The Willows in Winter Read online

  How long Toad gloried in this wonderful world of bright light and endless space none could say, least of all himself He was absorbed by the views, and the freedom, and to one who had been chained and fettered by the likes of Badger for so very long (as it seemed to him) time was of no account before such limitless wonders.

  “I am” he began to say to himself as he banked one way and then another and hummed to himself at the same time, “I am a Toad extraordinaire, a magnificent Toad! None is my equal. What Toad, what creature, has ever showed such capacity, such expertise, such brilliance with so powerful a machine as I have today?

  “Alone I did it and alone I do it. I, Toad, care not for your Honours and your Sirs and your Lords, for I am sovereign of all I survey!”

  With wild words and ever more outrageous ideas such as these — and more, and worse — not to mention various songs of triumph and conquest which he made up by the moment and sang into the sun-filled air that streamed by, while the real world remained cut off by the bright clouds below him and his infernal machine, Toad lost himself utterly in his own selfish pleasures.

  “Toad is up, high in the sky,

  Toad is up and away.

  Toad is the monarch of all he surveys,

  Toad is not stuck down below!

  There goes Toad

  And Toad goes there,

  And they’re all down below!

  Toad is great

  It was not long before Toad, having grown tired of singing his own praises, imagined that others must be singing them as well. It was but a short step — and a short flight — to modify his self-centred song in a way that others might sing it if, as he would have wished, they could see him flying his machine so brilliantly.

  “Look at Toad! He’s high in the sky;

  Look, he’s up and away!

  He really is monarch of all he surveys,

  While we are all stuck down below!

  He’s a wonder is Toad,

  A wonder to see,

  But us? We’re stuck down below!

  “Yes you are!” cried Toad over the edge of his craft to his imaginary admirers. “But I’m not! Nor ever will be again, tra la la —”

  Toad is up, high in the sky,

  Toad is up and away

  Toad is…

  — and he was off again into his song, chortling, laughing, almost weeping with the pleasure of it all.

  That all could change and be lost in a moment did not occur to him — not even when the machine’s engine spluttered and stopped briefly for a moment or two, before starting up once more.

  “Ha!” cried Toad. “Nothing can defeat me, nothing!” Not even when the machine seemed to slow a little, and not pull out of his latest loop the loop as fast as it had before, so that it skimmed briefly through the clouds below and plunged him into misty gloom before heaving and shuddering its way at his heavy touch up into light once more.

  “Not me, not us!” he cried, as if the machine was now alive and had become his friend.

  No, not even when, as the machine spluttered some more, the sky ahead darkened quite suddenly, the sun was gone and the prospect before him was no longer glorious nor fine, but heavy with the swirl of cloud-laden winds.

  “We’ll turn from all that — that nuisance’ said Toad, pointing a mocking figure at what even he could tell were stormy winds, “and return once more to that —that —”

  He was going to say, “That light and wondrous place where I was but moments ago and which is surely still there somewhere behind me”, and he was going to bank the obedient machine again to go back where he had been and so forget about the “nuisance” into which he was flying.

  But bank and turn he could not, nor could he speak. The engine’s spluttering grew worse, and the darkness of the skies seemed to surround him and take him and his machine upwards with a power far greater and more dreadful than any he might have imagined for himself. Then, as suddenly as he had been taken up, he was plunged unerringly down, down, down into darkness, far faster than he had gone down before. As this nastiness began something else happened, and right in front of his very eyes: the propeller stuttered, stopped briefly, started for a few laboured revolutions and then stopped utterly, as finally and inevitably the fuel ran out.

  No amount of frantic pushing and puffing at the controls, or twisting of the joystick, or looking about for something else, anything else, to make the propeller start again, had any effect at all. And still the machine plunged down. The terrified Toad, realising that his game was up, or rather on the way down, could see little, for his goggles were covered by what seemed mist, then black stinging rain, and the exposed part of his face was assaulted by a wind no longer bright and clear, but one dark, and cold, and savage.

  “Help!” bleated Toad, turning back to see if by some miracle the Rat, having fallen out of the machine earlier when he no longer needed him, might perhaps have fallen back in again when he did. But no Rat was there to rescue him now.

  A little later Toad re-opened his eyes — for he had closed them some time before — saw that the clouds were shooting vertically upwards and he and the machine therefore shooting downwards, and he huddled down into his seat and covered his head with his hands in the hope that his problem might go away.

  He dared open his eyes again only when the world about him lightened, and he found he was through the clouds and hurtling towards the ground, though not quite as vertically as he had thought. The propeller was just as motionless as before.

  Then the machine jolted, banked, shuddered and, slowly and inexorably, turned over and went along upside down, rocking from side to side in a very confusing way.

  Toad gulped, for somewhere above him — or was it to his side? — he could see what looked suspiciously like ground, very solid ground, with trees, and rivers and fields, and not far off, houses.

  “The Town,” he said aghast, “we’re going towards the Town.”

  Now while this was generally true, the route became a somewhat errant and chaotic one, for Toad and his machine were caught up in the very centre of a storm of wind and rain and cloud. This caused him to loop the loop in ways unimaginably horrible, and to fly upside down at speeds quite intolerable, and to shoot off at angles quite incalculable before, unerringly, the storm winds brought him back to the one place he had no wish to go, or to be seen near, which was, as he had rightly told himself, the Town.

  It spread unavoidably wider as he got nearer to it, and he saw all its terrible detail: the Cathedral, for example, with all the suggestion of sinfulness and retribution it implied; the Police Station, large and square and unmistakable, which loomed towards him from below, and towards which the machine seemed to twist and twirl and throw out embarrassing signals of contempt and disdain; while nearby, even more imposing, dark and sombre in its crenellations, the Court House reached up towards Toad threateningly as his machine helter-skeltered down towards it.

  “No!” cried Toad rather desperately “O no!” he whimpered, beating the wooden dashboard of the machine and then in his panic looking down past his seat at its flimsy floor as if he half hoped there might be a back stairs there down which he could scramble to safety, and escape.

  But all this seemed as nothing when — the Cathedral, the Police Station and the Court House successfully flown over, and Toad beginning to think that perhaps the winds might let him down gently in some quiet and private field from where he could slip away and return to Toad Hall, never to go astray again — when he saw (and though he was upside down again, and going sideways he knew it instantly) something he had never ever, not once, wished to see again.

  It had walls dark and dolorous, it had a keep huge and impregnable, it had great stout gates of wood and horrid rusting nails, and it had a dungeon, deep and dank, where once, a lifetime before as it seemed, he had been confined: it was the Castle.

  Towards this place, which was the highest, thickest, darkest castle in all England, with the lowest, dampest, most dungeony dungeon imaginable, his
machine now rushed through the air.

  “Out is surely better than in!” Toad now cried terribly, gripping the side of the machine and heaving himself up against the forces that held him down. “They shall not confine me again! Death is better than such a life as that! I, Toad, aviator and explorer, shall go gloriously to my final liberty, saying farewell to everybody now!”

  With that, and the prospect of crashing into the Castle too much for him to bear, Toad leapt clear, his fear of death infinitely less than his fear of the fate that lay in store for him if he were recaptured by the forces of justice.

  And indeed, had not the very thoughtful and resourceful Rat tied the cord of his parachute to the fuselage Toad might well have fallen to his doom — a doom, some might say, which he partly deserved. But Rat had secured the cord, and Toad had not tumbled far when with a sudden and unexpected jolt, and a loud report above him as the air filled his parachute, he found himself floating towards the ground.

  As he did so his machine, which had seemed set on a course destined to bring it somewhere near the top of the impressive Castle keep, leapt in the air as it was lightened of its load, skimmed over the top of the castellations, and went slowly on to crash harmlessly somewhere in the empty meadows beyond.

  Meanwhile, Toad discovered that the winds had not yet quite finished with him. It was not, it seemed, parachuting weather, and his passage down was accompanied by several return journeys upwards as, quite helpless, and nearly suffocated by the strapping around his middle and chest, and with his goggles all steamed up, and his body bitterly cold, he made a slow and erratic descent towards the earth.

  It was not in Toad’s nature to count his blessings, remarkable though they were, but rather to assume them, as spoilt animals usually do.

  “I am, then, alive,” he was saying to himself as he made his erratic descent, “and I therefore remain the clever and insuperable Toad I was before — before my attempted self-sacrifice. Clearly, I was not meant to be caught and confined, and I shall not be. I shall land in that verdant field of which I dreamed only a short time before, and from there I shall decide what route to take, and what my future holds.

  “Flying was fine while it lasted, but now I am returning to earth I declare I feel a certain happiness and contentment. Let none say I have not lived, nor seek to guess what the future may hold for one as full of genius as I!”

  The ground was now coming uncomfortably close, except that it was not mere common ground towards which he was floating, even Toad could see that: it was some vast estate — a good bit vaster than his own —with a huge house, and outbuildings, and all the accoutrements and more that such estates generally have. Unfortunately it was towards a particular part of it that Toad now found himself helplessly drifting, and the nearer he got to it the less he liked what he saw He tried tugging at the strings of his parachute in a vain attempt to change direction somewhat.

  “Only a little bit, that’s all I need!” he muttered to himself with increasingly alarm.

  Since that produced no change, and if anything seemed to bring him ever more swiftly and inexorably towards the object of his fear, he tried waving his arms about, and wiggling his legs and feet in a most ridiculous way But it was all to no avail. Destiny may have saved his life (so far) but destiny seemed intent on punishing him all the same.

  For what Toad found himself floating so rapidly towards was a great and shining tropical hothouse, which looked quite as big as Toad Hall itself, and which was filled, as he could all too plainly see, with tropical trees and jungle blooms. It was true that these might at least cushion his landing, but it was what he must first crash through to reach them that concerned him.

  Nor could there be an easy getaway if he made so spectacular a landing. The noise alone would surely bring forth the whole estate — though one thing, at least, seemed in his favour: by some happy chance there was not a single worker or person about who might be witness to his descent.

  The shining glass and white metal structure of the hothouse was rushing up at him. One moment it was there, all neat, perfect, elegant beneath him, the fronds of greenery just beyond, and the next there was a crash! and a thump! and Toad was —Toad was —

  — coming dizzily to his senses to discover that he was neither in nor out, but rather betwixt and between. The top half of his body, his head, shoulders and arms, was stuck outside the superstructure into which he had fallen, with bits of wood and metal, and nasty shards of broken glass, poking at him from all sides or lodged irredeemably in his thick jacket, whose lambskin and thick inner lining had undoubtedly saved him from anything worse than heavy bruising, and a few cuts here and there.

  His lower half, from his middle down, seemed to dangle a very long way below him and felt — and here he could count a single blessing at least — pleasantly warm. His parachute was spread to one side across the unbroken curves and elevations of the hothouse, where its silky folds swayed and fluttered in the light breeze.

  Toad tried to heave himself up, hoping perhaps to clamber onto the roof and then slither down its shallower angles and so to the ground. No good. He could not raise himself.

  Toad tried to lower himself, by drawing in his stomach and chest and so slide down into the branches and foliage of whatever rough tree it was in which he now felt his legs dangling. But that was no good either. Neither up nor down could he go.

  “Help!” he shouted, though rather half-heartedly, for he still entertained the hope that he might free himself and be off before he was discovered.

  “There ought to be some common worker about,” he thought to himself “some fellow who for a small consideration — though it will have to be the promise of one since I have no actual money on my person — will release me, and ask no questions.

  He peered from his ungainly, if superior, position about the extensive and well-kept lawns and vegetable gardens, and towards the impressive walls and windows of the House itself— for help, and with an expedient eye to future advantage if he was detained. But his reflections were interrupted by a rapidly growing sense of discomfort down below, equalled only by a conflicting sense of discomfort up above.

  For in his lower half, where his legs and feet were dangling and unable to get any purchase or hold on the foliage, the agreeable warmth he had felt earlier was rapidly building beyond warmth into a hothouse heat. Indeed, the lower half of him felt very much as if it had been immersed in a bath that is a shade too hot, and for which there is no conveniently placed jug of cold water to cool it down a little.

  While above, where his head and shoulders were, the air was cold, very cold indeed. And getting steadily colder, as it seemed to Toad.

  “I am —” he began.

  But he could find no word adequate for what he was, since one vital part of him was bitterly cold, and the other vital half was fearfully hot.

  “I must escape,” Toad told himself, his vocabulary failing him and beginning to struggle once more, “for if I do not I shall die of— of pneumonia.”

  Toad now began to panic, beating at the tough glass about him, which though it had been so easy to fall through now proved quite impossible to dislodge. He wiggled his feet and toes downwards, only to find that mounting, terrible, humid heat below was now being aided and abetted by the tickling, and the scratching, and the malevolent rasping, of the spiny leaves, and prickly fruits, of the upper branches of the exotic tree into the top of which he had fallen.

  It was not long before Toad began to imagine the worst of outcomes: the pneumonia — he already had a headache, and could feel a sore throat coming on very fast — would overtake his frail body; and while his lower half suffered heatstroke his upper part would freeze. It would be a dreadful fate.

  “Help!” he cried again. “Let me down! Money is no object!”

  These cries went unheard, and despite the fact that so vast and rich an estate must surely have a vast staff, not a single person was to be seen, or appeared to have seen him. He might as well have landed on the moon,
or on a deserted island, for all the signs of life there were.

  Then, in the distance, he heard the bark of a dog.

  “Help!” he cried. But no help came.

  Then Toad heard, again out of sight and in the distance, a door opening, a snatch of male laughter, and then the scrunch of feet on gravel.

  “Help, you heartless fools!” cried Toad, whose teeth were by now chattering, but whose lower half was being braised in that tropical hell beneath him.

  “Help! Help! Help!” he cried again. “Surely you can see me up here, can’t you? I’m —” He was about to say he was Toad of Toad Hall, for he assumed that those below would be common staff who would be impressed by who he was. Yet he was still sufficiently composed to remember that beyond the river, beyond his own estate, Toad of Toad of Hall was not merely persona non grata, but, in some eyes, a common felon and escaped prisoner, and it might be better if he did not reveal his identity.

  “I’m — an aviator in distress!” he bleated, which was the best he could offer.

  Then the opening of another door, a metal one, and a vibration in the superstructure around him, followed by the clank of feet upon the kind of cast-iron grille that often lines the floors of hothouses, caused him to fall silent and still. He would wait and see who they were, these fools and dunderheads, and if they seemed friendly and sensible, and likely to yield to a small consideration in return for freeing him and saying nothing, then he would call down to them.

  He could have wished that the foliage that tormented him would fall as still as he now tried to, but it did not. It continued to tickle at him, to scratch him, and to make him want to scratch and itch his legs, which he could not, unless he raised one foot and scratched the other leg with it, which surreptitiously he did.