Toad of Toad Hall and the "poetry of motion"

How I came to revise my opinion of the mercurial amphibian in The Wind in the Willows.

Swaggering Down the Steps by EH Shepard

Growing up in the Devon countryside in the second half of the last century, I used to come across an abundance of wildlife on the farm. None of it was very large or generally very threatening. This was a relatively gentle world, though still red in tooth and claw, where mesopredators like the fox reigned. Even sightings of those timid aggressors were rare.

Mostly I’d see hedgehogs, frogs, an occasional snake and quite often, toads. Sometimes these would be swimming around in a cattle trough on the edge of a field, an undisturbed place for them during the winter when the cows were kept indoors.

In the farmhouse during winter, the focal point of our lives during those winter days was the kitchen rayburn which would provide heat to the room as well as function as a stove and oven. And my mother would sometimes use it to make a dish called toad in the hole. The name was not appealing, but it was a warming and delicious meal in winter. ¹

But none of the encounters with the creatures of the wild (or the imaginative name of an English recipe) reminded me much of the animals I’d come across in storybooks, such as Kenneth Grahame’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, which featured a small children’s zoo of animals ranging from badgers to water voles to weasels—and, of course, a toad.

Somehow, the animals of this classic book, which I loved as a child, had no connection with the animals I might see on the farm. They inhabited very separate worlds, one a landscape of imagination and story, the other of the mud-splattered realities of life in the English countryside. Their world, though, was a vivid alternative reality for me to slip in and out of as a child and even into later life.

I was reminded of the book recently when looking for a suitable painting for my post Round the world in seven and a half cars. The one I chose, Abstract Speed – The Car has Passed (1913) by Giacomo Balla, transported me to a particular scene in Grahame’s novel, where Toad is instantly transfixed by the rush of a passing car.

It seems remarkable that Balla’s painting and Grahame’s novel were only five years apart in composition. Certainly, the latter’s whimsical anthropomorphic tale belongs to a very different aesthetic from Balla’s brash invocation of the majesty of speed and engines.

Yet Balla’s painting and the scene where Toad is mesmerised by speed both perhaps owe something to JMW Turner’s 1844 classic, pulsating painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway.

Of course, Balla’s painting looks forward to a brash new mechanical world, while The Wind in the Willows mostly feels full of nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing rural way of life. However, the two visions of passing automobiles both anticipate, in their different ways, the 20th century’s emerging obsessions with speed and the motorcar.

That scene with Toad in The Wind in the Willows has stayed with me my whole life. This may be because it brought some of the best prose out of Grahame, and I’d like to quote the scene at some length.

Toad and his friends are on the road in his horse-drawn caravan (they have accompanied him because he didn’t want to go on a trip on his own) when, in a narrow country road (of the kind I was very familiar with as a child), the apparition appears.

Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out the dust a faint "Poop-poop!" wailed like an uneasy animal in pain. Hardly regarding it, they turned to resume their conversation, when in an instant (as it seemed) the peaceful scene was changed, and with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the nearest ditch. It was on them! The "Poop-poop" rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment's glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.

Following this, Toad immediately jettisons his previous hobby of horse-drawn caravanning. He becomes besotted with cars and speed, and this leads to a series of wild misadventures. Toad literally drives the plot.

Since childhood I have laughed at Toad’s foolishness in following fad after fad and at his reckless addiction to speed. No doubt many readers do. But when I read the beautifully described scene now with its compelling portrayal of “breath-snatching” speed and the driver “ tense and hugging his wheel”, I see that this was about more than the carefree exchange of one hobby for another. For Toad, this was a kind of epiphany.

Unlike his more workaday friends, Toad is able to imagine another life and is willing to pursue that vision.² Toad is absurd here, sitting in the road and reciting “poop-poop!” in imitation of the car horn. But he is also alert to what he calls “the poetry of motion”. He is not very likeable at this moment (he generally isn’t terribly likeable, though he can be generous with his friends), but he is able to see something the others cannot grasp and envision worlds whose existence they cannot imagine.

Of course, it’s a folly on Toad’s part. But as I look back on my life, I too entertained more than one chimaera in the zoo of my mind. There was the time I thought I could become a teak farmer in South America – I still have old spreadsheets filled with impressive-looking numbers about how this would work. I also entertained the idea of leaving my steady job and pursuing a PhD, despite having no money with which to do so. ³

And later in my career, at a time when I was well established in my leadership career with the British Council, I seriously considered giving it up and instead working in Spain as a teacher or translator, far away from the stresses and strains of public service. ⁴

Like Toad, I was chasing ghosts of inchoate plans of escape (as I saw it). I wanted, in the British idiom of my era, to “jack it all in” and pursue a different life which would be more to my taste. Unlike Toad, I didn’t follow through.

These thoughts bring me almost inevitably to some famous amphibians in English literature, Philip Larkin’s poem, Toads. In this well-known work, the poet imagines what it might be like to give up the apparent imposition of his steady job in which he works six days a week.

He thinks of others who he sees as having an easier life:

Lots of folk live on their wits:

Lecturers, lispers,

Losers, loblolly-men, louts-

They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

They seem to like it. ⁵

Later, in Toads Revisited, Larkin would conjure up a beguiling world of ease enjoyed by those who no longer work but idle their hours away among

The lake, the sunshine,

The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises.

But he dismisses this option for himself:

Not a bad place to be.

Yet it doesn’t suit me.

This takes us back to the first of the poems, where he explains to himself why he can’t shake off “the toad work”.

For something sufficiently toad-like

Squats in me, too.

Perhaps I can also recognise something like that in myself—in the shape of an oppressive abundance of prudence.

But if I look back on my working life now, although Larkin’s toads come to mind, it’s mostly Kenneth Grahame’s Toad, with his feverish pursuit of what he’d later call “that swan, that sunbeam, that thunderbolt!”, that I reflect on.

I no longer feel that the difference between Toad and me is simply that I was sensible and responsible and that he was foolish and rash.

The difference is also that he had the courage to chase his dreams, give himself up to the poetry of motion and run after sunbeams, no matter the consequences. And I did not.

1. "Usually in America, toad in the hole refers to an egg cooked in the hole cut out of a piece of bread. But in England, it's sausages cooked in what is essentially Yorkshire pudding."

2. It helps, of course, that he has the means to do so, as he is apparently independently wealthy.

3. My idea for this came after reading Linda Colley’s wonderful book, Britons. A story for another day.

4. This desire became especially intense after a series of disagreeable encounters with UK government ministers in the course of my duties.

5. As an anti-intellectual and conservatively minded librarian at a university, Larkin couldn’t resist a dig at lecturers and their lighter workloads (as he saw it), many of whom would have had very different politics from him.

---

Dear readers, if you’d like to support the work of ERL and join us in our next Supporter Sidebar, you can do so by subscribing here at 50% off forever. This offer ends on 5th October 2025.