A caress from gentler times

Why did a story that starts off with Mole, busy with the spring cleaning of his underground home and suddenly aflame with the desire to explore the world, become so popular?

How many children’s books about small woodland critters have inspired classic prog rock songs? It seems absurd that any such tale should have had an impact on the male-dominated rock music scene of the 1960s and 70s, especially one that has a mole, a water rat, a badger and a car-crazy toad as its walking, talking protagonists. But The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic of English literature and the inspiration for Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, cannot be shelved away as just a children’s story of anthropomorphised animals.

When the book was published, Grahame had retired as Secretary from the Bank of England. His day job might have been in banking where he rose up swiftly through the ranks from a clerical post (after he’d been denied a university education), but his passion had always been writing and literature. He’d written stories for journals and papers, which were published as collected works before the success of The Wind in the Willows.

Why did a story that starts off with Mole, who’s busy with the spring cleaning of his underground home and suddenly aflame with the desire to explore the wide world and proceeds to dump dust pans and brushes to ramble to the river, become so popular? Many critics have remarked that while the characters are animals, they behave very much like upper class men of Edwardian England. An England that is still rural and “unspoilt” by the industrial revolution. No signs of smokestacks and Dickensian childhood poverty here. Instead, there are snobbish rabbits, poetry loving rats and badgers that wear smoking jackets.

And then there’s Toad of Toad Hall, as perfect a depiction of the idle class that was ever portrayed in fiction. Toad’s weekly obsessions — in the book he starts off with a horse-drawn caravan and graduates on to the motor cars that were just then beginning to tear around quiet English roads — propel much of the story. But he’s not always the main character — in fact, the chapter that was to inspire Pink Floyd revolves around Rat and a baby otter that’s lost. It’s easy to see why this part of the book inspired Syd Barrett: it has to be one of the most beautifully transcendent pieces of spiritual fiction in the English language.

I have often read and re-read The Wind in the Willows — I still have the red, hardbound copy I bought as a 10-year-old in Muscat and have taken it over the past three decades across cities and homes. I have opened its yellowing pages and chuckled at Toad’s escape from prison, been creeped out by the weasels in the snow-bound woods and felt that same yearning to explore that afflicts Rat when he meets the Wayfarer. And I still have fond memories of Cosgrove Hall’s stop-motion animated TV series that brought to exquisite life Grahame’s characters.

Teddy Roosevelt read The Wind in the Willows not long after it was first published and he wrote to Grahame that he’d read the book again and again and considered the characters old friends. And that’s what they are, really: old friends who continue to live on in those pages, eternally messing about in boats, wandering around quiet lanes, and watching a river and its busy life flow by.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.