Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  The two children – ‘a sturdy little boy not quite six and a spoilt baby of three and a half’5– were abandoned at Lorne Lodge without any explanation beyond Ruddy’s being told that he must learn to read and write so that his parents could send him letters and books. They were woken before dawn, hugged and put back to bed again, and when they next woke it was to find that their mother and father had vanished. In their bewilderment the children turned to Mrs Holloway, only to be informed that they had been left behind ‘because we were so tiresome and she had us in out of pity’. Ruddy refused to accept this explanation and questioned the kinder Captain Holloway, who told him that ‘Papa had left us to be taken care of because India was too hot for small people’. But even this answer failed to satisfy: ‘We knew better; we had been to Nassik, the Hill Station of Bombay. So what could be the real reason? We couldn’t think and it worried us terribly.’6

  In Something of Myself Kipling describes Lorne Lodge as ‘an establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors.’ In her determination to break his will Mrs Holloway subjected the boy to beatings, solitary confinements in the cellar or the attic, threats of eternal damnation and constant vilification that continued throughout the six and a half years he spent under her roof.

  In his later years Kipling rarely let the mask slip, but at the age of twenty-three he sat down and in rage and anguish wrote the most directly autobiographical of his short stories, ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ – the tale of little Punch and his even littler sister Judy who are abandoned by their parents to the ministrations of Aunty Rosa at the House of Desolation. In it he came as close as he ever would to expressing his real feelings about the hurt done to him as a child. At the end of the story Punch tries to reassure his sister: ‘We are just as much Mother’s as if she had never gone.’ To which the writer of the tale responds: ‘Not altogether, O Punch, for when young lips have drunk deep of the waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’

  Several biographers7 have accused Kipling of indulging in dramatic licence in writing of the House of Desolation, but his best defence comes from his sister. A few months after his death in January 1936 she typed out her own no less harrowing account of their Southsea years in ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’, a companion-piece to Rudyard’s ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. A decade later she returned to the subject in a scripted BBC radio broadcast talk entitled ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’.8 She also discussed it with his first biographer, Lord Birkenhead, informing him that she and her brother had never spoken of their time at Lorne Lodge because ‘it hurt too much’.

  Because she became something of a pet to Mrs Holloway, Trix suffered less. But in ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’ she describes her terror when Aunty Rosa first tried to discipline her by making her stand on the high table at which the two children did their lessons. Judy finds this a terrifying ordeal: ‘She was afraid of falling over the edge, and being dashed to pieces on the red and blue carpet; which used to sink further and further away while she grew colder and colder, and a funny noise, like a boiling kettle, only louder, sang in her ears. She wasn’t allowed to hold on to Punch’s long hair, though he offered it to her as a lifeline, or even his sleeve.’ That fear, suggests Trix, will remain with Judy for ever: ‘She might forget grey striped squirrels, or kind brown faces in Bombay, but anything that hurt or frightened her could not be forgotten. She was not a brooding or vindictive child, but pain and terror, especially terror, seemed to dig a groove in her brain, and she could no more efface it than she could turn her blue eyes brown.’

  Outside their fiction, neither brother nor sister ever admitted to having suffered any lasting psychological damage. In Trix’s case, Lorne Lodge turned an already highly strung child into a desperately insecure one. Ruddy was of made of sterner stuff and was that bit older, yet the experience undoubtedly brutalised him. Trix always clung to the illusion that the House of Desolation did her brother no lasting harm: ‘My brother should have grown up morbid, misanthropic, narrow-minded, self-centred, shunning the world and bearing all men a burning grudge. Whereas, of course, he grew up just the opposite.’9 But what Trix could not see, others did, for both as a child and as an adult Rudyard Kipling displayed traits that match precisely Trix’s list of the characteristics her brother did not possess. The future Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, an exact contemporary, met Ruddy briefly in London when they were both about ten years old and retained a memory of a boy who was ‘extraordinarily clever and exciting though there was something in him that repelled me’.10 He was particularly shocked by Ruddy throwing stones at a cat. Other commentators and biographers have made much of Kipling’s appetite for revenge and the unpleasant note of sadism that crops up in so many of his stories.

  Of the two children, it was Trix who came closest to admitting that the real harm done to them lay not so much in Mrs Holloway’s cruelty as in their parents’ betrayal:

  The real tragedy … sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us. We had had no preparation or explanation; it was like a double death, or rather like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar … We felt we had been deserted ‘almost as much as on a doorstep’ … They had gone back to our own lovely home, and had not taken us with them. There was no getting out of that, as we often said.11

  None of the Kipling and Macdonald relatives seem to have had any inkling of the ill-treatment suffered by the Kipling children. Eleven months after their arrival at Lorne Lodge their Macdonald grandmother and two of their aunts spent a fortnight at Southsea and noticed nothing untoward, Mrs Macdonald even observing in her diary that the two children were ‘well and happy’, seemingly ‘attached to Mrs H.’ – and ‘much improved in manners’.12 But as Kipling explains in his autobiography, ‘Badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of the prison-house before they are clear of it.’ His sister offered a similar explanation, with a different simile. ‘She did not know,’ she wrote of her grandmother, ‘that well-trained animals watch their tamer’s eye, and the familiar danger signals of “Aunty’s” rising temper had set us both fawning upon her.’13 The two children had learned to dissemble all too well.

  In her determination to reform the two children Mrs Holloway tried turning one against the other, which had the effect of making them intensely protective towards each other. As Trix put it in ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’, ‘Punch had always been Judy’s oracle, as well as her angel, so she did not love him less, only distrusted Aunty more.’ Where Mrs Holloway did succeed, however, was in her efforts to teach the children to read and write. According to Trix:

  Aunty Rosa thought it would be more convenient if we both learned to read at the same time. She instructed us together, the only difference being that our punishments were different. Rudyard, being six years old, and a man, was rapped over his knuckles with a ruler, whereas I, being a lady, was only made to stand alone on the table … Perhaps, however, this punishment sharpened my wits, because it is my boast that I learnt to read with fair fluency some weeks before he did.14

  Why Ruddy should have experienced such difficulty with his reading is hard to understand, but in his discovery lay his salvation. ‘I was made to read without explanation,’ Kipling writes in Something of Myself, ‘under the usual fear of punishment. And on a day that I remember it came to me that “reading” was not “the Cat sat on the Mat”, but a means to everything that would make me happy.’ Once the breakthrough had been made the boy read voraciously and at every opportunity, and when punished by being forbidden to read, ‘read by stealth and the more earnest’. Like Dickens’s David Copperfield, for whom books provided his ‘only’ and ‘constant comfort’, Ruddy found solace in his reading – along with the satisfaction and sense of power that came from outwitting his tormentor. And here, at least, their parents were able to
show they cared by sending books and magazines that both children pored over until they knew entire stories by heart. One of Ruddy’s favourites was an illustrated Robinson Crusoe, which he would take down to the basement of Lorne Lodge and use as a catalyst for his imagination: ‘My apparatus was a coconut shell on a red cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing-case which kept off any other world. Thus fenced about, everything inside the fence was real … The magic, you see, lies in the ring or fence that you take refuge in.’

  An even more valuable refuge was Ruddy’s annual visit to the Burne-Joneses for the Christmas holidays, beginning in December 1873 and continuing every Christmas thereafter – a refuge unaccountably denied his sister: ‘For a month each year I possessed a paradise which I verily believe saved me … At “the Grange” I had love and affection as much as the greediest, and I was not very greedy, could desire.’ Here Ruddy enjoyed the company of his two elder cousins and the ‘incessant come and go of young people and grown-ups all willing to play with us’. Best of all, Ruddy gained a surrogate mother in the ‘beloved Aunt’: Georgie Burne-Jones. Ned Burne-Jones’s ever-widening circle of artistic and literary friends meant little to an eight-year-old, but with each succeeding year this month-long immersion in a house filled with laughter, music, wit, intelligent conversation and bright colours became increasingly important: a vital transfusion of life as it could be lived that gave the boy hope and the knowledge that he was still loved.

  From the recollections of one of the many children born to Alice Kipling’s brother Fred, it is clear that Ruddy stayed from time to time with other members of the Macdonald family – and that, for all Aunty Rosa’s efforts, he remained as troublesome as ever:

  With insatiable curiosity and exhaustless enterprise, he often led the rest of us into trouble. But we in the nursery found him a delightful playfellow and storyteller, always full of enthusiasm and new ideas. I remember an occasion when he had his ears boxed by a railway porter for impudence, and he returned to our house swelling with rage and mortification. He stormed up and down the house, telling us all about it, then pulled himself together and returned to Addison Road Station to repeat the offence.15

  But the annual respite offered by The Grange was not enough. In Ruddy’s tenth year he became increasingly and unaccountably clumsy. In ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ he describes his alter ego Punch, now transformed into ‘Black Sheep’ by his irredeemable wickedness, ‘spilling everything he touched, upsetting glasses as he put his hand out, and bumping his head against doors that were manifestly shut. There was a grey haze upon all his world, and it narrowed month by month, until at last it left Black Sheep almost alone with the flapping curtains that were so like ghosts, and the nameless terrors of broad daylight that were only coats on pegs.’ Ruddy’s fear of this enclosing darkness grew all the more as it became increasingly hard for him to read his school books, when ‘even the pages of the open-print story-books danced and were dim’. His school work suffered, leading to further confrontations with Aunty which came to a head on a Monday morning dated by Trix to March 1877, but which must have been some four or five months earlier.

  Trix had been forbidden to see or speak to her brother over the preceding weekend, but on the Monday morning she was ordered to practise the piano in the front room with the curtains drawn. Disobeying orders, she peeped through the curtains and saw Ruddy walking to school ‘like an old man’, with a cardboard placard on the back of his jacket proclaiming him a ‘LIAR’ in capital letters. It has been suggested that this episode was borrowed by Kipling from David Copperfield, in which case Trix also entered into the deception, even to the extent of adding the detail that she ran down the street after her brother, unpicked the placard with a knife and danced on it in a rage. A screaming match then followed between her and the cane-wielding Mrs Holloway, which ended with the ‘scarlet-faced virago’ in tears. ‘It was the end of my childhood,’ Trix told her brother’s first biographer. ‘I was fighting for Ruddy as well as myself … He was too broken by fasting and beating to have any kick left in him.’16

  Over Christmas 1876, as the boy turned eleven, his Aunt Georgie noticed him behaving very strangely, hitting out at trees in her garden as if someone was threatening him and running across the room to touch the walls ‘to see if they were there’.17 In Something of Myself Kipling admits to having had ‘some sort of nervous breakdown, for I imagined I saw shadows and things that were not there, and they worried me more than the Woman’. His cousin Stanley Baldwin put it more bluntly: ‘The boy was half-blind, and crazed to the point of suffering delusions.’18 A retired medical friend of the Kiplings, who had known the child in Bombay, was sent down to Southsea to find out why he was suffering his hallucinations. Ruddy’s condition was very speedily diagnosed as ‘myopia of the seventh degree’ and he was taken to an optician in Holborn to be fitted out with bottle-lensed spectacles and a pince-nez which cut painfully into his nose.

  Thoroughly alarmed by the doctor’s report, Georgie Burne-Jones wrote at once to Alice Kipling in Bombay to tell her to come home.

  Alice Kipling had originally planned to return to England after not more than two years’ separation from her children, but for reasons that probably have more to do with straitened circumstances than parental neglect, five and a half years passed before she saw them again.

  Nevertheless, the Kiplings’ exile had been made a lot easier to bear by their increasing participation in the Anglo-Indian literary scene. In 1871 a new literary magazine had appeared, The Chameleon: An Anglo-Indian Periodical of Light Literature, printed on the presses of the Pioneer in Allahabad, its founder and editor Phil Robinson styling himself ‘Chameleon’. The magazine was made up of short stories, essays and verses, mostly by established Anglo-Indian poets and essayists such as Alfred Lyall and Henry Keene, but with enough contributions from hitherto unrecognised contributors to suggest that here was the makings of a new school of writing in India, one that was a little brash, poked fun at established authority and saw itself as defiantly Anglo-Indian.

  The second issue of Phil Robinson’s magazine, published in May 1872, included a short story by ‘L. K.’ and two poems by ‘A. L. K.’ The first was a romance inspired by Lockwood Kipling’s visit to Yorkshire the year before. Recounted in the first person by a bored Civilian on Home leave, it tells how on the train to Scarborough he encounters a pretty young lady, whom he afterwards observes emerging from a bathing machine on the seashore. He contrives to meet her and falls in love: ‘I was very far gone in what a brutal world calls spoons.’ The story ends happily with the narrator’s return to India with his new bride, who turns out to be the sister of his best friend. It is a tale that never quite lives up to the expectations raised by its opening aphorism, a literary trick afterwards adopted with greater facility by the son of the father: ‘That man is wise and happy beyond most of his fellows who knows how to get through a long holiday without discontent.’

  Alice Kipling’s two contributions as ‘A. L. K.’ were no better, the first a poem entitled ‘To Her Children at Home’ which tells of ‘a little girl, / Mother’s bonny baby’ and ‘a little boy, / Mother’s darling treasure’. Both ‘are gone, / Leaving Mother lonely, / With the laugh, and shout, and fun, / Now remembered only’. The last verse says it all:

  Little girl and little boy,

  Mother loves you dearly,

  It would fill her heart with joy

  Just to see you merely.

  Far away, night and day,

  Sadly does she miss you,

  And would give, I believe,

  All the world to kiss you.

  Today these lines read like something from a greetings card, but they would have struck a chord with The Chameleon’s female readers, and since Alice was never one to hide her own or her children’s talents under bushels we can assume that a copy of ‘To Her Children At Home’ was posted to Southsea and there gave Ruddy and Trix some comfort.

  The second published poem, ‘A Bargain’, was much more in
keeping with Alice Kipling’s reputation for wit and flirtatiousness. A pair of lovers plight their troth, but as they flirt the woman asks her lover if he can kiss her with lips as pure as her own, or have those lips previously made a vow ‘that’s broken now’? It ends:

  ‘But can you give me love for love

  And faith for faith?’ said she.

  ‘And is your truth like mine in sooth

  That you should plight with me?’

  Later issues of The Chameleon contained a more ambitious work of fiction from Lockwood Kipling entitled ‘Inezilla: A Romance in Two Parts’. Set partly in the Mediterranean and partly in India, it confirms that whatever other artistic gifts he possessed, writing fiction was not among them. Intriguingly, in the same issue which carried the first part of ‘Inezilla’ was an essay entitled ‘Concerning young men and their manners by a Lady’ that was full of sharp words about the pressures a married woman in India was forced to endure. The pseudonymous ‘Florence’ accuses Englishmen in India of forcing married women to receive their attentions ‘for politeness sake’, resulting in ‘those incessant flirtations which are so rife in Anglo-Indian society’. Surrounded on all sides by ‘danglers’ – unmarried young men thirsting for love – a married lady had ‘the alternative of receiving the attentions of one or two men who make it their business to pay them to her, or of receiving none at all’. ‘Florence’ sounds very like ‘the wittiest woman in India’ of fifteen years later.