Free To the River by Olivia Laing Page A

decapitated by a train. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death, but the coroner’s report leaves very little doubt that Mouse had taken his own life.
    In the wake of Alistair’s death the Grahames left the rural farmhouse they’d inhabited for years, sold off most of their possessions, including the vast collection of toys Kenneth had lovingly collected, and ran away to Rome. They spent the next decade drifting around Europe and didn’t return permanently to the heartland of the Thames until 1930. Two years after his homecoming Kenneth died of a brain haemorrhage in their cottage by the river, and was buried in a grave lined with so many thousands of sweet peas that the air was steeped with their elusive scent.
    Later his body was disinterred and shifted to Holywell in Oxford, where Alistair was also buried. I’d visited this place with Matthew, quite by chance, a few years back. The graveyard was half-wild, the grass uncut, and beneath a lilac bush we came across a sleeping fox curled nose to tail in the shade. Kenneth was buried there beside his son and on the front of their joint headstone was carved: To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alistair, who passed the river on 6 th of July 1932, leaving childhood & literature through him the more blest for all time.
    That spring I’d been reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, which is set at the beginning of the last century, during the great flowering of Edwardian culture and art. The novel is populated by all sorts of children’s authors, among them J.M. Barrie and Grahame himself, and it exposes the inadvertent, almost collateral, damage they seemed compelled to cause by dint of their obsessive interest in the young. Among the cast is a fictional writer, Olive Wellwood, who spins an ongoing private story for each of her own children. All of them find their stories subtly oppressive, but one, Tom, is destroyed by his, and I thought he might stand in some way as a tribute to Alistair Grahame.
    Tom is a wild boy, happiest in the woods, and he is maimed by the entrapping experience of being sent away to school. ‘His’ story involves a boy whose shadow is stolen and who must pass into fairyland to claim it back. When his mother later turns it into a popular play he feels unbearably exposed and sets out on a long maddened walk from London to Kent, where he reaches the sea at Dungeness, waits for the sun to go down, and then walks into the waves. ‘He had sensed,’ Byatt writes at some point in this troubled, troubling story, ‘that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up.’ It is impossible to know whether this was what Mouse intended, but as an epitaph for Kenneth Grahame it seems uncannily precise.
    I was recalled to the world abruptly then. I’d been walking up a long, sloping ride and as I turned a corner a golden dog and what looked like a deerhound came racing down the path. I must have jumped, for the man who followed them greeted me kindly, observing, You were walking in a dream and then these dogs came from nowhere , which added to the suspicion that I might have been talking out loud.
    I’d come clean through the woods, and I found myself now in a snaggle of private lanes between beautiful old houses. It was a hidden world of a different sort, the spell cast this time by money. The houses – Pegden, Pilstyes, Little Grebe – were set back behind curling drives, the gardens edged by box the everlasting and rusty stands of beech. Fragments of conversation lifted over the hedges, accompanied by the sound of lawnmowers and running taps. I could see beds and borders through gates; attic rooms and gables; eaves and chimneypots.
    According to the map there was a pub a mile or two further on, down in the valley where the river crossed Sloop Lane. The houses gave way to a plateau of horse