1
Edinburgh is distinguished. Even today, when most towns have sunk into a sameness of shopping precincts and supermarkets, it preserves its dramatic, haughty flavour. As if alarmed by its own theatricality, it is courteous rather than kind, and hard-bitten rather than enthusiastic. "East windy and West-Endy" was the traditional Glasgow description of it, uttered with some complacency from that western city's warmth and social cohesion, and it is true that Edinburgh tends to be, in every sense of the word, cool. And yet, to come to it by train, under the shadow of the sheer cliff on which the Castle stands, is to be aware of an ineffable grandeur. The underlying geography of the place dominates the town; for all the classical architecture and leaping bridges and the grand boulevard of Princes Street, Edinburgh cannot dismiss the impressiveness of the rock and the water and the ever-moving sky. The strident rhythms of "Caledonia stern and wild" rise from the childhood memory of anyone old enough to have grown up in a familiarity with that torrent of verse, and it is perfectly plain why this city is the capital of Scotland.
At Edinburgh's heart lies a controlled energy like the radioactivity of its granite, kept in check by the severity of the material itself. Somewhere within its very geology, there is a hard, formal magic. In the mid-nineteenth century, that intrinsic flavour must have been much stronger, undiluted by the visual blanketing of modern architecture and the universality of chain-stores, banks and building societies. For Kenneth Grahame, who was not old enough to understand the city in any conscious way when his parents removed him from it, the sense of powerful landscape, more real and dependable than any construct of human beings, remained throughout his life the most dominating influence.
Castle Street rises from the Caledonian end of Princes Street, directly opposite the craggy height of the Castle itself. Above the new shop-fronts, the tall terraces are still gracious and, in their midst, a little before the roundabout at the crossing of George Street, one particular house is outstandingly impressive.
Number 32, now the offices of a chartered surveyor, is double-fronted, with a total of six floors rising from the basement to the small servants' rooms set into the grey slate roof. Curved railings of a modest, practical kind flank the two stone steps which lead to the front door, and the windows are tall and beautifully proportioned. A plaque on the wall used to read, "Kenneth Grahame of the Golden Age was born here", though it has now been replaced by one which cites Grahame as the author of The Wind in the Willows. It seems odd, perhaps, that the original made no reference to the famous book; one might think that "the golden age" was a sentimental description of the time in which Grahame lived.
In a sense, this is true. For his contemporaries, it was not as a children's writer that Grahame was known, but as an essayist and rememberer of his own childhood. Long before Toad and Mole and Rat were thought of, adult Victorian readers were responding to Kenneth Grahame's revelation of the child's point of view in a book which both shocked and enchanted them. The Golden Age, published in 1895, is a half-fictionalised account of growing up, recalled with nostalgia and rueful humour, and with an underlying thread of anger which dispels any trace of mawkishness. It was for the authorship of this that the original plaque commemorated him, and it is odd to realise that, in the eyes of those who put it there, our own view of Grahame as the writer of a classic children's book would be quite unfamiliar. To his late-Victorian contemporaries, Kenneth Grahame followed a well-established literary tradition, being an essayist very close in character to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was only nine years his senior.
This, too, comes as something of a shock, for The Wind in the Willows has the feel of a twentieth-century book, whereas Stevenson seems not far removed from the Victorian grandeur of Sir Walter Scott. The connection was, in fact, tangibly present in the young Kenneth's life, for Sir Walter had lived for twenty-four years just across the road, at 39 North Castle Street. The house is there to this day, narrow and bow-fronted, much less grand than the Grahames' residence further down towards Princes Street, despite its owner's eminence. Although the great man left there in 1826, he was such a towering figure of his time that his presence was still felt in Castle Street after his departure, and those who read Scott in our own time might reasonably say that Edinburgh is even now imbued with his spirit.
The Grahames' house has much to say, in its silent way, about the background which made Kenneth the complex, self-guarding person he was. The architecture itself embodies contradictions. Built in the grand style, there is a touch of the arrogant aestheticism which speaks of absolute financial security, and yet the design stops short of flamboyance. The silvery granite of the north-east has none of the near-foppishness of Bath. There is a decent restraint implicit in the plain façade of this house, and, too, in the almost Roman breadth of Castle Street. The Scottish capital is the antithesis of New York, where the streets are canyons packed with human activity and self-obsession. In Edinburgh, the wind-blown sky and rocky landscape form an active part of the city and impose their own reminder that humankind is not all-powerful. It expresses the essential Scottish contradiction between creative energy and a God-fearing respect for the way things are. Whoever ran the big house in Castle Street would need to observe both elements in order to keep a proper balance between ostentation and modesty.
Kenneth Grahame's father, James Cunningham Grahame, could not keep that balance, for he was unable to find it within himself. He was an aristocrat born into the failing years of aristocratic rule, when the newly rich businessmen were taking over from the easy old power of the cultured, high-born families. On both his mother's and his father's side, Cunningham Grahame could trace his descent back through the Stuarts to Robert the Bruce, and he had inherited an aristocratic confidence which, coupled with a low boredom threshold, made him impatient with the mundane details of everyday life. Ostentation ruled him. He was a bon viveur, a poet, a spender of money; a popular man with a taste for good claret which brought him more friends than his unenthusiastically pursued legal career. As a king, he might have been splendid, but royal freebooting was a vanished option. The more recent generations of his family had gone into banking and law, while the earlier ones had generally settled for the Church.
Religion added its own tensions to the situation in which Cunningham found himself. His instinctive desire to be happy and idle was directly opposed to the Calvinism which had dominated his childhood. He was a man whose inner being was charged with a sense of excitement and infinite possibility, but he had been sternly taught to repress these feelings. He obediently studied law and became an advocate, and kept his writing of poetry so secret that it would never have been known at all but for a note by his cousin, Colonel John Grahame, saying that Cunningham "was a poet of no mean order, with a wonderful spirit of imagination".1 Such creativity was more likely to be thought of by his elders as Original Sin than originality. As a result, the young man felt a guilt about his own nature which prevented him from being what he wanted to be, while he could not with enthusiasm be what he was supposed to be. His appearances in court had a certain popular following among his colleagues, but more for their entertainment value than the thoroughness of their preparation - and he drank heavily.
On 13 March 1855, when he was twenty-four years old, Cunningham married Bessie Ingles, the beautiful and extremely practical daughter of David and Mary Ingles, of Heriot Row, Edinburgh, and brought her to the house in Castle Street. He himself had lived at 118 Princes Street. Although Cunningham's father had been a lawyer, in the family tradition, Bessie came of merchant stock, and had been born in Gibraltar. World travellers are apt to have an airy confidence about them, and Bessie had certainly inherited or acquired this quality. At eighteen, she was full of gaiety and charm, and Cunningham adored her. A daughter, Helen, was born to them a year after their marriage, followed in 1858 by Thomas William, always known as Willie.
The third child, Kenneth, was born in the icy morning of 8 March 1859, when the east wind, according to family legend, scoured along Princes Street and snow lay in the gutters.2 Dr James Simpson, whose pioneering use of chloroform in childbirth had become fashionable ever since Queen Victoria availed herself of it, came to the house just before dawn, and by eight in the morning had delivered Bessie of a hefty baby. Shaking hands with the proud father on the doorstep as he went out, Simpson guessed, rightly, that the child weighed little short of nine pounds. And, he said with optimism as he pulled his sealskin coat more tightly round him, blossom-time would not be long.
"The beloved professor", as he was generally known, may have felt that the family whose house he was leaving had cause to be optimistic. Cunningham and Bessie were a handsome young couple, well supplied with life's necessities. Compared with the births he had seen in his earlier years among the insanitary closes round the...
