The Real Main Character

Anyone who reads the literature of the United Kingdom comes to recognize the one character that all writers from Great Britain include in their tales, although it is almost never given a name. It is so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of both British society and its storytelling that to remove this character from a book would be to change the entire nature of the book, without altering any of the plot or dialogue.

It is the land. The bustle and mystique of London, the beauty of the Highlands, the windswept mystery of the outer islands—every city, town or village the site of thousands of years of recorded history, all packed into an area just over half the size of California.

For me, a kid who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, the British Isles were literally a fairy-tale place with their rolling green meadows, their trees whose names were familiar to me only as street names, their tradition of monarchs granting land to feudal lords who in turn ruled over their lands and tenants in a relationship that has no analogue in American society, enshrined in British law as “right to roam,” meaning that anyone has the right to hike and camp in the wild places of Great Britain. The land’s mark upon its people, as evidenced by their habit of adding the word “British” to nearly anything, thereby assigning a certain superiority to it, permeates The Wind in the Willows. I suppose we are all a product of where we grew up—I consantly miss the stark beauty and comforting warmth of the desert I grew up in—but as a child, I couldn’t help but feel what Germans call “fernweh,” a feeling akin to homesickness felt for a place one has never been.

For American writers, giving readers a sense of place can be a challenge. Thanks to television and movies, all big cities have become generic, and the US has such varied landscape that it might as well be 50 entirely different countries. Very few Americans live in the same place their great-great-grandparents lived, and many don’t even know their own family trees that far back. Perhaps that is why Americans can’t get enough of British literature.

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh, but spent most of his childhood in Inveraray (a village in western Scotland), and then in Cookham Dean, Berkshire, where Grahame’s uncle introduced him to boating, and the inspiration for The Wind in the Willows likely took hold.

Think for a moment what The Wind in the Willows would be without the river, the woods, or the fields—the story of four animals in a zoo would hardly have kept so many generations spellbound! I will leave you with this beautiful description of the glories of the English countryside, and the hope that after you’ve read these wonderful stories and poems, you might pick up The Wind in the Willows, and revisit its lovely places.

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.

And what a play it had been! Drowsy animals, snug in their holes while wind and rain were battering at their doors, recalled still keen mornings, an hour before sunrise, when the white mist, as yet undispersed, clung closely along the surface of the water; then the shock of the early plunge, the scamper along the bank, and the radiant transformation of earth, air, and water, when suddenly the sun was with them again, and grey was gold and colour was born and sprang out of the earth once more. They recalled the languorous siesta of hot mid-day, deep in green undergrowth, the sun striking through in tiny golden shafts and spots; the boating and bathing of the afternoon, the rambles along dusty lanes and through yellow cornfields; and the long, cool evening at last, when so many threads were gathered up, so many friendships rounded, and so many adventures planned for the morrow.

Lise Quintana