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

0:00This 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. 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. 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 Wildwood. There's the fighting the weasels and the stoats. I love all that stuff. Then we have the legendary Toad Hall, and that is home to the reckless and motor car obsessed Mr.

0:45Toad Sandbrook.

0:46Dominic Sandbrook: Very, very good banter there. Well done. Thank you. 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. Yeah, it absolutely is. It's something that you can treasure for the rest of your life. Folio's The Wind in the Willows is available now. Find your favourite story at foliosociety.com slash thebookclub. Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress.

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2:12There's only one more thing to be done, said the gratified badger. Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat, before your friends hear, 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. No! He said, a little sullenly, but stoutly.

2:44Dominic Sandbrook: I'm not sorry, and it wasn't folly at all. It was simply glorious. What? cried the badger, greatly scandalised. You backsliding animal, didn't you tell me just now, in there? 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 can 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?

3:19Then you don't promise, said the badger never to touch a motor car again

3:24Dominic 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 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. Tread carefully, Tabby. Tread carefully. So in that scene, a 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 and having tricked the the dignified and honorable badger 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 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 that's good to know that is good to know so I think even in that little scene you get a clue to the wind in the willows is 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.

5:02Dominic Sandbrook: That, I think, captures this sort of truth about human nature. All human nature is there in those four characters. 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 the reason for it to appear, 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 i actually couldn't believe it when i stumbled across that in your notes i'm delighted but i'm shocked but you love the odyssey i do actually toad is a much more interesting character 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 he does he wears a lot more tweed than odysseus and even the new 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 which is strange if because it feels so present everywhere you know it's had such a lasting impact that i i forgot it was so old there are very few books published in 1908 that are still in print yeah and there are very i mean children's books or adult books and there are very few books from that era who've left such a mark on the world's imagination so mole rats especially toad are colossal figures even to people who've not read the books.

6:27Dominic Sandbrook: 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've been adaptations on the stage. Best of all, Tabby, on TV. Oh, God, yeah. So, I mean, this is the great trauma of your life. I've been seeking serious counselling in advance of this episode.

7:01Dominic Sandbrook: You couldn't bring yourself to watch the ITV adaptation? 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. They do have kind of big eyes. Yeah, they have like almost like a religious fervor in the way that their eyes are constantly upraised. It's nightmare provoking, but then equally sinister and perhaps even more sinister was the 1996 adaptation starring Steve Coogan, I believe in the role of Mole.

7:44Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, Steve Coogan was Mole. Steve Coogan was Mole, friend of the show. Hold on, who's the friend of the show there, Mole or Coogan? Partridge actually, so neither. Exactly, Alan Partridge is a friend of the show. I don't know about it. I've got nothing against Steve Coogan. Who cares about Coogan? Yeah. Philomena 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.

8:16Dominic 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 poor arthur honestly 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 yeah i was excited actually to read it in part because of your enthusiasm for it.

8:53I know that 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.

9:01Dominic Sandbrook: Right. I can't get behind them. I'm not invested. Like Beatrix 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 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 and I love the way you know a little bit like Narnia or something everyone always goes to bed, well fed, cosy and content.

9:53Dominic Sandbrook: There's a lot of buttered toast. There's so much buttered toast, you can't have enough buttered toast. Correct. So I really enjoyed it. So before we get into some of the themes and we get into Kenneth Graham, the author, who's a fascinating character, 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? 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.

10:22And 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 newfangled motor car because cars have been on the roads since the 1890s. And then this is when he starts yelling his famous poop poop that 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 never been there and he's curious.

10:56And 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, it'd be very frightening.

11:04Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, it's scary when he's lost in the wood. Yeah, it's genuinely frightening. One of a child's greatest fears is always being lost. 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 Wayfarer's All.

11:37And 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

11:45Dominic Sandbrook: bit more later 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 yeah total through a tunnel rat is sitting on a on a disturbing um armament pile he has so many weapons yeah he's like an arms dealer 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 yeah and you can never if If you go questing or something, you can never have enough on you.

12:40Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly right. Exactly. And the idea of sneaking in through a tunnel. Brilliant. Brilliant. It completely speaks to you when you're under 10 years old. And the cross-dressing, of course. Well, yes. I bet that spoke to you as a 10-year-old boy. There is a bit of cross-dressing. Well, disguises. Kids love disguises. Yeah. So they sneak in. They liberate Toad Hall. They have a celebratory banquet. Toad is slightly reformed. So he gives up on 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.

13:19Well, 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 accultulated, which is the best kind, by the way. You feign some kind of atonement or reform in order to still be making a statement.

13:35Dominic Sandbrook: I don't want to give too much away to Abby, but basically I found in my life that feigning modesty is very satisfying and effective. Totally. 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. 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.

14:13So apt that I think I think that's that's very well observed.

14:17Dominic 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 power. And I think that's definitely true of The Wind of the Willows. So Sam Leith 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.

14:53Dominic Sandbrook: And his very strange kind of conflicted response to the traumas of his early life. so there's actually a lot of darkness under the surface in the wind and the willies which you wouldn't spot when you read it when you're seven years old or something kind of like unlike pg woodhouse those you know the jeeves and worcester books 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 yeah and yet it never the darkness never seeps in i suppose which is kind of interesting but 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 yeah there's a there's a sad kind of passivity to him i think yeah completely 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 so tell us take us through what happened to him, tell me.

15:53Yeah, so he's born in Edinburgh in 1859. 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 lock with his father and his father's telling him a story. And this makes its way into the Wind in the Willows when Mole is walking by a 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.

16:29And 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 -

16:37Dominic Sandbrook: Well, she was only, I think, late 20s when she died. I mean - She was very young. Yeah. It's very sad. And then Kenneth Graham himself catches it too. He nearly dies. is 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, isolation or something. Like the loss of a parent. It's so striking how many of the great writers lost a parent when they were young. Yeah. 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.

17:09So 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 Cookham 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.R. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's time living in Serhole, I think, which is a really idealized period of life kind of in the countryside.

17:32Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, just outside Birmingham, exactly the same thing. So similar period of time, the Victorian, Edwardian, and again, the sort of the rural idyll, exactly that. Yeah, 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 interlude 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 la havre which is miserable drinks himself to death basically yeah and um so his children end up being shuffled around various relatives all the time um which would give you such a sense of kind of not belonging and abandonment 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 yeah but i actually think that's just the most understandable in a way quite a healthy reaction 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 yeah um 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 Denison 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 yeah 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 a bit like jm barry actually interesting yeah yeah and i think there's definitely a cult of childhood at that point yeah i think you're right 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 and 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.

19:41Dominic Sandbrook: And the characters are constantly being pulled between these two things. And you can see that escape, he would equate, you know, Toad, escaping Toad Hall, a little bit like his father running away to France or something. Yeah. At one point, the rat is actively tempted by the prospect of running away and living a carefree kind of responsibility-free life. And it's - Yes, of course. Irresistible almost. Exactly. And then on the other hand, the houses of the different animals, you know, you mentioned living in Cookham-Dean by the Thames, the houses of the animals by the riverbank are massively important to them.

20:16Dominic Sandbrook: And again and again, you have these scenes where they come back to their house and they love their house and 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 think that's mad. I think that's massively deepening. Also, for one thing, it's quite a masculine book, you know. 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 well yeah that's what i was going to say though i mean definitely that massively applies to one um 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 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.

21:34Dominic Sandbrook: And as somebody who like loved being a child and loves kind of children's books, I actually do find that quite relatable. I mean, not that I ever, I mean, I never suffered all the sort of the losses that he did. But I think there's a bit of all of us deep down that sentimentalizes and is nostalgic about the world of child. Don't you Tabby? Or is this just me? 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 um i'll always retreat into the books of my childhood for a little bit for like comfort right i totally relate to that yeah 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 sent tost 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.

22:27So Humphrey Carpenter says, the behavior of Mr. Toad rather than mole. Although Toad, like me, is certainly not head boy material, I would say. And he's not shy.

22:36Dominic Sandbrook: Well, you'd be a very implausible head boy. I mean, no offense. 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 but you're not you're you're dissing the Bank of England but actually when he joins the good job it's a good job 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 indian pandemonium often reigned while business was supposed to being conducted the staff et and drank heavily on the premises kept pet animals and amused themselves all hours oblivious of decorum and this is very like uh nicole alfie uh produces i was gonna say yeah exactly it's just like working on the book eating and drinking heavily yeah we never do these recordings sober it's incredible so anyway he rises through the ranks He's very good at, and he becomes - Has more animals than anyone else.

23:53More japes.

23:54Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. More japes. And he becomes the Secretary of the Bank of England when he's only 39, 1898. Yeah. 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? 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 holidays. who visits Italy, et cetera. He's having a lovely time. Very kind of the riverbank community from Wind in the Willows. Totally. And actually one of the - And the male camaraderie as well.

24:28Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and one of his mates is a guy called Mr. Furnival, F.J. Furnival, who runs a rowing club. So he's often seen as the model for the water rat. And it's this bloke, Furnival, who says to him, you know, 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. Very fashionable at this time. 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 their tweed coats and stuff.

25:08Think like Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien, Lewis, et cetera. Don't think Extinction Rebellion or Glastonbury.

25:16Dominic Sandbrook: it's the opposite of that kind of it's that kind it's that it's the first kind of conservative not the second very conservative yeah exactly 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 uh the future president theodore roosevelt is a huge fan of them i know the bloke who invented the teddy bear i know parallels all around so 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 um 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 and well he's keen to guard his privacy from one class of person above all else yeah and actually these are some of the most these are terrible people and unfortunately he meets one of them yeah 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 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 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 just breaks down to a sweat and starts quaking exactly and he's made it almost to 40 unscathed and then he falls into the clutches of a literary super fan that's a terrible thing it is a terrible thing called elspeth thompson and elspeth thompson is from a rich family and she's uh sort of hung around on the fringes of the London literary set.

27:12Dominic Sandbrook: She's generally, she's a sort of professional super fan. 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 pointing at yourself there tabby it's terrifying is this all too close to home it's just a window into my life and my future well she's very well don't become a slovenly eccentric whatever you do i don't know though i don't know who knows yeah elspeth is very needy and demanding um 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.

28:08Dominic Sandbrook: 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. I have to say, I'm always utterly bemused when you hear it. Because, you know, you hear of this happening sometimes. 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. No, because 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 i mean i see yeah by the by the stands of the day this isn't exactly yeah 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 uh 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 and 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 um they write purely in baby talk to each other but how do you write baby talk you know like give me an example he writes like this okay i eat what i choose is 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 as like a baby girl backline a lisbon kind of way to him so that's worse than the itv series that's horrible yeah very disturbing well anyway they um they get married in 1899 and um 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 um they he just goes off straight away and he goes off boating with his mates and corn one and stuff and he doesn't want anything to do with her which she finds enraging yeah and they clearly have you know she complains bitterly to her friends and things there is no physical dimension to their marriage like she's shocked they clearly have had one encounter presumably on their honeymoon because in 1900 she gives birth to a son so once and once only i think they basically consummated the marriage arguably one time too many well i Yeah, because this is, well, there would be no wind in the willows without this, though.

30:48There would be no wind in the willows. So she gives birth to a baby boy. He's called Alistair, but they call him Mouse. And his life, I have to say, I was quite harsh about him just now, but 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 mothers kind of possibly who, you know, it's kind of a miracle that they were born at all. She puts him, Elspeth puts him on a massive pedestal and is always insisting that he's very talented and amazing.

31:23So very Petunia Dursley or Cersei Lannister vibes, I would say. Yeah, she spoils him massive. 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.

31:40Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. 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 ends up being an absolute monster of a boy, doesn't he? 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 spoiled little brat. And people may have expected him to be the inspiration for, you know, maybe Mole in The Wind and the Willows.

32:15But no, he's actually the model for Toad. And it's insane that Kenneth Graham based Toad on his own son.

32:26Dominic Sandbrook: I know, that's the mad thing because Toad is the one character. That's the ultimate, like, you know, immortal slur on your child. Yeah. Brutal. You would absolutely expect that Mole, because Mole seems to speak for the child reader. Yeah, and he's vulnerable and sweet. 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.

32:57All they have left is the baby talk.

32:59Dominic Sandbrook: 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 story is a very garbled version so what becomes the winter of the willows because the mold is behind the car there by the time mouse is for the stories that are that he's being told are about mr toad and his adventures the joke here is that toad is mouse toad 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.

34:03Yeah. 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 Littlehampton, 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 has faked, been kidnapped by brigands and writes a ransom demand but then really runs away and he steals a car 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 um and so they appear in the book almost unchanged the tone being a picaresque 18th century romp and then mouse's governess keeps these letters and they're reprinted at the end of the penguin classics edition there indeed but they are at this point just fun he never imagines anyone else will ever see them.

34:58And 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 Guilden Age kid stories were so popular. And somehow she manages to wrangle an invitation to the house. And it turns out that And Elspeth, you know, who'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.

35:35And secretly, Constance is a feminist, but she has to keep that quiet because this is not a household in which...

35:42Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, they're a conservative household. Yeah. Exactly. So she's invited back. And on a later visit, she overhears Kenneth Graham telling 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 already written it. So she works on Mouse, which is slightly odd. Works though. It does work and tells him to turn the letters into a book.

36:18And he loves the idea. I mean, obviously not minding at all that it's kind of all about the worst sides of his nature. And he persuades Kenneth Graham to change his mind. And so finally he says, yeah, fine, I'll do it.

36:30Dominic 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 Wind in the Willows really is its blend of different ingredients. So you've got, first of all, the stories of a mole and rat messing around in boats on the riverbank.

37:02Dominic Sandbrook: 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. um so you know it's a bit uh it's very much the what you mentioned talking it's very much the world of the hobbits isn't it yeah or tea with mustard tumnus in um the lion the witch in the wardrobe yes it is it's that cozy well c.s lewis and jr r tolkien would both undoubtedly have read the wind and the willows yeah i mean so they would have sort of even if they're not necessarily modeling what they write on it they would be they would have drunk of the same waters i guess Yeah.

37:39And then you have second ingredient toad, his brush with the law, his escape, his return to claim his house, the odyssey elements of the book.

37:48Dominic Sandbrook: And then 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 constant smedley and absolutely nobody wants to publish this at all they're like this is bonkers what is this yeah so basically publishers say animals up in human clothing 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 and also the illustrations lead the way so if you have that as kind of a visual guider it's a bit different 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 the world no pagan gods no pagan gods so everybody's magazine when constant smelly says well this is the result of my labors 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 met you 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 tons 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 of the title so the title it was so often that with so many of the books we've done in this podcast the original title was mad chosen by the author yeah yeah the lapping of the stream i mean so dreary is no good i quite like the alternate the other alternative which was the children of pan i quite like that 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 that's one tiny part of it and then And the other title that they kick around is River Folk.

40:00Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, which I guess... I don't love that. Yeah, but bland. Finally, though, 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. Yeah. And then this is what's used in adverts and stuff like that. But then Methuen decide it's too similar to the W.B. Yeats poem, The Wind Among the Reeds. So they amend to the alliterative, The Wind in the Willows, which does sound good. Well, we're used to it though now, aren't we? Yeah, I suppose. I suppose. I think we're just so used to it being called The Wind and the Willows that it never occurs to us to question.

40:33It's very silvery though. I like it.

40:34Dominic Sandbrook: Well, I think the illiterative 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?

41:08This is insane, yeah.

41:09Dominic Sandbrook: And the guy who wrote the review said, this book is mad. 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 his complaint is moles don't paint their burrows this is the imagination of a milk jug and the wit of a yeah exactly a tow driving a car that's not possible i know um and actually the review goes on to say it's a book with hardly a smile in it ironically yeah through which we wander in a haze of perplexity, uninterested by the story itself and at a loss to understand this deeper purpose.

41:58Dominic Sandbrook: 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. yeah but obviously it's a story about animals dressing up in human clothes yeah and so not a book for adults as in if you're 30 you're not going to read this book i don't know i enjoyed it but yeah of course 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 yeah but anyway the mad thing is it starts to become a success through word of mouth doesn't it so people clearly like it does speak to somebody publishes dream yeah it's just a success but in america because our old friend And President Theodore Roosevelt massively champions it.

42:52He tells Kenneth Graham, I have read it and re-read 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 are obviously a similar thing.

43:24Slightly anthropomorphized animals.

43:26Dominic Sandbrook: And what they do in Toad of Toad Hall is they take out all the stuff that's a bit weird. The ethereal stuff. Yeah, exactly. They really slim it down so it focuses on the adventure story, as it were, and on 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. 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.

44:06And 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 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

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46:15welcome back to the book club and before the break we promised that we'd be delving into the wind in the willows itself so um 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 kind of sardine action but it's all very simple basically is what he's saying there's no deeper meaning um and he is definitely right about kind of the lack of sex in it and you know the absence of women or complications or anything anything like that but the question is is he right you know is he being honest is there really nothing going on beneath the surface i don't think he is right

47:01Dominic Sandbrook: to me um otherwise it'll be a very short podcast or at least short by our standards that would be great to be honest that's just right here 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 kind of going back to the pre-raphaelites and john ruskin and stuff people have idealized the kind of 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 sort of there's been a huge cult in england of nature writing and this is a this is a perfect example of that i would say so the first chapter you know when mole comes out of his hole you know i was really struck when i was reading it to 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 copses 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 recognized this and they would have said gosh this is you know it's a bit like um even as late as you know we did 1984 and we did the thing about winston smith and julia escaping to the countryside and there's kind of dappled 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 often produced by people like Kenneth Graham who live in the suburbs or live in the city they see the countryside as a place you escape to a sort of refuge from the world I suppose yeah definitely so you've got that and then you have the talking animals as characters that's probably you know for the for the late Victorian Edwardian audience is reading this book that's probably slightly less standard even if we're used to it now would you say it's a standard i know you don't like it you don't like talking animals do you which i find mad i can see the coziness of it i just can't get invested although this time i did anyway 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 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 it when he's writing about this book he says i use the animals because i wanted the book to um well first of all there's 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 you can completely get away from that and it can be a childlike fantasy but kenneth graham explicitly said you know by simply using the animal i wanted to get away at once from weary sex problems and 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 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 he's completely like thing again i think he's completely the person in your kind of friendship group who whenever everybody starts coupling up with they start when girls are introduced or women yeah yeah And he's really depressed because he thinks, gosh, the band is being broken up.

51:08Dominic Sandbrook: These terrible people, these women have invaded it and messed it up for everybody. There's no one to fight a Budapest with anymore. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's very much his thing. Basically, he wants to be on the river rowing with his mates. I mean, obviously, the first reviewers found all this very weird. And I think that's something we kind of now overlook. Because the world building, how mad and kind of inconsistent it is. and they pulled this out and now obviously the Wind in the Willows is such an 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 no he's human size clearly 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 yes 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 Ratty or whatever live in holes.

52:08Yeah. There's a massive inconsistency there. Or Badger lives in a burrow, whereas he lives in kind of a towered mansion. Yes. 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 other?

52:25Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, because Badger says at one point, you'll give us a very bad name among the humans. Yeah. 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 so like this horse who pulls the caravan yeah what's the social hierarchy there you know is he a surf is he an equal stuff like this the other thing is we find hedgehogs having porridge and fried ham for breakfast hedgehogs eating pigs I know hedgehogs eating pigs are we dealing with cannibals here has all morality totally you know been thrown out the window in his uh burrow badger has eggs he has hams hams again badger living underground eating pig so sinister right in his picnic yeah 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 yeah are they eating their friends you know what's going on here it's disturbing it is disturbing also some Some of them wear clothes and some don't.

53:30So is this like a particularly open-minded society? Do they embrace nudity? Yeah, Toad wears his tweed. But the horse isn't wearing clothes. Yeah, well, the horse has tack. So what's up with that? Is that like, you know, is he a repressed creature? The otter is always naked. Bit odd. Some of them hibernate as well. Yes. So that's an animalistic feature that's come through. Very confusing, but most chillingly of all, towards the end of the book, Toad is described as combing his hair.

54:01Dominic 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. Like, is it a toupee? Is it a wig? The illustrator doesn't lean into that, I think, wisely. No, no, that's actually so true. And even the ITV series, what you mock as the Fluffy Puppet series, because they don't have, they don't give to a food either. But 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, Bilbo Baggins has coffee. Where's the coffee from?

54:35Yeah, totally. In The Hobbits. No one says, come on.

54:37Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, maybe an adult does in a very pedantic 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, you know, they thought it was a work of natural history. Yeah. 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.

55:09Dominic Sandbrook: But halfway through the book, it's as though Kenneth Graham has lost interest and he's decided that Toad is actually the hero. I know. Because we follow Toad completely. And Rat, I know you like Rat, but Rat is off stage for huge chunks of the book. He is actually, I guess. Yeah. But they're all off stage for sections of the book, I would say. Sections, except in the second half where Toad really dominates. Yeah. 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.

55:41Dominic Sandbrook: And that's so vague and evasive. like perhaps chiefly come on make your mind up 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 so far he loses track i guess 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 in 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 it's lovely 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 at the ages where you would read a talking animals That they would be capable of reading that.

56:52Yeah. Compare this to the writing in The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance. Or Harry Potter. Which is so panned back. Well, we actually compared this to Harry Potter, didn't we? Yeah.

57:01Dominic Sandbrook: We're saying how much more complex the writing is. It's so much more sophisticated. 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. Yeah. Or do your eyes just slightly glaze over those bits and you move on quite quickly? I think 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, there are so many words they don't know.

57:33Dominic Sandbrook: They don't find it weird that the word caressed or celerage 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. 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.

58:08They're 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 i.e you know that's telling because he's you know whatever class he's from whatever way he leans so I think it's true of anyone I think I think everyone is made

58:34Dominic Sandbrook: up of all these characters you can go through your own friends and people you know you could go through the gold hanger office and say are you a mole a rat a toad it's full of wild wooders just endless i mean there's a lot of toads let's be honest 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 yeah he has all the anxieties of the kind of respectable you know he wants to be respectable he wants to do the right thing um there's a sort of suburban side to him so later on when we go back to his burrow it's described as having these um this decorations of 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 i know so strange 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 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 my favorite chapter is it yeah so i was very touched by it he's gone on this uh 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 cozy quarters or toads 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 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 mom and they're just not there yeah no one hears you and you just want to be elsewhere so i think it's really moving 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 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 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 um 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 yeah he's great now what about rat 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 right so he's a socially a cut above mole he has much more social ease 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 and 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 he does and sandwiches bloody good shot 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 um and he is a dreamer and an idealist so his buried wanderlust surfaces in this chapter um called uh in wayfarer's all and we'll get onto 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 taught um and he likes writing bad poetry and he's the first one to hear the music of the god pan yes he is his relationship spiritual side to him 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 wrapped friendship as a celebration of a cheerful bachelor-like existence and and this is you know that shared by kenneth graham and his friends where there was messing around in boats and going on jaunts to foe and stuff like that exactly exactly and there's sort of the world of picnics and the world of all this yeah 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 better come and stop with me for a little time and I'll teach you to row and all of this.

1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook: And Mole is so touched, he can't answer. And we're told he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw. It's the ultimate bromance. Yeah, well, that's very like when Dr. Watson realises that Sherlock Holmes actually does like him and cares about him. And 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 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 Wildwood. You know, we don't go there very much. We riverbankers.

1:04:51Dominic Sandbrook: And the Wildwood 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 Wildwood 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, you know, a man from the home counties. a well-heeled man from the home counters going into the east end wandering into archway right yeah well i'm more thinking that kind of in the 1900s 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 victoria late victorian edwardian nightmare you know that you'll be lost in this underworld so the world would 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 um kenneth graham fears most of all this kind of sexuality you know maturity sensuality all of this kind of thing his wife's domain exactly his wife's domain something like that but i think that scene we would that that moment when mole 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.

1:06:07Dominic Sandbrook: And that sort of scent, 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And then finally you get home and you're rewarded with a hot chocolate or whatever. Yeah. I'd always run away and hope to be found. So I can relate. Yeah. And then, and also when you do make it home or whatever, there's always that safe parental guardian figure to make you feel like you're in the realm of safety again.

1:06:42And in this, that is Badger, who's the other major character of this story. And Carpenter calls him the still center 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 fount of wisdom and common sense. And he has, I mean, massive natural authority. I mean, the opening reading that we did, that was him confronting Toad for his bad behavior.

1:07:20And he lives in this huge, rambling ancient house or warren. And it's the great country house and its estate dominating the villages with literally ancient foundations.

1:07:29Dominic 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 yeah 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 there's a sense that badger represents kind of english history and a kind of i mean he's he's living among amid ruins right and he's old england he is old england he completely is 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.

1:08:03Dominic Sandbrook: 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 was interested in The Adventures of Toad. Yeah, I liked it. And actually they are cut from the theatrical adaptations. They are typically cut from the TV thing that you don't like, madly. Yeah. They're not in that. So the first one is The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is Mole and Rat go looking for this lost otter baby called Portly. Yeah, pretty sweet. And it's beautiful kind of nature writing. It is such beautiful writing. It really is. The moon 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.

1:08:51Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, they see 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 and 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 quite homoerotic isn't he 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 to 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 i don't know i i actually quite liked it i always like a little bit of an ethereal element and it reminds me do you know what it really reminds me of Tom Bombadil.

1:10:13Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, that's a great comparison actually. Yeah, and I don't really like Tom Bombadil. 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. 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. 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.

1:10:53So 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 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 these glittering adventures. And he goes into this kind of trance and his eyes get glazed and set.

1:11:28And he's like one of Odysseus's mariners, seduced by the siren song. And he's gone 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 Rat, you know, this socially competent Englishman, essentially, 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.

1:12:05Dominic Sandbrook: It is. But on the other hand, I think it'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 csl is 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 yeah 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 because he's right 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 it's all about that dreadful it's basically 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 because this is an idealized version of life isn't it really that he's writing in the completely 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 cartoons really aren't they yeah no hint that you could ever meet a woman animal in this book no no way unless it's a man animal dressed up as a woman that's the closest which brings us very neatly yeah to most people's favorite character doesn't it yeah so definitely the best known so this is Mr.

1:13:58Toad 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 kind the kind of character he is and his personality is definitely familiar he's boastful untrustworthy greedy self-promoting but also jolly enthusiastic brave and ultimately good-hearted he's true 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 don't know the question is is he perhaps the son of a rich self-made businessman or something like that you know the not so early a generation of money that he is literally nouveau but he's still not old money yes i agree i agree

1:15:17Dominic Sandbrook: completely i think toad it's there's a sense that he doesn't quite know how to behave and he's behaving badly like that boy that's the clown of the class because he's a bit insecure 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 yes always which suggests a kind of insecurity and yet he doesn't seem troubled by excessive self-doubt does he really doesn't know i mean i think he's a very very familiar literary type actually i think he's full staff yes um from from the henry the fourth part one and two so as like full staff 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 noughtonness to him there's another character i mean a character that you know that i love which is billy bunter the school who was often called the schoolboy full staff who was in boarding school stories at the time edwardian again you know a thief a liar greedy blah blah blah blah but he's the hero and people like him it's like horrid henry at the end of the book 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.

1:16:38Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. So Toad is also, I mean, he's also obviously an addict, isn't he? Yeah. So there's that hilarious bit when his friends, it's like from the opening bit when 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 and he's and i think if you were being very sort of deep about it and 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 yeah um 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.

1:17:41Oh yeah when we get towards the end of our evenings when we have scheduling meetings or whatever like with Nicole or everyone I am pure Toad

1:17:50Dominic Sandbrook: What do you think you are the beginning Tabby? I mean come on you're deluding yourself I'm the venerable Mr Badger So yeah the other thing about Toad he is, I know you like this bit he is Odysseus. Honestly, cunning quicksilver Odysseus and then Mr. Toad. 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 modelled on the Odyssey without, you know, Penelope and Telemachus, the family element, the sex, so to speak. But, you know, 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 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 um 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 no what what it's like what it's obviously modeled on is something like the french revolution where all the people are broken into the house the sonculott are broken in and they're helping themselves to the aristocrats wine cellar and all that which is precisely what the weasels and care they're having a banquet aren't they when it's that invasion fantasy isn't it 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.

1:19:31Dominic Sandbrook: 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, 1908 would have sort of spoken to them, maybe in a way it doesn't speak to us. Badger says to Toad, this is all your fault, because Badger said to Toad, yeah you were letting the side down with your self-indulgent behavior you know you're giving us animals a bad name you're exposing us to danger you're weakening our defenses 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.

1:20:21Dominic Sandbrook: So, I mean, 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, what's he doing? He's like dropping his stuff, falling over. 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. That's completely what it is, though, at the same time. The Toad is behaving like... They think they're a war band, but Toad is behaving like the naughty child on a school trip.

1:20:53But then also, rats' mental arsenal of weapons. It's a secret arms dealer.

1:20:59Dominic Sandbrook: I think it's really cleverly done, though, because basically kids love weapons. They do. I loved weapons as a child. I had a bow and arrow, a sword. I couldn't get enough of it. Of course. I mean, we used to have so many swords. It was beyond belief. Yeah, smuggled into the country from around the world. It's okay. Yeah. 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 covers, I mean, no one gets hurt. It's like the A-team. There's no bloods. They do bash weasels on the head with cudgels and things, but that's fine.

1:21:36The 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

1:21:48Dominic Sandbrook: clear what's going on but it's wonderful 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 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.

1:22:25Dominic Sandbrook: 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 fun. He's not even allowed to give a kind of speech about himself at his own victory speech. Thank God. At his own victory banquet, rather. um badger has won like badger has tamed him and defeated him and actually that's true of all the animals gladstone has won exactly i mean it actually badger has got a very gladstone rat didn't go abroad toad didn't get his car it's like they'll never grow up they'll never develop none of them has a girlfriend no no well they didn't want girlfriends there did they no they didn't they didn't want girlfriends rat would be the first to get a girlfriend he would he he would I actually, I think, yeah.

1:23:08Dominic Sandbrook: You think Rat would be a good boyfriend? I don't think Mole, I don't think Mole would stand a chance, I have to say. Mole's one of these people who someone would say he'd be a nice husband, but not a boyfriend. So, 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 Adita Mouse, because that really is not a happy story, is it? No. 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 Denison 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.

1:24:03Friends suggest that he's homeschooled, 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 kind and he ends up being homeschooled. They get him into Oxford somehow, but he seems to have been very unhappy there too. Perhaps crushed by the 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 really really really sad and his

1:24:45Dominic Sandbrook: parents react to that in the classic kenneth graham way don't they they run away they they sort of seek escape they go to italy and then they have this sort of very very matthew dennis 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 did the gillian avery call a kind of eccentric shabby slufferly figure eccentric shabby and slufferly yeah 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 uh taking his own life so there's the kind of sadness actually that i think that is so so dreadfully sad yeah all of that and and you don't i don't know is there a melancholy in the wind of the willows i mean actually i think i think there is i think there is real melancholy i don't think it's you know the melancholy of a obviously at this stage of a man mourning his son or 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 the motor cars will come and 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 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 there is a longing definitely there's definitely there's a longing anyway uh our verdicts in the book and 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 10.

1:26:46Dominic Sandbrook: So first of all, this is 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 love. And I think actually Kenneth Graham in the characters expressed something. something quite profound about the human condition and 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.

1:27:24Dominic Sandbrook: I loved rereading it and I would give it a 10 out of 10. Wow. Oh, that's touching. 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 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 Mole's homesickness and Toad's occasional um contrition all this rats wanderlust the writing is just beautiful i mean far and away above any children's book i've ever read it's still not one of my favorite books so i'd give it an eight out of ten eight out of ten tabby that's that's pretty high i think that's harsh it's even higher than a court of thorns and roses yeah i think i've now ranked animal action in that as well have i ranked This is literally twice as high as East of Eden.

1:28:31Dominic Sandbrook: Right, this is madness. Which characters are we? That's the question. Okay, so I'm going to do yours first. Are you? So naturally. Yeah, go on. No, so you have bits. I know what's coming. You have bits of all of them in you. You're a cross-dressing toad. No, of course we all do. But you especially, because you have the kind of wanderlust and the sociability of Ratty. Toad's love of fine clothes. You live in a manor house. I do not. Just to be clear to the listeners, I do not live in a manor house. He has a bombastic side, so do you. But you also, you're a history badger. And you know a lot, so there's something of badger in you.

1:29:09I think you're less mole, possibly.

1:29:11Dominic Sandbrook: Less mole? Yeah, I think so. Interesting. But I think if you had to be one, I think you'd be ratty, actually. Oh, Tabby. That's what I want. You too, stockpile armaments to sell on the black market. No, I genuinely think so. I think because you're very sociable, you're organized, you're confident, and you're pretty, you know, pretty decent, really. And you also have a passion for boating. 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 a rat, but I know that I'm Mr. Toad. So that's really interesting.

1:29:52Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, my God. That is so self-knowing. The rest is therapy. 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. Nice, sweet. I think you very much, I think you definitely think of yourself as rat. I so do. 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. Totally. Popular. Right. however anybody who works with you soon discovers that actually this is um only skin deep as it well or like fur deep because what you've not been boasting about when you've been claiming oh i've been out of 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 leave you're exposing me like this 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 definitely i think you have a very very pronounced inner mole i don't know i actually think that could be fair and and you know yeah mole's a great guy all right so i'll just give you a sense of what's coming up so uh next week is giuseppe tamasi de lam produces the The Leopard, a very different book, a brilliant book, I have to say.

1:31:23Dominic Sandbrook: Arguably the greatest historical, some people say the greatest historical novel ever written. Certainly one of the most reflective. Then we have your choice, Tabby, Madeline Miller's Circe. You love this book. So back to the Odyssey, because we're doing this sort of like an Odyssey special for the movie when that comes out. Then we have John Buchan, The 39 Steps. We have Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend by Popular Demand. Yeah, and our producer Nicole is one of her favorites. 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.

1:31:57Dominic Sandbrook: So we're doing For Whom the Bell Tolls. So lots to look forward to. Loads to look forward to. All right. Great to see you, Molly.

1:32:06Thanks, Toad.

1:32:07Dominic Sandbrook: Bye, everybody. Boop, boop. Bye.

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