The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  Over the road at the Perch and Pike, I had a nightcap at the bar and bumped into Paul, one of the last farmworkers still living in the village. He was about my age.

  ‘Don’t listen to what all the farmers tell you. Business is booming. It’s incredibly profitable. We’re only early summer and most of the crops on the fields round here have been pre-sold already for harvesting. There’s a lot of demand out there. And not just wheat. Oilseed rape is booming and some of these speciality crops, like poppies, do very well.’

  I had seen the fields of poppies coming right up to my barn, the mauve ones that are cultivated for medicinal morphine (and, so local anecdote had it, were monitored carefully around harvesting time to make sure no one got the wrong idea and treated them as an Afghan-style drugs crop). Together with the yellow of the oilseed rape fields, this part of the country was beginning to look like an oriental rug.

  Paul told me how the farms along the old Icknield Way had been forced to pool their resources. A modern combine harvester could cost around £200,000. As agribusinesses, the arable farms at least were flourishing.

  ‘Not that much of the money gets down to the workers!’ Paul added. Wages were still low. He depended on overtime: twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts a day.

  The change in the character of the village meant that there was much less sympathy for farming. At times, Paul encountered outright hostility, particularly when he was spraying the fields, and local drivers went by shielding their faces ostentatiously and gesturing. Or they complained if he was harvesting late at night because of the noise and the lights. The police had been sent out to talk to him.

  I had been aware of this myself. The lanes around Little Stoke had been awash with slurry manure for a week when they were dressing the fields, and the lorries had slopped their loads around. It didn’t matter much with my old car – when I had been able to drive it – but some of my neighbours in upmarket BMWs and 4×4s were not happy at looking as if they had just run a rally through a mudbath.

  ‘Still, you get all sorts here now,’ said Paul. He told me of an American couple who complained on moving to the village about the loud bell-ringing from the local church. There was amusement at the subsequent Parish Council meeting when the motion was debated and had to be paused several times because of the noise made by the twenty high-speed trains that pass through the centre of the village each hour.

  The bridge and cutting that the railway creates as it carves its way through South Stoke is a cause of social division. There is a sense that you are either on the right or wrong side of the tracks: down towards the river and the meadows and the pub, with their more spacious detached dwellings, at the leafy end of the village; or in the shadow of the railway, in one of the old terraced labourers’ cottages, with the trains thundering overhead.

  *

  If Dorset at the start of my journey had been Hardy country, then this was Kenneth Grahame’s. Every house along the river laid claim to be the inspiration for Toad Hall, every island to be where Pan played his pipes ‘at the Gates of Dawn’. The Wild Woods behind me in the Chilterns; the railway along which Toad made his escape from jail; the ring of Downs to the south, Ratty’s ‘Mountains of the Moon, beyond which was the Wide World’; and of course the riverbank itself: all were near by.

  Kenneth Grahame was a figure I found fascinating, a traveller who had returned to his childhood home. His early years had been spent on the Thames at Cookham. Then, after decades working in London at the Bank of England and journeys abroad, he returned to Cookham in his forties, now married and with a son, and wrote The Wind in the Willows in 1908. Later, he lived in a succession of homes along the river from me, at Blewbury and Pangbourne.

  An admirer of Richard Jefferies, he tramped for miles along the Icknield Way and some of his first essays were on the pleasures of walking:

  Join [the Icknield Way] at the point where it crosses the Thames; at once it strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid, purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the Downs a broad green ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the neighbouring grass, yet distinct for all that. No villages nor homesteads tempt it aside or modify its course for a yard; should you lose the track where it is blended with the bordering turf or merged in and obliterated by criss-cross paths, you have only to walk straight on, taking heed of no alternative to right or left; and in a minute ’tis with you again – arisen out of the earth as it were.

  Like Jefferies, Grahame was fascinated by his own childhood as a period of receptivity, of openness to nature, and he drew inspiration for The Wind in the Willows from Jefferies’ novel Bevis, the Story of a Boy, set along the waterbank.

  When The Wind in the Willows appeared, the anonymous Times reviewer dismissed it with what must be one of the worst and funniest judgement calls in the history of literary criticism: ‘As a contribution to natural history, this work is negligible.’ It needed Arnold Bennett, in Punch, to see that ‘the book is an urbane exercise in irony at the expense of the English character and of mankind. It is entirely successful.’

  And the well-loved characters are archetypes of the different sorts of English male: shy bachelor Mole, worldly Ratty, boastful Toad and strong, silent Badger. What prevents them from being stuffed animals is that along with the most comfortable of English characteristics – a fondness for picnics, messing around in boats and eating tea in their slippers – is some strikingly neurotic behaviour: the sort of deep disturbance that often lies beneath the English skin.

  Toad is the most extreme manifestation of this: his glazed ‘poop-pooping’, the self-delusional addiction for boats, caravans and then finally – his hard drug – for cars, which leaves him in ‘violent paroxysms’. Mole cries frequently and has equally violent paroxysms of grief at the thought of the home he has abandoned; while Ratty at one point has to be physically restrained from absconding to the warm South for a life of unspecified Mediterranean pleasures. As for Badger, he already has a reputation for latent violence – even the Wild Wooders are afraid of him – before we see him laying about with his ash cudgel.

  There are hardly any female characters in The Wind in the Willows – not even a boyish Tinkerbell figure, let alone a Mrs Mole (although an early draft suggested one). Their absence allows Grahame to focus on a different component of the Englishman’s character. What drives his creatures is not romance but an obsession with ‘home’, a word that is repeated almost a hundred times throughout the book.

  The story begins with Mole leaving Mole End and finishes with Toad, helped by his friends, regaining Toad Hall. Throughout, ‘homesickness’ is an emotion so strong it almost incapacitates its victims. Yet there is a constant oscillation between the need to create a home and the need to escape it: the tension between the allure of ‘The Open Road’, as Grahame calls his chapter introducing the car, and the retreat to the womb-like home, of which Mole’s is the most emblematic. At one point poor Mole, when he’s been away for some time, gets a whiff of the smell of his own burrow on the breeze and the effect is almost electric:

  Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!

  The English love of the home goes with an overwhelming protectiveness. I was used on my travels in South America to the near-universal concept of mi casa es su casa, ‘my home is yours’, the welcome given to almost complete strangers – often by those who can least afford it. To give someone a bed for the night, or to share the family’s meal with them, is instinctive.

  The English equivalent was ‘my home is not yours but very much mine, although I might invite you to stay if I like you a great deal.’ We don’t have shotguns loaded, in the way of the American West, to see off the unwanted; but we have cold indifference and ‘Beware of the Dog’. The first sight Mole has of Toad Hall is a noticeboard saying: ‘Private. No Landing Allowed.’ The only reason Mole and Ratty dare to knock on Badger’s
door is because they are lost in the Wild Wood at night: ‘I’ve never even ventured to call on him at his own home myself, though I know him so well,’ says Ratty.

  Badger’s reaction is as English as it comes: an initial gruff crossness that anyone has dared knock on his door; then a warm welcome and, when he takes Mole aside for a private tour, the perfect summary of why an Englishman’s home is his castle: ‘You know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You’re entirely your own master.’ The unstated subtext, from confirmed bachelor to confirmed bachelor, is ‘as long as you don’t get married’.

  Badger’s warren is more substantial than might have been expected for, in a fine flight of fancy, Grahame gives him the ruins of a Roman city as a sett with, Mole notes in comical wonder, masonry, pillars, arches and pavements: ‘“How on earth, Badger,” he said at last, “did you ever find time and strength to do all this? It’s astonishing!”’

  Just as Jefferies wrote his post-apocalyptical account of London after the fall, when nature had again taken over the city, so Grahame relishes Badger’s explanation of how, while the creators ‘built to last, for they thought their city would last forever’, it now lies subsumed beneath the Wild Wood, forgotten by everyone.

  Grahame was unhappy when he wrote The Wind in the Willows. His marriage had been a disaster. His only son, Alastair, had fits of bad behaviour that were the model for Toad’s. His own health was failing and he was soon to lose his job at the Bank of England.

  The return to the Thames was an attempt to re-create a golden summer that was beginning, by 1908, to be overshadowed by war and social change as the Edwardian era ended. The ferrets, weasels and foxes of the Wild Wood prefigure the anarchists and socialists who would assault Toad Halls all over Europe.

  The most intense of all the chapters is the one in which Mole and Ratty hear Pan playing his pipes on some islands just upstream. The ostensible, tenuous link to the plot is that Otter has lost his son, so Mole and Ratty go looking for ‘young Portly’. Most abridgements of the book for children, let alone plays and films, lose this section.

  But the epiphany that Mole and Ratty experience upstream is intense; it is the place of Ratty’s song-dream, the place ‘the music played to me’:

  In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir’s shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.

  (‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’)

  The epiphany is short. The animals experience a glimpse of Pan for just a few seconds before dawn. When the sun rises, they forget what they have seen – his gift to them, so they are not left with a sense of endless regret. Is Grahame here writing about his own childhood? That, if he had not remembered it so intensely, he would not forever be trying to re-create its fugitive happiness, like his contemporary J M Barrie and the Lost Boys?

  But there is a happier aspect to The Wind in the Willows. No novel so celebrates idleness. Grahame claimed to be congenitally lazy – he left his bank early each day and took long holidays. Like Toad, he liked to stay in bed in the mornings. The whole book is a paean to sloth.

  He saw life on the waterbank as essentially for slackers. The Wind in the Willows makes clear that oarsmen who try too hard, like Toad and Mole, fall in the river. Rat has the right attitude: ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ Grahame had written an essay, ‘Loafing’, in which he extolled the joys of doing just that on the riverbank, preferably after a full breakfast, while serious, early-start oarsmen exhausted themselves on the water.

  He experienced the same sense of satisfaction at seeing a cyclist labouring past him on a hill, ‘dusty, sweating, a piteous thing to look upon’. Even better than walking, he liked the feeling at the end of the day when he could relapse into a pub for ‘unnumbered chops with country ale’ and when

  the hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from accustomed cares and worries – you are set in a peculiar nook of rest. Then old failures seem partial successes, then old loves come back in their fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of regret, then old jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing of the gods above, nothing of men below – not even their company. To-morrow you shall begin life again: shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything; meanwhile you sit, and the jolly world swings round, and you seem to hear it circle to the music of the spheres.

  It was in his heroic declaration of laziness that Grahame was at his most appealing. He would have been a fabulous companion for a walk or a picnic, like Ratty.

  I sometimes took my boys down by canoe to some small islands that lay close by on the river. They were deserted, scraggy islands of willow and brush, not far from the railway bridge Brunel built to take his Great Western line to Bristol, but they had the charm of wild abandoned places that no one visited.

  We liked floating down there in winter. Mole, when he entered the Wild Wood, ‘thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off’. Along the river there was then no cover for the herons who all summer had hidden in the shallows under the low branches of trees. Now they stood sentinel, as if by being still no one could see the flash of their yellow beaks against the bare branches. Dylan Thomas described herons, with their lugubrious solemnity, as priests. We glided right up to them on the riverbank in the canoe; when the awkward pretence that they were invisible could no longer be sustained, they flew ponderously across our bows.

  There were plenty of moorhens, grebes and the odd kingfisher; an invasion of Canada geese; and terns. But despite being almost ideal territory for otters – a jumble of undisturbed brush willow and alder, with shallow waterways between the different islands – there were none for Pan to rescue.

  Even when Grahame wrote, his otters were anachronistic. Richard Jefferies had already complained in the late nineteenth century that the Thames had become too polluted and hunted for otters to survive. Of all the river creatures, they are the best indicator of water purity, as I knew from the Amazon where the far larger and more savage giant river otters – sometimes called river wolves – are one of the best signs of ecological health.

  But otters are slowly coming back to the Thames. There have been a few sightings, near the source at Lechlade, although none as yet near here. Still, every time we canoed down, particularly at dusk, for otters love the night, the boys and I would float as quietly as possible past the islands in the hope that a velvety and sleek body might slither into the water.

  *

  My own home was isolated, a barn on the edge of the Little Stoke hamlet and looking out over the fields of what locals called ‘the prairie’. I had started renting it from the new owners when my parents sold the main house some two years before.

  It was small – one room in which to cook, live and work, with two bedrooms off – but it suited me perfectly. Not only was Little Stoke the place to which I had been returning all my adult life, but for a writer living on his own, it provided peace as well as roots, and a place where my children were able to run free – or dive into the river – when they were with me.

  The attached plot of land around the barn was wild enough not to be a garden. There was a copse of young silver birches, rowan trees and beech, which I thinned, with a hammock strung between two trees to lie in as a displacement activity when not writing. A long hedge of brambles separated me from the fields, with a view over them to the Chilterns beyond. The rabbits had pockmarked the ground and dug many of their holes at the edge of the brambles, so that their burrows were protected from above.

  There was a great concentration of wood pigeons at Little Stoke. Th
eir constant cooing was like a hubble-bubble of pots on a stove. My other favourite birds were the green woodpeckers which scavenged for ants outside the big, wide window of my bedroom, with their insistent and total absorption in the job at hand; and the charm of goldfinches, which came to glean the heads of the teasels and thistles, which I left long to encourage them. I spent hours watching them out of the window. My abiding fondness for birds comes from a sense that in England the many migratory species are both foreign and familiar, resident aliens.

  I had been a friend of Roger Deakin before his sad death in 2006, and greatly admired his books like Wildwood, which had inspired a renaissance of natural history writing. But Roger inspired me most with his sheds. I once took my children to meet him at his home on the edge of a Suffolk common. He made a point of first showing them his many writing sheds, which included an old railwaymen’s carriage half buried in saplings and a gypsy wooden caravan. Each had a bed made up, so that he could sleep in any one at any time, as the mood took him. My children were enchanted; and then disappointed when he revealed that he did have a house as well.

  I had three sheds, if not as well formed as Roger’s: one down by the river, another at the end of the grass meadow and one by the barn itself. Only this last was for the proper purpose of a shed, to store things in. The other two were for writing, either looking out over the Thames with its chestnut-lined banks, or over the fields to the Chilterns. I had set up camp beds in each of them. By sleeping in different sheds each night, I could pretend I was still on the move, even though I was patently resting up for a while before heading on.