Imagination

Often, when reading or being read to, we find the busy stage director in the subconscious who furnishes us with the story's settings drawing them from our own world. So, as Olivia read us The Wind in the Willows, Toad Hall, with its 'mellowed red brick' and'well-kept lawns', appeared to me as the Rectory; the WildWood, 'low and threatening', was Blackdown Copse, which lay on the horizon south of Kingsdon St Mary; and the railway station whose red and green lights caught the attention of thefugitive Toad was a station I'd seen, on a visit to school sports meeting with Olivia one autumn afternoon, crowning an embankment beyond the darkening playing field. (Mounted on a sky of juicy strawberry and orange, like my favourite double-fruit-flavoured chewy bar, cut from a velvet as rosy black as a blackrose, was silhouetted not only this station but a signal outside itset at red - and how beautiful that ruby cushioned in rosyblack was - and a shunting engine which, magical as any strange beast of romance, restively huffed and clanked and, against the fruity sky, raised aloft a plume of blue. And no silhouette of castle and forest illustrated in some fabulous tale could have enchanted me more than that symbol of the modern age that I saw before me. Symbol of the modern age, and one of quintessentially suburban magic...yet nonetheless seeming to me then not to belong to everyday life… to be a glimpse of the opening to another world...)

All that scenery from my own life more or less fitted the bill assettings for the story, But, because when we are very young there is only a comparatively small stock of it to draw upon,sometimes, unbeknown to us, the shadowy stage director is desperately forced to offer up as a suitable setting for a
particular episode scenery that is no such thing. So, for the River, with its 'rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble', the only remotely appropriate river he could trunde out was a stream on the other side of the village, where I used to look for sticklebacks. Clear but slow-moving, bedded with dusky pink, slaty blue,and milky buff pebbles, overhung with alders and permeated by a faint odd sour smell, it had little in common with that stretch of the Thames that inspired Grahame. But the child's visualising imagination when it reads has little critical sense (not that the adult's in the same situation has much more) it will swallow anything. And so, as I listened to those chapters featuring the River, I accepted without a second thought the mental stage flats of the village stream that were presented to me,
they no more lessened the enchantment of those episodes than actual stage flats poorly painted can spoil our enjoymentof a finely directed and acted play.