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Jonathan Sale on Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age; Dream Days

Et in Arcadia

My father was an intellectually austere Cambridge academic, so we never had a copy of The Wind in the Willows in the house. No talking toads on this family syllabus, thank you! But Kenneth Grahame did feature on our bookshelves in the shape of two late Victorian bestsellers which would otherwise have escaped my notice, as they have done most readers’ of late: The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). Neither was turned into a play by A. A. Milne or Alan Bennett, or filmed by Terry Jones. Yet without them there would have been no Toad Hall, no ‘poop-pooping’ motor cars, no escapes from prison and no epic battle with the stoats and weasels.

These earlier books made Grahame’s name. Among their countless readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who kept, apart for the Bible, only one book on his yacht: Dream Days. Kenneth Grahame was a highflier at the Bank of England when he wrote these two collections of short stories. They tell of five orphaned brothers and sisters in a rural household who are engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against the uncles and aunts attempting to keep them in order.

Grahame’s preface to The Golden Age concludes with the Latin tag ‘et in Arcadia ego’ and his two volumes were written during what could be called ‘Arcadia II’, as an unburdened bachelor messing about in boats and fields during long weekends. These realistic accounts of childhood’s ups and downs are bathed in the nostalgic glow of his own early years. It was the success of these stories that led directly to The Wind in the Willows. A female fan made overtures to the popular author and they entered into an unsuitable marriage; the Toad tales began as bedtime stories for their son, which Grahame was encouraged to turn into a book.

The Wind in the Willows is a novel for children which adults enjoy; The Golden Age and Dream Days are stories for adults which m

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My father was an intellectually austere Cambridge academic, so we never had a copy of The Wind in the Willows in the house. No talking toads on this family syllabus, thank you! But Kenneth Grahame did feature on our bookshelves in the shape of two late Victorian bestsellers which would otherwise have escaped my notice, as they have done most readers’ of late: The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). Neither was turned into a play by A. A. Milne or Alan Bennett, or filmed by Terry Jones. Yet without them there would have been no Toad Hall, no ‘poop-pooping’ motor cars, no escapes from prison and no epic battle with the stoats and weasels.

These earlier books made Grahame’s name. Among their countless readers was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who kept, apart for the Bible, only one book on his yacht: Dream Days. Kenneth Grahame was a highflier at the Bank of England when he wrote these two collections of short stories. They tell of five orphaned brothers and sisters in a rural household who are engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against the uncles and aunts attempting to keep them in order. Grahame’s preface to The Golden Age concludes with the Latin tag ‘et in Arcadia ego’ and his two volumes were written during what could be called ‘Arcadia II’, as an unburdened bachelor messing about in boats and fields during long weekends. These realistic accounts of childhood’s ups and downs are bathed in the nostalgic glow of his own early years. It was the success of these stories that led directly to The Wind in the Willows. A female fan made overtures to the popular author and they entered into an unsuitable marriage; the Toad tales began as bedtime stories for their son, which Grahame was encouraged to turn into a book. The Wind in the Willows is a novel for children which adults enjoy; The Golden Age and Dream Days are stories for adults which might appeal to children. Certainly they did to this child – I cannot remember them not being part of the furniture, although some of the wit and most of the classical references would at first have escaped me. In these twenty-five delicate sketches, the children sometimes go on epic sea journeys or fight bloody battles – but only in their fertile imaginations. Other stories hinge on small, childish mishaps and misunderstandings. In ‘The Magic of the Ring’ the unnamed narrator and his brother lose their promised trip to the circus – only to get their glorious treat after all from a more sympathetic adult. In ‘What They Talked About’ the dénouement is that the boys never do discover the topics of girls’ gossip. ‘Dies Irae’ – yes, even some of the titles are in Latin – depicts a household enveloped by a cloud of sadness, caused by a servant learning of the death of her brother and a little girl not receiving a thank-you letter from her brother. It is a poignant picture which stays safely this side of sentimentality. My own favourite comes from Dream Days. In ‘Mutabile Semper’ the young narrator has an encounter one morning with an intriguing little girl who does indeed turn out to be ‘always changeable’. She wheedles out of him the admission that during tedious moments he escapes into a dream landscape featuring a palace full of chocolates and a park with a row of cannons to be fired at his command. Revealing his secret turns out to be a bad move, since the jeune fille fatale bossily rearranges his fantasy world. She dictates the chocolates he will be allowed to eat and silences the nasty cannons. He smells a rat when she asks if there are other boys in this childish paradise ominously, she will not promise to be his special friend. He returns in search of her after lunch, only to be wordlessly dismissed. He has been supplanted by a real-life rival, ‘a common little beast’ of a vicar’s son who is fascinating her with one of his ferrets. The narrator slinks off home. En route, he escapes to his dream landscape and has his revenge by eating all the chocolate he likes and triumphantly parading all his soldiers and firing off all the guns. ‘The Secret Drawer’, in The Golden Age, is even more delicate. One of the uncles mentions casually that the old bureau in an unused room contains a hidden compartment. This means only one thing to our young hero: ‘Bullion, ingots or Spanish dollars’. Again his imagination gallops off. He decides he will pay off a massive debt of four pennies and in other ways share the fortune surely lurking in the antique writing-desk. But the secret drawer which he discovers is, though not empty, disappointingly lacking in ingots. ‘My confident little castles were tumbling down like so many card-houses.’ However, he takes some cheer from the fact that the contents of the drawer must have been placed there long ago by ‘a kindred spirit to my own’:
a portrait of a monarch unknown to me, cut from some antique print and deftly coloured by hand in just my own bold style of brushwork, some foreign copper coins and a list of birds’-eggs . . . It was a real boy’s hoard, then, that I had stumbled upon . . . Across the void stretch of years I seemed to touch hands a moment with my little comrade of seasons – how many seasons? – long since dead.
He carefully replaces the much-loved objects so that some young, kindred spirit in the future will discover them. Then he returns to the present and heads off for the loud game of bears which his siblings are playing down the corridor. Like his fictional creations, Kenneth Grahame had a parent-free childhood. His mother died when he was very young and his father disappeared into France, drink and death, leaving his children to the care of their forbidding grandmother. Young Kenneth too was free to roam around the countryside. In his stories adults have walk-on, amble-off roles. ‘The Olympians’, as he terms these remote creatures in his preface to The Golden Age, are often incomprehensible and uncomprehending but not deliberately unkind. The servants – these brothers and sisters may have been orphans but they were privileged orphans – are on the side of the children. Also on-side is the odd (in both senses) adult ready to join in their games, tell stories about talking dragons and let them thump at the piano without bothering with the tedious business of musical notation. These adults sometimes hand out extra pocket-money: ‘one – two – three – four half-crowns! . . . I hope he dies tonight, for then he’ll go straight to heaven!’ Regretting in his preface that he now has no wish to indulge his childish fantasies, such as letting off explosives on the lawn, Grahame wonders sadly if he too has become an Olympian. The answer at that point seems to have been ‘not quite’ and his books reflect the landscape and time where part of his mind still dwelt. For me too they bring back sensations from my own childhood. I experience nostalgia for his nostalgia. A reader coming fresh to these two books will, I hope, find them as intriguing as those cherished objects preserved in the secret drawer by a long-gone kindred spirit. Having introduced them to my own children, I can’t wait to pass on the stories to the following generation. However, my grandchildren are still very young, so we’ll do some walloping with Toad first.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Jonathan Sale 2014


About the contributor

Jonathan Sale was the Features Editor of Punch until both he and the magazine were axed. He has just edited a new version of a scary Victorian volume on premature burial.

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