Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

BOMBAY AND EXPULSION FROM EDEN, 1867–71

  The wayside magic, the threshold spells,

  Shall soon undo what the North has done –

  Because of the sights and the sounds and the smells

  That ran with our youth in the eye of the sun.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Song of the Wise Children’, 1899

  Rudyard Kipling came to look back on his Bombay childhood as a time of untrammelled happiness. In his unfinished autobiography he sets down his earliest recollection – ‘of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market.’ From the ever-widening neck of land upon which the Sir J. J. School of Art stood the Kiplings had easy access not only to the bazaars of the Native Town at the end of Esplanade Road but also to the palm-fringed sands of Back Bay. ‘Our evening walks,’ he wrote, ‘were by the sea in the shadow of palm groves … When the wind blew the great nuts would tumble and we fled.’ And with every sunset came the sudden nightfall of the tropics: ‘I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical even-tides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves and the song of the tree frogs.’1

  The garden within the School’s compound where Ruddy and the sister who followed him played was afterwards remembered by both children as a lush Eden before the Fall, with flowers ‘taller than chimneys’ and a well ‘where the green parrots lived, and where the white bullocks were always going blindfold round and round drawing up water in red waterpots to keep the roses alive, and the little grey striped squirrels nearly tame enough to eat biscuits out of his hand, used to play about in them.’2 Along with cool interiors and harsh sunlight, this sense of closeness to the natural world stayed with Ruddy all his life, returning vividly to mind when he visited South Africa for the first time in 1899:

  Oxen drawing water, possibly Bombay, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  We shall go back by the boltless doors,

  To the life unaltered our childhood knew –

  To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors,

  And the high-ceilinged rooms that the Trade blows through:

  To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond,

  And the tree-toads’ chorus drowning all –

  And the lisp of the split banana-frond

  That talked us to sleep when we were small.3

  Of Lockwood Kipling’s early years as a teacher of architectural sculpture and modelling little is known other than that he reported conscientiously on the progress of his students and was able to add to his earnings by giving private tuition. Among these students was a young Parsi named Pestonjee Bomanjee who subsequently became a respected artist in his own right and a teacher at the School. In old age Bomanjee recalled the infant Ruddy ‘as a tiny fellow playing in the school compound’.4 On one occasion, as the students waited in their classroom for their teacher to arrive, the boy was ‘surprised by his father within the forbidden precincts of the Modelling Class where he was relieving the tedium of things by throwing pellets of clay at the students. He was firmly expelled from the temple of art, which he had thus profaned, by his scandalised parent.’5

  Pestonjee Bomanjee had a high regard for his teacher but, initially at least, the feelings were not reciprocated. Lockwood Kipling’s long years of apprenticeship in Burslem and South Kensington had given him views on art and craftsmanship which his students seemed incapable of accepting. ‘A Hindoo makes a shot at the right thing & he hits or misses by chances so that no one thing is quite right,’ he grumbled in an early letter home. This applied as much to craftsmanship outside the confines of the School as inside:

  No masonry is square, no railings are straight, no roads are level, no dishes taste quite like what they should but a strange and curious imperfection & falling short attends everything. So that one lives as in a dream where things are just coming about but never quite happen. I don’t suppose if I were to talk for a week I could make you quite realise how far the brains of the native take him and where the inevitable clog of his indolence & that’ll-do-ishness stop him short. But it is very odd & strange.6

  The goal of reviving local tradition based on Native Indian forms remained at the heart of the School’s teaching, but combined with a very British emphasis on precision and conformity to rules. It was always intended that the skills learned at the Sir J. J. School of Art should have practical applications, and the decoration of the city’s new public buildings was an obvious outlet. The first to benefit was Bombay’s new covered market, built almost across the road from the School and named Crawford Market after the municipal commissioner, Arthur Crawford. The two magnificent semicircular marble bas-reliefs that adorn its façade are generally ascribed to Lockwood Kipling, although probably designed by an architect named Emerson. However, the carving of these reliefs was executed by Lockwood’s students under his supervision, and the market’s decorated fountain was very much Lockwood’s own creation. Sadly, its exotic birds and beasts have in recent times been painted over and all but buried under posters and advertisements.

  Under his guidance Lockwood’s students subsequently worked on the sculptural details for a number of public buildings, including the Victoria Terminus, the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home and Bombay University.7 The first Superintendent of Crawford Market was a Mr Bennet, who often dined with the Kiplings in their bungalow, and a possibly apocryphal story originating from him tells how the infant Ruddy would listen in keenly while his elders talked, ‘and how the boy would eagerly interrupt a discussion, a reflective frown on his face, with an “I don’t agree with that” or “I don’t think so”, although such precocity regularly ensured for him a rebuke from his elders!’8 If true, this vignette suggests not only precocity but also a distinct lack of parental discipline – as, indeed, does the earlier story of Ruddy throwing clay at his father’s students.

  The Kiplings soon discovered that, even in Bombay, Anglo-Indian social life followed a monotonous cycle characterised by convention and snobbery. However, one of its saving graces was hospitality. When a newcomer arrived at what outside the three Presidency cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras was called a Station, he would announce his arrival by leaving calling cards, beginning with the most important personages and working down through the lists as laid out in publications such as Thacker’s Directory. He would then be invited to dine, and if his manners and background – and those of his wife, if he was married – met with approval, word would spread and more dinner invitations would follow. In Lockwood Kipling’s single early letter of December 1866 he refers to one such welcoming dinner, hosted by a clergyman, where they met Lady Frere, the wife of the Governor, as well as other ‘swells’. After dinner Alice Kipling had sung like a bird ‘in the choruses and in the duets’ and had greatly enjoyed herself.9 At that stage the effervescent personality which was to charm Viceroys and Commanders-in-Chief had evidently failed to impress, but the combination of wit and sagacity which characterised the Kiplings as a couple was bound to make its mark and it was only a matter of time before they were welcomed by those who saw themselves as Bombay Society.

  One well-connected member of this society who went out of his way to befriend the Kiplings was Henry Rivett-Carnac, whose grandfather and uncle had been governors of Bombay and whose cousin was the current Lieutenant-Governor of the Central Provinces. His memoirs reveal that Sir Bartle Frere took a close personal interest in the progress of the Sir J. J. School of Art and that it was as the Governor’s aide that he came to know the Kiplings: ‘During my frequent visits to them in Bombay, I often spent a morning with the Professors in the wigwams in which they lived and carried on work before the school was built.’ The Kiplings struck him as an unusually good-humoured couple but what singled them out was that they ‘took a very intelligent interest in everything connected with the people and the country, and … were better informed on all matters Indian – religions, customs, and peculiarities – than many officials who had bee
n long in the country.’10 Rivett-Carnac was a man of influence, and in a land where contacts counted for a great deal his patronage was to prove invaluable to the Kiplings.

  In October 1867 Alice discovered that she was pregnant again. Unwilling to face the prospect of another painful delivery in difficult conditions, she went Home in February 1868 with her two-year-old boy, leaving her husband to complete the third year of his contract alone. Of that return journey, by way of the ‘overland route’ across the isthmus of Suez before the Canal opened in 1869, Ruddy retained a memory of ‘an immense semi-circle blocking all vision’: the paddle wheel of the SS Ripon, which took them on the first leg of their journey. By one account he was the worst-behaved of the several small children on board – a foretaste of what was in store for his mother’s family in England.

  Of his first eight months in England the adult Rudyard Kipling had very little to say beyond recalling a ‘dark land and a darker room full of cold, in one wall of which a white woman made naked fire, and I cried aloud with dread, for I had never before seen a grate’.11 That Kipling should have had only grim memories of this time is hardly surprising, for his mother parked him with her mother and her unmarried sister Edith at her parents’ new home in the village of Bewdley, outside Kidderminster, while she went off to spend the remainder of her confinement at The Grange, the splendid mansion in Fulham in which Georgina and Ned Burne-Jones had settled with their two small children – Philip, then aged seven, and Margaret, who was five months younger than Ruddy. The Grange had just been magnificently decorated throughout by the company that William Morris had recently set up with his friends, and Alice arrived in time to join the housewarming. However, all was not well between the Burne-Joneses, and the birth of Alice’s daughter on 11 June coincided with her sister Georgie’s discovery of a letter revealing her husband to be besotted with a flame-haired model.12

  Nor was Ruddy having an easy time of it. Even though his Aunt Edith took him into her bed the boy remained thoroughly unsettled, demanding constant attention during the day and kicking her all through the night ‘when he was not demanding drinks of water’. Perhaps he had good cause, having been first uprooted from his home and his beloved ayah and then abandoned by his mother among strangers in a cold, bleak land where his boisterous behaviour was checked at every turn. Nor could he have understood that his maternal grandfather was close to death and required the constant nursing of his wife and daughter. To spare the old man Rudyard was taken out of the house as often as possible, and on these enforced walks he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming! Ruddy is coming!’ – and on one occasion, when his feathers had been particularly ruffled, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’

  Another of Ruddy’s maternal aunts, Louisa, also lived in the village, having married Alfred Baldwin, the son of a wealthy ironmaster of the locality. The only person the two-year-old was able to get along with was the Baldwins’ coachman, Reuben, whom he liked to follow as he went about his work. When at last Alice Kipling reappeared in July nursing a month-old and extremely large baby daughter, Ruddy took this blow calmly. He is said to have watched silently as the adults made a great fuss over his new sister and then, after hearing her compared to a Rubens painting, concurred in a newly acquired Worcestershire brogue, ‘Ah, ’ur be very like Reuben.’13

  Christened Alice Macdonald, the new baby had not had an easy birth, having suffered a broken arm and a black eye during her delivery and then been left for dead on a rug on the floor until her Aunt Georgie had begged the doctor to revive her with some vigorous slapping. Never then or at any time afterwards did her elder brother show the slightest sign of jealousy or sibling rivalry. On the contrary: Ruddy took his little sister to his heart and set himself up as her most devoted protector – a position he maintained in adulthood throughout her unhappy marriage and the mental breakdowns that followed.

  From Bewdley Alice Kipling moved with her two small children to her mother-in-law’s house in Skipton, Yorkshire. After a two-month visit they then returned to her parents for a further month before departing once more for India. Their final departure from Bewdley brought sighs of relief from both the Macdonald and Baldwin households: ‘Alice and her children left us, for London, between 9 and 10, in the forenoon,’ reads an entry in Mrs Macdonald’s diary. ‘Ruddy, after being sweet and pleasant for a little while, screamed horribly just before leaving, which had the effect of drying our tears. I cannot think how his poor mother will bear the voyage to Bombay with an infant and that self-willed rebel. I hope his father will train him better.’14 Rudyard’s aunt, Louisa Baldwin, took the same view. ‘Dear old Alice left us on Monday,’ she wrote in a letter to another member of the family. ‘Sorry as we were to lose her personally, her children turned the house into such a bear-garden, and Ruddy’s screaming tempers made Papa so ill we were thankful to see them on their way. The wretched disturbances one ill ordered child can make is a lesson for all time to me.’15 Frederick Macdonald wrote to his brother Harry in America that the boy bullied his mother and was ‘a power and a problem with strange gifts of upsetting any household’.16 Even Ruddy’s godmother and favourite aunt, Edith Macdonald, believed the boy’s tantrums ‘hastened and embittered’ her father’s end, which came just eleven days after Alice and her children had gone from Bewdley.

  Alice Kipling left England all too aware of her mother’s and siblings’ ill opinions of her ‘self-willed’ son. Either out of pride or from deference to their feelings, she made sure that she never again put herself or her family in a position of such dependence, with serious consequences for her offspring.

  Before the end of the year the new baby was presented to her father in Bombay, and here for the first time the four of them made up the ‘Family Square’ that became such an important feature at a later stage of their lives. However, baby Alice was no placid second child. She drove her mother to distraction with crying fits which only Ruddy and the ayah between them seemed able to soothe, and it was on this account that she acquired her nickname: her father thought her a ‘tricksy baby’. Although as shy as her brother was outgoing, Trix(ie) was equally precocious, with a sharp mind and a quite remarkable memory. Before she was two she was showing ‘a talent for apposite quotation’17 and was able to read long before her brother. Ruddy, by contrast, ‘only learned to read with the greatest difficulty’, which Trix ascribed to his being too clever. ‘I remember a thing he said to me quite seriously,’ she afterwards wrote of his reading difficulties. ‘I was probably crowing over him and he said, “No, Trix, you’re too little, you see; you haven’t brains enough to understand the hard things about reading. I want to know why “t” with “hat” after it should spell “that”.’18

  Among the qualities which Trix claimed to have inherited from her mother was second sight. ‘Remember,’ she wrote many years later in a letter to the Kipling Journal, ‘my mother was the eldest of seven sisters, and a Macdonald of Skye, so her eldest daughter had a right to “the sight”.’ This psychic gift was apparently something that disturbed Alice Kipling greatly, but left her daughter untroubled: ‘She was afraid of it. I have always found it helpful.’19 Whatever gloss Trix may have put on it, her acute sensitivity made her a vulnerable and fearful child.

  When Rudyard returned to Bombay at the age of two years and eleven months he found the beloved ayah who had nursed him as a babe in arms gone, replaced by a budlee, or temporary, ayah until a permanent nurse could be found. This Hindu woman, named Radha, enjoyed frightening the two children with a stuffed leopard’s head mounted on the nursery wall, scaring Trixie so horribly that on one occasion Ruddy intervened and bit the budlee ayah. In his autobiography Rudyard assures the reader that his Hindu bearer Meeta saved him from ‘night terrors or dread of the dark’ by explaining that the leopard was there only to guard over him while he slept. But all the evidence points to this being wishful thinking, for he never lost his fear of the dark, and even as an adult hated being alone at night.

  Fort
unately for the children, the Hindu budlee ayah gave way to a Roman Catholic of Goan origins20 who became the dominant figure in both their lives for as long as they remained in Bombay. Indeed, the happiness that attended their childhood in India owed far more to the companionship of their household servants than to their parents or the company of other children. It is no coincidence that in every written recollection of their first years in India, and in the fiction that drew on their Bombay childhood, both brother and sister place Ayah and Meeta centre stage, while their parents hover in the background. Indian servants were generally known by their trades rather than by their names, and although Kipling describes Meeta as a bearer, his name identifies him as a sweeper of the lowest Hindu caste. Bearers acted as valets or personal servants and were most often Muslims, so either the Kiplings were defying local conventions or, more likely, had been forced to cut their cloth according to their purse.

  It was Ayah whom Rudyard remembered praying at roadside crosses, while Meeta went one stage further by taking him into Hindu temples ‘where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods’.21 The Bhuleshwar and Mumbadevi temples in the bazaar were both within easy perambulating distance of Crawford Market. The original shrine of the goddess Mumbai from which Mumbai Island took its name had been demolished in the mid-eighteenth century when the eastern perimeter of the Fort was enlarged. Its replacement became a focal point for Marathi-speakers and lower-caste Hindus, who would break coconuts before the shrine. The Mumbadevi temple is also unusual in containing a large number of images of the elephant-headed Ganesh and other popular Hindu folk deities: the ‘dimly-seen, friendly Gods’ of Ruddy’s early acquaintance.

  In the company of the household servants Ruddy and Trix mingled with a very different India from that of their parents, speaking not only the lingua franca known as Urdu, but also snatches of other tongues and dialects. ‘In the afternoon heats,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling in his autobiography, ‘before we took our sleep, she [Ayah] or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the cautions “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.” So one spoke “English” haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.’22 Learning to move effortlessly from one language to another and one culture to another enabled Ruddy to become the child of many parts portrayed in half a dozen of his Indian stories, where he appears sometimes as ‘Punch’ and at other times as ‘Tods’, the six-year-old son of a Simla grass widow. In ‘Tods’ Amendment’, set in Simla, the little boy is ‘beyond his ayah’s control altogether’ and ‘the idol of some eighty jhampanis [rickshaw-pullers], and half as many saises [grooms]. He saluted them as “O Brother”. It never entered his head that any living being could disobey his orders … The working of that household turned on Tods, who was adored by every one from the dhobi [washerman] to the dog-boy.’