The Willows in Winter

by William Horwood

  Yet, memorable though that party became, it is not quite for Toad’s homecoming that it is now remembered. Nor for the speeches he gave, and the merriment he caused by his vain and conceited account of his adventures and escapades; nor even for the ribald songs he sang of sweeps’ wives, and young brides, and butlers.

  Nor even for his demonstration on Badger’s high table, using his own silver as instruments of navigation, and the Rat’s pyjamas as a parachute — and all as the sky began to streak with the light of dawn — of how easy it was to fly a flying machine.

  No, Badger’s party, the most memorable ever given in the history of the river and the Wild Wood, is remembered for something more.

  For as the dawn rapidly advanced, and the entertainment had spilled over onto the clearing outside the Badger’s front door, the Mole was heard to say to the Rat, “Old fellow, tell me, have you heard the expression, ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning’?”

  “Why?” asked the Rat.

  “Because,” said the Mole, “the sky is red, and growing redder. Over there —”

  And he pointed, and all fell silent as he did so and looked in the direction he indicated.

  “But that’s over Toad Hall way,” said the Otter slowly But it was rather more than that: it was Toad Hall. The shouts of “Fire!” were useless. The general rush down to the bank and thence over to Toad’s estate held no hope that it would be in time to serve a useful purpose other than to be spectators at an unstoppable conflagration.

  The only practical action came from the Rat who, guessing at once the way things must be, cried out to the weasels and stoats, “Bring whatever food and drink you can; no point in leaving it!”

  Finally they stood staring dumbly at the flames that shot up the length and breadth of Toad Hall. At a little distance from them, and as close to the Hall as he could get in the heat, stood Toad, alone, silhouetted against the flames, almost demonic before the fire.

  “Let him be” suggested the Badger, “for I think no words can console him.”

  Then Toad slowly turned to them, stared at them where the flames lit up their faces, and cried out suddenly, “Don’t look so gloomy, you fellows! Isn’t it just magnificent? Did you ever see anything like it? I haven’t! My!”

  “But, Toad,” said the Rat, “it’s your ancestral home!”

  “Was, you mean,” said Toad excitedly.

  “But, Toad,” joined in the Mole, “you’ll have nowhere to live.”

  “Ha! Ha!” cried Toad, dancing about as parts of Toad Hall began to crash and crumble beneath the inferno. “I had decided to get rid of it anyway”

  “Toad,” said the Badger with something of his old sternness, “you didn’t —”

  “I did not!” protested Toad. “It may be that I carelessly left a candle burning, but do not use the word premeditation, Badger, for it is a word that reminds me of things I prefer to forget. No, this is a careless accident from which much good will come. A new Toad Hall, bigger and better, finer and more splendid —”

  “Not just a little smaller?” wondered the Mole. “I may have one room less over there perhaps,” said Toad, turning back to the flames and waving in the general direction of where a scullery had once stood, “or perhaps the ballroom might be more homely than it used to be —”

  “But the money,” said the Rat, “what of that?”

  “Lloyd’s will pay for it. Their word is their bond!” said Toad with satisfaction, before dancing about some more. “My father thought of everything.”

  “I think,” said the Badger in a measured and careful way, “that perhaps I will after all have that additional glass of wine that I refused earlier.”

  “Give him the bottle!” said Toad.

  So the party continued into the morning, as Toad Hall burned down before their eyes, its Lord and Master the least worried of any of them there. Indeed, by midday, when all was but a heap of smoking ruins, Toad was already pacing about the lawn with the Badger, both deep in conversation about the drawings, plans and schemes that Toad already had in mind. While the weasels and the stoats, sensing that the party was over, began to drift back to the Wild Wood, and their homes.

  Standing on the bank, by the river, where the last of the food and drink had been spread upon the grass in the springtime sun, the Rat said, “Mole, do you know what I think? I think we might perhaps venture out in my boat today”

  “Now!” cried Mole, who was the worse for wear. “Right away!”

  It did not take the Water Rat long to collect his boat, which was moored up by Otter’s house, and bring it up-river to where the Mole waited so impatiently for his first trip of the season.

  “Just a short one, mind!” said the Rat. “Just to whet our appetite for more!”

  Then they were off, leaving Otter and Portly and the Mole’s Nephew to wave them on.

  “Well, spring’s here, all right,” said the Otter after a short time, “and we’ve things to do. Portly, don’t be long!”

  The two youngsters were left sitting wearily on the grass, for the night had been a long one, with so much to take in. Yet Mole’s Nephew felt suddenly at peace.

  “Look!” he said to Portly, and pointed to where Toad and the Badger went busily about the blackened balustrades, pacing, measuring, conferring.

  “And there!” said Portly, pointing to the little blue boat in which the Mole sat so happily, being sculled about the river by the Water Rat.

  “And —”

  They spoke together, one for the river perhaps, the other for the bank, where the spring had started now, and winter fled away.

  “Mole,” said Portly suddenly, “it’s—“

  “I’m not Mole,” said Mole’s Nephew gently, “not yet, nor ever, I hope. But yes, it is as it should be. I think that this — all this — is what I came to see. Now you had better —”

  But Portly was already off, wandering along the bank and humming as he peered at the water, as otters will, to try to catch a glimpse of all the River promised through the season that had just begun.

  While Mole’s Nephew looked about him once again, and heard the murmur of the Badger’s voice in the distance, and the more excitable tones of Toad; and from the river the soft laughter of his uncle, and the plashing of the Rat’s oars across the water.

  Mole’s Nephew nodded and sighed, and he lay back on the soft new grass and closed his eyes with sweet content, as the Mole himself might have done, and listened to the joyful growing sounds of spring.

  THE END

  Author’s Note

  In the winter of 1992 I acquired several of E H Shepard’s famous illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. One of them was of the Mole, nervous and alone, trekking fearfully through the blizzardy Wild Wood.

  I knew, of course, what errand the Mole was on, for Shepard’s illustrations displaced all others after they first appeared in 1931, and provide the images most of us associate with the River Bank characters. This very drawing had been used to illustrate the edition I originally read so I knew that the Mole was looking for Badger’s house.

  But the Mole alone in the Wild Wood in a book was one thing; on my study wall he was rather different. As the months went by Shepard’s drawing became part of my own imaginative landscape and Mole’s original errand to find Badger faded as the great trees of the Wild Wood loomed larger before me, and the blizzard winds of winter surged and blew.

  One day, quite unexpectedly (though the drawing had not changed at all), it seemed to me that Mole was off on a journey rather different from his original one. True, he had set off from the same comfortable home he loved so much, but now he was no longer heading towards the comfort and safety of Badger’s house, but instead towards the River — the frozen River — and towards disaster. The story of The Willows in Winter had begun.

  So it was that just as Grahame inspired Ernest Shepard in 1931, sixty years later Shepard inspired me. No doubt he has inspired many other
writers, though whether they have had the same connections with Oxford, where Grahame went to school, that I have had, or with the River Thames, where I learnt my rivercraft, or with moles … I do not know.

  I do know that once the Mole had set off in my mind on his new journey there was no stopping him, nor any way of not writing the adventures that he and the Water Rat, the Badger and Toad subsequently have in the novel you have just read. I did not think much about whether or not it was wise to write a sequel to a classic; not then at any rate. Only afterwards, when people said, “But should you have?” did I really think about it.

  Those who are familiar with my work know that I tell stories in a broadly oral tradition. Before there were books I would have been one of those who wandered in from the shadows beyond the stockade, went to the communal fire, and sat down and began to tell stories in return for food and drink, and somewhere to rest. It is something one cannot help doing if one is made that way. Out of that living tradition have come all the great myths and folk tales, stories passed on from one generation to the next, not always from adults to children, but often so. Indeed, Kenneth Grahame, then Secretary to the Bank of England, began to tell stories about moles and water rats to his son Alastair on the occasion of his fourth birthday, May 12th 19O4. It happens that May 12th is also my birthday, not the least of many coincidences of birth, place and spirit that make me feel an affinity with the life of Kenneth Grahame.

  As for the storytelling, it seems that most artists, whether painters or composers or writers, have always borrowed from others’ work and probably always will. We re-tell, re-form, borrow and transmute. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based on an earlier version of the same story; Malory’s MorteD’Arthur is a great re-telling and re-packaging of the myths of Arthur and the Holy Grail; James Joyce’s Ulysses could not exist in the form he wrote it but for the Greek epic upon which it is based.

  So my novel, The Willows in Winter, arises out of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and with “his” Mole upon my study wall now transmuted into my own, I am content to be part of a continuum of storytelling and to write the sequel. If the story is good it will live; if not it will die.

  But in fact it is less the issue of writing a sequel that has interested me than the deeper level of meanings that may, or may not, exist in these Willows stories. It is through such meanings that stories gain their continuing resonance, and live on. Grahame himself was a modest and retiring man who was disinclined to attach deeper meanings to his work, but this is not to say there are none. Even a minimal knowledge of English social history suggests to readers that something of the clubby bachelor world of Edwardian England (particularly of the Edwardian City of London Grahame worked in) informs the four central characters of his story. Then too there is the strong pantheistic element in The Wind in the Willows, which was a popular view of nature in his time, and which gives rise in the original work to the much remembered, and sometimes ridiculed, chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. It has intrigued me that so many people remember so well passages they read as children which, as adults, they feel uncomfortable with. But it does not surprise me, for I have written passages like that myself in all of my Duncton books and I know that many readers share with me — and with Grahame — a sense of mystery about nature and life forces to which we prefer not to give religious or sectarian names.

  But finally what has given me most pleasure in the recreation of the world of The Wind in the Willows is the discovery — obvious to many readers and critics before me —of the universality of the four great characters Grahame first created in those stories told to his young son: Mole, Rat, Badger and most of all Toad. It is for readers to work out their own meanings for these characters, and to call one loyal, another resourceful, a third stern but wise and a fourth, well, exasperatingly lovable.

  ‘What I have learnt in writing The Willows in Winter is that the characters’ profoundest universality lies not in them as individuals to which we can give such easy labels, but in them as a small community in whose giving and taking, laughter and tears, exasperation and love, and final acceptance, we find something we may hope to touch in our own communities.

  As the Mole says in the first chapter of The Willows in Winter “Liking Toad doesn’t come into it at all. Toad is, that’s the thing about Toad. Just as the trees are, and the river, and summer … without Toad there would be nothing much to live for.” Which, were they given to reflection as the Mole is, any of the other characters might well also say about each other.

  For me, the greatness of Kenneth Grahame lies in this creation of characters who are at once complete individuals and mutually dependent, and so make up a true community. One might add — for without an audience to listen to his tale a storyteller is nothing at all — that the greatness of succeeding generations of readers since The Wind in the Willows was first published in 19O8 has been to recognise the real depth of Grahame’s tale by continuing to read and remember it so that it has become not just a story but a cultural tradition. To be part of that, as both reader and storyteller, seems to me as pure a pleasure as there can be.

  One day, of course, I shall retreat from the firelight back into the shadows, as Kenneth Grahame has done, but the River Bank characters will live eternally on. Especially Toad. He wasn’t really finished off at the end of The Wind in the Willows, and he seems to be thriving still at the end of The Willows in Winter. And the terrible truth is that even as I write, there on my wall, not far from Mole, is Patrick Benson’s brilliant new Mr Toad … and he seems to be rubbing his hands in gleeful expectation of some other wild adventure yet to come.

  William Horwood

  Oxford

  August 1993