21. The Wind In The Willows: How A Bedtime Story Became An Icon

How did Kenneth Grahame come up with the idea for The Wind In The Willows? Why was the novel initially rejected by publishers? And, what character would Tabby and Dominic be? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Wind In The Willows, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order The Wind In The Willows and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Bruno Di Castri Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

• 0:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Wind in the Willows is a story that has lasted and it's lasted for a reason. It's a tale in which friendship is the anchor, but adventure is the spark.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It actually started as a series of bedtime stories that Kenneth Graham would write to his son, and it is rooted in the English countryside and it paints a world that is both grand and rich, but cosy and warm.

• 0:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love the lazy boating days with Ratty, very much my character, and Mole, who's very much you, Tabby. There's the expedition to the wild wood, there's the fighting, the weasels and the stoats. I love all that stuff.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Then we have the legendary Toad Hall, and that is home to the reckless and motorcar obsessed Mr. Toad Sandbrook.

• 0:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very, very good banter there. Well done.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 0:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lots of people will know the story. However, you won't know it in this amazing edition. It's the Folio Society edition. Genuinely, it's the most beautiful book. It's one of the most beautiful books I own, I think.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it absolutely is. It's something that you can treasure for the rest of your life.

• 1:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Folios, The Wind in the Willows is available now. Find your favourite story at foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

• 1:13Speaker 02

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• 3:20Speaker 00

  "There's only one more thing to be done," said the gratified badger. "Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat, before your friends here, what you fully admitted to me in the smoking room just now. First, you are sorry for what you've done, and you see the folly of it all?" There was a long, long pause. Toad looked desperately this way and that, while the other animals waited in grave silence. At last, he spoke.

• 3:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  "No," he said, a little sullenly, but stoutly. "I'm not sorry, and it wasn't folly at all. It was simply glorious."

• 3:56Speaker 00

  "What?" cried the badger, greatly scandalized. "You backsliding animal, didn't you tell me just now, in there?"

• 4:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  "Oh, yes, oh, yes, in there," said Toad impatiently. "I'd have said anything in there. You're so eloquent, dear badger, and so moving and so convincing, and you put all your points so frightfully well. You could do what you like with me in there, and you know it. But I've been searching my mind since, and going over things in it, and I find that I'm not a bit sorry or repentant, really, so it's no earthly good saying I am now, is it?"

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Then you don't promise, said the badger, never to touch a motor car again.

• 4:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Certainly not, replied Toad emphatically. On the contrary, I faithfully promise that the very first motor car I see, boop, boop, off I go in it.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  So that was, of course, from Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908. And joining us on the show, Toad of Toad Hall. Hello, Dominic.

• 4:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tread carefully, Tabby, tread carefully.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  So in that scene, Badger, played by me, and the other animals who live by the river have staged an intervention to persuade the iconic Mr. Toad to give up his enthusiasm, his addiction for fast cars. And Toad initially promises Badger that he'll kick this bad habit, but he was only pretending. He was only saying that to shut Badger up and worm his way out of the room. So totally unrepentant, totally shameless. And he's now exulting in having tricked the dignified and honourable Badger.

• 5:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. So I always remember that scene from when I first read this book, which was when I was a child. And it's, I think it's every kind of little boy or little girl's fantasy, that you've promised to be good, and your parents have swallowed your apology. And then you turn around immediately and you say to them, I'm actually not sorry at all, and I would do it again. I would do it in a heartbeat. It's also a very good preview, actually, Tabby, of married life.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  That's good to know. That is good to know.

• 5:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I think even in that little scene, you get a clue to The Wind in the Willows' incredible success, because there's something, I mean, I'm only half joking about that. So there is something in those characters, in Toad and Badger, and then, of course, in Mole and Rat, who are the other sort of members of the quartet, that's, I think, captures this sort of truth about human nature. All human nature is there in those four characters.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So even though it's a book about, it's a children's book about the animals who live by the riverbank, I think it's actually much deeper than that. And that's, that's the reason for its appeal, and that's why it merits its place on the show. Because, among other things, it's a portrait of kind of rural Edwardian England, threatened by modernity. It's a celebration of male friendship and male kind of camaraderie. But actually, as we will discuss later, I mean, lots of people will be amazed to hear this, it's a reworking of Homer's The Odyssey.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  I actually couldn't believe it when I stumbled across that in your notes. I'm delighted, but I'm shocked.

• 6:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, you love the Odyssey.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  I do.

• 6:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, Toad is a much more interesting character than the

• 6:51Speaker 00

  I know, and I just couldn't agree more. I think Odysseus is the most interesting of the Greek heroes. But then again, Toad has a certain flamboyance to him.

• 6:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  He wears a lot more tweed than Odysseus. And even the new.

• 7:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, come on, I don't wear any tweed as well, you know. So it's now, what, almost 120 years old, The Winds in the Willows?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Which is strange, because it feels so present everywhere. You know, it's had such a lasting impact that I forgot it was so old.

• 7:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are very few books published in 1908 that are still in print.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they're very, I mean, children's books or adult books, and there are very few books from that era who have left such a mark on the world's imagination. So Mole, Rat, especially Toad, are colossal figures, even to people who've not read the books. I mean, everybody, if you say to somebody, he's a bit of a Mr. Toad, everybody really knows what you mean. If you go into any bookshop in the English-speaking world, you can find copies of the book. There's a historian of children's fiction, Gillian Avery, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. She calls it "an essential element of English childhood, part of the background of the reading adult, a book whose importance is unquestioned." And there have been adaptations, so on the stage, best of all, Tabby, on TV.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 8:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, I mean, this is the great trauma of your life.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  I've been seeking serious counselling in advance of this episode.

• 8:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  You couldn't bring yourself to watch the ITV adaptation?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, actually, I did, like, I've seen little bits of it. I saw it as a child when I was staying with my aunt and uncle in England, and I thought it was a truly terrifying thing. You know, it's full of these garishly grinning puppets, gallivanting across the screen in a sinister fashion, with their eyes, like, really raised and ecstatic.

• 8:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  They do have kind of big eyes.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have like, almost like a religious fervour in the way that their eyes are constantly upraised. It's nightmare provoking, but then equally sinister, and perhaps even more sinister,

• 8:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  was the 1996 adaptation starring Steve Coogan, I believe, in the role of Mole?

• 8:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Steve Coogan was Mole.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Steve Coogan was Mole, friend of the show.

• 8:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hold on, who's the friend of the show there, Mole or Coogan?

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Uh, Partridge, actually, so neither.

• 8:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Alan Partridge is the friend of the show. I don't know about, I've got nothing against Steve Coogan.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Who cares about Coogan, yeah. Filomena what? And the thing is, the thing that's terrible about that is they're humans, they look like humans, but they're slightly animalized. So they look like kind of bastardized versions of animals and humans. So all of this I find to be shudder inducing. And it's taken a lot of courage for me to be here today with you.

• 9:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the book I read as a child several times and then I read it to my son and we watched the TV series a lot, Tabby, which will terrify you.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Poor Arthur, honestly.

• 9:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, he's a big fan. He is a big fan. And I've always been, you know, had a massive sentimental fondness for it. And also always thought, well, certainly when I started thinking about it as a grown up, thought how interesting it was and how many layers there were and how much there would be to unpick if I ever wanted to to look into it. So actually doing this episode, I really, really enjoyed this. And there's loads of fascinating stuff under the surface, I think.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was excited actually to read it in part because of your enthusiasm for it. I know that it's a, it has a massive sentimental spot for you. But I'd actually never read it because I'm not a big fan of animals dressed in human clothing.

• 10:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  I can't, I can't get behind them. I'm not invested. I did, Chris Potter never really did it for me. But then my dad is a massive, massive fan of The Wind in the Willows, huge emotional attachment to it from childhood. So then when I was on a holiday recently, he gave me his kind of battered 1959 edition with like all the original illustrations. And I have to confess, I think I was wrong to have turned up my nose at it for so long because it's cozy, it's funny, it's whimsical. It's the very best kind of parable about human nature, because so many books of that era, as you said, are slightly out of fashion now, because, you know, when it's humans playing in that way, because children don't really play like that anymore. Whereas this, because it genuinely, I think, does say something about human nature. I think that's part of the reason it's endured.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  And I love the way, you know, a little bit like Narnia or something, everyone always goes to bed, well fed, cozy and content.

• 11:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of buttered toast.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  There's so much buttered toast, you can't have enough buttered toast.

• 11:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Correct.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  So I really enjoyed it.

• 11:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  So before we get into some of the themes and we get into Kenneth Graham, the author, who's a fascinating character, and we get into his world, why don't we give people a little reminder of the story? So we kick off with Mole, don't we?

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yes, we do. So we start with Mole and he is doing a spot of spring cleaning. And then he rushes out onto the riverbank and there he meets the water rat and they have great fun. They're messing around with boats. They have a picnic. It's just a bucolic fairy tale. And then in the next few chapters, we come across the other principal characters. So of course, there's Mr. Toad, obsessed with fads of various kinds. When we start, it's a caravan, then he has a car crash and he falls in love with the new fangled motorcar because cars have been on the roads since the 1890s. And then this is when he starts yelling his famous poop poop that you demonstrated in the opening reading. And then we come across Badger. He is kind of venerable and dignified. He is a bit older. He lives in the wild wood and Mole goes into the wild wood because he's

• 12:02Speaker 00

  never been there and he's curious. And it all goes terribly wrong. It's quite frightening. He gets lost in the wood and this bit is actually, even this time, I could see that as a child be very frightening.

• 12:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, it's scary when he's lost in the wood.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's genuinely frightening.

• 12:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of a child's greatest fears is always being lost.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, in the woods with eyes, you know, like in the original Snow White. There's this bit when she's rushing through the woods and there's eyes everywhere. It's just like that. And then we have this lovely reassuring homecoming when Rat goes and finds him and they go and take shelter with the ultimately kind Badger. And then there are these two slightly odd, very different chapters, which are very lyrical and slightly strange. And these feature Rat and Mole. So there is the piper at the gates of dawn and wayfarers all. And the first one is where they encounter the god Pan, bizarrely. And then later the Rat is tempted by the call of the sea and we'll be digging into that a little bit more later.

• 12:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And then you've got the second half of the book and that really belongs to Mr. Toad. So Toad, you know, he's promised Badger that he'll give up cars, but he doesn't mean it. He escapes. They try to lock him up and he escapes. He steals a car. He's sent to prison. Tremendous adventures, escaping from prison. And then he returns to find that Toad Hall has been invaded and occupied by the animals who live in the wild wood, who are the weasels, the stoats and the ferrets. And then the great climax, which I loved when I was reading, when I was kind of six or seven or something. A mole and rat and badger and toad kind of join forces. They tool up. They infiltrate

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Toad Hall through a tunnel.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Rat is sitting on a, on a disturbing armament pile. He has so many weapons. He's like an arms dealer.

• 13:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I love that. But that would obviously appeal to a child because children love to have, you know, toy pistols and toy swords and all of that.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  And you can never, if you go questing or something, you can never have enough.

• 13:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly right. Exactly. And the idea of it sneaking in through a tunnel. Brilliant.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Brilliant.

• 13:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely speaks to you when you're, you know, under 10 years old.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  And the crossdressing, of course.

• 13:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, yes.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  I bet that spoke to you as a 10 year old boy.

• 13:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is a bit of cross, well disguises. Kids love disguises.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they sneak in, they liberate Toad Hall, they have a celebratory banquet. Toad is slightly reformed. So he gives up on his, his plans to sing a song and to give an incredibly bombastic speech. And he surprises everybody at the end of the book by appearing to be, and I quote, an altered toad. Because he's a little bit better behaved than he was when the book began.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Well, he's still slightly one-upping them, isn't he? Because he realises that it'll have this reaction from everyone. He'll surprise everyone. So it's kind of accumulated, which is the best kind, by the way.

• 14:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  You feign some kind of, you know, atonement or reform in order to still be making a statement.

• 14:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't want to, I don't want to give too much away, Tabby, but basically I found in my life that feigning modesty

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  is, is very satisfying and effective.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, so where does it all come from? Does it mean anything more than just a children's story? There's a brilliant book about children's fiction that came out last year by a friend of mine called Sam Leith. And it's called The Haunted Wood. And he points out early on in this book, he says, the most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who've most invested in it emotionally. Often they're writing from a wound, whether a wound sustained in childhood or the wound of having to, had to leave it behind in the first place.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  So apt, that I think. I think that's, that's very well observed.

• 15:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think what it is is. Writers create a fantasy world of this kind because they're trying to get away from unhappiness, some form of unhappiness. But they create the escape, they create this sort of lost paradise. But the unhappiness somehow finds its way in, or finds a reflection. It's the tension between those two things that often gives these books their their power. And I think that's definitely true of The Wind in the Willows. So Sam Leath says, it's one of the most hermetically kind of closed worlds of innocence in the history of children's literature. But the reason it exists as it does is precisely because it's powered by Kenneth Graham's own personal unhappiness and his very strange kind of conflicted response to the traumas of his early life. So there's actually a lot of darkness under

• 16:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  the surface in The Wind in the Willows, which you wouldn't spot when you read it when you're seven years old or something.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Kind of like unlike P G Wodehouse, those, you know, the Jeeves and Wurstbrooke, they genuinely are as light as and as they appear. But, you know, they have elements of quite a troubled childhood, his own troubled childhood in them. And yet it never, the darkness never seeps in, I suppose, which is kind of interesting.

• 16:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whereas I think there is more obvious darkness here. Well, we'll go into it, won't we? So Kenneth Graham's life, I mean, on the one hand, what happens to him is not so outlandish. But I guess it's the way he responds to it that is makes this quite strange and sad, don't you think?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a there's a sad kind of passivity to him, I think.

• 16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, completely.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Which is possibly slightly of the times, but it's always sad, I think, the way that, you know, men of that generation reacted. And it was just the done thing. And in a way, it's very brave, but it is sad.

• 16:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  So tell us, take us through what happened to him, tell me.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he's born in Edinburgh in eighteen fifty nine. His father is a lawyer. And then they move to rural Argyleshire when he's small. And one of his few memories of these early years is walking beside a loch with his father and his father's telling him a story. And this makes it its way into The Wind in the Willows, when Mole is walking by Rat, and it says, as one trots when very small by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories. And then when he's five, the first tragedy strikes. And this is when his mother, his mother has another son, she then catches scarlet fever, she lingers on for about two weeks. And then she dies. And her final words, which are so incredibly moving, I think, are, it's all been so lovely. Like, I think we should all be so lucky on our.

• 17:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, she was only, I think, the late twenties when she died. I mean.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  She was very young.

• 17:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  It's very sad. And then Kenneth Graham himself catches it too. He nearly dies. So many of the authors we've done on this show had terrible illnesses at some point in their lives, I think. I wonder if that kind of lends itself to writing or something, you know.

• 18:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I always think like the loss of a parent. It's so striking how many of the the great writers lost a parent when they were young.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Anyway, he recovers, but he's left with bronchial issues for the rest of his life. And his father just can't cope with these children. So it's two brothers and one sister. So he sends them south to live with his mother in law, Mrs Ingalls, in the Berkshire village of Cuckum Dean on the bank of the Thames. And this is a really idyllic time in his life. And it gives him inspiration for the riverbank in The Wind in the Willows. And it reminded me of J R Tolkien, J R R Tolkien's time, living in Surghol, I think, which is a really idealized period of life, kind of in the countryside.

• 18:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, just outside Birmingham, exactly the same thing. So similar period of time, Victorian, Edwardian. And again, the sort of the rural idyll, exactly that. Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Totally. And then after a couple of years with his mother in law, he moves to a smaller cottage. And then there's a brief and really unhappy interview when he goes back to live with his father. But by this point, his father is drinking far too much and it just doesn't work out at all. And his father then runs away, abandons them. He runs away to France and dies years later in a boarding house in Le Havre, which is miserable.

• 19:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Drinks himself to death, basically.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And so his children end up being shuffled around various relatives all the time, which would give you such a sense of kind of not belonging and abandonment.

• 19:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think so. And I think what Kenneth Graham does is he withdraws, doesn't he, into a fantasy world of his imagination, from which he never really emerges.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I actually think that's just the most understandable in a way, quite a healthy reaction.

• 19:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, lots of children live in their heads. But as you grow up, you leave the world of, I mean, we never entirely leave the world of daydreams behind, do we? But we, you know, you you at least meet the real world halfway. And I think there's an argument with Kenneth Graham. I mean, his biographers kind of say, he really is somebody who chooses deliberately never to grow up. So this biography of him, a really nice book actually about him, very sad book. By Matthew Dennison called Eternal Boy. And the theme of that is about how basically he wants to be, you know, an eight year old boy all his life. He shuns the adult world.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  And and he's frightened of it because it means he equates it with suffering disappointment, you know, being grief, all of those kinds of things.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Bit like J M Barrie, actually. Interesting.

• 20:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's definitely a cult of childhood at that age, at that point in time anyway.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you're right.

• 20:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so, um, I think there's a, well, lots of critics think that the heart of the wind and the willows, there is this tension between wanting to escape and have adventures on the one hand. That's something we've already mentioned, wanting to come home to the kind of hearth and the buttered toast and the cozy world of your burrow on the other and you're and the characters constantly being pulled between these two things. And you can see that escape, he would equate, you know, toed escaping toed hall a little bit like his father running away to France or something.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. At one point, the rat is actively tempted by the prospect of running away and living a carefree, um, kind of responsibility free life. And it's, and it's

• 21:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, of course.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Irresistible almost.

• 21:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And then on the other hand, the the houses of the different animals, you know, you mentioned the living in Cookham Dean by the Thames. The houses of the animals by the riverbank are massively important to them. And again and again, you have these scenes where they come back to their house and they love their house and they they snuggle down and all of this sort of stuff. And, you know, some critics sort of say in a very Freudian way, oh, this is the kind of return to the womb or something like that. I know you don't.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  I think that's mad. I think that's, I think that's massively deepening it. Also, for one thing, it's quite a masculine book, you know.

• 21:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it is a very masculine book. Well, we'll talk about that. But it's also, it's, that is the theme of the Odyssey. One of the foundational texts of Western literature is going far from home and coming back and finding perhaps your home may have been taken from you.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say, though. I mean, definitely that massively applies to one animal's arc. But the difference is that, you know, in the Odyssey, home, you know, he goes back and it's not this kind of cherished perfect place he's been fighting for all these years. Home really is as good as one hopes it will be in the wind and the willows.

• 22:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it is. Exactly. It completely is. And I think, you know, these are common themes in children's literature. But Kenneth Graham seems to have taken that retreat into fantasy to a to an extreme, not matched by most other writers. So, I mean, a huge theme of his life, he emotionally rejects the adult world and adult interests, and he finds such comfort in his kind of schoolboy imagination that he never, ever wants to leave it. And as somebody who liked being a child and loves kind of children's books, I actually do find that quite relatable. I mean, not that I ever, I never, I mean, I never suffered all the sort of the losses that he did. But I think there's a bit of all of, of all of us, deep down, that sentimentalises

• 22:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  and is nostalgic about the world of childhood, don't you, Tabby? Or is this just me?

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I totally. And also, you know, I've always, even now, whenever there's something slightly daunting or unnerving or something on the horizon, I'll always retreat into the books of my childhood for a little bit for like comfort. I totally relate to that. But the thing is, this all makes him sound like he's very damaged in some way. But on the surface, you know, as we said, he seems pretty jolly, pretty well adjusted. So he's sent to St Edward's School, it's a new school then. And although he's very shy, he actually gets on really well. He plays for the rugby first 15, he becomes head boy. So Humphrey Carpenter says, the behaviour of Mr Toad rather than Mole. Although Toad, like me, is certainly not head boy material, I would say. And he's not shy.

• 23:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, you'd be a very implausible head boy. I mean, no offence.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  It's 2026, Dominic, catch up. Anyway, he works very hard and he hopes to go to university. But no, his uncle says it's a waste of time and money. And so gets him a job at the Bank of England instead, which I think is so sad in a way. So is this a big disappointment to him? It's hard to know. But I think tellingly, he basically breaks off relations with most of his family from this point. And he's a very self-contained person anyway. And that's another thing that I like about him, to be honest.

• 24:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you're, you're just in the Bank of England. But actually, when he joins the Bank of England.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  It's a good job. It's a good job.

• 24:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's 19 years old, it's 1879, he's a gentleman clerk, they don't do much work. And actually Humphrey Carpenter, in his book on children's literature, he says of the Bank of England, pandemonium often reigns. While business was supposed to be being conducted, the staff ate and drank heavily on the premises, kept pet animals and amused themselves at all hours oblivious of decorum. And this is very like Nicole Alfie, our producers on Utabby.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, yeah, exactly. It's just I'm working on the book.

• 24:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Eating and drinking heavily.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, we never do these recordings sober. It's incredible.

• 24:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So anyway, he rises through the ranks. He's very good at, and he becomes.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Has more animals than anyone else, more japes.

• 25:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. More japes. And he becomes the Secretary of the Bank of England when he's only thirty nine, eighteen ninety eight. Yeah. And actually, he is, I mean, on the surface, he's quite a conventional, he seems a very conventional kind of late Victorian Edwardian, doesn't he?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, he does. And then he joins a territorial regiment and he goes to Cornwall. And there he's, you know, messing around in boats, he's going on walking, walking holidays, he visits Italy, et cetera. He's having a lovely time. Very, um, kind of the riverbank community from Wind in the Willows.

• 25:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally. And actually, one of, and one of his mates.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  And the male camaraderie as well.

• 25:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And one of his mates is a guy called Mr. Fernival, FJ Fernival, who runs a rowing club. So he's often seen as the model for the water rat. And it's this guy Fernival who says to him, you know, you like, you like writing and stuff, don't you? You make up stories. Why don't you send them into the newspapers and magazines? And he does, and they get published. There's a book of essays that he does called The Pagan Papers, which is all sort of, it's very sort of C.S. Lewis, hearty.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Very fashionable at this time.

• 26:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally. It's very, very Edwardian camaraderie. Let's all go for a jolly country walk and then go to a country pub and have a foaming pint of ale and be great chaps together in our tweed coats and stuff.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Think like Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien, Lewis, et cetera. Don't think Extinction Rebellion or Glastonbury. It's the opposite of that kind of.

• 26:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's that kind. It's that, it's the first kind of country pursuit. Not the second, very conservative.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Then he does some short stories which are published. They're, they're basic children's stories. They're the Golden Age and Dream Days. These were about kids being brought up by their aunts and uncles, as of course he was. And they're kind of getting into scrapes and stuff and having fun. And because they're a little bit more anarchic than Victorian children's stories, they strike quite a chord. They are very popular in America. The future president Theodore Roosevelt is a huge fan of them.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  I know.

• 26:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  The bloke who invented the teddy bear.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  I know. See, parallels all round.

• 27:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  But he doesn't, he never sees himself though as a professional writer, or he doesn't at this time see himself as a professional writer though, does he?

• 27:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Because he's very, and he's very shy, like he's just a gentleman amateur and he's very shy of publicity and is keen to guard his privacy.

• 27:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, well, he's keen to guard his privacy from one class of person above all else.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, these are some of the most, these are terrible people. And unfortunately, he meets one of them.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  And falls into this person's clutches. And this person is a woman. So he has basically shunned women completely. And not for any, you know, he's not, there's absolutely never the slightest suggestion that he's gay before, if that occurs to any listeners.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  And it's his childishness as well, isn't it? You know, sex and women don't really fit into this, you know, fantasy world that he, he retreats into.

• 27:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  He really is an eight-year-old boy who just, when people say to him, oh, there are going to be some women, he's like, what? Oh, no. You know, they're so.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Brings out a sweat, stops quaking.

• 28:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And he's made it almost a forty unscathed. And then he falls into the clutches of a literary superfan.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  That's a terrible thing.

• 28:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is a terrible thing. Good Elspeth Thompson. And Elspeth Thompson is from a rich family and she's sort of hung around on the fringes of the London literary set. She's generally, she's a sort of professional superfan. So she cultivated friendships with Tennyson and other writers and things. And everybody who writes about her, all the biographers and critics of Kenneth Graham say, she's terrible. So Humphrey Carpenter calls her a ferociously flirtatious, blue stocking. And actually, you might think, well, this is misogyny, but actually Gillian Avery, in her introduction to the Penguin Classics, calls her an emotional, garrulous, fae woman with literary pretensions, who later developed into a slovenly eccentric. I can see you pointing at yourself there, Tabby.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  It's terrifying.

• 28:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is this all too close to home?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  It's just a window into my life and my future.

• 28:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, she's very, well, don't become a slovenly eccentric, whatever you do.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I don't know though. I don't know. Who knows?

• 29:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  You reckon you're on that slippery slope?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Elspeth is very needy and demanding. And he can't get rid of her. And then the weird thing happens. So Kenneth Graham falls ill. And when he falls ill, he's helpless. She starts inviting herself around to see him and look after him. And then he feels he's trapped and he has to marry her.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I have to say, I'm always utterly bemused when you hear, because you know, you hear of this happening sometimes. He, you know, they just kind of fell into a marriage and before he knew it, he was walking down the aisle. Surely at some point you just say, you know, Elspeth, no.

• 29:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, because he's, he's afraid of emotional attachment. And he's so he's because of that, he's afraid of any form of emotional conversation. He just can't bring himself to have the conversation, I think. And to say, I don't want to marry you. And because she's come to his house or his flat or whatever. When he was ill, he feels compromised. People think of them as a couple.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Oh, I see. Yeah. By the, by the standards of the day, this isn't exactly, yeah.

• 30:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  His sister apparently saw the announcement in the newspaper. And was absolutely stunned and said to him, what is this? Who's this? Are you going to go through with you? Seriously, I'm going to go through with this. And Kenneth Graham replied, quote, and I quote, in a tone of the deepest gloom, I suppose so. I suppose so. As in, I am going to go through with it. So other people's marriages, usually when you read about other people's marriages in books, you sort of get an insight into them. They all sound terrible. But this one, I think, sounds particularly awful because they basically communicate in baby talk letters. So they write purely in baby talk to each other.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  But how do you write baby talk, you know, like, give me an example?

• 30:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  He writes like this. Okay. I eat what I chooses and what I don't want, I don't. And I don't care a damn what they does in Berlin. Thank God I'm British. So he writes in a kind of music hall Cockney way. And it's spelled phonetically and she writes us like a baby girl back line of Lisbon kind of way to him.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  That's worse than the ITV series. That's horrible.

• 30:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Very disturbing.

• 31:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, anyway, they, um, they get married in 1899. And it is an absolute disaster. So basically they don't love each other. Well, she loves, she, she craves affection from him, which he's never ever going to give her. And there is no physical dimension. There's no dimension of, you know, even sentiment really at all.

• 31:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um, they, he just goes off straight away and he goes off boating with his mates and Corn and Cornwall and stuff and he doesn't want anything to do with her, which she finds enraging.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they clearly have, you know, she complains bitterly to her friends and things. There was no physical dimension to their marriage, like she's shocked. They clearly have had one encounter, presumably on their honeymoon, because in nineteen hundred, she gives birth to a son. So once and once only, I think they basically consummated the marriage.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Arguably one time too many.

• 31:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I don't, um, yeah, because this is, well, there will be no wind in the willows without this though.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  There would be no wind in the willows. So she gives birth to a baby boy. He's called Alastair, but they call him Mouse. Um, and his life, I have to say, I was, I was quite harsh about him just now, but it is, it is a tragedy. He's born prematurely, he has eye problems, which means that he's left almost blind in one eye and then has a squint in the other. He's very sickly and difficult, but I think this is often the case with kind of sickly, difficult children and, and mothers kind of possibly who, you know, it was kind of a miracle that they were born at all.

• 32:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  She puts him, Elspeth puts him on a massive pedestal, pedestal and, and is always insisting that he's very talented and amazing. So very, um, Petunia Dursley or Cersei Lannister vibes, I would say.

• 32:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, she spoils him massive, well.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. And she gives him unrealistic kind of, you know, an unrealistic perception of himself, which is always going to make you unhappy in life, I think.

• 32:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they, they do that thing that some parents do, I think, of sort of simultaneously spoiling and neglecting their child. So in other words, they're quite distant parents, but when they are with him, they tell him he's brilliant and he's wonderful and he, and he ends up being an absolute monster of a boy, doesn't he?

• 33:02Speaker 00

  He's like Hubert Lane from Just William, except worse. He's cheeky, he's boastful, he's a terrible show off, he's nasty to other children, he bullies small girls, he doesn't make friends or fit in, and Sam Leith calls him a conceited, spiteful and spoilt little brat. And people may have expected him to be the inspiration for, you know, maybe Mole in The Wind in the Willows, but no, he's actually the model for Toad. And it's insane that, that, um, Kenneth Graham based Toad on his own son.

• 33:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, that's the mad thing, because Toad is the one character.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Like, you know, immortal slur on your child.

• 33:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Brutal.

• 33:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  You, you would absolutely expect that Mole, because Mole seems to speak for the child reader.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he's vulnerable and.

• 33:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, but no. So this is how The Wind in the Willows is born, as basically bedtime stories for this boy Mouse. And we know this from the mad baby talk letters that Kenneth Graham is still writing to his wife. So even though they basically, I don't know, sleep in separate rooms or stuff, they still write to each other in the baby talk.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  All they have left is the baby talk.

• 34:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and this is in 1903, so Mouse is three years old. And Kenneth Graham says to Elspeth, "There was a story in which a mole, a beaver, a badger and a water rat," these are all spelt, by the way, kind of phonetically, because it's the part of the baby talk, "in which a mole, a beaver, a badger and a water rat was characters and I got them terribly mixed up as I went along. But he always straightened them out and remembered which was which. I heard him telling nurse afterwards. And do you know, the mole saved up all his money and went and bought a motor car." So clearly, at this point, the stories are very garbled versions of what becomes The Wind in the Willows, because the mole is buying the car there. By the time Mouse is four, the stories that are, that he's been told are about Mr. Toad and his adventures. The joke here is that Toad is Mouse. Toad

• 34:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  is you. You know, I'm telling you the stories about yourself. And animal stories are very fashionable at this point. So this is Beatrix Potter time. Beatrix Potter published Peter Rabbit in 1902, so two years before this. And in 1903, I think, they launched the first licensed merch in history, which was Peter Rabbit merch.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then in the spring of 1907, Graham and Elspeth, they go away to Cornwall for a break, while Mouse's governess takes him for a separate holiday in Little Hampton, which is strange, in Sussex. And then while they're away, Kenneth Graham is writing Mouse a series of 15 letters. And in those, he continues the adventures of Toad and refers to him as a low, bad animal, harsh. And in these, you know, Toad is faked to have been kidnapped by brigands and, and writes a ransom demand, but then really runs away and he steals a car. And he basically has all the adventures that are familiar from the second half of The Wind in the Willows, you know, the police, the court, the jailer's daughter. And so they appear in the book almost unchanged, the tone being a picaresque 18th century

• 35:53Speaker 00

  romp. And then Mouse's governess keeps these letters and they're reprinted at the end of the Penguin Classics edition.

• 36:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  There indeed.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  But they are, at this point, just fun. He never imagines anyone else will ever see them. And then at the end of August 1907, he's visited at home by an American journalist, and she's called Constance Smedley. And she lives nearby and her editor at Everybody's Magazine in Philadelphia has told her to kind of form a relationship with Graham to worm her way in and get him to write something for the American market because his Gildon Age kids' stories were so popular. And somehow she manages to wrangle an invitation to the house. And it turns out that Elspeth, you know, she's very, you know, has aspirations of being very literary minded, has read her novel, An April Princess, so they kind of chat about that.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  And secretly, Constance is a feminist, but she has to keep that quiet because this is not a household in which.

• 36:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're a conservative household, yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Exactly. So she's invited back and on a later visit, she overhears Kenneth Graham telling bedtime a bedtime story to Mouse. And it's the one about the riverbank animals. And she says, well, why don't you turn these bedtime stories into a book? And he says, no. So he hated writing. It was physical torture. Why should he undergo it? But then she finds out perhaps from Mouse about the toad letters. And she says, well, come on, you've, you've already written it. So she works on Mouse, which is slightly odd.

• 37:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Works, though.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  It does work and tells him to turn the letters into a book. And he loves the idea. I mean, obviously not minding at all that it's kind of all about the worst side of his nature. Yeah. And he persuades Kenneth Graham to change his mind. And so finally he says, yeah, fine, I'll do it.

• 37:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you can see why that would work, right? Because she's basically saying to the little boy, oh, don't you think your daddy should turn these letters into a book? Wouldn't it be wonderful to see it published? What child is ever going to say no to that? Of course, they're going to love the idea. And so Kenneth Graham says, fine, I'll do it. And in autumn 1907, he starts to turn the letters to Mouse and the bedtime stories into a book. And so the genius of The Winds and the Willows really is this blend of different ingredients. So you've got, first of all, the stories of mole and rat messing around in boats on the riverbank. And it's male friendship in this kind of idealized rural England, in this kind of country idyll, all of this, like the stuff that we were talking about, country walks and kind of picnics and great japes and all of that.

• 38:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um. So, you know, it's a bit, uh, it's very much the what you've mentioned Tolkien, it's very much the world of the hobbits, isn't it?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, or tea with mustard tummness in um The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

• 38:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it is. It's that cosy. Well, C S Lewis and J R Tolkien would both undoubtedly have read The Window in the Willows.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, so they would have sort of, even if they're not necessarily modelling what they write on it, they would be, they would have drunk of the same waters, I guess.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then you have second ingredient Toad, his brush with the law, his escape, his uh return to claim his house, the odyssey elements of the book. And then the the stuff that then Kenneth Graham puts in after that, which is the, we already mentioned, these strange melancholy, almost mystical kind of chapters. So mole pining for his home, rat pining for the sea, the two animals meeting the god Pan, all of this. So he's combined all these different elements. He gives it to, you know, his agent and Constance Smedley. And absolutely nobody wants to publish this at all. They're like, this is bonkers. What is this?

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So basically publishers say.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Animals up in human clothing.

• 39:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Publishers say, what the hell? What's all this with the animals? Like, why, why have you not written stories about kids? So even though the the Beatrix Potter craze is going, people, I mean, the Beatrix Potter stories are very different. They're aimed at obviously a much smaller reader.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  And also the illustrations lead the way. So if you have that as kind of a visual guider, it's a bit different.

• 39:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And also they're very obviously whimsical and they're slight and they're, you know, there's no, no, no, no vague realism in Beatrix Potter.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  No pagan gods.

• 40:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  No pagan gods. So everybody's magazine, when Constance Smedley says, well, this is the result of my labours, they're like, what? We don't want this. Kenneth Graham's agent tries various magazines, they all say no. Lots of publishers say no, eventually Matthew and say, fine, but this is so mad. We won't give you an advance. They give him a deal, which basically has a sliding scale of royalties, a very sharply sliding scale of royalties. And instead of an advance, that works out brilliantly for him because he and his, in the Bodleian Library, which is his heir ultimately, they end up making tonnes of money from this, from this deal. Anyway, no one can see that coming at the time. Then there's the issue, isn't there, with the title. So the title was so often with so many of the books we've done in this podcast,

• 40:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  the original title was mad, chosen by the author.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  The lapping of the stream. I mean, so dreary. What else would it? The alternative, the other alternative, which was the children of Pan. I quite like that.

• 40:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  The children of Pan, though, but it's not what the book is. Well, I mean, nor is The Wind in the Willows, I suppose.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  That's one tiny part of it. And then the other title that they kick around is Riverfolk.

• 41:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, which I guess.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  I don't love that.

• 41:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but bland.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Finally, though, they they settle on The Wind in the Reeds, which is a reference to the Pan chapter. You can see there how the Pan thing is such a big part of this for Graham.

• 41:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  And then this is what's used in adverts and stuff like that. But then Matthew and decide it's too similar to the WB Yates poem, The Wind Among the Reeds. So they amend to the alliterative, The Wind in the Willows, which does sound good.

• 41:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we're used to it though now, aren't we?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose. I suppose.

• 41:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think we're just so used to it being called The Wind in the Willows that it never occurs to us to question.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Very silvery, though. I like it.

• 41:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think the alliterative side of it is really important. It just trips, it does trip off the tongue. Anyway, so it comes out 1908. And guess what? It's a damp squib. Like, people are just completely baffled by it. And sometimes whenever you go online, you see, you know, when people do like the top 10 worst reviews, most misguided reviews in literary history, The Wind in the Willows is often one of them because there was this hilarious review in the Times Literary Supplement, which said, as a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible. I mean, how you could read this thinking it was meant to be a natural history book.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  This is insane, yeah.

• 42:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the guy who wrote the review said, this book is mad. A water, a water rat doesn't use a boat to cross a stream? Why would a water rat need a boat? Makes no sense. Quote, no doubt moles like their abodes to be clean, but whitewashing? Are we very stupid or is this joke really inferior? So this is the most literal minded review in the world.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  I was gonna say.

• 42:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  His complaint is, moles don't paint their burrows. This is.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  The imagination of a milk jug and the wit of a.

• 42:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  A drive.

• 42:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  A toad driving a car. That's not possible.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  I know.

• 42:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, the review goes on to say, it's a book with hardly a smile in it.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Ironically.

• 42:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, to which we wander in a haze of perplexity, uninterested by the story itself and at a loss to understand this deeper purpose. And then the writer does say something which I think is not unreasonable. The puzzle is, for whom is the book intended? Grown up readers will find it monotonous and elusive. Children will hope in vain for more fun. Now, maybe we can talk about this a tiny bit more after the break, but the reviewer is not wrong there. This is a very strange book because it is way above most children's reading level.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  But obviously, it's a story about animals dressing up in human clothes.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so not a book for adults, as in if you're 30, you're not going to read this book.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  I don't know, I enjoyed it, but yeah.

• 43:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, but we're reading it in the knowledge that it's a classic. The first readers would be like, who is this for? I'm completely baffled by this.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  But anyway, the mad thing is, it starts to become a success through word of mouth, doesn't it? So people clearly like it. It does speak to somebody.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Publisher's dream.

• 43:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  It's just a success in America because our old friend, President Theodore Roosevelt massively champions it. He tells Kenneth Graham, I have read it and reread it and have come to accept the characters as old friends. And I'm almost more fond of it than your previous books. And I get what he means there. I like what he says about them being old friends because that's how it does come to feel. And it's reprinted every year for the next two decades, sometimes twice a year. And then in 1929, there's a real turning point because it's adapted for the stage by A. A. Milne in Toad of Toad Hall. And this is the guy that wrote Winnie the Pooh. So it must have been an inspiration slightly on the Winnie the Pooh stories, which obviously the similar thing, slightly anthropomorphized animals and.

• 44:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and what they do in Toad of Toad Hall is they take out all the stuff.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  The ethereal stuff. Yeah.

• 44:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  They really slim it down. So it focuses on the adventure story, as it were, and on the the banter and the japes and all of that kind of thing. And they take the more mystical stuff and they just ditch that completely.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  So it's more accessible and then it becomes a Christmas pantomime standard. And then there's a Disney version in 1949. That is the backstory for the book, but we haven't actually delved into the. Book itself, which we will do after the break. And we'll also be digging into how the story reflects Kenneth Graham's childhood unhappiness, his miserable marriage. And the, you know, is it, we'll be exploring, is it an allegory for Edwardian class politics or something darker? And then the ultimate question at the heart of this episode. Are you Dominic?

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Mole, rat, badger or toad? And what am I? And actually, the other big question, why does toad have hair? That's what really perplexes me. Anyway, all this after the break.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated?

• 45:57Speaker 04

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• 47:16Speaker 06

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• 47:53Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the book club. And before the break, we promised that we'd be delving into The Wind in the Willows itself. So Kenneth Graham, writing to thank President Theodore Roosevelt for his kind words about The Wind in the Willows in 1909, said, "It was a book with no problems, no sex, no second meaning. It is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life." And they are, I think, very kind of English joys. There's a great deal of sardine action, but it's all very simple, basically, is what he's saying. There's no deeper meaning. And he is definitely right about the lack of sex in it and the absence of women or complications or anything like that. But the question is, is he right? Is he being honest? Is there really nothing going on beneath the surface?

• 48:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't think he is right, Tabby. Otherwise, it would be a very short podcast, or at least short by our standards.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  That would be great, to be honest. That's just right here.

• 48:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. Come on. So, first of all, the world of the book. So the world of the book is a very Edwardian, escapist fantasy. So this is an age, you know, they think the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, it's an age when writers and artists are in constant revolt against what they see as kind of industrial urban modernity. So for more than a generation, going back to the pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin and stuff, people have idealized the pastoral English landscape, the natural world, all of this. It's an escape from the horrors of the city and from factories. And there's been a huge cult in England of nature writing. And this is a perfect example of that, I would say. So the first chapter, you know,

• 49:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  when a mole comes out of his hole, I was really struck when I was reading it to Arthur, to my son, years ago. It's beautiful writing, actually. You know, he comes out and he says, it all seemed to be too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows, he rambled busily along the hedgerows, across the copsees, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting, everything happy, progressive and occupied. And there's this sort of sense that this is, the riverbank is paradise, it's untouched by the Industrial Revolution or any of these kinds of things. It's just this kind of Arcadia that people have been dreaming of for the last few decades in England. And that those first readers in 1908, they would have recognised

• 50:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  this and they would have said, gosh, this is, you know, it's a bit like, even as late as, you know, when we did 1984 and we did the thing about Winston Smith and Julia escaping to the countryside and this kind of dapple glades and all of that kind of thing. I mean, that's a sort of late example of that. I think this, this same tendency to basically have a really romantic fantasy of this sort of early 20th century countryside. It's, it's often produced by people like Kenneth Graham, who live in the suburbs or live in the city. They see the countryside as a place to escape to, a sort of refuge from the working world, I suppose.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 50:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you've got that. And then you have the talking animals as characters.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  That's probably, you know, for the, for the late Victorian Edwardian audiences reading this book, that's probably slightly less standard, even if we're used to it now, would you say?

• 51:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is less standard. I know you don't like it. You don't like talking animals, do you? Which I find mad.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  I can see the coziness of it. I just can't get invested, although this time I did. Anyway.

• 51:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, we mentioned Beatrix Potter. So people have started to get used to it with Beatrix Potter from 1902. We know that Kenneth Graham read Beatrix Potter's stories to Mouse. But the appeal of the animals, I think, to him is that he can, I mean, he's very blunt about it with, when he's writing about this book. He says, I used the animals because I wanted the book to, well, first of all, there are no parents, there's no mother figure, there is no teacher, there is no authority figure, there's nothing about school or about work or anything like that, you can completely get away from that and it can be a childlike fantasy. But Kenneth Graham explicitly said, by simply using the animal, I wanted to get away at once from weary sex problems and

• 51:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  other problems and just, and just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching. Now, this is twice now that he has mentioned about the sex, getting away from sex. You can see that he has no shame about saying to people, I think sex is a terrible thing and we should avoid it at all costs.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  And also, this is a man who was just desperate to kind of spend his time, you know, at the pub with the lads, I don't know, these days, watching the football or whatever it may be. He wants to be in that kind of carefree ecosystem. He doesn't want the pressures of, you know, family, woman, marriage, all those things. It's that childlike thing again, I think.

• 52:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is completely the person in your kind of friendship group, who when everybody starts coupling up with, they start, when girls are introduced, or women, and he's really depressed because he thinks, gosh, the band has been broken up, these terrible people, these women have invaded it and messed it up for everybody.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  There's no one to fight a Budapest with anymore.

• 52:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly, exactly. That's very much his thing. Basically, he wants to be on the, on the river, rowing with his mates.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  I mean, obviously, the first reviewers found all this very weird, and I think that's something we kind of now overlook, because the, the world building, how mad and kind of inconsistent it is, and, and they pulled this out, and now obviously, The Wind in the Willows is such a accepted part of kind of literary culture, that no one thinks of it. But, so, the animals are at once, animals and people, they change size accordingly. So when Toad drives, he has no trouble kind of reaching the pedals or anything.

• 53:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's human size, clearly.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. When he impersonates a washerwoman, no one looks at him and says, you're green and you're a toad. They take it totally for granted.

• 53:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  He's basically a human being, and I think he's actually the most human of all the animals. In many ways, because he lives in a massive hall above the ground, whereas at least mole and rat tea or whatever live in holes.

• 53:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Or Badger lives in the burrow. Whereas he lives in kind of a towered mansion that, you know, what's the relationship here between the humans and the animals, you know? When they bring up Toad in court, are they like, this is an animal? Or are they like, he's a citizen like any of the, any, any other?

• 54:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because Badger says at one point, you'll give me this a very bad name among the humans.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the, and we want to kind of stay out of the way of the humans. We keep ourselves to ourselves, but they're kind of living alongside the humans. And what's also really weird is there are some animals who are very clearly animals.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  So. Yes.

• 54:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like this horse who pulls the caravan.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is a horse, is a.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  What's the social hierarchy there, you know?

• 54:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Is he a serf? Is he an equal? Stuff like this. The other thing is we find hedgehogs having porridge and fried ham for breakfast. Hedgehogs eating pigs.

• 54:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, hedgehogs eating pigs.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  And we're dealing with cannibals here. Has all morality totally, you know, been thrown out the window?

• 54:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  In his, uh, burrow, Badger has eggs. He has hams.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Hams again. Badger living underground, eating pig. So sinister.

• 54:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rat in his picnic.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He has, you know, when he does the huge list of everything he has, that includes cold chicken, cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef. So the rat is eating beef?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Are they eating their friends? You know, what's going on here? It's disturbing.

• 55:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is disturbing.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Also, some of them, some of them wear clothes and some don't. So is this like a particularly open minded society? Do they embrace nudity? Yeah, Toad wears his tweed.

• 55:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the horse doesn't like wearing clothes.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the horse has tack. So what's up with that? Is that like, you know? Is he, is he a repressed creature? The otter is always naked. Bit odd. Some of them hibernate as well.

• 55:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  So that's an animalistic feature that's come through. Very confusing, but most chillingly of all, towards the end of the book.

• 55:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Toad is described as combing his hair.

• 55:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is, he parts his hair, doesn't he? So Toad, there are a couple of mentions in the book of Toad's hair.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Like, is it a toupee? Is it a wig?

• 55:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  The illustrator doesn't lean into that, I think wisely.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  No, no, that's actually so true.

• 55:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  And even the ITV series, what you mock as the fluffy puppet series, they don't have, they don't

• 56:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  The thing is, you see, a child, when they read that, they just take it all for granted. They don't, it doesn't occur to them for a minute, this wouldn't work, or it wouldn't. It's a bit like, you know, Bilba Baggins has coffee. Where's the coffee from?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  In the hobbit. No one says, come on. I mean, maybe an adult does in a very pathetic way, but nobody, I don't think people, this is why the wrong people were reviewing The Wind of the Willows, because they were taking it, yeah, they thought it was a work of natural history.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  It obviously isn't. Now, the other things that are a bit inconsistent, and that a modern publisher would surely hate, Kenneth Graham can't make up his mind who the hero is. So when the book starts, you know, we see it through Mole's eyes. Mole is us, really. Mole is the child, particularly, you know, he's vulnerable and he's nervous and all of that. We'll come on to the characters a little bit later. But halfway through the book, it's as though Kenneth Graham has lost interest and he's decided that Toad is actually the hero.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  I know.

• 56:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because we follow Toad completely. And Rat, I know you like Rat, but Rat is offstage for huge chunks of the, of the book.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  He is actually, I guess. Yeah. But they're all offstage for, for sections of the book, I would say.

• 57:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sections, except in the second half where Toad really dominates.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then the other thing is that Kenneth Graham clearly hasn't really worked out who the book is for, because he wrote a blurb for the publisher and he said, it is perhaps chiefly for youth. And that's so vague and evasive, like, perhaps chiefly? Come on, make your mind up.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Because I guess when you're telling these stories to a child, you know, when he was reading them to Mouse, the, the kind of sophistication of the language wouldn't necessarily be there. So it just would straightforwardly be for a children, for a child. But then you write it down and it's, he adds those two slightly strange, ethereal chapters and the writing is so sophisticated.

• 57:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  So far.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  He loses track, I guess.

• 57:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, yeah, I mean, this is the second paragraph. I looked at the first page. This is the second paragraph of the whole book. "The sunshine struck hot on his fur. Soft breezes caressed his heated brow. And after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long, the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing, almost like a shout. Jumping off his four legs all at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side." I mean, It is lovely writing.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  It's lovely writing.

• 58:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's really nice writing. It's it's obviously mad to think that a six or seven year old or eight year old, which are the ages where you would read a book with talking animals, that they would be capable of reading that.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, compare this to the writing in um The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance.

• 58:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or Harry Potter.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Which is so padded back. Well, we actually compared this to Harry Potter, didn't we?

• 58:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. It's it's it's way.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  How more complex the writing is.

• 58:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's so much more sophisticated.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose the counter argument would be, I did read this when I was a small child. And what I must have done, even though I don't really remember doing it, is what all children do, which is just to skip the bits that you don't, the words that you don't get. Or do your eyes just slightly glaze over those bits and you move on quite quickly. I think children, children read in ways that we don't, that we lose touch with when we're adults. They're actually, so much of what they read is new to them. You know, they, there are so many words they don't know. They don't find it weird that the word caress or cellar ridge or seclusion are there in a book about talking animals because they're like, yeah, of course, there's going to be words we don't know.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  You take it for granted, don't you? And I suppose you just take the imagery away with you, the animals. Because I think that's the thing, the lasting appeal of this book. It's clearly down not just to the escapist world, but I think specifically the characters. So as we've said, Toad is a jokey portrayal of Alistair. And most critics agree that the other three, so mole, rat and badger, are all different aspects of Kenneth Graham's own self-image, their versions of himself, the versions that he'd like to be. But they're also the different sides of English society and national character. And I think also human nature, because isn't this a, this is a famous thing, isn't it? That, well, traditionally it was every Englishman is one of those characters.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  I E, you know, that's telling because he's, you know, whatever class he's from, whatever way he leans. But I think it's true of anyone. I think, I think everyone is made up of all these characters.

• 1:00:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can go through your own friends and people you know, you could go through the goal hanger office and say, are you a mole, a rat, a toad?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  It's full of wild wooders, just endless.

• 1:00:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, there's a lot of toads, let's be honest.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um, so if we start with mole, so mole is the character we begin with. I think he's a brilliant way to introduce children to this world because we're emerging from darkness into daylight. He's kind of blinking and trying to make sense of the world. He's shy, he's anxious as children are. He's modest, he's nervous. In his, in sort of class terms, Mole is very middle class.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  He has all the anxieties of the kind of respectable, you know, he wants to be respectable. He wants to do the right thing. There's a sort of suburban side to him. So later on, when we go back to his borough, it's described as having these, um, these decorations, a plaster statuary. He's got a statue of Garibaldi. He's got a statue of some biblical characters. He's got a statue of it's heroes of Italian unification bizarrely.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  I know, so strange.

• 1:01:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of Queen Victoria. And I think the joke here is that these are the kind of things you would have got in kind of mass produced chain stores in the 1900s. So they were perhaps a little bit suburban, a little bit gauche.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  Studying math.

• 1:01:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, a bit naff. So this is a joke, I think, for the parents rather than from the children. And, and Mole, you know, the heart of Mole's character is the tension between wanting to go up and explore the world. So adventure, all of that. And then wanting to go back, you know, his love of home. And there's a chapter called Dulce Domum, Sweet Home.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  My favourite chapter.

• 1:01:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is it?

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  So.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  I was very touched by it.

• 1:01:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's gone on this walk, hasn't he, or something with Rat? And he smells his, his house and he starts crying and he wants to go back to it. And he sort of sobs and sobs. And he says to Rat, I know it's a shabby dingy little place. It's not like your cosy quarters or Toad's beautiful hall or all this, but it was my own little home and I was fond of it and I went away and I forgot all about it. But then I smelt it suddenly on the road and he called out to Rat and Rat didn't hear him and then he just sat down and cried.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Because that's, you know, when you're a child, I remember this feeling really, really homesick, like my first ever sleepover or something and I'm calling out for my mum and they're just not there. And no one hears you and you just want to be elsewhere. So I think it's really moving.

• 1:02:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is moving. And then at the end. You know, he sort of, he reaches a kind of state of equilibrium. He says he doesn't want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and all of this. But it was good to think that he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which was so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome. I think that's really, I agree with you. I think it's really sweet and it's really, and it does express, you know, in this sort of childlike way, the tension within all of us between wanting to go out and have fun and to see the world and have adventures and then wanting to come home and curl up in front of the fire.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  I think also in a way, Mole is the most believable character because he's very fearful and vulnerable, but also he forces himself to kind of go beyond the boundaries of what he considers to be safe and comfortable. So in a way, he's actually the bravest because he confronts his fears every time and he does this thing where at the end, when they, they have to face these enemies that have taken over one of their houses, he dresses up as a woman, more drag, dresses up as a woman and infiltrates this, this house of enemies and, and tricks them into being frightened and gets, plays mind games with them. So hurrah for Mole.

• 1:03:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's great. Now, what about Rat?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  So then there's Rat, yeah. He's the one, I think, I do like Rat. He's the one I think everyone really wants to be.

• 1:03:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  So he's a socially a cut above Mole. He has much more social ease, he, he's sociable, he has more friends and he's already pals with the local landowner, so this is Mr. Toad, and Mole is very differential to him. So for instance, in the chapter that we just discussed, and he's more upper, more of an upper middle-class gentleman of leisure. So he's messing around in boats, he has no financial or domestic cares or ties, he has a massive stockpile of weaponry.

• 1:04:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does, and sandwiches.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Bloody good shop. He has, you know, he has a vast picnic, lots of different meat and sandwiches, so eating more of his friends, ginger beer, soda water, he's very well off. He's also a more complicated character because he's shrewd and he's practical. I actually think he's a bit of a fuss pot endearingly, and he is a dreamer and an idealist. So his buried wanderlust surfaces in this chapter called In Wayfarers All, and we'll get on to more of this later, but. In that you kind of see that he's torn between the two sides of his life, as they all are torn.

• 1:05:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  And he likes writing bad poetry and he's the first one to hear the music of the god Pan.

• 1:05:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he is.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  And his relationship.

• 1:05:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Spiritual side to him.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Definitely. And his relationship with Mole is one of the classic early 20th century fictional friendships. So it's very Holmes and Watson again, I guess. One is always taking the lead, one is slightly secondary following in his wake. And Humphrey Carpenter sees this mole Rat friendship as a celebration of a cheerful bachelor-like existence. And, and this is, you know, that's shared by Kenneth Graham and his friends where they're always messing around in boats and

• 1:05:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  going on jaunts to foy and stuff like that.

• 1:05:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. And that's sort of the world of picnics and the world of all this.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's a sort of understated, well, it's very Holmes and Watson. So the moment when Rat first says to Mole, look here, I think you'd better come and stop with me for a little time. And I'll say, teach you to row and all of this. And Mole is so touched, he can't answer and he has to, we're told he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  It's the ultimate bromance.

• 1:06:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's, well, that's very like when, um, Dr. Watson realises that Sherlock Holmes actually does like him and cares about him. And he can't, he can barely speak. He's kind of choked up with emotion. I think it's a very kind of similar thing. So you've got these two mates and then the, against them is set the jeopardy, the threat. And this is made explicit to Mole. Mole says to Rat, what's over there? And Rat says, it's the wild wood. You know, we don't go there very much. We're river bankers. And the wild wood is inhabited by the weasels and the stoats and the ferrets. And lots of the critics who've written about the wind of the willows think that the wild wood basically represents the proletariat, the working classes, social disorder. You know, that when Mole does go there and he does go for a walk and gets lost, it feels a bit like a sort of,

• 1:06:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  you know, a man from the home counties, a well-heeled man from the home counties going into the east end.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Wandering into archway.

• 1:06:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, yeah. Well, I've been more thinking the kind of in the nineteen hundreds. If they went into the East End and they saw the sort of faces glaring at them from the rookeries and the slums or whatever, you know, that's the sort of Victorian, late Victorian Edwardian nightmare. You know, that you'll be lost in this underworld. So the wild wood could be that, it could be social. Humphrey Carpenter suggests the wild wood might be the subconscious. Might be, I mean, that's the thing that Kenneth Graham fears most of all, this kind of sexuality, you know, maturity, sensuality, all of this kind of thing.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  His wife's domain.

• 1:07:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, his wife's domain, something like that. But I think that scene, that that moment when Mul gets lost in the wild wood and then he, he, he finds his way to Badger's house. As a child, I loved that because there's something about being lost and then found that really speaks to you as a child. And that sort of scent that the, the, the coming into the kind of the warm hearth and having the tea. When you've been freezing outside and terrified and sobbing in the snow. That's a, I mean, when you're six or something, that happens to you all the time. Basically, your parents have dragged you on a walk or something.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then finally you get home and you're rewarded with a hot chocolate or whatever.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  I'd always run away and hope to be found. So I can relate. Yeah. And then, and also when you, when you do make it home, whatever, there's always that, you know, safe parental guardian figure to make you feel like you're, you're in the realm of safety again. And in this, that is Badger, who's the other major character of this story. And Carpenter calls him the still centre around which the book's various storms may rage and he's scarcely touched by them. And he's clearly a cut above them both socially. He's a kind of elderly aristocratic gentleman from an old family. And he knew Toad's father and all the other animals defer to him and he's venerable and wise and well respected. But he's also gruff, shy, serious. He's a font of wisdom and common sense.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  And he has, I mean, massive natural authority. I mean, the opening reading that we did, that was him confronting Toad for his bad behaviour. And he lives in this huge rambling ancient house or warren and it's the great country house and it's a state dominating the villagers. With literally ancient foundations.

• 1:09:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, we don't need to massively go into this, but even his kitchen is described explicitly as like an Anglo Saxon hall.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory or weary harvesters could line up before the, along the table, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a sense that Badger represents kind of English history and a kind of, I mean, he's, he's, he's living among, amid ruins, right?

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  He's old England.

• 1:09:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is old England. He completely is. And, and he interestingly is not in the more weird chapters because he wouldn't fit. He's too commonsensical, he's too gruff, he's too grounded, too sensible. So these two chapters are ones that as a child I always used to skip because I just thought they're so weird. Yeah, because I always wanted to do the Adventures of Toad.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  I liked them.

• 1:09:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and actually they are cut from the theatrical adaptations. They are typically cut from the T, from the TV thing that you don't like madly.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're not in that. So the first one is the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is, um, Mole and Rat go looking for this lost otter, uh, baby called Portly.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, very sweet.

• 1:10:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's beautiful kind of nature writing again.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Such beautiful writing. It really is.

• 1:10:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  The moon, uh, uh, last over the rim of the waiting earth, the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off free of moorings and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, they see the, the landscape lit up in the moonlight. Then they hear this strange melody. Rat is described as rapt, transported, trembling. He's literally entranced by this melody. Um, he's like, oh, mole, the beauty of it. Row on mole, row, the music on the call must be for us. They keep rowing. Mole hears the music too. And then at the break of dawn, they see this god Pan, you know, the sort of, um, the Greek or Roman god, and he's cradling the lost otter. And Pan is described in a very.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Quite homoerotic, isn't he?

• 1:11:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's very kitsch, I think. So, I mean, literally he's got this kind of rippling muscles, shaggy limbs and they kneel and they worship him. And I think this is the one bit of the book that's massively dated because the Edwardians, the Edwardians love the figure of Pan. They are fascinated by kind of paganism and by nature gods and things. And yeah, piece of Pan, obviously named after Pan. Um. And they were really into this sort of pagan mysticism as a rejection of the modern. Whereas to us, this just looks a bit bizarre. And I think most critics now, I mean, one calls it a ghastly error in taste. Another calls it an error of judgment on a grand scale. So.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  I don't know. I I actually quite liked it. I always like a little bit of an ethereal element and.

• 1:11:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  It reminds me, do you know what it really reminds me of? Tom Bombadil.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  Yes, that's a great comparison, actually. Yeah. And I don't really like Tom Bombadil.

• 1:11:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like a mad chapter. You can't understand what it's doing there. And at the centre is this sort of nature spirit who doesn't seem to belong in the rest of the world.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  I quite like it. I like that, you know, I think it's quite profound, the spell they come under and this sense of kind of an existential force governing their lives or whatever. I actually do. And I think the writing is so beautiful. But then there's a second odd chapter that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the book. This is the one we mentioned earlier, Wayfarer's All, and it dramatizes the theme of escape and homecoming that has undoubtedly obsessed Kenneth Graham all his life. So in this, the rat is restless. He sees that the birds are migrating, that everyone's getting ready for the change of season. He tries to persuade the swallows not to go, and he feels a newborn need for travel and adventure and going beyond the downs. And it's a massive change of kind of pace for

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  a character that's otherwise very content in himself and his life. And he meets this sea rat and is thrilled by these stories that sea rat tells him about his journeys around the Mediterranean and his voyages and his, you know, glittering adventures. And he goes into this kind of trance and his eyes get glazed and set. And, you know, he's like one of Odysseus' mariners, seduced by the siren's song. And he's going home to pack up his bags and jump on the next boat out. Then he bumps into Mole, and Mole basically talks him down. Mole convinces him to stay at home and stay content about where he is, even though he says, you know, the shores, they're calling me. So Mole restrains him. And then and then Rat, you know, this, you know, socially competent Englishman essentially,

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  breaks down in tears and he comforts himself by writing poetry and has to console himself with the pleasures of home. So it's the usual tension, I guess.

• 1:13:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. But on the other hand, I think there's also an element, to me, reading this, especially once I was aware of like Kenneth Graham's backstory. It's as though Rat is being tempted by growing up. You know, C S D also hated growing up as well in The Chronicles of Narnia. So, so maybe the travel isn't just like travel around the ports of the Mediterranean. Maybe the travel represents, you know, Rat is being tempted by leaving behind their childhood world.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  And going to the big, the big world out there with its women and its relationships. And all of this. And basically Mole says, don't go, Rat. You know, stay here with me and our friends. And, and actually what Rat literally does is he returns to the world of the imagination. Cause he's, as you said, he writes poetry and he returns to Mole. And it's a sort of, I think this is yet another reminder of just how much Kenneth Graham really hated his wife.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  It's all about that dreadful wife.

• 1:14:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's basic, it's basically what Kenneth Graham wishes he had done. I wish I hadn't been persuaded by this awful woman to marry her and to, you know, go to bed with her and whatever. That was the worst decision I ever made. I should have stayed with my friends messing around in boats.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  Cause this is an idealized version of life, isn't it really that he's writing in The Wind of the Willows?

• 1:14:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And with, and tellingly with no women in it at all. So we already said there are no female animals. So the otter cub who gets lost, it's his father who's looking for him, not his mother. Mother never mentioned at all. So even among the humans, the only women you see are the, there's a jailer's daughter and there's a comic barge woman. And they're just mad caricatures.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Cartoon really, aren't they?

• 1:15:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  No hint that you could ever meet a woman animal in this book.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  No, no way. Unless it's a man animal dressed up as a woman. That's the closest you're gonna come.

• 1:15:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which brings us very neatly.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  To most people's favourite character, doesn't it?

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  So.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Definitely the best known. So this is Mr. Toad. And he's tremendous fun. I think the book absolutely comes alive whenever he's, he's in it, whenever he enters the narrative. And even for those who have never read The Wind of the Willows or even barely aware of it, he's definitely familiar. His, his kind, the kind of character he is and his personality is definitely familiar. He's boastful, untrustworthy, greedy, self-promoting, but also jolly.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Enthusiastic, brave and ultimately good hearted. He's he's such fun. So a few Toad kind of points. He has a very ambiguous class position because he's the lord of the manor and we know that his father was mates with Badger, who's kind of classic old money, respectable old money, you know, an aristocrat and that Toad Hall has been in their family for at least one generation before. But then he constantly acts in a very nouveau riche manner. So he wears loud suits. He is boastful and showy. He's always talking about how much money he has. He's obsessed with bling and the latest fads and gadgets, particularly cars. Um, so I know the question is, is he perhaps the son of a rich self-made businessman or something like that?

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  You know, the not so early a generation of money that he is literally nouveau, but he's still not old money.

• 1:16:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I agree. I agree completely. I think Toad, it's there's a sense that he doesn't quite know how to behave and that he's behaving badly.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Like that boy that's the clown of the class because he's a bit insecure.

• 1:17:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. Oh, completely. That's what Toad is. Is Toad insecure? I don't know. I mean, he wants to sing songs and stuff about how brilliant he is.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  Yes, always.

• 1:17:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which suggests a kind of insecurity and yet he doesn't seem troubled by excessive self doubt, does he?

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  He really doesn't, no.

• 1:17:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I think he's a very, very familiar literary type, actually. I think he is Falstaff.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  From from the Henry the Fourth, part one and two. So as like Falstaff, Toad is a liar, he's a cheat, he's a braggart, he's a thief. But we forgive him because he's ultimately generous and kind. And he's funny. He's really funny and he's great. He's irrepressible. And there's a sort of good natured naughtiness to him. There's another character, I mean, a character that you know that I love, which is Billy Bunter, who was often called the schoolboy Falstaff, who was in boarding school stories at the time, Edwardian, again, you know, a thief, a liar, greedy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he's the hero and people like him.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  It's like Horrid Henry at the end of the book.

• 1:18:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  At the end of those stories, he always has a moment of kind of redemption and atonement, but he does terrible things along the way.

• 1:18:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So Toad is also, I mean, he's also obviously an addict, isn't he?

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's that hilarious bit when his friends, um, it's like from the opening bit when when they. They sort of have a come to God moment with him and they lock him in his room and he pulls all the chairs together to make a sort of car and he's going like this. So it's like an addict, like reaching for the bottle or something. He starts shaking and quivering. He has the different stages of addiction.

• 1:18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's, and I think if you were being very sort of deep about it, he is pure id. He's pure desire and impulse and self indulgence. So Otter says of him that when he goes boating, he has no stability and, and he has no stability generally. He's addicted to whatever the latest fad is, whatever his latest enthusiasm is. So he was addicted to caravanning, then to cars and whatnot. He has no discipline. And I think each of, I mean, we will get on to talk about which characters we most resemble, but there is definitely a bit of, I mean, surely all human beings have a Mr. Toad.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. When we get towards the end of our, of our evenings, when we have scheduling meetings or whatever, like with Nicole or everyone, I am pure Toad.

• 1:19:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. What do you think you are at the beginning, Tabby? I mean, come on, you're deluding yourself.

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  I'm the venerable Mr. Badger.

• 1:19:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So yeah, the other thing about Toad, he is, I know you like this bit, he is Odysseus.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Honestly, cunning, quicksilver Odysseus and then Mr. Toad. I just, it doesn't sit well with me. I do get it. Of course I get it. I get it in terms of, you know, the story of the second half is clearly modeled on the Odyssey. Without, you know, Penelope and Telemachus, the family element, the sex, so to speak. But, you know, the, the different episodes of his journey home. So his escape from prison, overcoming a series of trials and then returning home to find his house occupied by weasels, which is obviously the suitors from the Odyssey.

• 1:20:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So, and the other thing about this, so on the one hand, it's the Odyssey, but on the other hand, there is a kind of political dimension to it. Because I think when you think about the occupation of Toad Hall, you don't think initially about Penelope's house occupied by the suitors from the Odyssey.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:20:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  What what it's like, what it's obviously modelled on is something like the French Revolution, where all the people have broken into the house, the song culotte have broken in and they're helping themselves to the aristocrats wine cellar and all that, which is precisely what the weasels and they're having a banquet, aren't they?

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  It's that invasion fantasy, isn't it?

• 1:20:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, it's exactly, it's the it's the sort of, it's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you if you've got money. You know, that basically the lower orders will break in and they'll steal your stuff and all of that. I mean, this is the fantasy, the nightmare that haunted the Edwardian imagination in an age of like trade unions and the birth of the Labour Party and anarchism and socialism and all of this. Yeah, for a lot of the people who probably bought The Wind in the Willows, this was their nightmare. That one day the working classes would kind of break in and steal all their stuff. And I think readers in, you know, nineteen oh eight would have it sort of spoken to them, maybe in a way it doesn't speak to us.

• 1:21:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Badger says to Toad, this is all your fault because Badger said to Toad.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  You were letting the side down with your self indulgent behaviour. You know, you're giving us animals a bad name, you're exposing us to danger, you're weakening our defences, you're making us vulnerable to riot and revolution. And that's, and so because of that, when the animals, when Mole and Rat and whatnot, they reclaim Toad Hall, this is a massive victory for the status quo for conservatism. So, I mean, I didn't, I didn't spot any of this when I was a child. You know, I loved the bit when they're in the tunnel and they're making their way through the tunnel. Toad is like, I think what's he doing is like dropping his stuff, falling over.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  I found it a bit comical, actually, you know, Badger sending Toad, you know, to the back and then sending him to the front because he can't be trusted. It reminded me more of kind of a crocodile of schoolchildren visiting the British Museum or something.

• 1:22:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's completely what it is, though, at the same time, that Toad is behaving like, like they think they're a warband, but Toad is behaving like the naughty child on the school trip.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  But then also Rat's mental arsenal of weapons, it's a secret arms dealer.

• 1:22:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's really cleverly done though, because basically kids love weapons. But there's that basically.

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  They do. I loved weapons as a child. I had like a bow and arrow, a sword. I couldn't get enough of it.

• 1:22:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course. I mean, we we used to have so many swords. It was beyond belief.

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, smuggled into the country from around the world.

• 1:22:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's okay. Yeah, that's don't say that. I don't want to have flipping the customs people coming around to reclaim all Arthur's stuff. Anyway, when the animals do break in and they're like firing their pistols and waving their couds, I mean, no one gets hurt. It's like the A team. No one gets, there's no blood, there's no, they do bash weasels on the head with cudgels and things, but that's fine.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  It kind of, the melee of it kind of reminded me of, so there's wonderful Paddington books. Whenever Paddington cooks or does something like that, it's always this mad melee of paws and marmalade and flying pants and stuff. It's never really clear what's going on, but it's wonderful.

• 1:23:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's very like that. Exactly. Exactly. So, um, anyway. So there's that element of it, which is a bit of a daily tale of our fantasy. But then the other, the other thing, I think, when you get to the end of the book, it's not just the wild wooders, the insurgents, as it were, who've been defeated. But actually Toad himself is defeated, isn't he?

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because he's basically fallen back into the clutches of the animals who wanted to tame him and make him behave himself. Toad really has tried to escape. Toad has tried to go off, drive his car, well, other people's cars, actually. Behave badly, all of this. But the book ends with him put back in his box. He's had to give up his cars. He's had to give up his farm. He's not even allowed to give a kind of speech about himself with his own victory speech.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Thank God.

• 1:24:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  At his own victory banquet, rather.

• 1:24:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Badger has won. Like Badger has tamed him and defeated him. And actually, that's true of all the animals.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  Gladston.

• 1:24:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rat didn't, yeah. Gladston has won, exactly. I mean, it actually, Badger has got a very Gladston feel to him.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Very Gladstonian.

• 1:24:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rat didn't go abroad. Toad didn't get in and get his car. It's like they'll never grow up. They'll never develop. They're frozen.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  None of them has a girlfriend.

• 1:24:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  None of them. Well, they they didn't want girlfriends there, did they?

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  No, they didn't. They didn't want girlfriends.

• 1:24:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rat would be the first to get a girlfriend, I think.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  He would. He he would. I actually, I think, yeah.

• 1:24:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  You think Rat would be a good boyfriend?

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  I don't think Mole, I don't think Mole would stand a chance, I have to say.

• 1:24:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mole's one of these people who someone would say he'd be a nice husband, but not a boyfriend. So, uh, before we give our final verdicts in the book, we should just tie up actually what happened to Kenneth Graham, because actually that's not, and and Adidas Mouse. Because that really is not a happy story, is it?

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  It's really not. So Graham had lost his job at the Bank of England just before the book was published, possibly because he fell out with his boss, possibly because he was so distracted by the writing. And he's well off, but he seems lonely and sad, possibly without purpose. And you know, now I guess there's no distraction like this. He has to spend all of his time at home with his wife that he dislikes. So Matthew Dennison says, for hours he walked, often he was alone in the silence of his own thoughts. His days were overwhelmingly empty. And what happens to Mouse is a genuinely very, very sad story. So he's sent to rugby, he doesn't fit in and he leaves after six weeks. Friends suggest that he's home schooled, but his mother insists that he go to Eton. That also doesn't work out. He doesn't fit in. And so eventually he has a breakdown of some

• 1:25:50Speaker 00

  kind and he ends up being home schooled. They get him into Oxford somehow, but he seems to have been very unhappy there too. Perhaps crushed by parental expectations, you know, of his mother having been told all his life that he was something special. Then you go out into the world and people tell you you're not. Nasty shock, I guess. He fails exams, he doesn't make any friends. And then his body is found on a railway line one morning in May in 1920, and he's killed by a train and it's almost certainly suicide, which is obviously genuinely really, really sad.

• 1:26:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And his parents react to that in the classic Kenneth Graham way, don't they? They run away. They sort of seek escape, they go to Italy. And then they have this sort of very, very, Matthew Dennison, I think, calls it a recessional, basically a kind of dying fall. They just don't do anything. Kenneth Graham spends all his time going for walks on his own. And Elspeth, she's now, what's it, the Gillian Avery quarter, kind of eccentric, shabby, slovenly figure.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Eccentric, shabby and slovenly now.

• 1:26:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he dies, Kenneth Graham died of a stroke in 1932, and he lost, left all his royalties to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, because obviously he didn't have an heir, because Mouse had taken his own life. So there's the kind of sadness, actually, that

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  I think that is so, so Dreadfully sad.

• 1:27:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And and you don't, I don't know, is there a melancholy in the wind in the willows? I mean, actually, I think.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  I think there is.

• 1:27:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  You think there is?

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  Real melancholy. I don't think it's, you know, the melancholy of a, obviously at this stage of a man mourning his son and mourning his life or anything like that. But I think you get this sense, or maybe it's because I'm reading it from the perspective of, you know, the present. But I get the sense throughout that, so a little bit like in Narnia, how the children are always going to have to go back. I get the sense that this is the, it's a dwindling age. This is, this is a world that can't endure for long. And that it's like, it's, it's.

• 1:27:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  The motor cars will come and rip it all up.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's at the height of every season. Every season is perfect. And yeah, the engines are coming, the motor cars are coming. And, you know, is it, are the, are the humans coming? Is the law coming, whatever it may be? And I think, I think there is a melancholy in that. And whenever they have these surreal, strange chapters, I think those are sad too, when they're longing for something great.

• 1:28:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is a longing, definitely, there's definitely, there's definitely, there is a longing. Anyway, uh, our verdicts in the book, and do you know what? We haven't agreed what we're going to rank it in. So to, have you got something in mind? Oh, in poop poops. Brilliant. Okay, we're going to rank it in poop poops. Out of ten. I, so first of all, like, this is a clearly a book that has lasted, and books last for a reason. It shouldn't work. You know, the world building is mad. The tone is very inconsistent. But it's incredibly charming. I think it's really funny. I think there is something in all the characters for us to, to love.

• 1:28:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think actually Kenneth Graham in the characters expressed something, you know, it's something quite profound about the human condition and about the, about human nature. I think it is beautifully written at times, far in advance of most children's books. I mean, almost any other children's book, actually. I loved it when I was a child. I loved rereading it and I would give it a 10 out of 10.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  Wow. Oh, that's touching. Um, I, I agree that I think it, I genuinely think it does express something profound about the different facets of human nature. I think that as a. Roosevelt said, they do kind of become your friends, these characters. And even though not a great deal happens, you know, the stakes aren't that high. You're in this childhood fantasy. I was so invested in everything that went on and I found bits of it very moving. For instance, when Otter is looking for his baby son and he's sitting on the bank, waiting for him to come home and moles homesickness and toads occasional contrition, all this rats wanderlust. The writing is just beautiful. I mean, far and away above any children's book I've ever read.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  It's still not one of my favourite books, so I'd give it an eight out of 10.

• 1:29:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Eight out of 10, Tabby, that's.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  That's pretty high.

• 1:29:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's harsh.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  It's even higher than A Court of Thorns and Roses.

• 1:30:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think I've now ranked.

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  Animal action in that as well.

• 1:30:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Have I ranked this literally twice as high as East of Eden? Right, this is madness. That's which which characters are we? That's the question.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm gonna do yours first.

• 1:30:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Are you?

• 1:30:15Speaker 00

  So naturally.

• 1:30:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, go on.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  No, so you.

• 1:30:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know what's coming.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  You have bits of all of them in you. You're a cross-stressing toad.

• 1:30:25Speaker 00

  No, of course we all do, because but you, you know, you especially, because you have the kind of wanderlust and the sociability of Ratty. Toads love a fine clothes. You live in a manor house like Toad.

• 1:30:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just to be clear to the listeners, I do not live in a manor house.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  He has a bombastic side, so do you, but you also, you're a history badger. And you, you know, you, you know, a lot, so there's something of badger in you. I think you're less mole, possibly.

• 1:30:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Less mole?

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:30:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Interesting.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  But I think, I think if you had to be one, da, da, da, I think you'd be, I think you'd be Ratty, actually.

• 1:30:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tabby, that's, that's what I want.

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  You too, stockpile armaments to sell on the black market. No, I genuinely think so. I think because you're very sociable, you're, you're organised, you're confident and you're, you're pretty, you know, pretty decent, really. And you also have a passion for boating.

• 1:31:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks. Well, I mean, this is great for my ego, by the way, we should do this more often. So actually, the funny thing is, I thought I'd like to be rat, but I am, I know that I'm Mr. Toad. So that's really interesting.

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, that is so self-knowing. The rest is therapy.

• 1:31:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  I've got a massive Mr. Toad side to me, I think. So I have you down as, I think you very much present, as it were, to use the jargon, as rat.

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Nice, sweet.

• 1:31:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think you very much, I think, I think you definitely think of yourself as rats.

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  I so do.

• 1:31:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you really, you know, the fun-loving, sociable, always sort of boasting about how you've been out on the town and how many parties you've been to.

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Totally, popular, all this.

• 1:32:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  However, anybody who works with you soon discovers that actually this is only skin deep, as it were, or like fur deep, because what you've not been boasting about, when you've been claiming, oh, I've been out at parties and I've got a massive hangover and blah, blah, blah, is that actually secretly, you've probably come back home from the party and have been like working really late or something and like reading mad stuff about Eleanor of Aquitaine or whatever.

• 1:32:28Speaker 00

  Leave you're exposing me like this.

• 1:32:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. So it's a classic, it's like actually a very modern thing. It's like the difference between someone's Instagram manicured image and the reality. I think there was definitely a rat element to you, but I think you have a very, very pronounced inner mole.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  I don't know. I actually think that could be fair and, and you know.

• 1:32:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  Mole's a great guy.

• 1:32:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So I'll just give you a sense of what's coming up. So next week is Giuseppe Damasci de Lampe, producers The Leopard, a very different book, a brilliant book, I have to say, arguably the greatest, some people say the greatest historical novel ever written, certainly one of the most reflective. Then we have your choice, Tabby, Madeleine Miller Cersei, you love this book.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  So back to the Odyssey, because we're doing this sort of, as sort of like an Odyssey special for the, for the movie when that comes out.

• 1:33:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Then we have John Buckon, The Thirty Nine Steps. We have Elena Ferrante, my brilliant friend by popular demand.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And our producer Nicole is one of her favourites.

• 1:33:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of her favourite books. Then we have Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. Again, by popular demand, lots of people have been saying, please do some Hemingway, including you, Tabby, actually. So we're doing For Whom the Bell Tolls.

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  So lots to look forward to.

• 1:33:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Loads to look forward to. All right. Great to see you, Mole.

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  Thanks, Toad.

• 1:33:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  Poop, poop. Bye.

• 1:33:57Speaker 05

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