Thursday 3 July 2014

Mr Toad, Middle Earth and Boris Johnson

This text was written originally for the programme for the London Nautical School production of A. A. Milne's "Toad of Toad Hall".

To say that “The Wind in the Willows” is a strange story is like calling Cambridge a small town with a disproportionate number of Nobel prize-winners in it: an understatement. The tale of a small Mole who finally leaves, like a certain Hobbit, his hole in the ground and discovers Rat, Badger and, of course, the unforgettable Toad has endured because it speaks to a point much greater than its fairytale appearances suggest. Alejandro Jodorowsky, when working on his film version of Frank Herbert's “Dune” confessed he had never actually read it. When it was put to him that that might be a good idea he replied that some stories live in the shared consciousness of mankind, too great and powerful for one version to be definitive. Of this sort, I shall suggest, is Grahame's tale.

It has been a source of inspiration for generations of eccentrics, whether they knew it or not. The original singer of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was considerably under its spell, naming the first Floyd album "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" after the book's first chapter. The Floyd, that most Cambridge of bands, drew attention to and considerable inspiration from the vision of benign, possibly aristocratic oddballs "larking about" by a river.

The link with Oxbridge and the sixties counterculture is not the only connection to "The Hobbit". Tolkien’s story, "The Willows" Oxford equivalent, reveals in its contrasts the different approaches to learning those institutions have historically affected. The Hobbit is serious, shot through with long poems and concern for the future of the state. Willows, like Cambridge, loves nonsense, the natural world, and replaces high aristocratic elves with faded tweed and stately homes in need of upkeep.

Yet the scenario is fundamentally the same: a small scrap of life, a grammar school boy from the provinces if you like, falls in with an experienced traveller and is embroiled in a conflict which takes in the local great and good as they turf out corruption. It is the amazement of Mole which sustains the story, just as it is Bilbo's wide eyed astonishment at what befalls him which sells The Shire to us in Tolkien's rather po-faced children's book. That Middle Earth has become a media juggernaut whilst Willows remains strictly for the cognoscenti only strengthens the essential contrast.

In the characters he created, Grahame has left on our literature the template of the upper middle classes and lower aristocracy as seen by a debutante. Mole is our eyes, literally blinking in the bright light as he meets the smooth talking young tyro (Rat, takes a third in divinity in the end we somewhat suspect, to no particular consequence), the erudite, brilliant Don (Badger, perhaps published extensively in his youth but lately content to trot out the same lectures from decades old notes) and most memorably, Toad.

Toad is everyone's rich mate. He's the guy you meet during Freshers and go and stay with in the summer. He's the ludicrously generous, immensely funny minor noble who awaits "something turning up" in "the foreign office or whatever". He has no idea what he is studying, but great granddad built the college so what?! In short, he is Boris Johnson in Bullingdon best, tossing a cheque to the proprietor of the restaurant he just smashed up before opening a bottomless bottle of champagne on the night bus and giving most of it away. And like the cat in Monty Python, Mole, who we cut back to, blinks, rubs his eyes, blinks again.

The light which is let in by this story, which penetrates deep into suburban holes, is the promise that life can be lived, that scholarship boys still get invited to the ball, that one can be the " great wheel as it rolls downhill": the same one which Lear's Fool warns us not to cling to. This might not be as bad an idea as the Fool suggests , witness BoJo himself, the master of the Hapless Oaf Gambit, dangled from a high wire during the Olympics, literally rising in everyone's estimations, Parp Parping and Toot Tooting his way to media victory, the master of his private revels.

To declaim that the story is dated, nostalgic and classist is to miss the point: it holds the promise of an endless idyll, where summer never ends and where the weasels never corrupt our institutions for long. So whilst Peter Jackson green screens another six hours of deadly aristo-elf tedium, sit back and enjoy the shambles, like inductees into a great secret: the Piper is still at the Gates, and Dawn just breaking