The Willows in Winter (33 page)

Yet, memorable though that party became, it is
not quite for Toad’s homecoming that it is now remembered. Nor for the speeches
he gave, and the merriment he
caused by his vain and
conceited account of his adventures and escapades; nor
even for the
ribald songs he sang of sweeps’ wives, and young brides, and butlers.

Nor even for his demonstration on Badger’s high
table, using his own silver as instruments of navigation, and the Rat’s pyjamas
as a parachute — and all as the sky began to streak with the light of dawn — of
how easy it was to fly a flying machine.

No, Badger’s party, the most memorable ever
given in the history of the river and the Wild Wood, is remembered for
something more.

For as the dawn rapidly advanced, and the
entertainment had spilled over onto the clearing outside the Badger’s front
door, the Mole was heard to say to the Rat, “Old fellow, tell me, have you
heard the expression, ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky at
morning, shepherd’s warning’?”

“Why?” asked the Rat.

“Because,” said the Mole, “the sky is red, and
growing redder. Over there —”

And he pointed, and all fell silent as he did
so and looked in the direction he indicated.

“But that’s over Toad Hall way,” said the Otter
slowly
But
it was rather more than that: it
was
Toad
Hall. The shouts of “Fire!” were useless. The general rush down to the bank and
thence over to Toad’s estate held no hope that it would be in time to serve a
useful purpose other than to be spectators at an unstoppable conflagration.

The only practical action came from the Rat
who, guessing at once the way things must be, cried out to the weasels and
stoats, “Bring whatever food and drink you can; no point in leaving it!”

Finally they stood staring dumbly at the flames
that shot up the length and breadth of Toad Hall. At a little distance from
them, and as close to the Hall as he could get in the heat, stood Toad, alone,
silhouetted against the flames, almost demonic before the fire.

“Let him be” suggested the Badger, “
for
I think no words can console him.”

Then Toad slowly turned to them, stared at them
where the flames lit up their faces, and cried out suddenly, “Don’t look so
gloomy, you fellows! Isn’t it just magnificent? Did you ever see anything like
it? I haven’t! My!”

“But, Toad,” said the Rat, “it’s your ancestral
home!”

“Was,
you mean,” said Toad excitedly.

“But, Toad,” joined in the Mole, “you’ll have
nowhere to live.”

“Ha! Ha!” cried Toad, dancing about as parts of
Toad Hall began to crash and crumble beneath the inferno. “I had decided to get
rid of it anyway”

“Toad,” said the Badger with something of his
old sternness, “you didn’t —”

“I did not!” protested Toad. “It may be that I
carelessly left a candle burning, but do not use the word premeditation,
Badger, for it is a word that reminds me of things I prefer to forget. No, this
is a careless accident from which much good will come. A new Toad Hall, bigger
and better, finer and more splendid —”

“Not just a little smaller?” wondered the Mole.
“I may have one room less over there perhaps,” said Toad, turning back to the
flames and waving in the general direction of where a scullery had once stood,
“or perhaps the ballroom might be more homely than it used to be —”

“But the money,” said the Rat, “what of that?”

“Lloyd’s will pay for it. Their word is their
bond!” said Toad with satisfaction, before dancing about some more. “My father
thought of everything.”

“I think,” said the Badger in a measured and
careful way, “that perhaps I will after all have that additional glass of wine
that I refused earlier.”

“Give him the bottle!” said Toad.

So the party continued into the morning, as
Toad Hall burned down before their eyes, its Lord and Master the least worried
of any of them there. Indeed, by
midday
, when all was but a heap of smoking
ruins, Toad was already pacing about the lawn with the Badger, both deep in
conversation about the drawings, plans and schemes that Toad already had in
mind. While the weasels and the stoats, sensing that the party was over, began
to drift back to the Wild Wood, and their homes.

Standing on the bank, by the river, where the
last of the food and drink had been spread upon the grass in the springtime
sun, the Rat said, “Mole, do you know what I think? I think we might perhaps
venture out in my boat today”

“Now!” cried Mole, who was the worse for wear.
“Right away!”

It did not take the Water Rat long to collect
his boat, which was moored up by Otter’s house, and bring it up-river to where
the Mole waited so impatiently for his first trip of the season.

“Just a short one, mind!” said the Rat.
“Just to whet our appetite for more!”

Then they were off, leaving Otter and Portly
and the Mole’s Nephew to wave them on.

“Well, spring’s here, all right,” said the
Otter after a short time, “and we’ve things to do. Portly, don’t be long!”

The two youngsters were left sitting wearily on
the grass, for the night had been a long one, with so much to take in. Yet
Mole’s Nephew felt suddenly at peace.

“Look!” he said to Portly, and pointed to where
Toad and the Badger went busily about the blackened balustrades, pacing,
measuring, conferring.

“And there!” said Portly, pointing to the
little blue boat in which the Mole sat so happily, being sculled about the
river by the Water Rat.

“And —”

They spoke together, one for the river perhaps,
the other for the bank, where the spring had started now, and winter fled away.

“Mole,” said Portly suddenly, “it’s—“

“I’m not Mole,” said Mole’s Nephew gently, “not
yet, nor ever,
I
hope. But yes, it
is
as it
should be. I think that this — all this — is what I came to see. Now you had
better —”

But Portly was already off, wandering along the
bank and humming as he peered at the water, as otters will, to try to catch a
glimpse of
all the
River promised through the season
that had just begun.

While Mole’s Nephew looked about him once
again, and heard the murmur of the Badger’s voice in the distance, and the more
excitable tones of Toad; and from the river the soft laughter of his uncle, and
the plashing of the Rat’s oars across the water.

Mole’s Nephew nodded and sighed, and he lay
back on the soft new grass and closed his eyes with sweet content, as the Mole
himself might have done, and listened to the joyful growing sounds of spring.

THE END

Author’s Note

In the winter of 1992 I acquired several of E H Shepard’s famous
illustrations for Kenneth
Grahame’s
The Wind in
the Willows.
One of them was of the Mole, nervous and alone, trekking
fearfully through the
blizzardy
Wild Wood.

I knew, of course, what errand the Mole was on,
for Shepard’s illustrations displaced all others after they first appeared in
1931, and provide the images most of us associate with the River Bank
characters. This very drawing had been used to illustrate the edition I
originally read so I knew that the Mole was looking for Badger’s house.

But the Mole alone in the Wild Wood in a book
was one thing; on my study wall he was rather different. As the months went by
Shepard’s drawing became part of my own imaginative landscape and Mole’s
original errand to find Badger faded as the great trees of the Wild Wood loomed
larger before me, and the blizzard winds of winter surged and blew.

One day, quite unexpectedly (though the drawing
had not changed at all), it seemed to me that Mole was off on a journey rather
different from his original one. True, he had set off from the same comfortable
home he loved so much, but now he was no longer heading towards the comfort and
safety of Badger’s house, but instead towards the River — the frozen River —
and towards disaster. The story of
The Willows in Winter
had begun.

So it was that just as Grahame inspired Ernest
Shepard in 1931, sixty years later Shepard inspired me. No doubt he has
inspired many other writers, though whether they have had the same connections
with
Oxford
, where Grahame went to school, that I have had, or with the River
Thames, where I learnt my
rivercraft
, or with moles
… I do not know.

I do know that once the Mole had set off in my
mind on his new journey there was no stopping him,
nor
any way of not writing the adventures that he and the Water Rat, the Badger and
Toad subsequently have in the novel you have just read. I did not think much
about whether or not it was wise to write a sequel to a classic; not then at
any rate. Only afterwards, when people said, “But
should
you have?” did
I really think about it.

Those who are familiar with my work know that I
tell stories in a broadly oral tradition. Before there were books I would have
been one of those who wandered in from the shadows beyond the stockade, went to
the communal fire, and sat down and began to tell stories in return for food
and drink, and somewhere to rest. It is something one cannot help doing if one
is made that way. Out of that living tradition have come all the great myths
and folk tales, stories passed on from one generation to the next, not always
from adults to children, but often so. Indeed, Kenneth Grahame, then Secretary
to the Bank of England, began to tell stories about moles and water rats to his
son
Alastair
on the occasion of his fourth birthday,
May 12th 19O4. It happens that May 12th is also
my
birthday, not the
least of many coincidences of birth, place and spirit that make me feel an
affinity with the life of Kenneth Grahame.

As for the storytelling, it seems that most
artists,
whether painters or composers or writers, have
always borrowed from others’ work and probably always will. We re-tell,
re-form, borrow and transmute. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
is based on an
earlier version of the same story;
Malory’s
Morte
D’Arthur
is a
great re-telling and re-packaging of the myths of Arthur and the Holy Grail;
James Joyce’s
Ulysses
could not exist in the form he wrote it but for
the Greek epic upon which it is based.

So my novel,
The Willows in Winter,
arises
out of Kenneth
Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows,
and
with “his” Mole upon my study wall now transmuted into my own, I am content to
be part of a continuum of storytelling and to write the sequel. If the story is
good it will live; if not it will die.

But in fact it is less the issue of writing a
sequel that has interested me than the deeper level of meanings that may, or
may not, exist in these Willows stories. It is through such meanings that
stories gain their continuing resonance, and live on. Grahame himself was a
modest and retiring man who was disinclined to attach deeper meanings to his
work, but this is not to say there are none. Even a minimal knowledge of
English social history suggests to readers that something of the clubby
bachelor world of Edwardian England (particularly of the Edwardian City of
London Grahame worked in) informs the four central characters of his story.
Then too there is the strong pantheistic element in
The Wind in the Willows,
which was a popular view of nature in his time, and which gives rise in the
original work to the much remembered, and sometimes ridiculed, chapter entitled
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. It has intrigued me that so many people
remember so well passages they read as children which, as adults, they feel
uncomfortable with. But it does not surprise me, for I have written passages
like that myself in all of my
Duncton
books and I know
that many readers share with me — and with Grahame — a sense of mystery about
nature and life forces to which we prefer not to give religious or sectarian
names.