love of rivers it might also be responsible for this faint mistrust of woods, for I came to it in such a way that it was impressed indelibly upon my mind. My father left when I was four, and every other weekend he drove up from London to take us to his house. The soundtracks to these journeys were story tapes – The Ghost Stories of M. R. James , Three Men in a Boat , A Tale of Two Cities – and of them all our favourite was The Wind in the Willows . We lived then in theThamesValley, not far from where Kenneth Grahame himself grew up, and the locations, though unnamed, were instantly recognisable. My sister and I listened to that tape so often it became part of our code, turning up in birthday cards and long-standing family jokes. We liked to recite the mantra cold chicken cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad french rolls cress sandwiches potted meat ginger beer lemonade soda water , and to replicate it as greedily as possible in our own Thames-side picnics.
One autumn in the early 1980s we were coming home in a storm, and somewhere along the way the car ran out of petrol. It was raining hard and I suppose my father felt he had no choice but to lock the doors and leave us there, with the keys in the ignition and the tape still whirring on. It wasn’t dark but rain was blotting out the windows, and through the streamy glass the world seemed very distant. When we broke down the Toad had just encountered his first motor car, and after his wild raptures the story shifted key. It was a cold still afternoon , the narrator said, and the Mole had gone out walking. The winter air must have intoxicated him, for in one of those moods of recklessness to which he was prone he decided to visit the Wild Wood, though he’d been warned about it long ago.
My sister and I looked at each other uneasily. At first the wood seemed pleasurably spooky, and it was only when the light began to drain away that the Mole noticed something peering at him from a hole. Could it be a face? He looked hard. No. But then there was another, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them, evil wedge-shaped faces with hard staring eyes. Then to the faces was added a flurry of whistles, and then a patter of feet that increased in time to an almighty hail, as if something – someone? – was being relentlessly pursued. The Mole began to run too, pell-mell, his breath ragged, his legs pounding, until at last he almost fell into the hollow of a great beech tree and there took refuge beneath a pile of dead leaves.
My father returned at that moment, fortuitously enough, driven by a stranger and clutching a billycan of petrol. The Mole – we waited breathlessly – was also safe. Rat had come to find him, armed with a cudgel, and the pair of them had stumbled across Badger’s den as the woods subsided into snow. No harm was done. No one had been bludgeoned to death by a weasel; we were still intact in the back seat. And yet this incident confirmed in me a creeping sense that the world was not always as pleasant as it seemed, so that when I heard the story of Kenneth Grahame himself, I cannot say I was wholly surprised at how dark it turned out to be.
Kenneth was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and spent his early years in Argyll, where his father was the Sheriff-Substitute. He lost a lot of things early on – a mother, a father, his home – and though his mother’s death was caused by scarlet fever the rest were the result of drink. Cunningham Grahame was an alcoholic: a secret and morbid drunk of the kind that can wreck a family, not through violence or malice but by failing to prevent it from slipping into chaos. After his wife’s death Cunningham’s drinking was no longer under his control, and it became apparent to the more sober members of the family that the four bereaved children would need to be transplanted into a different home.
The one chosen for them was The Mount in Cookham Dean, a little Berkshire village a mile from the
One autumn in the early 1980s we were coming home in a storm, and somewhere along the way the car ran out of petrol. It was raining hard and I suppose my father felt he had no choice but to lock the doors and leave us there, with the keys in the ignition and the tape still whirring on. It wasn’t dark but rain was blotting out the windows, and through the streamy glass the world seemed very distant. When we broke down the Toad had just encountered his first motor car, and after his wild raptures the story shifted key. It was a cold still afternoon , the narrator said, and the Mole had gone out walking. The winter air must have intoxicated him, for in one of those moods of recklessness to which he was prone he decided to visit the Wild Wood, though he’d been warned about it long ago.
My sister and I looked at each other uneasily. At first the wood seemed pleasurably spooky, and it was only when the light began to drain away that the Mole noticed something peering at him from a hole. Could it be a face? He looked hard. No. But then there was another, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them, evil wedge-shaped faces with hard staring eyes. Then to the faces was added a flurry of whistles, and then a patter of feet that increased in time to an almighty hail, as if something – someone? – was being relentlessly pursued. The Mole began to run too, pell-mell, his breath ragged, his legs pounding, until at last he almost fell into the hollow of a great beech tree and there took refuge beneath a pile of dead leaves.
My father returned at that moment, fortuitously enough, driven by a stranger and clutching a billycan of petrol. The Mole – we waited breathlessly – was also safe. Rat had come to find him, armed with a cudgel, and the pair of them had stumbled across Badger’s den as the woods subsided into snow. No harm was done. No one had been bludgeoned to death by a weasel; we were still intact in the back seat. And yet this incident confirmed in me a creeping sense that the world was not always as pleasant as it seemed, so that when I heard the story of Kenneth Grahame himself, I cannot say I was wholly surprised at how dark it turned out to be.
Kenneth was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and spent his early years in Argyll, where his father was the Sheriff-Substitute. He lost a lot of things early on – a mother, a father, his home – and though his mother’s death was caused by scarlet fever the rest were the result of drink. Cunningham Grahame was an alcoholic: a secret and morbid drunk of the kind that can wreck a family, not through violence or malice but by failing to prevent it from slipping into chaos. After his wife’s death Cunningham’s drinking was no longer under his control, and it became apparent to the more sober members of the family that the four bereaved children would need to be transplanted into a different home.
The one chosen for them was The Mount in Cookham Dean, a little Berkshire village a mile from the
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