Wandered our dusky crew;
And the keepers swore to see us pass,
Me and the Other Two.21
The poem was rejected by Mrs Dodge, who may well have had doubts over its author’s claimed age. But it confirms the assessment made by two of Ruddy’s fellow pupils outside his circle at USC that he was ‘so brilliant and cynical that he was most cordially hated by most of his fellow students’.22 The fact was that for all his gifts – and, to some degree, because of his gifts – Ruddy could never be one of them, neither at school nor afterwards in India.
Yet the ‘col’ made Ruddy happy. After the disorder and insecurity of his early childhood the discipline and sense of fair play USC inculcated came as a huge comfort, and consequently he developed an almost uncritical devotion to the school and to the headmaster who had made it work.23 He learned that society needs rules to avert chaos, and that to be part of a well-ordered society meant abiding by its code. Yet at the same time he became increasingly aware that he was an outsider: he might enjoy the freedom of the observer, the ability to cock a snoot at teachers and other authority figures, but he did not belong. His schoolmates would go on as a ‘scattered brotherhood’ to enter the military and the other Indian services, whereas he was disqualified from doing so – as much by temperament as by physical inadequacies or social background. They were fully paid-up members of a select community and he was not, and to be part of such a community – whether team, school, club, regiment or class – conferred power and privilege that would always be denied him. He would always remain outside the closed circle looking in, and part of him longed to be admitted to membership, to be one of the pack.
The USC was the first of many institutions that Kipling came to revere and whose approbation he always sought, and it was there that he discovered that a means of gaining this much-desired acceptance was to give public expression to what might be described as the group psyche or mood. Kipling the public poet first made himself known in March 1882, when he was in his sixteenth year. In that month a madman fired a shot at Queen Victoria and missed. ‘The school – to put it mildly – is intensely amused,’ wrote Ruddy to a friend of his mother’s a week after the event. ‘I’m afraid we are scarcely loyal and patriotic enough – but anyhow three parts of us laughed and the Democratic quarter seemed to be sorry.’24 Yet these sentiments did not prevent Ruddy from writing ‘Ave Imperatrix’: six sonorous verses, set down in the back of a textbook during a French class, hailing the British monarch as ‘the greatest as most dear, / Victoria, by God’s Grace, our Queen!’, and sending greetings from her most loyal of subjects, the boys of United Services College. It was an unashamed paean to British imperialism:
Such greetings as should come from those
Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes,
Or served you in the Russian snows
And dying, left their sons their swords.
For we are bred to do your will
By land and sea, wherever flies
The Flag to fight and follow still,
And work your empire’s destinies.
It was first published in the United Services College Chronicle in March 1882, and its patriotic fervour surprised his friends quite as much as its authority astonished his teachers. Beresford, for one, was never convinced and afterwards asserted that ‘Ave Imperatrix’ was not written out of personal conviction: ‘Here was something topical for Gigger to sing about … His muse did not jib: he brought her to the water, and, behold, she drank. We two, Stalky and I, roared with laughter at the novel tone of the poem and at Gigger’s taking on like that.’25 Beresford was right in thinking that ‘Ave Imperatrix’ was ‘the first finding of the man with the necessary words’,26 but it was equally an early demonstration of the true poet’s ability to place himself in any situation and to feel accordingly – what Keats termed ‘negative capability’.27 The poem can also be seen as a response to a rival ‘Ave Imperatrix’, written a year earlier by one of Ruddy’s lesser models, Oscar Wilde. Ruddy read Wilde’s version and concluded he could do better, which he did.
Another sphere within which the adolescent Ruddy ran ahead of his peers was in matters of sex. According to the adult Kipling, USC was ‘clean with a cleanliness that I have never heard of in any other school’. His friend Dunsterville used the same word and almost the same expression. This absence of sexual activity Kipling ascribed to open dormitories and the headmaster’s prophylactic of keeping the boys so active throughout the day that they went to bed dead tired. However, in his fourth year at school his housemaster, Mr Pugh (the hated ‘Prout’ in the Stalky stories), ordered Ruddy – ‘with an unreasoning violence that astonished me’ – to transfer to another dormitory. Five years later he learned from Dunsterville that it was because he had been suspected of ‘impurity and bestiality’. He reacted with fury, writing to Mr Croft swearing revenge: ‘I am conscious of a deep and personal hatred against the man which I would give a great deal to satisfy. I knew he thought me a liar but I did not know he suspected me of anything much worse. However, I shall have my consolation. He shall be put into my novel.’ Ruddy then went on to claim that at school ‘I was not innocent in some respects, as the fish girls of Appledore [the nearby fishing village] could have testified had they chosen.’28 Some biographers29 have seen this as a case of Kipling protesting too much. Yet it is clear that Ruddy was regarded by his schoolmates as an authority on the opposite sex, even if his friend Beresford took the view that his ‘vast romantic experience’ came from his reading rather than first-hand knowledge.
Whatever the case, Ruddy considered himself a modern in the Rossetti mould and at the first opportunity fell romantically in love. The object of his infatuation was Flo Garrard, whom he first met under Mrs Holloway’s roof while visiting his sister Trix at Lorne Lodge in the summer of 1880, when he was fourteen and she sixteen or seventeen. Flo was another of Aunty’s young charges, a grey-eyed, long-haired and ivory-skinned beauty, described afterwards by Trix as ‘like the Princess disguised in the shepherd’s cottage’. The princess showed no interest in Ruddy the swain, for reasons that only became obvious a decade later, but Flo’s very elusiveness acted as a spur, and all Ruddy’s frustrated, pent-up feelings for her were poured into his poetry. In October 1880 Lockwood Kipling wrote to Edith Plowden to say that the latest of his son’s verses received was a love poem. ‘They are prettily turned,’ he wrote, ‘and show that he has started on a round of spoons which he will follow up till his death.’
The poem in question was ‘The Lesson’, concerning the love of an innocent boy for an older girl so ‘womanly-wise’ that she thinks nothing of the meeting which means so much to him. More love verses followed, of which thirty-two were set down in one of Ruddy’s Russia-leather volumes, entitled Sundry Phansies writ by one Kipling, dated February 1882, and presented by their author to the object of his affections. One spoke of a princess who scorned her suitors ‘coldly, strangely, and haughtily’,30 another of ‘Hot kisses on red lips that burn – / A silence – Then some loving word’.31 Many were deeply lugubrious, involving broken-hearted lovers torn apart by death or fate. The best of the lot, and the most ambitious yet attempted, was ‘The Story of Paul Vaugel’, a tale of a Norman peasant and how he ‘took himself an unfortunate [a prostitute], and maintained her, and how she died, and how he buried her in the Pol-lourdess [sea coast] and of the evil that came on him’. It was a dark tale of forbidden love, retribution and guilt set out in sonorous, four-beat iambics that take on an extraordinary dream-like force akin to Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ as the narrator carries his dead lover down to the strand and buries her in the dunes:
Then I piled the sand over face and hair
Till I left no whit of the body bare,
For I felt in the dark lest foot or hand
Should be uncovered by the sand.
And I staked up gorse till my fingers bled,
Lest the sheep should pasture over head.
And I weighted the bushes with
boulder clay,
And I sat on the dunes and wept till day.
And a great mist rose from the dim St Lo,
And an inland wind on the full tide’s flow
And all night long the sea-mist passed
In a thousand shapes before the blast
And all our past Life shewed to me
Till morning broke on the sullen sea.32
This was Ruddy on the cusp of turning sixteen, with what he afterwards took to calling his ‘Personal Daemon’ starting to settle on his shoulder.
In the early autumn of 1880 Alice Kipling rejoined her husband in Lahore. During her absence Lockwood had found somewhere large enough to accommodate their entire family: a square bungalow newly built in the Punjabi style and set in its own compound off the Mozung Road, south of and running parallel to the Upper Mall. Despite being a vast improvement on anything they had known in Bombay, it was not a dwelling in which Alice felt comfortable: ‘Our house is very large for two people,’ she complained to Edith Plowden after moving in –
we quite rattle about in it – and built on such an inconvenient plan that when we want to go into any of the 14 rooms we have to walk thro the other 13 to get to it. It is ugly too in spite of a wooden floor to the drawing room & papered walls – the rooms being the shape of boxes – and the walls cut up with big doors which take up all the corners. Its only merit is that being new it is clean – but the situation is bad & all the dust of the Mozung Road passes through the house several times a day.33
The bungalow came to be known as ‘Bikaner House’, after the Bikaner desert in Rajasthan. According to Trix, this was because ‘my father would never have bullock-gearing fitted to the well – he thought the risk of fever for his young people too great, so the compound grew chiefly dusty ferash [date palm] trees with a few flowers round the verandahs’.34
A drawing by one of Lockwood’s former students, Baga Ram, confirms these descriptions. It shows a whitewashed bungalow with a flat roof, surrounded on all sides by a verandah closed in at each corner to create four extra rooms, its austerity relieved by a series of ornate arches and double pillars. Despite its desertification, Bikaner House was to be the Kiplings’ home until Lockwood’s retirement in 1893.
Lockwood was now in his element, with two institutions to run of which he was sole master. The Lahore Museum gave full scope to his encyclopaedic knowledge and the Mayo School of Industrial Art allowed him to promote what he now saw as his chief professional duty: the preservation of traditional Indian craftsmanship. ‘A charge has been brought against Indian schools of art,’ he wrote at this time, ‘of seeking to supplant indigenous art by the introduction of European ideas. Their proper function is rather the reverse, so far as style is concerned; and it is the object of the Lahore School to revive crafts now half forgotten.’35 But Alice had no such cause to keep her busy. With her children gone she had little to fall back on other than the four staples of social life for the memsahib – housekeeping, exercising, entertaining and being entertained – none of which appealed to her. Initially, however, she found herself fully occupied as Lahore prepared to receive the new Viceroy, Lord Ripon.
Lord Lytton’s successor was his antithesis in almost every respect, being plump, liberal, middle-rather than upper-class and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Lytton’s high-handed and hugely expensive invasion of Afghanistan in 1878, combined with harrowing evidence of the suffering caused by his handling of the recent famines, had contributed to the defeat of Disraeli’s government in 1880. His successor William Gladstone had appointed Ripon as Viceroy in the hope that he would break up what Gladstone believed to be a caucus of reactionaries in authority in Calcutta and Simla, and steer India back on the course of reform. As a result, Anglo-India viewed Ripon with suspicion. He was received in Lahore with all due ceremony, but without affection. ‘We got rid of the Viceroy two days ago,’ wrote Alice to Edith Plowden in mid-November. ‘The camps are rolling up & bye & bye the flags and venetian masts will disappear & I shall be able to see what Lahore is really like, which up to this time I have not done, you know, all for we have been going thro’. A procession – a durbar – and nautch party, a big ball, fireworks, theatricals, races – these all ending tragically, Mr Hoare being thrown from his horse & dying of a fractured skull a few hours after the ball, for the decorations of which John toiled like a negro slave.’
But with the celebrations over it was business as usual and, for Alice, a return to boredom: ‘I have hardly the patience to describe the doings of the Station, so dreary & uninformed do I find them … Take the women all round, they have not brains enough to make such a cutlet as I ate at breakfast this morning & how I am going to exist here god knows.’ At this point in the letter its writer breaks off, to pick up her pen a week later: ‘This ought to have been posted yesterday & John quite scolded me when I said I had not finished it. You see, I rather broke down as I contemplated things & couldn’t pick myself up gracefully … I try to find books & papers to read but I feel very much out of it all … I long to hear from you when you have seen Trix – I feel the loss of that sweet bright creature even more than I think I should – and I am home sick more than I ever was in my life – I cannot care for this country.’
At the foot of this sad letter is a postscript from Lockwood: ‘She certainly does not like India much better than she used to do, but after all, she is very well & the interest she is taking in the arrangement of her room & indeed house generally shows there is nothing very profoundly wrong with her.’36
Alice’s mother had long suffered from prolonged bouts of melancholia and Alice now began to display the same condition. Her brother Fred was similarly troubled, suggesting a family predisposition towards depression, if not what today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, characterised by violent mood swings alternating between acute withdrawal and manic activity, that was inherited by both the Kiplings’ children. In the months that followed it was Lockwood who kept in touch with Edith Plowden, maintaining an air of rather desperate jocularity. ‘Miss Egerton [daughter of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab] is to be married to Mr Mackworth Young!’ he exclaimed in a chatty letter written just before Christmas 1880:
It is an undreamed of catch, a most tremendous haul. For never, surely, went matrimonial hook into the depths so slenderly baited … You remember Dr Dickson – Miss Dallas’s widower – well, he is engaged to Miss Coldstream, a grim Scotch lassie, pious as tomb-stone granite, and about as warm, sister of that egregious prig Thunda-pani [cold water, thus Coldstream], late Commissioner of Lahore … Going into the museum in the twilight the other day I was aware of a didactically sweet feminine voice chanting or rather reading aloud and there in a secluded place were this couple, the maiden reading from a letter or MS & Dr Dickson’s swivel blue eyes wandering wildly with pleasure.
Eight months later Lockwood was writing in much the same vein from Simla: ‘There is not a breath of scandal in the whole place and the club’s invitations to a masked ball scarcely scandalise anybody, for, like high-caste Brahmins whose incalculate purity nothing can defile, we are immeasurably above all possibility of irony.’ He had little to report on Alice’s health, other than that she worried constantly about her son: ‘He won’t write with anything like freedom in his letters and it is not easy to make out his notions … Anything you can tell us about Ruddy – whether knowledge, observation or surmise [–] would be above all things welcome. His health worries us – and as to his mental moods we know he is in the troubled waters that beset most young men when they are such very young men.’37
Ruddy was now immersed in his unrequited love for Flo Garrard. But he was also troubled about his future, knowing that he could not follow Dunsterville, Beresford and other schoolmates into their military colleges and that his parents could not afford to send him to university. For a period he toyed with what his sister described as ‘a fancy to be a doctor’. His Aunt Georgie then arranged for him to visit St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where a post-mor
tem proved too much for him. ‘Ruddy never described it to me,’ wrote Trix. ‘All he said was “Oh, Infant” – I had become “Infant” by then, not “Trix” – “Oh, Infant, Mark Twain had a word for it.” Dramatic pause. “I believe I threw up my immortal soul.”’38
It was Crom Price who provided the solution when in June 1881 in a moment of inspiration he proposed to Ruddy that the United Services College Chronicle, a six-page periodical which had been started a year or two earlier only to fold for lack of an editor, should be revived. Ruddy at once threw himself into the task: writing most of the copy for the first number, sub-editing it to length, overseeing the typesetting in a small printing shop in nearby Bideford, correcting the proofs and finally overseeing its publication. As an adult Rudyard Kipling afterwards joked about ‘how sweet and good and profitable it is – and how nice it looks on the page – to make fun of people in actual print’,39 but as a schoolboy of fifteen and a half Ruddy made a discovery which was little short of a revelation: that there was power in the printed word, and that the means existed whereby he could take control of its printing and thereby gain greater power. In the process he found his vocation: receiving, in the apt words of his first serious biographer, ‘the first injection into his veins of the printer’s ink that he never again worked out of his system’.40 His year-long editorship of the United Services College Chronicle showed him where his future lay. As soon as the first number had been printed, in midsummer 1881, he wrote to his parents to say that he wished to pursue a career in journalism.
However, Ruddy’s parents – his mother, in particular – were equally determined that their son should join them in India when he left school. Initially these two ambitions appeared irreconcilable, because no Anglo-Indian newspaper was going to take on a man who had not thoroughly learned his trade, usually on an English provincial newspaper. Nevertheless, during his annual leave in Simla that late summer Lockwood sought the advice of George Allen, the boxwallah proprietor of the Allahabad Pioneer. He talked of his son’s experience gained as editor of his school chronicle and no doubt referred Allen to Schoolboy Lyrics. The outcome was an offer from Allen to look up the boy when he returned home in the spring, with a view to finding him suitable employment in India when, at eighteen, he left school.
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