‘Then you don’t promise,’ said the Badger, ‘never to touch a motor-car again?’
‘Certainly not!’ replied Toad emphatically. ‘On the contrary, I faithfully promise that the very first motor-car I see, poop-poop! off I go in it!”
Last week, General Motors filed for bankruptcy — 14 factories will close, 21,000 jobs will go. As Tim Reid wrote in The Times, this marks the fall of a mighty giant: the company that invented the tail fin, power steering, automatic transmission and the self-starting engine. “Bye, bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry . . .”
The car made the United States we know it now — a place of interstates and gas stations, where the sure sign of a real loser was someone who had to ride a Greyhound bus. As other countries aspired to be as the United States was (great, successful, rich!) so they aspired to the culture of the car. Britain’s first motorway was the Preston bypass, which opened in 1958; the first section of the M1 came a year later. The Wind In the Willows was published exactly 50 years before the Preston bypass, but in the book were intimations of how destructive an obsession with the petrol engine could be.
It’s always a pleasure to reread Kenneth Grahame’s early classic of eco-lit; one can only feel sorry for Toad as he pays the price for his passion. Norton’s fine new edition is covetable and informative (did you know that Toad drove an Armstrong Hardcastle Special Eight?); the scholar Annie Gauger has uncovered extraordinary new material on Kenneth Grahame, his troubled life and the story’s origins.
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As GM falls, is this the end of the road for our love affair with the car? I doubt it. We are all more like Mr Toad than we would like to admit.
The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame edited with a preface and notes by Annie Gauger. Introduction by Brian Jacques, W. W. Norton, £28