THE anniversary of Wind in the Willows is going to be celebrated by Henley schools as part of the Literary Festival on September 19th.
Four performances have been organised for the first day of the festival, meaning that around 400 school children will see the event.
Exactly 100 years ago the secretary of the Bank of England put the manuscript of a book into an envelope and sent it off to a firm of publishers. They were unimpressed, and sent it back. He tried again, submitting the book to several other firms. They too rejected it. It was not until October, 1908, and the unexpected intervention of President Roosevelt that Kenneth Grahame’s fifth book, The Wind In The Willows, was finally published.
Grahame’s previous works — a mixture of pastoral description and whimsy, shot through with a deep note of sorrow — had some moderate success.
For their author, they were a vital respite from his work and from the long periods of illness he suffered. His mother had died young of scarlet fever and his father was an alcoholic, so Grahame and his siblings had spent much of their youth living in Cookham by the side of the Thames and being looked after by their grandmother.
Grahame was keen to go to Oxford, but was overruled by his uncle — now his legal guardian — who sent him instead to work for the Bank of England. Grahame hated his job at the bank, and began writing stories as a way of alleviating the boredom.
In their time, his first story collections, The Golden Age and Dream Days were as much loved as The Wind in The Willows now is. It was partly because Grahame had departed from a trusted formula that the critics disliked The Wind In The Willows.
But the public disagreed. They loved it, and have gone on loving it steadily for a century since. They loved it for its freshness and its charm, but above all for its intense evocation of the Thames and its vivid cast of characters — Toad (based, it is said, on Grahame’s young son Alastair) and Ratty, and Mole, and the creepy weasels in the Wild Wood.
Though Grahame was a Scot, the book is as utterly English as the Thames itself. It has been adapted, illustrated and dramatised countless times and in countless forms since its publication. Everyone from Alan Bennett to Arthur Rackham and A.A. Milne have been drawn to its gentle charm, and to the image it paints of a rural England still just visible today.
The success of TheWind in the Willows was so great and so immediate that Kenneth Grahame was finally able to give up his job at the bank. Even so, he never wrote another book; damaged first by Alastair’s suicide and by illness, he lived out the rest of his life quietly in Pangbourne, resisting all demands to write a sequel, before dying in 1932.
This year, to celebrate the centenary of The Wind in the Willows and to complement the permanent Wind in the Willows exhibition at Henley’s River & Rowing Museum, the Co-operative Bank Henley Literary Festival and A Word In Edgeways will be staging a new storytelling performance of Grahame’s masterpiece.
“It has been so popular with the schools that we have had to add an extra performance — there are now four for schools plus one at 4.30 p.m. open to everyone,” says festival director Sue Ryan.
Other events for children at the festival include Hugh Montgomery talking about Project Genie the hugely successful book about the environment and climate change written specifically for children. There are also creative writing courses and free children’s event on Saturday, Sept 20th, at Lovibonds brewery.
l The box office is open at the Regal cinema, 01491 414150, 12-7 p.m. Monday to Saturday. The festival runs from September 19th to 21st. More details available at www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk
Published on 18 August 2008
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