This is the story
of a story.
One which has exercised a powerful grip on millions of readers.
Mythical and beautifully-written,
it also happens to be continuously funny.
It's about four animals and their adventures,
written for children but worshipped by adults.
And it fascinates me because once upon a time,
I was lucky enough to be in it.
Well, here we are. It's a photograph
of me, playing the part of Toad in the Wind in the Willows
at the National Theatre, about 20 years ago.
The play was a huge hit
and I loved everything about it.
It was an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's
monumentally successful children's book, first published in 1908
and it proved once again that Mr Toad and his friends,
Mole, Ratty and Badger,
have become some of the most loved characters in all of literature.
So I'm off into their world
of riverbanks, wild woods...
..and fast cars!
Because I want to tell you about the making of this masterpiece...
..and the enigmatic, complex personality of its creator.
Hold on tight!
Mr Toad is back in town.
(OWL HOOTS)
Just over 100 years ago,
much like today,
this street in Kensington was home to the rich and successful.
And in one of these houses lived a writer
and his somewhat wayward child.
The Wind in the Willows
began life as a bedtime story.
Right here.
And it started with the bumptious Mr Toad,
a character Grahame made up
to entertain his bumptious seven-year-old son, Alastair.
'As he tramped along gaily, he thought of his adventures and escapes
and how, when things seemed at their worst,
he always managed to find a way out.
"Ho, ho!" he said to himself,
as he marched along with his chin in the air.
"What a clever toad I am!
"There is surely no animal equal to me..."'
Without really being aware of it, Grahame was creating a classic.
It was my favourite book as a kid.
I think I found, as show-offy kids do,
the character of Toad completely irresistible.
My mother gave me a copy of The Wind in the Willows
with the EH Shepherd illustrations in 1953, when I was seven.
It's been a huge part of my life ever since, and to this day,
I don't think more than six months have ever gone by
without me re-reading the book.
The Wind in the Willows continues to entrance young readers,
even today.
The book begins with shy little mole,
who ventures out from his burrow
and meets cultured, poetic but tetchy Ratty.
Ratty takes Mole under his wing, introducing him to a life of leisure:
to walks, to messing about on boats and to great feasts.
And then he takes him to meet wise patrician, Mr Badger.
And all of them worry about rich, impetuous, naughty Mr Toad.
And of course, he's my real hero.
Toad is a conceited, cowardly rogue
who has an adventure with a gypsy wagon,
steals a car,
gets thrown into prison, then escapes on a barge and a train.
It all seems a simple enough story.
But should it be recognised as a much deeper symbolic book,
shot through with classical allusion and allegory,
and the philosophian values of the author himself?
Many think so.
The Wind in the Willows is a classic not just of children's literature,
but also of English literature.
And I want to find out how it came to be made,
how it reflects the life of Kenneth Grahame
and also his relationship with his son.
It's a fascinating story
and ultimately, a sad one.
Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859.
His prosperous mid-Victorian family
was descended from Robert the Bruce.
But he spent most of his childhood
here in the English countryside,
close to the River Thames.
He arrived in the Berkshire village of Cookham Dean,
after a series of dramatic changes in his young life.
This is the house called the Mount,
where Kenneth Grahame was brought up.
He had effectively, at the age of five,
become an orphan
because his mother had died
giving birth to Kenneth's brother
and his father had become, by all accounts, an alcoholic
and had then escaped from life, bolted away to France
and was never heard of again by the family.
Escape and security were to become central
to Kenneth's mental landscape.
The children were brought up here by their grandmother, Granny Ingles,
under the watchful eye of a not entirely unsympathetic Uncle John.
Yet Grahame later claimed that the ages of four to seven
were the time he had felt most imaginatively alive.
Granny Ingles left him free to roam the countryside
and it became his playground.
Perhaps he was escaping from sadness
into a world of fantasy and invention.
This time at The Mount would go on
to inspire everything he wrote as an adult.
He idealised, almost envied,
the freedoms of his childhood for the rest of his life,
as if he'd never wanted it to end.
But at the age of 17,
Grahame found himself thrown into the heart of Victorian London.
He'd dreamed of studying at Oxford
but strict Uncle John insisted his nephew get a proper job.
And finally, on New Year's Day, 1879,
Grahame came to work here, at the Bank of England.
He started at the bottom as a clerk.
But eventually rose to the important position of Secretary of the Bank.
To find out what sort of place this shy young man joined,
I'm meeting the current deputy governor, Charles Bean.
The Bank was a much more relaxed place than it is today.
You can imagine, since the financial crisis came along,
we've all been working flat out.
But in those days, the hours were relatively short.
Certainly some pretty liquid lunches.
So it's difficult to know how much good work was done
after sinking a couple of quarts of Porto
or whatever the local drink was.
So a sort of fairly conscientious, quiet person might have found
a niche for themselves in terms of working their way up the ladder?
Well, at first glance, you might think this surely wouldn't
have suited Kenneth Grahame, who was a fairly shy intelligent individual.
But he clearly enjoyed the ambience at the bank and thrived in it
and it was an environment where his intelligence was allowed to succeed
and he rose to the Secretary of the bank
at a relatively early age, at 39.
The Secretary was, to all intents and purposes,
the Chief Operating Officer of the bank.
So it was a very influential and very important position.
Did Grahame's soul really belong to high finance?
Like Mole, he was quiet and retiring and a bit of a dreamer.
He kept to himself amidst the grandeur of the bank.
Then, just a few years before he wrote The Wind in the Willows,
a dramatic incident occurred
in these hushed corridors.
One morning, in November 1903,
a man arrived at the bank and he asked to speak to the Governor.
The Governor wasn't available so they wondered
whether he would like to speak to the Secretary instead
and he said yes. Kenneth was summoned.
When he arrived, the man handed Kenneth a document.
It had a black ribbon at one end and a white ribbon at the other end.
He later said it was because Mr Grahame took the black ribbon
that he felt obliged to pull out a gun and start shooting at him.
Kenneth, for his own safety,
popped quickly behind a door.
Later the man went to Broadmoor
and Kenneth went home on the commuter train.
Did the shooting incident at the bank have a profound impact on Grahame?
It certainly must have confirmed his belief
that the real world was full of menace and danger.
He disliked modern city life,
the speed and the noise.
He always longed to escape to the romantic paradise
of that lost childhood.
And with the spread of the railway across Victorian Britain,
he could.
It's ironic, given that the bank had financed the railways
that Grahame himself was battling against
the encroachment of the modern world.
He called the railway 'an iron fetter that scurfs the face of this island,
banishing the pleasant life of the road.'
Yet the train was his gateway to that pleasant life.
To villages, fields,
copses and lanes.
The golden world of his boyhood by the Thames.
The Wind in the Willows is Grahame's love letter
to a very circumscribed English pastoral.
Its subtitle is, 'Tales of the Riverbank,'
and the river flows throughout the story,
right from the beginning as Mole leaves his burrow,
and confronts it for the first time.
'Never in his life had he seen a river before.
This sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal,
chasing and chuckling,
gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh.
All was a shake and a shiver.
Glints and gleams and sparkles.
Rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.
The mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated."
It isn't long before Mole encounters the story's second major character:
Ratty.
Ratty takes Mole into his boat,
and introduces him to the loafer's life.
Together they explore the delights of another of the book's great themes:
boating.
Quite difficult to find a quiet spot on the Thames now,
what with all the stinkpots
and the aeroplanes flying over and the motorcycles.
But...
Strangely enough, the idea of the quiet old Father Thames
is pretty much a Victorian invention.
The old commercial river traffic had passed.
The coming of the railways turned the Thames
into a pleasure-ground.
Rowing became a fashionable, middle-class pastime
and Kenneth Grahame took to it like a dabbling duck.
And as Ratty famously says,
as he and Mole drift down the riverbank,
'Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing,
absolutely nothing, half as worth doing
as simply messing about in boats.'
The words could have been spoken
by a man called James Furnival,
because the young mole-like Kenneth Grahame,
bumped into this man shortly after he'd joined the dreaded bank.
Furnival was a keen boatman and poet.
He was one of the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary,
and he was Grahame's entry to the literary world.
Clearly, this man was a mentor.
A Ratty to Kenneth Grahame's Mole.
Effectively, he introduced the young Kenneth Grahame
to essential two oars that later propelled The Wind in the Willows.
One was the whole idea of messing about in boats,
but the other was the literary side of his life.
Furnival encouraged Grahame to develop his writing.
The bored banker would soon be on his way
to becoming a successful and acclaimed author.
After his business day had finished,
Kenneth Grahame spent his evenings working on a series of short stories.
Gradually, they were published.
By his early thirties, his literary reputation was rising.
And then the quiet banker was invited
to become part of the most radical publication in Victorian England:
the Yellow Book.
To find out more, I've come to meet someone who owns every issue:
literary critic, Matthew Sturgess.
We've got some copies of the Yellow Book here,
sort of anthologies of work of leading writers at the time.
Yes, it was the quarterly magazine that looked like a book.
A yellow book. And of course, yellow was considered to be
a rather daring and dangerous colour in the 1890s
because it was the colour of French novels.
And French novels were known to be dangerous.
Naughty? Naughty, dangerous. Yes.
So we're finding the Secretary of the Bank of England writing
in what was a sort of deliberately slightly racy periodical?
Yes. Well, it caused outrage and amazement.
The periodical, not Kenneth Grahame's appearance in it.
One of the most startling contributors to the Yellow Book
was the young artist, Aubrey Beardsley,
who designed the covers.
Beardsley was infamous for his decadent, racy pictures.
Mr Mole was mixing in heady company.
There is a description of a rather riotous dinner that was given
to launch the first number of the Yellow Book,
at a little Italian restaurant down in Soho.
And it was crammed with tables and everybody was there
and somebody noticed Kenneth Grahame
looking slightly bemused at the edge of the crowd,
but very pleased to be included.
Here he is, working at the Bank of England, a most unlikely Bohemian.
He managed to position himself, or was swept into the position,
of being at the cutting edge, really,
of the literary world of the 1890s.
Kenneth Grahame's Yellow Book stories were far from racy, though.
They were based on a pinpoint accurate recollection
of his blissful childhood.
But in their own way,
they were a radical affront to Victorian attitudes.
Grahame's children weren't regimented innocents or victims.
They were fully-formed imaginative human beings
who found the grown-up world ridiculous.
Collected into a book called Pagan Papers,
they became a sensation.
Grahame was told that the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm,
had only two books in English on his yacht:
one was the Bible and the other was Pagan Papers.
Yet for all his literary stardom,
Grahame preferred the security and simplicity of the bachelor life,
male company and walking.
But when he was 39,
a woman named Elspeth Thompson set her sights on the talented Mr Mole.
Like Kenneth, Elspeth was an orphan
from a solid upper middle class family.
But their romance was anything but conventional,
as Grahame's biographer, Alison Prince explains.
Everybody wanted Grahame
but he was terrified of young women and sexual approach.
Obviously knew nothing about women.
They were regarded as a rather terrifying race.
Elspeth did the opposite thing.
She obviously realised that she was not going to be terrifying at all.
She was a woman who had the romantic idea of being simple
and walking among the daisies and being open to nature.
And she wrote to Grahame. And it is the most extraordinary document.
In a childish scrawl, it says, 'Dear zur...' Z - U - R.
'I being so very 'umble
cannot expect that he will look at me kindly.'
And it was written like a milkmaid,
in sort of child's language.
But that was how she got him.
She was so artless, so vulnerable,
so in love,
what could he do but marry her?
Grahame sent equally bizarre letters to Elspeth,
written in a curious misspelled baby language.
Within a year, Dino and Minky, as they called each other,
were married, surprisingly late in life by Victorian standards.
Within months, Elspeth was pregnant.
These quite reserved, childlike people
had one child.
Yes. Alastair.
Whom they loved to bits.
But they spoilt him dreadfully
and he was an obnoxious brat.
He used to pull little girls' hair in Kensington Gardens
and he got himself banned eventually.
He obviously had no idea how to behave.
He was born with disabling sight problems.
Yes. He could barely see at all out of one eye.
And all evidence suggests that the child was not particularly bright.
The Grahame's doted on Alastair,
whom they nicknamed Mouse.
They were convinced he was a genius.
And it was love for Mouse that more than anything
sparked the creation of The Wind in the Willows.
Grahame had written nothing for a decade
when he started to tell the seven-year-old Alastair
those bedtime stories about the escapades of Mr Toad.
'Oh, ho! I am the Toad!
The handsome, the popular, the successful toad.'
The boy loved this outrageous character.
But soon after, Kenneth and Elspeth set off on an eight-week holiday
to Cornwall.
As was the standard of their time and class,
they left beloved Alastair at home
with his nanny.
But Alastair wanted more of the Toad adventures.
I've come to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to see what happened next
because if the Grahame's had never gone away,
the Toad stories might never have been written down.
It is amazing to see these letters...
..from Grahame.
Because there came a point where
Kenneth couldn't continue to tell the stories personally to Alastair
so he wrote him extensive letters,
from the Fowey Hotel in Cornwall, where he'd gone.
'My dearest Mouse,
Now I daresay you'll want to hear something more
of the sad misadventures of Mr Toad.
Well, when he found himself outside the prison gates,
it was quite dark...'
And then he just drops straight into the book!
I mean, 'When he found himself outside the prison gates,
it was quite dark.' This is actually...
Suddenly you're reading The Wind in the Willows.
Or at least the basic outline of it.
'Then he remembered that when he'd changed clothes in such a hurry,
he'd left all his money and his keys, pencils and watches and everything
in the pockets of the clothes he'd taken off.
So there he was, miles and miles from home,
dressed like a washerwoman without a penny of money.'
Now, this...
..is the actual manuscript.
Again, it's in his own handwriting.
But we can see that he's taken the basic story
and started to embroider it a little bit.
'To his horror, he recollected that
he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell,
and with them, his pocket-book,
money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case.' Slightly longer list!
'All that makes life worth living.
All that distinguishes the many-pocketed animal,
the lord of creation,
from the inferior one-pocketed or no-pocketed productions
that hop or trip about permissively, unequipped for the real contest.'
And we're seeing a writer at work.
Somebody who's taking his simple story
and adding a bit of fine writing.
Alastair's bedtime story had become a beautifully-composed children's book.
Grahame's admirers had waited ten long years
for him to produce more work.
But this was not what they wanted.
His usual publisher rejected it.
But he sent a copy to one of his most ardent fans
who happened to be one of the most powerful men in the world:
US President Theodore Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt said, 'This is absolutely wonderful.
We must find a publisher.'
And he in fact got it published by Scribners in New York.
And that's what unlocked it for Britain.
That's what started the book off.
Roosevelt became the book's unlikely champion.
In October 1908,
The Wind in the Willows was published in Britain.
This was the golden age of children's writing.
This was the time of Peter Pan,
of the Railway Children, of Beatrix Potter.
Yet first reviews of this contender were damning.
'A failure,' said one.
The Times dubbed it, 'Monotonous and elusive.'
Grahame was known as a sophisticated adult writer
about children, not for them.
So what was this baffling anthropomorphic broken-backed story?
Talking animals eating picnics while errant toads hopped around on barges.
I wanted to get a writer's take on this.
Someone who's written for both children and adults.
So I went to meet award-winning author
of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon.
So do you think it's written for children?
I think to write any good book for anyone of any age,
you sort of have to write it for yourself.
I mean, how do you know if something works unless you take off one hat
and put another hat on and think, 'It does it for me.'
And I think he was writing for himself.
It's self-evident cos the book works so well
that it must have been written for him.
And he was such a paradoxical character,
part child, part adult,
so it's almost in a grown-up body but he's a child at heart.
I mean, I didn't read it as a child. I read books about science.
I came to it rather late. Me too, me too.
Partly in the hope that I would persuade my children
this was a work of genius
and they were completely uninterested.
You came to it as an adult.
What, as an adult, do you find in it, then?
I think it's that idea of friendship and more importantly home
that just rings so strongly through the whole thing.
Partly because I'm Mole and partly... You're Mole, are you?
I'm definitely Mole. Which are you? Are you Ratty?
No, I'm Toad, I'm afraid. Yeah. (LAUGHS)
Boastful and prone to depression when things go wrong,
prone to elation when minor things go right. I am completely Toad.
But it's interesting that people split themselves.
The other thing that fascinates me as a writer,
he didn't write anything like it before
and he didn't write afterwards and no-one could persuade him
to write part two or indeed anything else.
Cos one of the fantastic things about it is that slightly uneasy mix
between quite sentimental, on this side of sentimental,
deep sentiment. And there's some quite nastiness at some points.
And the nastiness always comes from Toad, doesn't it?
And for me, one of the reasons that The Wind in the Willows
is so successful is because of its complex layered structure.
One minute, bucolic nature-worship.
The next, a rollicking adventure.
Never more so than in the escapades of Mr Toad.
Toad is forever misbehaving.
At one point, he finds a car parked outside a pub
and is so entranced that he can't help stealing it.
'As if in a dream, he found himself somehow seated in the driver's seat.
As if in a dream, he pulled the lever.
He swung the car round the yard and out through the archway.
And as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong,
all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended.
He increased his pace
but as the car devoured the street,
and leapt forth on the high road through the open country,
he was only conscious that he was Toad once more.
Toad, at his best and highest.
Toad, the terror, the traffic-queller,
fulfilling his instincts, living his hour,
reckless of what might come to him.
Poop-poop!
Of course, we long to go off with Mr Toad, don't we?
And when we do, the whole nature of the book changes
and it's really interesting that it changes
from being a closely-observed nature book,
where the animals are in touch with the realities of the countryside
to a comical place, a farcical place,
where there are silly judges and chases,
railway trains running through the countryside.
But all in a spirit of nonsense.
In other words, the real world, the world where humans live
and pursue their activities,
is a silly place.
Toad is one of the great comic creations of English literature.
He behaves like a fractious infant.
He can't control himself.
But it's commonly believed that he's not just any infant.
He was in fact the author's own.
I think there was a sort of private joke between them
that really, Toad was rather like Alastair.
He was very mouthy, very full of himself.
So he was a bit of a toad.
But instead of Kenneth Grahame being a sort of Victorian father,
who would have gone and beaten it out of him,
he had a sort of sympathy for it.
It's a very modern feeling in a father.
Yes, very. He was offering this to his son.
It was a very gentle way of saying,
'If you just refrain from being too obnoxious,
you get on rather better.'
He allows the boy to see that the other animals are going,
'Poor old Toady. He really is a bit silly, isn't he?
Dear, oh, dear. But we love him all the same.'
And surely that's what you should say to a child.
Toad, like Grahame's beloved Mouse,
is subversive and lawless.
But he gets away with it.
And a century after he was created,
we can still find miscreant roguish toads all around us.
One of my favourite EH Shepherd illustrations
in The Wind in the Willows
is of Toad being led in shackles up the steps of the prison
after he's been tried and sent down for 20 years.
And he's being escorted by two huge wardens,
wearing armour and carrying helmets.
And this poor shrunken monster Toad
now cut down to misery and degradation,
I must say I did think of Jeffrey Archer.
When Jeffrey Archer was taken away
after being at last found out and sent to prison,
I couldn't help thinking of Toad
being led up between the wardens and helmets.
I'm always accused of being Toad.
And that's fine. I have no problem with that at all
because Toad has stayed with me all my life.
You take Toad out of that book, it's a very ordinary book.
He is the one you're waiting for cos he's got all out failings
as well as some of our strengths.
And he is, of course, the hero of the book.
And he is, of course - When you say I am Toad, everybody's Toad.
Don't let's kid ourselves. You're Toad, everybody's Toad.
Well, in some ways,
I was more Toad than Jeffrey.
After all, I played the part for many months,
here at London's Royal National Theatre.
And that's what really stirred my enthusiasm for Grahame's book.
I've come to meet the director of that production, Nick Hytner.
Yet another lifelong fan of this children's classic.
Take this down. The last will and testament of Toad.
Toad, Toad, it's still me. Ratty!
When you cast me as Mr Toad,
you said, 'Oh, well, Griff is actually the most like Toad
of people I know.' Did you say that?
I could easily have said that. Were you trying to flatter me?
No, I think I probably remember you as a student
as being rather Toad-like.
At any gathering of a large number of people, you would always be the most entertaining.
Oh! You're being sweet. No, you mean the most boastful.
The most inventive!
How serious a work of literature do you think it is?
Well, I think to the extent that it caught the imagination
of its original readers and has continued to catch the imagination
of generations of readers ever since,
it is a serious work of literature.
Anything that captures an image of a lost golden age
has got to be a serious work of literature.
Grahame didn't just set his story in the English countryside.
He mythologised it.
The book's most lyrical passages offer a vision of the countryside
quite as Arcadian and poetic
as the writings of William Blake or the later Romantics.
But in keeping with the owner's own gentle personality,
it's achieved with a deceptive light and comic touch.
Grahame's characters love nature when it's ordered and fructifying
but if things threaten to get harsh,
they run back to a warm, welcoming burrow.
'Presently, they all sat down to luncheon together.
The mole found himself placed next to Mr Badger
and he took the opportunity to tell Badger
how comfortable and home-like it all felt to him.
"Once well underground,' he said, 'you know exactly where you are.
Nothing can happen to you and nothing can get at you."
The badger simply beamed on him.
"That's exactly what I say," he replied.
"There's no security, or peace and tranquility,
except underground."'
One of my favourite chapters and for me, the defining chapter is
when Ratty and Mole stumble upon Badger's haunt.
And then one of the central themes of this book comes to the fore,
which is the importance of a sort of...of a shed.
I think it appeals to the shed-like in every man
because what effectively Badger has
is an extremely cosy, very personal space,
which he invites these other animals to share with him.
This is one of the abiding themes of the books.
It may be about nature
but it's actually about escaping from the vagaries of nature.
This is all about trying to avoid the bad weather.
Getting below, getting warm,
getting cosy and eating huge quantities of food,
in front of a roaring fire.
It's about security.
It's remained my favourite book all my life.
And I chose it when I did Desert Island Discs
because if all books are in some degree comfort food,
The Wind in the Willows seems to me a comfort feast.
All one's troubles drop away as you sit there reading it,
you sink into a lovely, delicious bath of fantasy and comfort
and beauty because it is a deeply poetic book
and the lyricism of almost every line of it.
It has this wonderful calming effect.
Everything falls back into its proper proportion.
And you just see that all that really matters is living amid beauty
and having friendships and chaps who you can trust.
But there is another side to reality
that runs through the book.
Grahame is keen to paint shadow as well as light.
Sometimes, as Mole discovers,
the outdoors can be a wild and frightening force.
'As he lay there panting and trembling,
and listened to the whistlings
and the patterings outside,
he knew it at last, in all its fullness.
That dread thing that other little dwellers in field and hedgerow
had encountered here and known as their darkest moment.
That thing that the rat had vainly tried to shield him from.
The terror of the Wild Wood.'
Throughout the book,
there is a dark, dangerous, threatening place on the horizon.
And that's called the Wild Wood.
Now, when Ratty and Mole get lost in the Wild Wood,
they're a lon way from comfortable nature.
They're a long way from their burrows
in the countryside around the riverbank.
The Wild Wood works as a symbol
for all the horrible things Kenneth Grahame wanted to escape from:
modern cities, madmen with guns,
the harsh realities of adult life.
Beyond the Wild Wood, he wrote, was the Wide World.
Ratty warns young Mole that no one should even think about going there.
But The Wind in the Willows is a fantasy
and as Grahame will sadly discover,
it is impossible to avoid going out into the Wide World forever.
The success of The Wind in the Willows
made Kenneth Grahame a wealthy man.
Retired from the bank, he lived a charmed life of leisure.
But there remained a problem in his life:
his son.
Ten years after the book's publication,
difficult Alastair was now grown up.
Too old to escape into the fantasy land of Mr Toad,
he was forced to confront the pressures of the adult world.
Despite all their idiosyncrasies,
their rural seclusion and their daisy-chains and baby talk,
the Grahame's wanted to keep one foot
in their conventional upper middle class background
and they wanted Alastair to do well.
They especially wanted him to go to Oxford,
which had been so cruelly denied to Kenneth.
And so after some private tutoring,
the six foot three socially gauche boy came here, to Christchurch.
To Kenneth and Elspeth, Alastair was still a precocious talent.
Like his alter-ego Toadie,
he would always make good in the end.
But Toad was make-believe.
Alastair is complicated.
He'd obviously inherited the same kind of difficulties
in entering the adult world that his father and mother both had.
Not surprisingly. They passed it on to him. They passed it on.
They had.
And of course, he was never encouraged
to face difficulties and find a way out.
We have to have a great deal of sympathy for Alastair here.
Absolutely. Because here he is, brought up in a household
which was totally introspective. Yeah.
Which was a little bit fixated on childlike... What we might call...
A couple of batty romantics, really, as parents.
He arrived at Oxford, he couldn't cope with it.
He couldn't pass exams.
He was unconfident. He knew he was a failure.
He couldn't see. His sight was getting worse all the time.
And the depression just built up.
Early on the morning of the 8th of May 1920,
some railway gangers discovered a body
here on the railway line,
just outside Oxford.
It was a young man, an undergraduate,
Alastair Grahame.
At first, it was assumed and the official version always was
that his blindness, as he tried to cross the tracks,
had meant that he hadn't seen the train coming.
But the inquest, if looked at in detail,
tells a rather different story.
The official report listed the cause of death as decapitation.
Alastair's arms and legs were also fractured
and his body badly bruised.
All indications were that when the train passed through,
the young man was already lying in wait on the line.
The inquest left it a sort of open verdict,
whether he's taken his own life
but you're pretty convinced that that was the...
I think there's no doubt about it.
I mean, it was kind, of course, not to bring in a verdict of suicide,
because that was, at the time, a criminal offence.
And that would have left his parents without a shred of an excuse.
But looking at the misery that the boy had been in,
it seems fairly obvious to me
to think that he decided to bring it all to an end.
As an only child, Alastair had been a concentrated centre of attention
of his parents throughout his short life.
Kenneth Grahame created The Wind in the Willows for him.
He made him into his own little Mr Toad.
Not totally loveable but much loved.
And both parents seemed to want him to stay
in their escapist fantasy world of permanent holiday, countryside,
introspection and mild eccentricity.
Several times, Alastair was sent out into the real world...
..and failed to adapt.
Poor Mouse.
Poor Elspeth.
Poor, poor Kenneth.
The Grahames coped with their loss by escaping.
They sold all of Alastair's belongings
and many of their own.
And for years, shut out reality
by aimlessly travelling in Europe.
Kenneth never wrote another book.
He lived a life of aimless leisure on the riverbank
like Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad.
He went walking by the Thames,
even on the very day he died.
What I've discovered from the story
of the making of The Wind in the Willows
is that the book is more than simple fantasy.
It inspires devotion in its readers
because Grahame put his own faith into it.
His faith in beauty, companionship, comfort, forgiveness and security.
It was written to demonstrate what is worthwhile in life.
But never in a moralising way.
I think it's very difficult to achieve in any book
and when it comes, people tend to cherish them
and hug them to themselves.
It's a book about feeling.
It's full of emotion.
Not just the companionship that the animals have for each other,
the kindliness that they show to each other.
But in the description of the joy of the scenery,
the river, the homes, there's a great outpouring of feeling.
And we warm to it in the book
and that's what makes us love it.
And finally, and I think this is often forgotten,
it's very, very funny.
'"You common, low, fat bargewoman!" Toad shouted.
"Don't you dare to talk to your betters like that!
Washerwoman, indeed? I would have you know that I am a Toad!
A very well-known respected distinguished Toad!
I may be under a bit of a cloud at present
but I will not be laughed at by a bargewoman."
The woman moved nearer to him
and peered under his bonnet keenly and closely.
"Why, so you are!" She cried.
"Well, I never! A horrid nasty crawly toad!
And in my nice, clean barge too.
Now that is a thing I will not have!"'
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