The Wind in the Willows Read Free Page B

stories of the five children (Harold, Edward, Charlotte, Selina, and the narrator), Dream Days contains as the last entry a story within a story, now known in its own right as the children’s book The Reluctant Dragon. Grahame’s first biographer, Patrick Chalmers, calls it “the top note of all Kenneth Grahame’s articles and short stories” (Kenneth Grahame, p. 91). Published separately in 1938 after Grahame’s death and still in print today, the book depicts a resourceful, fearless child who reconciles Saint George with a peace-loving dragon by enlisting them in a mock battle, thus allaying the townspeople’s fears of the beast. The dragon, a “happy Bohemian,” who likes to laze in front of his cave, enjoying sunsets and polishing his poems, stands as a tantalizing portent of the riverbank characters in The Wind in the Willows.
    Grahame’s evolution as a writer was steady, clear, and, in 1898, nearly complete, the arc of his development taking him from personal essays to short fiction about childhood to an actual children’s story in “The Reluctant Dragon.” Peter Green describes it as a rising and falling curve, the falling curve being that of self-conscious explicitness, “the openly stated theme, the deliberate literary quotation or allusion, the carefully ornate style” and the rising curve that of “unconscious, implicit symbolism and allegory which is practically non-existent in the early essays” (p. 265) but which becomes apparent in The Wind in the Willows. After Dream Days, the stage was set for Grahame’s major work; his life’s events, namely his marriage and the birth of his son, squared with his temperament to propel him.
    Sometime in 1897 Grahame met Elspeth Thomson, who, at thirty-six, saw Grahame as an excellent catch. Though they shared some personal circumstances (both were from Edinburgh; both had three siblings; both lost a parent at an early age), they were ill-matched. Despite her artistic leanings, Elspeth was domineering, and the forty-year-old Grahame had been a bachelor for too long. If Elspeth had not set about securing him, he might have led a completely agreeable life on his own, like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Instead, after an illness, perhaps when he was feeling particularly vulnerable, Grahame embarked on a precipitous, ultimately unhappy marriage to Elspeth. The date of their wedding was July 22, 1899; the following May, their son Alastair was born.
    Alastair became the focus of his mother’s life as Grahame retreated into his work at the bank, his love of boating, and his uncomplicated male friendships, particularly with Arthur Quiller-Couch, Edward Atkinson, and Graham Robertson. Alastair was born blind in one eye with a noticeable squint in the other. His mother compensated for this defect by celebrating her son’s precocity and overlooking or repressing the disability that made him painfully different from his peers. Her overprotection and idealization of Alastair made it difficult for him to fit in at either public school or Christ Church, Oxford, which he later attended. In 1920, two years into his university education, suffering emotional problems, Alastair was killed by a train; evidence suggests that his death was a suicide. Grahame and Elspeth were devastated. Grahame lived the rest of his life in relative seclusion and never wrote anything of great significance again.
    In the spring of 1906, however, Alastair’s tragic end was distant and unimaginable. Grahame and his family had moved from London to Cookham Dene, the place of Grahame’s happiest childhood memories.
    Alastair was about the same age Grahame had been when he arrived at his grandmother’s home. The memories flooded back. As he later told Constance Smedley, who encouraged him to write down the stories of Toad: “I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner.... I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my