The Boy in the Willows

On Ratty, Mummy and a life of squalid sodomy

As a child, on a fleeting summer day, skinny-dipping was unsurpassed pleasure. The smell of crushed grass on the riverbank, the hum of darting insects and the splosh and drip of water. Dream days, when the cold silk of the river and the warmth of the sun renders us back to innocence.

What this scenario of childhood hours omits is the rather less halcyon reality. As the years passed I forgot how I had inevitably trodden my plimsolled feet through the crust of slick green cowpats walking through the field, how the brambles lacerated my legs and the nettles stung me as I struggled through the undergrowth to the muddy fringes of the river. And rather than emerging from the water like a naked glistening elf, I squelched out, mud-smeared and scratched, underpants saggy and wet, looking like a drowned rat.

Which was not the rat I wanted to be.

Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows has sat on my bookshelves as far back as I can remember. I still read it regularly as I did then. The bliss of sylvan childhood is nowhere more effortlessly evoked.

I was consoled by its portrayal of Mole’s adoring friendship with Ratty. It set alight in my imagination a longing for the happy domesticity of their lives. Two chaps drifting on the languid river, setting up home together, sharing everything. If ever Mole was distressed or unhappy, Ratty’s spirits would be there to brighten the mood. And in the background there was the deep avuncular affection the rather more serious Badger had for his young friends.

The book was given to me by Granny Jean. I never knew her. She was the mother of Johnnie – my first adopted father. A swashbuckling widow and great socialite – she had run off with a US army colonel from Vermont with a passion for fox-hunting. There is a photograph of me with her in a London park. I am two or three years old, standing at her feet gazing up at this wonderfully glamorous woman.

Granny Jean had taken Mummy under her wing, introducing her to a racy set around Knightsbridge. Gays aplenty, I later discovered. Apparently the two women were quite the life and soul of the party.

Years later, I had returned to the farmhouse to box up books to take to a new flat. A letter fell out of my copy of Wind in the Willows. It was from a beautiful boy with blond curls. Mummy found it on the floor. Like the story of the riverbank, it was sweet and harmless – full of ardent love.

She on the other hand was blistering with damnation. Brandishing the letter, “You must give up this life of squalid sodomy,” she screamed. “We will pray together, for you to overcome this.” I was certainly not in the mood to submit to her religious fervour. And moreover, I was rather abashed at how well informed she was – clearly far more so than I at that early stage in my life as a homosexual. I was dreaming of Brideshead Revisited and Maurice. Sodomy was still a far off diversion.

Once the boxes were packed into my car, it was all quickly brushed under the kitchen table – on top of which tea and buttered crumpets were politely served. Like all unpalatable incidents in my family, it was never mentioned again. But whenever I reach for the green cloth bound edition of my favourite book, I think of my bejewelled grandmother and the handsome boy I had loved.

I used to read to my husband in bed when we first met. I would do all the voices. I have always identified with Mole. He thinks I am more like Toad. Poop Poop!