Member-only story
The Wind in the Willows
Rich read and review
I first read The Wind in the Willows when I was nine. Or, perhaps I should say, it was read to me – softly, as I lay cocooned in a quilt my grandmother had sewn, the faded fabric smelling faintly of lavender and age. The words flew over me, rich and unfamiliar, like a language I didn’t quite understand but somehow felt. At nine, I didn’t know about nostalgia, but I knew how it felt – the ache of those riverbank stories, the longing to stay in them forever.
Decades later, I picked up the book again and found myself startled by what I hadn’t seen the first time. This was no story about talking animals. It was something far stranger and profound hidden in a children’s tale. Grahame was doing something almost illicit here, smuggling poetry and philosophy into a book one might at surface value, mistake for bedtime fluff. But that’s the genius of The Wind in the Willows — it doesn’t announce its brilliance. It ambles into it, like Mole stumbling out of his hole for the first time, blinking at the spring sunlight.
The opening chapters still feel, to me, like the start of a great romance – not in the modern sense, but in the old-fashioned way — a courting of the senses. Mole’s impulsive departure from his underground home, his discovery of the river, and Ratty’s little boat read like an ode to innocence rediscovered…
