Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Despite this background Cormell Price was a committed radical and a follower of the Pre-Raphaelite group – a most unlikely choice to be the headmaster of a public school with a strong military ethos. As one of his pupils afterwards described him, he was ‘in no sense a patriotic pedagogue’ but ‘a keen Liberal, a truculent Gladstonian, loathing Beaconsfield [Disraeli] … and sniffing scornfully at his institution of the title of Empress of India. Price’s attitude as headmaster was detached and philosophic, as befitted his association with the Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers in London and his friendship with Burne-Jones and Morris from his college days.’4 Rudyard Kipling put it more succinctly: ‘The Head was different, and in our different ways we loved him.’ Crom Price had an open mind and he treated each boy as an individual: ‘If you went to him with any trouble you were heard out to the end, and answered without being talked at or about or around, but always to. So we trusted him absolutely.’5

  Alice had been quick to write to Cormell Price to remind him of their past friendship and to enquire about the school and whether her son was eligible.6 At the time even the modest fees demanded would have been too much for the Kiplings, but two years on their circumstances had improved considerably and in May 1877 she wrote again, giving details of Ruddy’s level of education and saying that she was thinking of enrolling him as a day-boy while she herself took lodgings nearby. In the event she changed her mind and he became a boarder at the start of the spring term in January 1878.

  United Services College (USC) was a ‘long white barrack by the sea’ made up of a row of twelve brick lodging houses on a stretch of exposed ground beside the sea at Westward Ho!, a settlement just outside the town of Bideford in north Devon. The school had opened in 1875 with some two hundred pupils on the roll, a good number of them rejects from Haileybury. In consequence there was a lot of beating and bullying of the younger boys, one of whom was ten-year-old Lionel Dunsterville, born overseas and, like so many of his fellow pupils, the son of an absent Indian Army officer. As a retired major-general he wrote that ‘We were freely beaten and it did us good’, yet such was his unhappiness at the time that he made repeated attempts to run away.

  When Ruddy entered USC three years later as Number 264 he became an obvious target for ragging. It was not just that he was the only boy in the school to wear glasses, but they were absurdly bottle-lensed, hence his school nickname of ‘Gigger’, derived from giglamps. Furthermore, he was useless at games and he thought and acted differently from the other boys. As Lionel Dunsterville put it, ‘With very few exceptions, of whom Kipling was one, we were all sons of officers of the Navy or Army, so we represented a more or less homogenous type, but that fact merely accentuated the individuality of those who diverged from type.’7

  Within the first week Alice Kipling had received a cascade of tearful letters begging her to remove her son from this ‘hell on earth’, panicking her into writing to Cormell Price, warning him of the ‘roughness of the boys’ and asking him to give her son special attention: ‘For old time’s sake, don’t laugh at me for a spoon as I write this – but the boy is different from most boys – and I can’t stop worrying.’ A second letter enlarged on this difference: ‘The lad has a great deal that is feminine in his nature and a little sympathy – from any quarter – will reconcile him to his changed life more than anything.’8

  Most happily for Ruddy, sympathy both from Crom Price and a schoolmate not only reconciled him to USC but also gave him the security and encouragement he needed to flourish there. The schoolmate was Lionel Dunsterville, who took under his wing Ruddy and another new boy, George Beresford. Together the three thirteen-year-olds formed a ‘triple alliance’ that remained unbroken ‘till we dispersed to seek our fortunes in the world’, later romanticised into the schoolboy adventures of ‘Stalky’ (Dunsterville), ‘M’Turk’ (Beresford) and ‘Beetle’ (Kipling) in Stalky & Co. ‘Envisage a rather podgy, easy-going, careless, soft rather than hard, laughter-loving, slightly untidy adolescent,’ wrote Beresford in 1930 of his study-mate and ally, ‘taking the world very easily, humming or bleating a song or tune, but with everything threaded on a literary motive or moving to the unuttered rhythm of verse. He held no convictions or decided opinions on any earthly thing, let alone patriotism or the military idea; rather he let everything come as it would so long as it afforded him raw material, or led up to his central idea of literary expression.’

  Handicapped by his myopia and a degree of physical clumsiness and lack of co-ordination which today would be diagnosed as dyspaxia, Ruddy compensated by developing his own survival skills. He learned to withdraw from physical confrontation, diverting his fellow pupils with ‘wonderful grotesque outline drawings of strange monsters and demons’ and defusing the wrath of masters by ‘removing his glasses, polishing them carefully, replacing them on his nose and gazing in placid bewilderment at the thundering tyrant, with a look which suggested, “There, there. Don’t give way to your foolish tantrums.”’ But, above all, he found refuge in books. ‘In reading,’ noted Beresford, ‘he was omnivorous – with his spectacles on his forehead, face to the volume, his short-sighted eyes glittering over the pages, he would hump himself to his task, and pursue his researches with an almost audible energy.’ Through this dogged pursuit of the written word, much of it learned off by heart, Ruddy acquired an aura of ‘complete and expert knowledge’9 that the other boys found daunting.

  It took Crom Price less than a year to recognise that nothing was to be gained by forcing this awkward boy to conform. Instead, he encouraged him to pursue what he did best, to the extent of giving him the run of his own book-lined study. ‘There Beetle found a fat armchair, a silver inkstand, and unlimited pens and paper,’ wrote Kipling of this remarkable gift:

  There were scores and scores of ancient dramatists; there were Hakluyt, his voyages; French translations of Muscovite authors called Pushkin and Lermontoff; little tales of a heady and bewildering nature, interspersed with unusual songs – Peacock was that writer’s name; there was Borrow’s Lavengro; an odd theme, purporting to be a translation of something called a ‘Rubáiyát’, which the Head said was a poem not yet come into its own; there were hundreds of columns of verse – Crashaw; Dryden; Alexander Smith; L. E. L. [Letitia Elizabeth Langdon, whose sentimental poems and novels were popular in the 1830s]; Lydia Sigourney [an American writer of verse who enjoyed great popularity in the mid-nineteenth century]; Fletcher and a purple island; Donne; Marlowe’s Faust; and Ossian … and Rossetti – to name but a few.10

  As his list shows, the boy’s private reading was catholic to a degree. But under the eyes of his robust Classics and English master, W. C. Crofts, he developed a love for Horace, the Romantic poets and the heavyweights of the day: Macaulay, Kingsley, Scott and the two Arnolds – the pedagogue Matthew and the journalist Edwin, whose epic prose-poem on the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, was a best-seller in 1879 and led Ruddy into a brief flirtation with this Protestant interpretation of Buddhism. According to Beresford, ‘Gigger was the apostle of Buddha or Arnold for a span at Westward Ho! and used to declaim very finely certain portions about “om mani padmi Hum” or words to that effect.’ For a term he preached reincarnation to his room-mates, although none too seriously, since he built himself a shrine from ‘a gas-stove rigged up with a long India rubber tube from the fish-tail gas-burner which led directly to the life-giving sacrament of the cocoa cups’.11

  Outside Croft’s classroom Ruddy’s reading was undirected and never subject to the checks and balances that a university education would have imposed, allowing him to absorb the trite alongside the profound. Given his family’s and his headmaster’s links with the Pre-Raphaelites, it was inevitable that William Morris and the two Rossettis, Dante Gabriel and Christina, should have been enjoyed – until they and the vanguard of the Aesthetic Movement came to be thought of by Ruddy and some of his fellow pupils as suspect, at which point they were dropped in favour of more popular verse. From then on it was the poetry of
Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne which spoke most directly to him: the long dramatic monologues of the first and the seductive power of word and metre of the second. Whatever lines caught Ruddy’s imagination were learned off pat, to be declaimed or parodied, half in jest and half in earnest, to receptive audiences in the school study and dormitory.

  No less influential were the writings of a number of American poets and writers: Edgar Allan Poe, whose ‘tales of the grotesque and arabesque’ continued to be popular long after his death in 1849; Henry Longfellow, whose last extended verse epic, Ultima Thule, appeared in 1880; Joel Chandler Harris, whose evocation of the American Deep South contained in the first of his Uncle Remus stories, Uncle Remus, his Songs and Sayings, was also published in 1880; Charles Leland, whose ponderous Brietmann Ballads with their cod-German dialects appealed to Ruddy’s adolescent sense of humour; and Bret Harte, whose short stories with such outlandish titles as ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’ and ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ were as much admired and copied by Ruddy as his tragicomic verses. The consequences of this eclectic reading were far-reaching, for when Ruddy began writing his own verse and fiction any subject and every form was acceptable, leading to lapses of taste that Oscar Wilde later characterised as ‘superb flashes of vulgarity’ from ‘a man of talent who drops his aspirates’.12

  After a difficult first term puberty quite suddenly took hold and, as is so often the case with European children born in the tropics, Ruddy found himself ‘physically precocious’. Out of the plump, rounded pupa emerged an angular, whiskered teenager, aggressively impish in manner and appearance. With his short neck, hunched shoulders and slight stoop, Ruddy presented a beetle-like mien, and his features took on that distinctive craggy appearance which his friend Beresford found unnervingly Mongolian: ‘So sharp was the set-back from the massive eyebrow ridges that he appeared almost “cave-boy”. His lower jaw was massive, protruding and strong; the chin had a deep central cleft or dimple that at once attracted attention.’13 A new-found strength allied with his growing self-assurance allowed Ruddy to appear ‘rather more formidable than he was’, and the bullying stopped. This sudden physical change was accompanied by an even more startling growth of intellect, as if within months Ruddy aged mentally as many years. By the age of fourteen he was beginning to look and sound – and write – like a nineteen-year-old. ‘Though thoroughly boyish in his pranks,’ wrote Major-General Dunsterville of the boy intellectual, ‘he was mentally on a par with a middle-aged man, and intellectually superior to most of the grown-ups who had the difficult task of controlling or guiding his early youth.’14

  Nowhere was this coming of age more dramatically expressed than in Ruddy’s transformation into a man of verse. In the late spring of 1878 Lockwood Kipling joined his family in England, granted an extended leave in order to oversee the arts and crafts display in the Indian Hall at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He took his son with him to Paris and allowed him to do much as he pleased before the two of them joined up with Alice and Trix for a more conventional holiday. The rest of this happy summer was passed at 27 Warwick Gardens in west London, the home of ‘three dear ladies’: the spinster sister and cousins of a journalist friend of the Kiplings from Bombay, two of them romantic novelists and all three bluestockings.

  Within easy walking distance of the Burne-Joneses in Fulham, Warwick Gardens became thereafter the children’s base during their holidays. Here Ruddy found yet another library, and a ready audience for his own literary experiments: ‘In my holidays the three ladies listened – it was all I wanted – to anything I had to say. I drew on their books, from The City of Dreadful Night which shook me to my unformed core, Mrs Gatty’s Parables from Nature which I imitated and thought I was original, and scores of others. There were few atrocities of form or metre that I did not perpetrate.’15 Perhaps because James Thompson had been raised as an orphan in a Glasgow asylum and was an atheist and an alcoholic to boot, his doom-and-gloom-laden poetry held a particular fascination for the adolescent Ruddy. As well as satisfying his schoolboy appetite for the melancholy and the macabre, Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems provided Ruddy with a rich source of fin-de-siècle ideas.

  At Warwick Gardens, amid surroundings that were at once literary and old-maidish and initially with both parents at his elbows, what the adult Kipling afterwards described as ‘the tide of writing’ first set in. Ruddy began to write reams of verse, and when he returned to school in the autumn of 1878 this outpouring continued unabated, much to the puzzlement of his friends. ‘I pitied poor Gigger,’ wrote his friend Beresford. ‘He couldn’t help scribbling, so long as it had nothing to do with school-work. He kept spoiling reams – absolute reams, not quires – of cream-laid notepaper for poems; they must have been poems, because the lines were shortish and ended raggedly.’ Some of these poems were intended for the Scribbler, a self-published magazine which the elder children of the Burne-Jones, Poynter and Morris families assembled from time to time under the editorship of Jenny Morris, daughter of William. But at school Ruddy kept his verse-writing strictly to himself: ‘Inspection of the verses inscribed in his Russia-leather, gilt-edged, cream-laid MS. books would not have been at all welcomed … The leather-bound books were guarded by a taboo.’16

  After Alice Kipling’s return to India in the late summer of 1880 every letter written by Ruddy contained verses complete or in progress. The three dear ladies and his Aunt Edith Macdonald were similarly privileged, and when Ruddy finally met his parents’ Indian confidante Edith Plowden at Warwick Gardens she too became a recipient, the arrangement culminating in the gift of a ‘thick school copy-book’ filled with this first flowering of juvenile verse. Fearful that she might be missing out, Alice Kipling then wrote to Miss Plowden begging her to copy and post any verses Ruddy had sent her. ‘He promised I should have all he did – but he is not sending them,’ she complained, ‘and as time and distance do their fatal work I am sure his Mother will know less of him than any other woman of his acquaintance.’17

  However, Alice may well have had another motive in asking for copies of all her son’s poems, for in December 1881 she overcame her husband’s doubts to have printed in Lahore fifty copies of a set of twenty-three poems under the title of Schoolboy Lyrics. Evidently believing that she was acting in Ruddy’s best interests, she then dispatched copies unsolicited to a number of public figures, including George Allen in Allahabad and Algernon Swinburne in London – but not to Ruddy, who only saw a copy of Schoolboy Lyrics when he joined his parents in Lahore two years later. According to his sister, he was furious that his mother should have ‘taken and made use of something he needed and valued, and sulked for two days’.18

  The pace at which Ruddy’s poetry developed was startling. Some months after his return to India Lockwood Kipling wrote to Edith Plowden to say that he had just received a letter from his son in which Ruddy had baldly stated, ‘I am writing a poem it begins like this:

  A cry in the silent night

  A white face turned to the wall.

  A pang – and then in the mind of men

  Forgotten! And that is all.19

  Ruddy completed the poem in Miss Plowden’s presence a year later, when he was fourteen. Like so many of his Schoolboy Lyrics it was essentially an exercise in style, but reading through these early verses it is possible to see the pastiche and the derivative fall away as the boy-man learns to listen to his own creative impulse and finds his voice. Cynicism is the prevailing note, often put in the mouths of outcastes, such as the world-weary prostitute in ‘Overheard’, complaining to her customer:

  Took to the street for a life.

  Entre nous,

  It’s a terrible uphill strife,

  Like all professions – too filled.

  And now I’m in lodgings hard by,

  Au quatrième, up in the sky.

  Visit me by and by,

  They’re furnished, but oh – so cold,

  So cold!20

  No less
remarkable was Ruddy’s determination from the start to be ‘Gigadibs the literary man’, as his irritated English and Classics teacher labelled him – an ambition evidently shared by his mother. In September 1879 Mrs Mary Dodge, editor of the American St Nicholas Magazine for children, received a letter purporting to be from a thirteen-year-old English schoolboy who signed himself ‘J. R. Kipling’. The original letter is lost but there are good grounds for supposing that it came not from Ruddy but from a mother eager to promote her son’s literary talents. The letter was accompanied by a seven-stanza poem entitled ‘The Dusky Crew’, celebrating the comradeship of three independent-minded schoolboys and written in a pounding metre disconcertingly reminiscent of Edward Lear’s ‘Jumblies’:

  Our heads were rough, and our hands were black,

  With the ink-stains’ midnight hue;

  We scouted all, both great and small

  We were a dusky crew;

  And each boy’s hand was against us raised,

  ’Gainst me and the Other Two.

  We chased the hare from her secret lair,

  We roamed the woodlands through;

  In parks and grounds far out of bounds