the family firm and on New Year’s Day 1879 started as a clerk in the Bank of England. In the late nineteenth century the Bank was, by all accounts, an exceedingly eccentric place. According to Alison Prince, Grahame’s most recent biographer, it wasn’t unusual to come across a clerk in the lavatory butchering the carcass of a sheep bought wholesale in the local market. The lavatories were also used for dogfights, which were so much a part of Bank culture that some of the rougher clerks kept fighting dogs chained in readiness at their desks. Drunkenness was rife, hours were short, and behaviour in general seems to have been every bit as louche and riotous as that of today’s hedge fund managers and currency traders.
One might have expected such a sensitive young man to flail in this environment, but Grahame had been to public school and was accustomed to roaring boys. He kept his head down, drifted up the hierarchy, and in his free time began to write. His early pieces seem sentimental now, but they appealed to the Victorian obsession with innocence and were increasingly rapturously received. He wrote about nature, about wanderers and wayfarers, about pig-headed uncles and men who abandoned the strife of the city to wander footloose through the sleepy valley of the Thames. There are altogether too many Autumns being carried forth in russet winding-sheets for contemporary tastes, but over time these affectations declined. As Grahame began to document the world of his own childhood his writing became more simple and intense. The Golden Age , his second collection of stories, was almost entirely autobiographical and it appealed so deeply to readers of the time that he became famous almost overnight.
As the century drew to a close, two things changed in Grahame’s life. He was appointed Secretary of the Bank of England and he met Elspeth Thomson, the woman who would become his wife. In 1897 she was thirty-five; a strangely fey orphan who despite her girlish manner ran her stepfather’s house with considerable efficiency. Kenneth was frequently ill during this period, and much of the courtship was carried out by letter from the various haunts in which he was convalescing. Of what appears to have been a torrent of correspondence only one of Elspeth’s letters has survived, but there are hundreds from Kenneth, almost all written in a baby language that is as difficult to decode as it is maddening to read.
‘Darling Minkie,’ an early specimen begins: ‘Ope youre makin steddy progress beginning ter think of oppin outer your nest & facing a short fly round.’ Another, unusually romantic, example ends: ‘I’m agoin’ ter be pashnt my pet & go on dreemin a you till youre a solid reality to the arms of im oo the world corls your luvin Dino.’ Marriage proposals, wedding plans and negotiations around living arrangements were all carried out in this nursery prattle, which allowed both participants to play at being children adrift in a mystifyingly adult world. The sweet talk also served to conceal for a time the glaring differences between the two participants, for Dino had no real interest in intimacy, preferring boats and rivers to human company, while Minkie was scarcely educated and burdened with limitless romantic expectations.
Despite the violent objections of Elspeth’s stepfather and the dismay of Kenneth’s family, friends and even housekeeper, the marriage went ahead. The bride drifted up the aisle dressed like a self-conscious sprite in dew-damp muslin, a chain of daisies strung wiltingly around her neck. The honeymoon was spent in Cornwall, where Kenneth proved himself deeply unsuited to the solid reality of a wife by disappearing on solitary boating excursions at every available opportunity. Back in London, the benign neglect continued, much to Elspeth’s distress. Nonetheless, she managed to become pregnant and at the turn of the century the Grahame’s only child, Alistair, was born.
The tragedy of
One might have expected such a sensitive young man to flail in this environment, but Grahame had been to public school and was accustomed to roaring boys. He kept his head down, drifted up the hierarchy, and in his free time began to write. His early pieces seem sentimental now, but they appealed to the Victorian obsession with innocence and were increasingly rapturously received. He wrote about nature, about wanderers and wayfarers, about pig-headed uncles and men who abandoned the strife of the city to wander footloose through the sleepy valley of the Thames. There are altogether too many Autumns being carried forth in russet winding-sheets for contemporary tastes, but over time these affectations declined. As Grahame began to document the world of his own childhood his writing became more simple and intense. The Golden Age , his second collection of stories, was almost entirely autobiographical and it appealed so deeply to readers of the time that he became famous almost overnight.
As the century drew to a close, two things changed in Grahame’s life. He was appointed Secretary of the Bank of England and he met Elspeth Thomson, the woman who would become his wife. In 1897 she was thirty-five; a strangely fey orphan who despite her girlish manner ran her stepfather’s house with considerable efficiency. Kenneth was frequently ill during this period, and much of the courtship was carried out by letter from the various haunts in which he was convalescing. Of what appears to have been a torrent of correspondence only one of Elspeth’s letters has survived, but there are hundreds from Kenneth, almost all written in a baby language that is as difficult to decode as it is maddening to read.
‘Darling Minkie,’ an early specimen begins: ‘Ope youre makin steddy progress beginning ter think of oppin outer your nest & facing a short fly round.’ Another, unusually romantic, example ends: ‘I’m agoin’ ter be pashnt my pet & go on dreemin a you till youre a solid reality to the arms of im oo the world corls your luvin Dino.’ Marriage proposals, wedding plans and negotiations around living arrangements were all carried out in this nursery prattle, which allowed both participants to play at being children adrift in a mystifyingly adult world. The sweet talk also served to conceal for a time the glaring differences between the two participants, for Dino had no real interest in intimacy, preferring boats and rivers to human company, while Minkie was scarcely educated and burdened with limitless romantic expectations.
Despite the violent objections of Elspeth’s stepfather and the dismay of Kenneth’s family, friends and even housekeeper, the marriage went ahead. The bride drifted up the aisle dressed like a self-conscious sprite in dew-damp muslin, a chain of daisies strung wiltingly around her neck. The honeymoon was spent in Cornwall, where Kenneth proved himself deeply unsuited to the solid reality of a wife by disappearing on solitary boating excursions at every available opportunity. Back in London, the benign neglect continued, much to Elspeth’s distress. Nonetheless, she managed to become pregnant and at the turn of the century the Grahame’s only child, Alistair, was born.
The tragedy of
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