The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and once declared: ‘Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.’
It is Dennison’s contention that for Grahame the clock stopped even earlier. ‘I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner,’ he quotes him writing in 1907:
I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain I used from four to about seven can never have altered … After that time I don’t remember anything particularly.
Grahame was effectively orphaned at five when his mother died and he and his three siblings were removed from their alcoholically unreliable father to live with their maternal grandmother at Cookham Dean in Berkshire.
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