THE LAST YEARS
gayest and happiest of all his illustrations; for the work was rendered most arduous for him, first by Mrs Rackham’s increasingly serious illness, then by his own gradually failing health. But he began the task immediately: a letter from the author’s widow, Mrs Kenneth Grahame, at Pangbourne, is dated 8th September 1936. In it Mrs Grahame says that she will be ‘very glad’ to help Rackham ‘to discern the special spots on this reach of the river that might be connected with Toad, Mole and Company’, and she continues:
‘The trees which are such a feature along the river-bank here are really more full of “drawing” when the leaves are off – but you may not be able to wait for this aspect – or you may wish to see them (the trees) both in leaf & later on in branch. I know that Kenneth wrote to a small schoolgirl in an elementary school, who had written a prize essay on “The Wind in the Willows” – “I have always thought of ‘Toad Hall’ as being on the Oxfordshire side of the river” – & I know a house, Elizabethan but somewhat ornate, that might serve as a model. There is a lovely backwater where Mole & Rat may have boated, & a spit of foreshore where the swans nest, on which a year or two ago 2 baby otters were found. …
‘I rather hope you may not be time-driven to come till the weather is better again –as at present it is too windy to go on the river – which you might wish to do.
‘I shall be glad to help in any way in my power to show you the scenes & settings most appropriate to your purpose. …’
There was no hurry; Rackham’s drawings show trees that are bare and trees that are in leaf; he took-several walks beside the river with Mrs Grahame. By the spring of 1938, he could report only limited progress, however, and in the autumn of that year he went into the Oxted and Limpsfield Cottage Hospital for an operation for internal
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