Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  The Civil Station was so crowded with visitors that Ruddy was forced to share accommodation in a dak bungalow or rest house with a motley assortment of down-at-heel journalists and a hard-drinking loafer. To cheer himself up he went for an evening stroll in Peshawar town, to find himself confronted by scenes which he likened to Dante’s Inferno. The streets were crammed with pack animals and their drivers, together producing a rank stench ‘the most offensive in the world’. Even more disquietingly, the city’s inhabitants scowled and spat at him as he strolled through the bazaar. Their hostility unnerved him and he exacted his revenge by declaring Peshawar to be a ‘vast human menagerie’ populated by bestial creatures:

  Two Waziri tribesmen, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  Faces of dogs, swine, weazles, and goats, all the more hideous for being set on human bodies, and lighted with human intelligence … all giving the onlooker the impression of wild beasts held back from murder and violence, and chafing against restraint. The impression may be wrong; and the Peshawari the most innocent creature on earth, in spite of history’s verdict upon him; but not unless thin lips, scowling brows, deep set vulpine eyes and lineaments stamped with every brute passion known to man, go for nothing. Women of course are invisible in the streets, but here and there instead, some nameless and shameless boy in girl’s clothes with long braided hair and jewellry – the centre of a crowd of admirers. As night draws on, the throng of ignoble heads becomes denser and the reek of unwashed humanity steaming under the rain, ranker and more insupportable.11

  Two days later Ruddy’s dislike for the local Pathan and Afghan tribesmen was reinforced when he was stoned by a boy as he made his way on foot to Jamrood, the great mud fortress at the foot of the Khyber Pass. The incident might have been forgotten but for the fact that when he arrived back at the Station that evening he ran into a military patrol and found himself staring down the barrels of two loaded carbines. No one had told him that a curfew existed in Peshawar’s Civil Lines which came into effect as soon as darkness fell. The fright was over in a moment – but four years on he found himself admitting that he still sweated whenever he thought about it.12 When he next wrote to his old schoolmate Lionel Dunsterville the stone-throwing boy had become a knife-wielding Afghan whose attack he had foiled by heaving rocks at him13 – and by the time he came to write his autobiography more than fifty years on the two incidents had merged into one to become a pot-shot fired at him by an Afghan sniper in the Khyber Pass.

  After keeping his reception committee waiting and watching at the foot of the Khyber, Amir Abdur Rahman finally made his appearance, and on 30 March the focus shifted to Rawalpindi. The continuing bad weather forced the cancellation of a grand procession of elephants and a day of military manoeuvres, but for the sake of Government izzat or prestige it was decided that the planned review should go ahead, despite the mud. The concluding march-past was intended to impress the Amir with a show of armed might as magnificent as only the British military could make it – and it had much the same effect on the youngest and probably the most sceptical of the reporters present:

  When twenty thousand men march past in a straight line for two hours, in the presence of the men who will have to make the history of the next four years, the occasion is of anything but ordinary importance; and it is only fair, therefore, to record how superbly the whole function went off … Red, khaki, green, buff, maroon coats and facings – an infinity of booted feet coming down and taking up, with the exactness of a machine – thousands of pipe-clayed pouches swinging in the same direction, and all with the same impetus, dazzle the eyes, and produce on the mind, the impression of some interminable nightmare. Finally, one loses all idea that the living waves in front are composed of men. It has no will, no individuality – nothing, it seems, save the power of moving forward in a mathematically straight line to the end of time.

  After the infantry come the cavalry, shaking the earth as they came on, to be followed by the artillery, with its horse-drawn batteries passing the grey-clad figure of the Amir on the saluting dais in perfect alignment: ‘The Field and Horse batteries go past as one gun. A little thickened and blurred in the outlines, as if seen through a mist, but nevertheless one gun. How it’s done, the civilian’s mind cannot tell. To all appearance, the driver of the nearer wheeler lays the stock of his whip lightly on the withers of the off wheeler – and there you are, with about six inches between axle and axle, as level as though all six guns have been planed across the muzzles, jammed into a gauge and left there.’14

  It was an unforgettable spectacle that Ruddy was to revisit in the short story ‘Servants of the Queen’, and the accompanying poem, ‘Parade Song of the Camp-Animals’, published in The Jungle Book. But his abiding memory was of the marching feet. In the three weeks leading up to the review he had dispatched eleven lengthy articles to the paper, written in extremely trying conditions, so that by the time he came to write his two-column special on the review he was exhausted almost to the point of collapse. ‘Phantasm of hundreds of thousand of legs all moving together have stopped my sleep altogether,’ he wrote in his diary that same night, Tuesday 7 April. ‘Top of head hot and eyes are beginning to trouble me.’ The phantasm stayed with him. It inspired the beat of marching feet which gives ‘Danny Deever’ its relentless pace, and it was reanimated many years later in the mesmeric tramp-tramp-tramp to his poem ‘Boots’.15

  Once the talks and ceremonials were over and the Amir escorted back over the border, the Dufferins descended on Lahore with their royal guests the Connaughts. As always, no effort had been spared to present the city en fête, leaving Lady Dufferin with the impression that everything was covered in roses: ‘One drives through hedges of them,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and there are great bushes, and arches, and trees covered in them; it seems to me to be a real city of gardens.’16 An address at the railway station was followed by a durbar in Montgomery Hall and then a little sightseeing, concluding with a visit to the Mayo School of Industrial Art. Here Lady Dufferin noted that ‘the only uncommon sight was a row of juvenile carpenters, about eight years of age, learning their trade. They begin with carving, and they sit on the floor as only an Oriental can sit, working away with a chisel and a hammer on a sort of wooden copy-book and using their toes almost as much as their hands.’ The visit provided an opportunity for Lockwood and Alice Kipling to be introduced to the Dufferins by the Duke of Connaught, and to be noticed.

  From Lahore the Dufferins and the Connaughts proceeded directly to Simla, where the Vicereine, the formidable Hariot Lady Dufferin, likened their accommodation at Peterhof to Noah’s Ark balanced on Mount Ararat. ‘Altogether it is the funniest place!’ she wrote in her journal. ‘But I do feel that it is very unfit for a Viceregal establishment. At the back of the house you have about a yard to spare before you tumble down the precipice, and in front there is just room for one tennis court before you go over another. The ADCs are all slipping off the hill in various little bungalows, and go through most perilous adventures to come to dinner.’ Simla itself seemed little better: ‘Walking, riding, driving, all seem to me to be indulged in at the risk to one’s life … I never saw a place so cramped in every way out of doors.’17

  However, the Blackwoods were made of stern stuff and with their two eldest daughters, Lady Nelly and Lady Rachel, they lost no time in setting the pace for the Simla Season, with an exhausting round of burra khanas, state balls, ‘fancy’ adult balls, children’s fancy balls, dances, evening receptions, garden parties, gymkhanas and pagal khanas or ‘fools’ dinners’ – the Indian term for picnics, for who else but fools would deliberately eat food out on a hillside when they had homes to eat in. By the end of the Season in mid-October the Dufferins had played host to more than fifty functions in the cramped confines of Peterhof and had attended four times that number as guests. In his political role as Mulki Lat Sahib, Lord Dufferin was equally commanding, establishing himself as much by his charm as his authority, so that during his four-year term of office
British India underwent one of those periods that was afterwards looked back on as a golden age. Among the many who fell under his spell was Walter Lawrence, a friend of the Kiplings from Lahore, in his capacity as a junior under-secretary to Government, who afterwards remembered Dufferin as ‘a consummate whip’, presiding over ‘the best team of Indian administrators ever brought together’ and winning the hearts of all who served under him by ‘his power of making each think that his one object was to have a good talk with him’. In Lawrence’s eyes, Simla under Dufferin was transformed into ‘the brightest, wittiest, most refined community I ever knew’.18 And it was precisely this community that Rudyard Kipling now put under the microscope.

  As his reward for his recent exertions on behalf of the CMG Ruddy was granted a month’s early leave, with the additional bonus of a temporary appointment as the paper’s Simla correspondent for the summer – four and a half months in Elysium! The only drawback was James Walker’s insistence that he must learn to waltz, which he considered an essential requirement for all Simla correspondents. Hitherto Ruddy had resisted all efforts by his family to teach him, believing himself too clumsy. Now, as his father put it in a letter to Edith Plowden, ‘what we at home couldn’t persuade him to like, became a duty … and he has gone in for it very heartily … and being determined to do it well, bids fair to be a very good dancer’.19

  Much of Ruddy’s month of leave was spent in the company of a newly-married friend from the Punjab Public Works Department and his bride on what was then termed a hill tour and would now be called pony-trekking. Their route took them north-east through the Himalayan ranges towards Tibet. Three days out of Simla the track dropped steeply into the Sutlej Valley at Kotgarh, where they stayed in a cottage belonging to a mission school run by a lone European missionary, with a congregation of local hill-women whose younger members struck Ruddy as pretty enough to make him wish ‘to be Padre in these parts’. One of their number was duly worked into what became the first of his Plain Tales from the Hills, as ‘Lispeth’,20 the tragic story of a local beauty baptised by the Chaplain of Kotgarh, who finds an English traveller collapsed in the hills, nurses him back to health and falls in love with him. After assuring Lispeth that he will come back to marry her, the Englishman goes off to hunt butterflies in Assam, and after three months she realises that he and the missionaries have lied to her, whereupon she renounces her faith and goes back to her own kind.

  Like most of Kipling’s stories, it contained more than a grain of hard truth, for there was such a woman from the Kotgarh mission. She became the bibi or kept woman of an officer in a Gurkha regiment and bore two children by him, both removed to England. After her death she was found to have written a will leaving all her worldly goods to ‘Johnnie Baba’ and ‘Willie Baba’. The Simla authorities set out to trace the two boys and found one farming sheep in Australia and the other captaining a sailing ship off the coast of Florida.21

  By 10 May Ruddy was back in Simla and staying by himself in an out-of-the-way cottage. ‘Nothing to be done there,’ he noted in his diary, adding in subsequent daily entries, ‘Loafed and began to count the days to getting in collar,’ and ‘More loafing … Must wait like Micawber for something to turn up.’ While he waited he wrote up an account of his trek to Kotgarh and observed a troupe of langurs, long-tailed monkeys with black faces surrounded by a fringe of silvery whiskers, which daily invaded his cottage. The monkeys became the first subject of his ‘Simla Notes’ for the CMG: ‘The hillside is alive with their clamour, and presently they assemble in force on the lawn tennis court; despatching a deputation to warn me that the babies are tired and want fruit. It is impossible to explain to the deputation, that the sayings and doings of their descendants are of much greater importance than theirs.’22 The troupe’s leader showed unusual boldness, stealing a pair of hairbrushes from Ruddy’s dressing table, and duly became the hero of ‘Collar-Wallah and the Poison-Stick’, a long-forgotten children’s story which features both the Simla langurs and the trek to Kotgarh.23

  May ended with an invitation to attend a state ball at Peterhof to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday. This was the climax of ‘Simla Week’, which traditionally marked the official start of the Simla Season. Sixteen of the most important guests sat down with the Dufferins in their dining-room, another forty-eight dined in the ballroom and a larger number of the less privileged gathered in a shamiana or marquee erected on the lawn, including the CMG’s Simla correspondent. ‘As all the guests were in uniform,’ noted Lady Dufferin in her journal, ‘it was very pretty and very gay for an official performance.’ But Ruddy was not in uniform and he did not enjoy himself. ‘Went with scar on cheek painted up to the Eyes,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Felt an abject worm and think looked it.’ Three months earlier he had been stung in the face by what he thought was an ant, causing his cheek to develop a nasty sore which his father described somewhat callously as a ‘grievous blotch … appearing and disappearing as he revolves, like the red bull’s eye of a light house’.24 On the following day, with his cheek so inflamed and swollen that he was unable to work, he had been seen by Dr Lawrie at the Lahore Hospital and treated with cocaine for a nasty case of ‘Lahore sore’. This was probably leishmaniasis, caused by a parasite carried by the female sandfly, its symptoms being fever, weight loss and an enlarged spleen. Although it is occasionally fatal, most cases heal spontaneously, as did Rudyard Kipling’s, but not before causing him discomfort and embarrassment throughout the summer.

  In June Alice Kipling and Trix arrived in Simla for the summer, taking a small cottage named North Bank, one of several belonging to the Civilian Sir Edward Buck. Trix thought Sir Edward a ‘vague clever creature’ but he was one of Simla’s inner circle, acting as éminence grise to Lord Dufferin as Secretary to the Viceroy’s Council, and he was a powerful and useful friend. The Kiplings were now gratified to find themselves on Peterhof’s much-prized ‘free list’, containing the names of those automatically invited to whatever social functions the Viceroy and Vicereine chose to hold. Whether it was Sir Edward Buck or the Connaughts who initiated the Kiplings’ elevation, it was helped along by Alice Kipling, whose boldness caught the attention of the Viceroy, who thereafter ‘took such opportunities as offered of conversing with her’, leading to ‘heartburning among some of the titled ladies’. Lord Dufferin’s declaration that ‘dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room’25 swiftly went the rounds of the Simla salons, as did Alice’s response when challenged by a female acquaintance over the length of her conversation with the Viceroy: ‘Yes, my dear, and it was as broad as it was long.’26 The consequence was that Alice Kipling came to be regarded as a Simla wit and as someone whose company was to be sought, resulting in what Trix termed ‘many pleasant invitations’.

  Where the mother led the daughter followed, so that Trix too came to be seen as a delightfully clever young woman, for all that she turned seventeen only that June. A contemporary of Ruddy’s at USC who joined him in India after completing his military training afterwards recalled how popular was Mrs Kipling and how her daughter ‘Beatrice’ had ‘inherited most of her mother’s wit and skill’ – so much so that as a junior subaltern he had found her intimidating. ‘Looking back after all these years,’ he wrote in 1941, ‘it seems to me that I, uncouth youth that I was, felt rather shy in the company of this brilliant, witty girl.’27 But when Lockwood Kipling joined the two women later in the season he observed how Trix’s ‘radiant, merry look’ had the greatest effect not on Simla’s eligible bachelors but on his own age group: ‘It is they [-] to whom the beaming grin of happy youth is only a memory – who admire her most.’28 What was even more vexing for Trix was the ease with which her mother, at forty-nine, filled her dance cards while she remained a wallflower. It prompted her to set down her woes in verse and when, in early July, Ruddy joined the two ladies in their rented cottage, brother and sister at once put their heads together to write ‘My Rival’. Published in the Pioneer on 8 July under the signature of �
��Girofte’, it is the lament of a young lady of seventeen who finds herself overshadowed by a rival twice her age – her mother:

  I go to concert, party, ball –

  What profit is in these?

  I sit alone against the wall

  And strive to look at ease.

  The incense that is mine by right

  They burn before Her shrine;

  And that’s because I’m seventeen

  And She is forty-nine.

  Wherever she goes and whatever she does, it is always the same story:

  The young men come, the young men go,

  Each pink and white and neat,

  She’s older than their mothers, but

  They grovel at Her feet.

  They walk beside Her ’rickshaw wheels –

  None ever walk by mine;

  And that’s because I’m seventeen

  And She is forty-nine.

  Trix always maintained that it was she who wrote ‘My Rival’, but it was her brother who transformed it into a classic of light verse. And there was, of course, another unspoken reason why Trix failed to secure dance partners, which was that unmarried daughters ‘came out’ in the Simla Season expressly to find marriage partners. An unmarried man who danced with a single woman more than once was making a public statement, and if he was subsequently seen walking beside her rickshaw along the Mall or taking an ice with her at Peliti’s it was assumed that an understanding would soon be arrived at, with an engagement to follow. But Trix was not, to put it bluntly, a catch. Her family were not paid-up members of Simla Society, even if judged worthy of mixing with it. Lockwood Kipling’s position and salary were published annually in Thacker’s Directory and the Civil Lists for all the world to see, and because British India was the ‘land of the open door’ – in a quite literal sense, with curtains instead of doors – all the world knew that his daughter had neither position nor provision. It followed that Trix’s dance cards were filled mainly by married men, well aware that no impropriety was allowed where unmarried girls were concerned. Small wonder that Trix took to calling Simla ‘looking-glass land’.