Writing Home (39 page)

The real solution for Burgess would have been to live until he was eighty; then he would have been welcomed back with open arms. You only have to survive in England for all to be forgiven. This was more or less what happened to Oswald Mosley, whose offence seems to me much greater, and would have happened to Burgess, had he lived. He would have gone on chat shows, been a guest on
Desert Island Discs
, and dined out all over London. In England you only have to be able to eat a boiled egg at ninety and they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.

Some time in 1987 Richard Eyre, newly appointed Director of the National Theatre, asked me if I’d think about writing a play that would combine
The Wind in the Willows
with some account of the life of its author, Kenneth Grahame. I had one or two similar approaches around that time, including a proposal for a film in which Bob Hoskins was to play Rat and Michael Caine Toad. Kenneth Grahame died in 1932, so this flurry of interest could be put down to money and managements waking up to the fact that, fifty years on, here was a best-seller that was now out of copyright.

Cut to December 1990, a week before the opening of the play I eventually wrote. Passing the British Museum, I ran into Bodley’s Librarian, David Vaisey, who was taking a gloomy breather from some unending committee on the impending transfer to the new British Library. As I told him about rehearsing
The Wind in the Willows
, he became gloomier still. What I had not known was that Kenneth Grahame’s long love-affair with Oxford had led him to bequeath the copyright in the book to the university, and a good little earner it had proved to be. Now the National Theatre’s gain was about to be the Bodleian Library’s loss.

I don’t recall reading
The Wind in the Willows
as a child, or indeed any of the classics of children’s literature. This was partly the library’s fault. In those days Armley Junior Library at the
bottom of Wesley Road in Leeds bound all its volumes in heavy maroon or black, so that
The Adventures of Milly
Molly Mandy
was every bit as forbidding as
The Anatomy of Melancholy
. Doubtless
The Wind in the Willows
was there somewhere, along with
Winnie the Pooh
and
Alice
and all the other books every well-brought-up
Children’s Hour
-listening child was supposed to read. Actually, I think I do remember looking at
Alice
and being put off by the Tenniel illustrations. ‘Too old fashioned,’ I thought – ‘looks like a classic,’ and back it went on the shelf.

It was only in the sixties, when I was rather haphazardly reading round the Edwardians with some vague idea of writing a history play (which eventually turned into
Forty Years On
), that I read Kenneth Grahame’s
The Golden Age
and
Dream Days
. I left
The Wind in the Willows
until last, because I thought I had read it already – this being virtually the definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and which they often assume they have read themselves.

One consideration that had kept me away from the book for so long, that gave it a protective coating every bit as off-putting as those black and maroon bindings of my childhood, was that it had
fans
. Fans are a feature of a certain kind of book. It’s often a children’s book –
Winnie the Pooh, Alice
and
The Hobbit
are examples – or it is a grown-up children’s book such as those of Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and Conan Doyle. But Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are nothing if not adult and they have fans too – and fan clubs – so children are not the essence of it.

What is common to all these authors, though, is the capacity to create self-contained worlds; their books constitute systems of literary self-sufficiency in ways that other novels, often more profound, do not. It is a kind of cosiness. Dickens is not cosy; he is always taking his reader back into the real world in a way that Trollope, who is cosy, does not. So it is Trollope who has the fans. In our own day the same distinction could be drawn
between the novels of Evelyn Waugh and those of Anthony Powell – Powell with fans, Waugh not. And though exceptions occur to me even as I write – the Brontës? (fans of the lives more than the books) Hardy? (fans of the scenery) – I have always found fans a great deterrent: ‘It’s just your kind of thing.’ ‘Really? And how would you know?’

Back in 1988, I set to work trying to interweave Grahame’s real and fictional worlds, but I soon ran into difficulties. Grahame’s life had not been a happy one. Born in 1859, he never had (as he put it) ‘a proper equipment of parents’, and was effectively orphaned at the age of five when his mother died of scarlet fever and his drunkard father packed him off to Cookham in Berkshire to live with his grandparents; he never saw his father again. He was sent to St Edward’s School in Oxford, where he did moderately well, and was looking forward to going up to university there when the family – or the ‘grown-ups’, as he thought of them all his life – decided he should go into the City as a clerk (‘a pale-faced quilldriver’) in the Bank of England.

Disappointed though he was (and it was a disappointment that did not fade), Grahame did well at the Bank, and eventually became Secretary at the early age of thirty-nine. Still, for all his conventional appearance (and despite the ‘Kitchener Needs You’ moustache), he was hardly a conscientious clerk, and even in those relaxed days he soon acquired a reputation for sloping off early. When he was at his desk he was often not doing the Bank’s work but writing articles for the
National Observer
and
The Yellow Book
. Pretty conventional for the most part, his pieces deplored the creeping tide of suburbia and extolled the charms of the countryside, sentiments that have been familiar and fashionable ever since, although nowadays Grahame’s style is somewhat hard to take.

Grahame himself comes over as a sympathetic character who,
even when he begins to acquire a literary reputation, still has about him the air of a humble clerk, tied to his desk and longing to escape – like those little men on the loose that crop up in Wells or, later, in Priestley and Orwell. Of course, it is easier if you are an animal: his draper’s shop has to burn down and his death be assumed before Mr Polly can escape; with Mole, it is just a matter of flinging aside his duster and brush, saying, ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’, and then up he comes into the sunlight and finds himself in ‘the warm grass of a great meadow’ – and a new life.

A new life of a different sort began for Grahame in 1899, when he was forty. Hitherto very much the bachelor, he suddenly – and to the surprise and consternation of his friends – became engaged to Elspeth Thompson, whom in due course he rather resignedly married. A Scot like himself, she was fey as well as formidable – insisting, for instance, on wearing a daisy chain to their wedding – but though their courtship had been conducted largely in baby talk there does not seem to have been much talk about babies afterwards. Sex did not come up to the expectations of either of them, but before it was discontinued they had one quick child, Alastair, who was born premature and half-blind.

He was a precocious boy, though – Elspeth, in particular, insisting on his charm and ability – with the result that he was much spoiled and given to tantrums, during which he would beat his head on the ground in fits of grief and rage. When his father started to write letters to him telling the stories that, in 1908, became
The Wind in the Willows
, Mr Toad’s tantrums were intended to ring a bell.

The book was far from being an immediate success (‘As a contribution to natural history,’ wrote the
Times
critic, ‘the book is negligible’), but at least this saved Alastair Grahame from the fate of A. A. Milne’s son Christopher Robin, dogged always by
his fictional counterpart. Still, there was not much else that went right for Alastair. Since his father had longed to go to Oxford, Alastair was sent there, but as the child of eccentric parents and lacking any social skills he was as unhappy as he had been at Eton, and in 1920 he was found dead on the railway line that runs by Port Meadow.

The ironies are dreadful: the river-bank, setting of the father’s idyll, scene of the son’s death; the train, Mr Toad’s deliverer, the instrument of the real-life Mr Toad’s destruction. Though these tragic events were made the substance of an excellent radio play –
The Killing of Toad
, by David Gooderson – I found it impossible to imagine them incorporated in
The
Wind in the Willows
without casting a dark shadow over that earthly paradise, and so the project lapsed.

In March 1990, at the suggestion of Nicholas Hytner, the National revived the idea of an adaptation of Grahame’s book, only this time in the form of a Christmas show that would be virtually all sunlight and would display to advantage the technical capabilities of the Olivier stage.

My theatrical imagination is pretty limited; it is all I can do to get characters on to the stage and once they are there, I can never think of a compelling reason for them to leave – ‘I think I’ll go now’ being the nearest I get to dramatic urgency. So I was too set in my ways to be instantly liberated by the technological challenges of the commission.

‘But there’s a caravan in it,’ I remember complaining, ‘what do we do about that?’

‘I’m sure it’s possible,’ comforted Nicholas Hytner, who is accustomed to launching 747s from the stage. ‘Just write it in.’

‘But it’s drawn by a
horse
,’ I persisted. ‘We can’t have a real horse and we can’t have a pantomime horse or else we’ll have to have a pantomime Rat and Mole and Badger.’

‘Who is this idiot?’ would have been a permissible response, but Nicholas Hytner patiently explained that there were several actors who looked like carthorses and who would take the part very well. It was all so simple, just as long as one used the imagination.

I set this down more or less as it happened, in case there should be any budding playwrights more tentative than I am. It’s unlikely. I’ve been at it now for twenty-five years, and if I still can’t stretch my mind to envisage a man playing a horse what have I learned?

After that, though, it all came much easier. When the motor car appeared, I just wrote ‘
A motor car comes on
’, and likewise with the barge. The only thing the designer Mark Thompson was dubious about – on grounds of expense – was the railway train, but by that time I had got the bit between my teeth and wrote the scene in which Toad is rescued by the train with the note ‘I think you can suggest a train with clouds of steam, hooters, etc.’ Etcetera.

These props, and particularly the car and the train, were splendidly done and handsomely finished. As Griff Rhys Jones (who played Toad) remarked, most stage props look worse the closer you get to them, whereas these stood up to the actors’ closest scrutiny, being beautifully detailed in places (such as the dashboard of the car) that the audience can scarcely hope to see.

To understand the technical side of the production, one needs to know that the stage of the Olivier comprises an inner circle and an outer circle. The meadow on which much of the action takes place was built on the inner circle; round and slightly crumpled in appearance, it was generally referred to by the crew as ‘The Poppadum’. Around this, the outer circle – a rim about six and a half feet wide – did duty as river or road. Both inner and outer circles can revolve in either direction, and the inner circle can rise or fall, either one half at a time or in one
piece, when it resembles a huge hollow drum. Thus when the scene changed to Rat’s house the inner circle revolved and the drum rose at the same time, to reveal the interior of the house beneath the meadow, the combination of the stage rising and revolving making the scene appear to spiral up into view. A similar transformation took place when Rat and Mole were taken into Badger’s house, with the bonus that, while Badger, Rat and Mole were sitting cosily by the fire on a level with the audience, one could still see, up above, the Chief Weasel and Weasel Norman keeping their chilly watch in the Wild Wood.

Mark Thompson’s costumes incorporated some of the animals ‘natural appearance – Rat’s tail, for instance, and his outsize ears – but not so as to obliterate the actors’ human features. Jane Gibson taught the cast the movements of the various creatures they were representing: the linear shufflings of the hedgehogs, the dozy lollopings of the rabbits, the sinuous dartings of the weasel and so on.

Younger actors take to this kind of thing more readily than their seniors. Michael Bryant, playing Badger, was initially sceptical and avoided the movement classes; then, in an apparent access of enthusiasm, he asked if he could take home the various videos depicting badger activity. When he came in the next day, he handed back the videos, saying, ‘I’ve studied all these films of the way badgers move, and I’ve discovered an extraordinary thing: they move exactly like Michael Bryant.’ But to most of the actors, some of whom were doubling as different creatures, the animal-movement classes were of great value. For example, one could see in David Bamber’s Mole that his get-up as an old-fashioned northern schoolboy did not entirely displace the shy, scuttling creature with splayed hands and feet, who people were always after for a waistcoat.

I have tried to do a faithful adaptation of the book while, at the
same time, not being sure what a faithful adaptation is. One that remains true to the spirit of the book, most people would say. Well,
The Wind in the Willows
is a lyrical book, and the first casualties, for the book to work on the stage, were those descriptive passages that give it its lyrical flavour. The splendid music Jeremy Sams wrote helped to compensate for this loss and his lyrics too – which he dashed off with such speed that I felt, had he had a couple of hours to spare, he could have adapted the whole thing.

Still, the play is nowhere near as gentle and atmospheric as the book. No matter, other people would say: its special charm lies in the characters. But to adapt the text on that principle is not straightforward either, as the tale is very episodic. Rat and Mole disappear for long stretches, as does Badger, and it is not until Toad’s adventures get under way that there is anything like a continuous narrative. It was for this reason, I imagine, that A. A. Milne called his adaptation
Toad of Toad Hall
, whereas to many readers of the book it is Rat and Mole who hold the story together.

The most substantial cut I made had been made by Milne too – namely the chapter entitled ‘Wayfarers All’, in which Rat encounters a sea-going cousin. Milne also omitted the mystical chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, but this I did include, though I’m not sure what children made of it in the play – or made of it in the book, for that matter. In the play, Pan was heard but not seen, which is just as well: Grahame’s description – ‘the rippling muscles, on the arm that lay across the broad chest … the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward’ – makes him sound too much like Mellors the gamekeeper. Both chapters, incorporated into
The Wind in the
Willows
at a late stage, recall the kind of pieces Grahame began writing when he worked at the Bank, and which were collected in his first book,
Pagan Papers
.