The Willows in Winter (34 page)

But finally what has given me most pleasure in
the recreation of the world of
The Wind in the Willows
is the discovery
— obvious to many readers and critics before me —of the universality of the
four great characters Grahame first created in those stories told to his young
son: Mole, Rat, Badger and most of all Toad. It is for readers to work out
their own meanings for these characters, and to call one loyal, another
resourceful, a third stern but wise and a fourth, well, exasperatingly lovable.

‘What I have learnt in writing
The Willows
in Winter
is that the characters’ profoundest universality lies not in them
as individuals to which we can give such easy labels, but in them as a small
community in whose giving and taking, laughter and tears, exasperation and
love, and final acceptance, we find something we may hope to touch in our own
communities.

As the Mole says in the first chapter of
The
Willows in Winter
“Liking Toad doesn’t come into it at all. Toad
is
,
that’s the thing about Toad.
Just as
the trees are, and the river, and summer … without Toad there would be
nothing much to live for.”
Which, were they given to
reflection as the Mole is, any of the other characters might well also say
about each other.

For me, the greatness of Kenneth Grahame lies
in this creation of characters who are at once complete individuals
and
mutually
dependent, and so make up a true community. One might add — for without an
audience to listen to his tale a storyteller is nothing at all — that the
greatness of succeeding generations of readers since
The Wind in the Willows
was first published in 19O8 has been to recognise the real depth of
Grahame’s
tale by continuing to read and remember it so
that it has become not just a story but a cultural tradition. To be part of
that, as both reader and
storyteller,
seems to me as
pure a pleasure as there can be.

One day, of course, I shall retreat from the
firelight back into the shadows, as Kenneth Grahame has done, but the River
Bank characters will live eternally on.
Especially
Toad.
He wasn’t really finished off at the end of
The Wind in the Willows,
and
he seems to be thriving still at the end of
The Willows in
Winter
.
And the terrible truth is that even as I write,
there on my wall, not far from Mole, is Patrick Benson’s brilliant new Mr Toad
… and he seems to be rubbing his hands in gleeful expectation of some other
wild adventure yet to come.

William
Horwood

Oxford

August 1993