idea of my possibilities. Catching sight of me, he as
ked sternly, “What’s that thing doing down there?” The master in charge could only reply that whether it was crass ignorance or invincible stupidity, he wotted not, but there it was. The Headmaster, who was, I was persuaded, a most illogical man, and could not really have studied that immortal work, the Republic of Plato, in which the principles of ideal Justice are patiently sought out, merely remarked that if the thing — meaning me — was not up there or near it, pointing to the head of the form, before the close of work, it was to be severely caned; and left the room.
‘Well, you can imagine my feelings. I was a very little chap — not yet ten. I was not accustomed to be caned — that is, beaten. I never had been beaten. I had been doing my best, and at home I had not been considered an absolute fool. And there I was, up against it in the fullest sense of the word! It was not surprising, perhaps, that I shed some bitter tears. But what happened? No one of my colleagues started forth, as I half expected, to champion the cause of youth and innocence. Instead, they all proceeded to display an ignorance and a stupidity, on even the simplest matters, which seemed unnatural, even for them. The consequence was, that I presently found myself, automatically it really seemed, soaring, soaring — till I stood, dazed and giddy, at the top of the form itself, and was kept there till my friendly colleagues thought the peril was safely past, when I was allowed to descend from that bad eminence to which merit had certainly not raised me. It was from that moment, I think, that I first began to realize that I was never very likely to become either a successful general or a leading statesman.
‘You see therefore that the path to success is not easy, even by a steady neglect of the educational side of school life. Some of you may therefore say, “I will try other methods. Hang it all, why shouldn’t I try and get into the Sixth!” Well, it is a great thing to have arrived at the Sixth, even if you are unable to maintain your position there for as much as a whole term. But you must remember, that the Sixth are very great men. To hope to reach the giddy height of the Sixth is like wanting to begin life as a Cabinet Minister. No, it might be more prudent to have a modest aim — say about the middle of the Fourth. The advantage of that is, that nobody will be jealous of you, and as people will think you more stupid even than you really are, they will always be ready to lend you a helping hand. Let us suppose, then, that Jones, as we will call him, goes forth into the world from the giddy eminence of the Lower Fourth. He looks round for somebody to give him a leg up, and he sees Smith, whom he remembers in the Sixth, and who, of course, by now holds some distinguished position. He writes to Smith. Smith says, condescendingly, “Ah yes, Jones! I remember him well. Such a good fellow, Jones. Not a genius, of course, like some fellows. Poor Jones! We must give him a leg up.” He does so, and in due course Jones finds himself occupying a position not very inferior to that of Smith. And soon, by giving his mind to it, Jones succeeds in doing Smith out of his job, and wangling it for himself. That is one way of doing it, almost as good as the general’s way of dodging education altogether.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 73