![]() ![]() It is perfectly obvious from the vast Edwardian waterside picnic which Mole and the Water Rat consume (and from Toad’s glorious breakfast the day after he escapes from prison) that their appetites are adult and human, while their characters are at least partly wild. In fact I did not notice the problem until a modern author tried to write a sequel, in which he struggled to decide whether his characters should eat and drink the food of humans or the things which real moles and water rats consume. Nor did I mind about the way his animals were human at one moment, and inhuman the next. I think in those days we did not seek to know too much about authors, or to try to analyze them. ![]() I knew nothing, when I first read the book, of Kenneth Grahame’s unsatisfactory life and the long tragedy involving his son (both now lie in one of Oxford’s picturesque graveyards, another connection between that city and the canon of English children’s stories). I thought the poor man’s eye had actually become loose, tumbled from its socket and landed on a pig, and I had to be calmed down with much soothing.īut when it came to The Wind in the Willows, I had no such problems. Let me confess here that as a literal-minded four-year old I was reduced to hopeless weeping when I read the words “His eye fell on a pig,” in The Tale of Pigling Bland. And all inevitably bring to mind Beatrix Potter’s astonishing little books. The setting of The Wind in the Willows, clearly the banks of the Thames near Pangbourne, connects it with Oxford and Alice in Wonderland, likewise filled with animals-from the scurrying White Rabbit to the sensitive Dormouse who cannot abide talk of cats, and the angry pigeon who mistakes Alice for a serpent. I was astonished to find that Shepard, a master of small-scale wit, associated forever in my mind with woodland peace and furry animals, was an artillery officer in the Great War, decorated for his courage in battle. Milne, for whom he also brilliantly pictured one of the greatest characters in English literature, the wittily pessimistic donkey Eeyore. Shepard’s drawings link the book with the works of A.A. For me, it was Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in The Willows which instilled it above all things, especially the version illustrated by Edward (E.H.) Shepard. But the idea that animals are in a way our equals is a view I cannot escape. But rats are rats, and even Beatrix Potter, while she makes her rats quite engaging, does not try to make them loveable. I must confess that I once enjoyed an afternoon spent ratting in the undergrowth with a farmer friend, many years ago, as the terriers massacred about a hundred of those widely unloved rodents in less than five minutes. I think French children are much more matter-of-fact on the subject, perhaps because they are closer to the land. In any case, a sentimental view of animals is a deep part of the upbringing of the English middle class, at least in my own time. I suspect a lot of us try harder to be kind once we have found out that we are capable of unkindness. We do not like other people displaying things we hate in ourselves. I know from my Bolshevik days that I am capable of cruelty and perhaps that is why I was angrier and more shocked than a gentle person could possibly have been. The man put a lot of energy into it, as if he hoped that by doing so he could make the mouse even more dead than it was already. The creature, a mouse of the picturesque sort, clean, with large ears and visible whiskers, had just been passing by. The action was pointless and could only have been done for pleasure. In a handsome street in the French Concession in Shanghai I once saw a stallholder kick and stamp a mouse to death. ![]()
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