Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Reading through these reports today one’s eye is caught by the occasional discordant remark, such as Lockwood’s aversion to the constant round of exercise and sport that was such a feature of Anglo-Indian life. Like the son who followed him, Lockwood’s stature and myopic eyesight barred him from anything that required athleticism. Forced to attend the races, he reported that ‘some are born horsey but few, by taking thought, achieve horsiness’; polo he thought little better than ‘hockey on horseback’; and golf he dismissed as ‘a puerile, purposeless and preposterous game’, adding that he ‘would rather drive a hearse than walk solemnly about in a red coat after a ball’.40 Thirty years on Rudyard was to echo these same sentiments in pouring scorn on ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’.41

  What is even more striking about these newspaper articles is the frequency with which one particular note is sounded: that of the jaundiced observer who has seen it all before. ‘Things interest us here only through persons,’ was how Lockwood summed up Bombay Society. ‘There is little else to furnish us with the gentle mental exercises of which we are capable … Thus the quarrel between Robinson and Green, which rages in official foolscap; the flirtation of Mrs Brown and Mr Jones, is my opera; the careful study of ladies’ bonnets and dress in church has all the interest of the Royal Academy … These things, and many more, are provided by a bountiful Providence for the entertainment of mankind.’42 Five years as a badly paid teacher in Bombay’s Department of Public Instruction did not make him a seasoned koi hai who knew all the ropes, but that was how he presented himself. It was a trick his son picked up and improved upon, sometimes to a degree that made him almost insufferable. With both men it was a case of the outsider eager to ‘pass’ as an insider.43

  However benevolent Lockwood appeared to his Indian students, his political views matched those of the proprietors of the Pioneer. Whatever nonconformist opinions he may have held in England, in India he trod the line, accepting the shibboleths of the day, which were that socialising with Indians was undesirable, political reforms that allowed Indians a greater share of government dangerous and Indians in general untrustworthy – particularly the educated ones. One of Lockwood’s first duties as the Pi’s Bombay correspondent was to report on a degree ceremony at Elphinstone College. Whether out of respect for his proprietors’ views or because he himself thought it right to do so, he mocked the Indian graduands in their academic gowns and mortar boards, declaring his deep veneration for ‘the force of character displayed in our resolute imposition of the time-honoured forms of England on our Aryan brother. I like to see familiar folk in unfamiliar guise, especially when robes of learned state cover garments of Eastern cut.’44 Throughout his time in India Lockwood Kipling clung to the Macaulayite view that Indian philosophy, science and history was so steeped in superstition as to be valueless: ‘There are many lies in history, but Hindu writers are remarkable for having deliberately and of set principle ignored all the facts of life. All is done, however, with such an air of conviction and pious purpose that we must use Dr Johnson’s kindly discrimination and say they are not inexcusable, but consecrated liars.’45

  Not all Anglo-Indians shared these views. At this same time a small but growing number of Civilians were working to reduce the racial divide, idealists like the Bombay judge William Wedderburn, who had came out to India barely three years after his elder brother, sister-in-law and niece were murdered by mutineers in 1857. Wedderburn considered himself to be a ‘servant of the Indian people’, so much so that he came to be regarded by his seniors as a ‘one-sided fanatic’46 and was passed over for high office before retiring to become an active supporter of the Indian National Congress in the House of Commons. But men like Wedderburn were the exceptions. Even a liberal reformer like the scholarly administrator William Hunter believed that British rule in India meant ‘order in place of anarchy’.47

  Seen in this light, Lockwood Kipling’s illiberal attitudes, however reprehensible they now appear, were no more so than those of the Anglo-Indian mainstream. Like so many of his peers, he had time only for those Indians who posed no threat, exemplified by the figure of the Indian ryot. It is no accident that the most offensive of his newspaper articles are those that mock Anglicised Indians, and the most sympathetic those portraying Indian farmers and artisans. The drawings Lockwood brought back from the North-West Provinces and those he did later in the Punjab are suffused with a real understanding of the harsh lot of the Indian peasantry and the artisan. During his up-country tour of 1870 he had watched a young woman herding buffalo in the rain, presenting

  the most pathetic Arcadian figure one could possibly imagine as she flounders after her wallowing buffaloes, screaming hoarsely against the wind and sweeping rain … Her limbs are sometimes as smooth and as round as any that Pradier carved but slime covers them and the rain chills them to an unlovely texture of goose-flesh, and she sets the muscles of her face so hard against the bitter weather that she acquires the sullen fixity of a wild animal … Happily, it is not given to her to know how utterly wretched she is, and what a leaky dog-hole is the damp hutch in which she sleeps; how coarse and poor her food, how grim and hard her life.48

  The arrival of a troop ship in Bombay Harbour in February 1871 and the landing of British troops allowed Lockwood to write no less sympathetically about the lot of the British common soldier. ‘The opinions of Private Jones, Corporal McSweeney, and Sergeant Maloney,’ he wrote in an uncanny anticipation of his son’s ‘Soldiers Three’,

  on novelties of scenery, manners and customs are not perhaps so fresh and suggestive as one might imagine; indeed for all they seem to see they might as well travel in close blinkers like shy horses; but the native-and-to-the-manner-born way in which all ranks and sexes take to elephants, dhoolies, camels, tattoos, bullock-gharries, and all sorts of hitherto unimagined modes of progression, is a striking instance of our powers of adaptation which superficial foreigners insist we do not possess. Private Jones, fresh from the soul-destroying furnaces and igneous abominations of the iron-works of England, jogs along through a medieval country, arranged, if only he knew it, on principles he has never hitherto seen in operation, and smoking his pipe gazes with incurious eyes on – Arcadia!

  In April 1870 Alice gave birth to the Kiplings’ third child, a boy they named John, who lived only a few days. What effect this little tragedy had on the family can only be guessed at. However, when a child’s dismembered hand was found by Alice in their Bombay garden her distress was enough to frighten the children. She forbade them to ask her any questions and it was left to their ayah to explain this ghoulish mystery: that the hand had been dropped by a vulture feeding on the corpses left exposed by orthodox Parsis in their Towers of Silence on nearby Malabar Hill.

  A more distant brush with death that also seems to have left its mark occurred late one night when their mother returned early from a burra khana or grand dinner and told Ruddy, who was still awake, that ‘the big Lord Sahib had been killed and there was to be no Big Dinner’. In adulthood Kipling took this event to be the assassination of the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, knifed by a convict while on a visit to the penal colony of the Andaman Islands. However, Lord Mayo’s murder took place in February 1872, ten months after the two children had left India. The identity of the victim remains a mystery, since the Indian term Lat Sahib was applied only to the highest in the land such as Viceroys, Lieutenant-Governors and Commanders-in-Chief. The incident could well reflect the general air of insecurity among the British community in India at a time when there was much talk of Muslim conspiracies and ‘Wahabee’ plots against the Government. Clearly some traumatic event – perhaps his mother’s distress at the loss of her third child – took place at this time shocking enough to lodge in a sensitive child’s memory and to add to the night fears that remained with Ruddy into adulthood.

  Perhaps it was just as well that Lockwood’s appointment as the Pioneer’s Bombay correspondent came at this same time, for it marked th
e start of an upward turn in his fortunes. For the first time in five years the Kiplings could afford to take a holiday, and as soon as the School’s summer term ended they joined the rush of Europeans and wealthy Parsis who fled the Hot Weather by taking refuge in the Hills.

  The nearest thing to a hill-station that Bombay possessed was Matheran, sited high on a ridge on the first range of the Western Ghats some fifty miles due east of Bombay, and approached only with difficulty and expense. Less exclusive but far more accessible was the Hindu pilgrimage town of Nassik, situated ninety miles away on the banks of the River Godavari. Nassik was close to the Bombay, Baroda and Central India railway line linking Bombay to northern India and was served by Deolali railway station, soon to acquire notoriety on account of its transit camp and the military sanatorium established there for British soldiers deemed to be ‘doolally’. The ruler of the princely state of Bhavnagar owned a comfortable bungalow directly overlooking the Godavari, to which a friend of the Kiplings employed by the maharaja had access. Here the four Kiplings spent a blissful summer holiday, marred only by both the children and their father suffering a bout of intermittent fever, treated in the formers’ case by laxatives and quinine laced with honey and jam – the subject of a pen and ink sketch by Lockwood showing an extremely chubby child with jam all over his face and captioned ‘Ruddy’s Idea of Heaven’.

  Nassik was celebrated as one of four Hindu holy sites in India where the nectar of the gods had fallen and was visited by pilgrims in their thousands, who came to bathe in the river every morning and to cremate their dead on its banks. That the boy saw a lot more than a glimpse of this Hindu India can be judged by an interjection made by little Punch as Ayah tells her tale in ‘The Potted Princess’: ‘Like the holy men I saw at Nasik on the mountain?’ he asks. ‘They were all nungapunga [stark naked] but they showed me their little Gods, and I burned stuff that smelt in a pot before them all, and they said I was Hindu.’ That Ruddy at four years and eight months had acquired a working knowledge of Maratha as well as Urdu is shown by an exchange with his mother afterwards related to Mrs Rivett-Carnac. ‘Ruddy for a while coveted the possession of a donkey, but came to me the other day saying, “Never mind of that donkey. I’ve seen a little white horse, & the man will let you have it for four rupees.”’49

  It was here at Nassik, too, that Alice Kipling was given the abiding image of her four-year-old son clasping the hand of a local cultivator and calling back to her, ‘Goodbye, this is my brother.’50 The word used here is bhai, which includes members of one’s own caste or local fraternity as well as one’s brother. It extends into the term bhai-bhand, denoting a brotherhood which binds men together as in a regiment, Masonic lodge or school and demands loyalty to an almost sacred degree. It was a concept that Ruddy came to hold very dear in his early adulthood, and it is tempting to see in this bucolic vision of child and peasant hand in hand a metaphor for the urge to reach out across cultural and class divides that was to become such a striking feature of his work.

  Despite recent advances in medicine and hygiene the fear of her child contracting a fatal disease such as typhoid haunted every European mother in India. Whooping cough was rarely fatal in itself, but the paroxysms of coughing it brought so debilitated small children that they became vulnerable to other maladies. So when Ruddy contracted whooping cough after their return to Bombay he was subjected to a strict regimen of hot baths, chest and back rubs with brandy and salad oil mixed in equal parts, and a nightly purgative consisting of ipecacuanha wine. The appropriate dose for a four-year-old was one and three-quarter drams in two ounces of water, which Ruddy took in his stride. An evening routine was established whereby his mother read to him as they waited for the emetic to take effect, but under strict orders to stop reading the moment he put up his hand and said, ‘Now!’

  Two other vignettes from this same period have also been preserved, both testifying to the precocity of brother and sister. One is of the four-year-old boy puzzling over his identity and exclaiming, ‘I cannot imagine what God made me of. It cannot be dust, because there’s red blood inside me!’51 The other, also theological, comes from Henry Rivett-Carnac:

  One day Master Ruddy had left a small quantity of pudding uneaten. ‘You must finish that,’ said the sister, ‘or God will be angry with you.’ ‘Boo, boo,’ replied the delinquent, ‘then I shall change my God’ (as he might his dhoby or washerman). But his sister, who claimed superior technical knowledge, replied authoritatively, ‘You can’t change your God, it is the Sirkar’s [Government] God.’ And Rudyard, realising even at that early age, thanks to the gorgeous chaprassie who accompanied him on his morning walks, that he occupied a sort of official position under the Government, which carried with it certain responsibilities, surrendered.52

  Doubts have been cast on the authenticity of this story, first because its author evidently believed Trix to be the elder of the two children and secondly because it is unlikely that the Kiplings would have employed a chaprassie – a uniformed Government employee whose emblem of office was a chaprass or brass badge worn on a red sash. But the exchange itself, recounted by the proud father to Rivett-Carnac in a letter, seems authentic enough.

  At the end of the Cold Weather of 1870–1 Lockwood was offered the renewal of his contract for a further three years and the opportunity of a six-month furlough. Despite numerous appeals, the staff and students at the Sir J. J. School of Art were still living in the temporary sheds erected in the year of the Kiplings’ arrival in Bombay. ‘The works had been calculated to stand for three years only,’ complained Mr Terry, the School’s Superintendent, to the Director of Public Instruction, adding in a subsequent letter that ‘Mr Kipling and myself have frequently been laid up through the unhealthiness of the rooms in which we have lived for several years … and the frequent rheumatic attacks I suffer from are much aggravated if not brought on by the damp atmosphere I am obliged to live in.’53 However, no funds were forthcoming and Lockwood and Alice Kipling had now to conclude that their children’s interests would be best served by removing them from India.

  On 15 April 1871 the four Kiplings sailed for England by way of the newly opened Suez Canal. For the two youngest it marked the ending of their innocence and the beginning of their years in exile. Ruddy was aged five years and fifteen weeks.

  3

  ‘A double death’

  SOUTHSEA AND LAHORE, 1871–7

  God’s mercy is upon the young,

  God’s wisdom in the baby tongue

  That fears not anything.

  Rudyard Kipling, from the introductory verses to ‘Tods’ Amendment’, April 1887

  The Kiplings arrived in England in late May 1871. A wet month at the seaside in Sussex was followed by a round of family visits. The last, in mid-September, was to Bewdley, where widowed Mrs Macdonald found Ruddy to be a ‘dear, good child’1 – which makes what followed all the more puzzling.

  The Anglo-Indian custom was to settle one’s children with a close relative before returning to India. All Alice’s sisters except the unmarried Edith had produced offspring: Georgie and Ned Burne-Jones’s children Philip and Margaret were now aged ten and five. Ambrose Poynter and Stanley Baldwin, born within a month of each other, were aged four. So Ruddy and Trix had four cousins with whom they might have been expected to share more than the occasional visit. They also had their maternal grandmother living at Bewdley with their Aunt Edith, and Lockwood Kipling’s mother up at Skipton, both of whom offered to have the children; as did the Baldwins, if with the proviso that Ruddy be shared out between several households. But for reasons never satisfactorily explained the Kiplings chose to leave them with strangers – a married couple who had placed an advertisement in a newspaper offering to foster children whose parents were stationed in India. That Alice Kipling was the prime mover in this can be deduced from letters which show that she saw the children’s education as her responsibility rather than her husband’s, but Lockwood must surely have been complicit.

  Acc
ording to a family friend, Alice spoke of ‘complications’,2 but what these were can only be guessed at. However, all her married sisters’ husbands now enjoyed a degree of financial security and public recognition denied her own spouse, and some insight into their perception of Lockwood Kipling’s work can be gleaned from a comment made by Agnes Poynter in a letter in which she declared herself to be ‘more and more ashamed of John’s mission to that country’.3 It may be that Alice was determined not to be beholden to her family and that she still smarted from the hostility shown towards her boy two years earlier. Years afterwards Trix was to comment to her cousin Stanley Baldwin that Ruddy was ‘about as spoilt as he could be when we came home in 1871’,4 and the awkwardness of dumping this undisciplined, wayward, unlettered brat on one or other of her sisters seems to have been more than Alice was prepared to bear.

  On 1 October 1871, as Lockwood’s six-month leave drew to a close, the Kiplings travelled to Southsea on the south coast and handed over the children to the care of the woman they were told to call ‘Auntie’: Mrs Sarah Holloway, who, together with her husband, an elderly naval captain, and their twelve-year-old son Harry, occupied Lorne Lodge, at 4 Campbell Road, Havelock Park, Southsea. In Ruddy’s and Trixie’s semi-fiction this became the ‘House of Desolation’ and Mrs Holloway ‘Aunty Rosa’. In Kipling’s autobiography she is referred to simply as ‘the Woman’.