Free To the River by Olivia Laing

Kenneth Grahame’s obsession with childhood is encapsulated in the purblind figure of his son, who he swiftly skewered with the diminutive Mouse. If Kenneth never quite grew up emotionally, Mouse would refuse the sordid business of adulthood altogether, and his story can be read as one of the more distressing examples of that strange region in literary history which deals with the real children who inspire or are otherwise caught up in classic books, from Christopher Robin to Alice Liddell and the Lost Boys of J.M. Barrie.
    Mouse was born blind in one eye and with a painful-looking squint in the other. From the start he was an unusual child and his parents became convinced that he was a genius, though he was prone to wild tantrums and had an unpleasant habit of attacking servants and stray children in the street, a tendency Kenneth found amusing and did little to discourage. The Wind in the Willows started life as a way of entertaining Mouse, who according to the custom of the time was brought up largely by servants and spent frequent holidays away from his parents. It began, as Kenneth explained in a note to Elspeth, as a bedtime ‘tory in which a mole, a beever a badjer & a water-rat was characters’ – the baby talk was evidently surviving the couple’s growing separation – and was developed further via letters. The tory was initially a very private business and it was only much later that Kenneth was persuaded it might be fattened into a book. During the writing process he inserted the more mystical elements, including ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, that strange and wistful chapter in which a lost otter cub is discovered, in a moment of rapturous pantheism, at the feet of the Horned God himself. The resultant blend of childish romp and distinctly pagan nature worship confused early reviewers, but the clarity and humour of Grahame’s writing has proved unusually resistant to the attritions of time and his riparian world remains beguiling a century after it was first confined to print.
    The character of Toad, that hapless blusterer, is said to owe a great deal to Alistair, but while Toad’s wildness was given firm limits by his faithful friends Rat and Mole, Mouse was alternately spoiled and ignored. After the years of alternate coddling and solitude, public school came as a terrible shock. Mouse seems to have had a rough time of it at Rugby, leaving after only six weeks, while a brief stint at Eton precipitated a nervous breakdown. Contrary to his parents’ fantasies, the boy was neither especially academic nor easy with his fellows, though his letters possess a pleasantly cocky charm and he looks attractively built in the few surviving photographs. In the end he was packed off to a private tutor, where he managed to disport himself with sufficient success that his father, after some string-pulling, won him a place at Christ Church, one of Oxford’s larger and more prestigious colleges.
    Oxford had been Kenneth’s dream, but Mouse foundered there from the start. He couldn’t keep up with the work, botched his exams and failed to make friends among the other undergraduates. At last, in May 1920, he walked one evening from his college to Port Meadow, a pretty 400-acre area of grazing land bordered by the Isis, the young Thames, the same river his father had immortalised in his famous book. Oddly enough, another great work of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland , had its origins in Port Meadow. Decades before Mouse took his walk, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, who is better known as Lewis Carroll, rowed up the river there one July afternoon with the three young Liddell sisters, who persuaded him to make up a tale about a strange world beneath the ground. Mouse, whose private childhood story had also been parcelled up and sold off to the public, walked through the meadowsweet and buttercups to the railway track, lay down across it with his head over the line and at some point before dawn was