The first I read more than once, loved it but at that age was rather annoyed by “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter. I now know it was probably the point of the whole book, but very much a thing of the early 20th century. Think Australian artist Sydney Long for example.
My eBook Library has this American edition of The Wind in The Willows.
Beautifully illustrated too.
The wayfarer was lean and keen-featured, and somewhat bowed at the shoulders; his paws were thin and long, his eyes much wrinkled at the corners, and he wore small gold ear rings in his neatly-set well-shaped ears. His knitted jersey was of a faded blue, his breeches, patched and stained, were based on a blue foundation, and his small belongings that he carried were tied up in a blue cotton handkerchief.
When he had rested awhile the stranger sighed, snuffed the air, and looked about him.
“That was clover, that warm whiff on the breeze,” he remarked; “and those are cows we hear cropping the grass behind us and blowing softly between mouthfuls. There is a sound of distant reapers, and yonder rises a blue line of cottage smoke against the woodland. The river runs somewhere close by, for I hear the call of a moorhen, and I see by your build that you’re a freshwater mariner. Everything seems asleep, and yet going on all the time. It is a goodly life that you lead, friend; no doubt the best in the world, if only you are strong enough to lead it!”
“Yes, it’s the life, the only life, to live,” responded the Water Rat dreamily, and without his usual whole-hearted conviction.
“I did not say exactly that,” replied the stranger cautiously; “but no doubt it’s the best. I’ve tried it, and I know. And because I’ve just tried it—six months of it—and know it’s the best, here am I,footsore and hungry, tramping away from it, tramping southwards, following the old call, back to the old life, the life which is mine and which will not let me go.”…
“You are not one of us,” said the Water Rat, “nor yet a farmer; nor even, I should judge, of this country.”
“Right,” replied the stranger. “I’m a seafaring rat, I am, and the port I originally hail from is Constantinople, though I’m a sort of a foreigner there too, in a manner of speaking. You will have heard of Constantinople, friend? A fair city and an ancient and glorious one…”
That’s quite high-level writing really, looking at it now. But at 11 I just lapped it up!
I also read of all things James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr Chips! I recall borrowing it from the Sydney Boys High Library and reading it in my room in Vermont Street Sutherland, with tears streaming down my face towards the end! I think I visualised Mr Chips as my grandfather, Roy Christison, a great country teacher himself.
When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape. It was like that for Chips as the autumn term progressed and the days shortened till it was actually dark enough to light the gas before call-over. For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past; and well he might, for he lived at Mrs. Wickett’s, just across the road from the School. He had been there more than a decade, ever since he finally gave up his mastership; and it was Brookfield far more than Greenwich time that both he and his landlady kept. “Mrs. Wickett,” Chips would sing out, in that jerky, high-pitched voice that had still a good deal of sprightliness in it, “you might bring me a cup of tea before prep, will you?”
When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and drink a cup of tea and listen to the school bell sounding dinner, call-over, prep, and lights-out. Chips always wound up the clock after that last bell; then he put the wire guard in front of the fire, turned out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed. Rarely did he read more than a page of it before sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming.
He was getting on in years (but not ill, of course); indeed, as Doctor Merivale said, there was really nothing the matter with him. “My dear fellow, you’re fitter than I am,” Merivale would say, sipping a glass of sherry when he called every fortnight or so. “You’re past the age when people get these horrible diseases; you’re one of the few lucky ones who’re going to die a really natural death. That is, of course, if you die at all. You’re such a remarkable old boy that one never knows.” But when Chips had a cold or when east winds roared over the fenlands, Merivale would sometimes take Mrs. Wickett aside in the lobby and whisper: “Look after him, you know. His chest . . . it puts a strain on his heart. Nothing really wrong with him — only anno domini, but that’s the most fatal complaint of all, in the end.”
Anno domini . . . by Jove, yes. Born in 1848, and taken to the Great Exhibition as a toddling child — not many people still alive could boast a thing like that. Besides, Chips could even remember Brookfield in Wetherby’s time. A phenomenon, that was. Wetherby had been an old man in those days — 1870 — easy to remember because of the Franco–Prussian War. Chips had put in for Brookfield after a year at Melbury, which he hadn’t liked, because he had been ragged there a good deal. But Brookfield he had liked, almost from the beginning. He remembered that day of his preliminary interview — sunny June, with the air full of flower scents and the plick-plock of cricket on the pitch. Brookfield was playing Barnhurst, and one of the Barnhurst boys, a chubby little fellow, made a brilliant century. Queer that a thing like that should stay in the memory so clearly. Wetherby himself was very fatherly and courteous; he must have been ill then, poor chap, for he died during the summer vacation, before Chips began his first term. But the two had seen and spoken to each other, anyway.
Chips often thought, as he sat by the fire at Mrs. Wickett’s: I am probably the only man in the world who has a vivid recollection of old Wetherby. . . . Vivid, yes; it was a frequent picture in his mind, that summer day with the sunlight filtering through the dust in Wetherby’s study. “You are a young man, Mr. Chipping, and Brookfield is an old foundation. Youth and age often combine well. Give your enthusiasm to Brookfield, and Brookfield will give you something in return. And don’t let anyone play tricks with you. I— er — gather that discipline was not always your strong point at Melbury?”
“Well, no, perhaps not, sir.”
What a thing for an 11-year-old to be reading! But I also lapped up comics, Biggles, William of course…. But Mr Chips eh! Now I find myself dreaming not of Mr Wetherby’s study, but of Cronulla High almost 60 years ago, or Dapto more than 50… Or of reading books in my room in Sutherland almost 70 years ago….
But what a movie! Starred my mother’s heart-throb Robert Donat, but I didn’t get to see it until after 1956 as not until then was there television in Australia, and it may have been very late 1957 before we had one. In Kirrawee by then.
Neil's Commonplace Book 