The Man in the Willows by Matthew Dennison

Author:Matthew Dennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

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‘I hardly feel I tread the earth I only know that thou art mine’

APPROPRIATELY, IT WAS a courtship of words. By letter Elspeth requested that Kenneth ‘save thy heart for me’.1 In his letters Kenneth offered her the devotion and physical ardour that gripped him intermittently. He committed himself by letter, too.

And what letters they were. Early on, Elspeth affected rusticity – ‘Zur, Plaze to vorgive that I make so bold as to write-ee’ – like a milkmaid or serving wench in a sentimental comedy; then her side of the correspondence disappears.2 Kenneth wrote to her in a mixture of music-hall Cockney and baby talk: his letters are studded with childish mispronunciations, contrived spelling mistakes and elongated Cockney vowels, all conveyed phonetically. In this mawkish Darby and Joan play-acting, Kenneth was ‘Dino’, Elspeth ‘Minkie’, the grounds for these aliases now lost. It was not always a smoothly loving exchange: Kenneth’s letters betray exasperation as well as fondness. If Elspeth had slackened her chase and Kenneth been less kind and decent, he would certainly have slipped away.

He was promoted early in 1898 from acting secretary of the Bank of England to secretary. It was an administrative and executive role, concerned not with devising policy but overseeing its implementation and, bar the dilatoriness of his approach, ideally suited to Kenneth’s good-natured tact, his common sense and the respect his lack of partisan politicking had already won for him. Laconically Kenneth described his role as ‘writ[ing] letters… for one’s daily bread’.3 At the end of the year, to a second chorus of praise, John Lane issued Dream Days. The book consolidated Kenneth’s literary renown. His finances were comfortable, his position in the City assured.

Against this backdrop of professional and literary success, Grahame was enduring rapidly escalating ill health and feelings bordering on panic. 1899 proved crunch time. No record survives of Kenneth and Elspeth’s meetings over the previous year and a half: that there had been communication, contact, advances offered and accepted is clear from Elspeth’s behaviour subsequently and Kenneth’s letters. Elspeth’s single remaining letter contains a steely warning: ‘Now ’ee don’t think o’ me, do ’ee? Happen he forgets the garden and all that stood in’t… But he spook kine [kind], and the trees heard ee, and I remember.’ [my italics]4 In February, Kenneth experienced a recurrence of the old familiar bronchial problems in the form of a severe cold. Elspeth fell ill at the same time. From his bed, he wrote her his first Dino/Minkie letter. He thanked her for a copy of Moby-Dick, admitted that he felt ‘orfle slack still but am wearin down the cold grajjly’, that he was lonely and low in spirits; he called her ‘darlin’, described himself as ‘your own luvin Dino’.5 Pet names and loving expressions indicate the distance travelled since that first accidental meeting in Onslow Square.

Kenneth complained at the prospect of returning to the bank. ‘Don’t like goin ter work tmorrer one bit. It dus seem a shame wen I can do nuffin so well & other people aint no good at it torl.

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