Messing about on the river

The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and once declared: ‘Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.’

It is Dennison’s contention that for Grahame the clock stopped even earlier. ‘I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner,’ he quotes him writing in 1907:

I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain I used from four to about seven can never have altered … After that time I don’t remember anything particularly.

Grahame was effectively orphaned at five when his mother died and he and his three siblings were removed from their alcoholically unreliable father to live with their maternal grandmother at Cookham Dean in Berkshire. While human affection was in short supply there, young Kenneth discovered the beautiful, river-based landscape that would become the setting of his most famous book, and the place to which he would retreat in his imagination when things became difficult in his later life. The stories for adults with which he made his literary reputation also drew upon his memories of this period, featuring the exploits of five parentless children, one of whom is the narrator and clearly stands in for Grahame himself. They were collected in two volumes with titles, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1899), suggesting a lost world; and Dennison makes extensive and excellent use of the stories in recreating Grahame’s childhood.