Kipling and Trix

Acknowledgements

AcknowledgementsI couldn’t have written this book without the generous support of many individuals and institutions around the world. Not all of them can be named here but I particularly want to thank Henry Louis Gates Jnr. for keeping a welcome for me in Harvard and David Page, John Radcliffe and John Walker for giving me a home in the Kipling Society.

The staff in the Houghton Library and in Widener, like the keepers of Sussex University’s Kipling Archive, have been unfailingly helpful. I shall always be in debt to Tanya Barben of the University of Cape Town, for sharing her exhaustive knowledge of Kipling’s time in South Africa and to Barbara Fisher, for allowing me access to her own research on Trix Kipling.

I owe the Clink Street Writers’ Group for astute feedback and for the constant friendship that kept me on track as I was writing.

Most of all I am grateful to my husband, Nick Cumpsty, for his backing.

Note about the bookThe story I’m telling in Kiping & Trix follows the historical facts very closely. But in bringing it to life, I had to draw on imagination for scenes and conversations and to explore the inner thoughts of my characters. It was because I wanted to make emotional sense of these lives that I chose fiction rather than biography.

This book is for my brothers

Christopher and John

and in memory of Michael, 1947–2011

SONG OF THE

WISE CHILDREN

BY RUDYARD KIPLINGWHEN the darkened Fifties dip to the North,

And frost and the fog divide the air,

And the day is dead at his breaking-forth,

Sirs, it is bitter beneath the Bear!

Far to Southward they wheel and glance,

The million molten spears of morn—

The spears of our deliverance

That shine on the house where we were born.

Flying-fish about our bows,

Flying sea-fires in our wake:

This is the road to our Father’s House,

Whither we go for our souls’ sake!

We have forfeited our birthright,

We have forsaken. all things meet;

We have forgotten the look of light,

We have forgotten the scent of heat.

They that walk with shaded brows,

Year by year in a shining land,

They be men of our Father’s House,

They shall recieve us and understand..

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-celled rooms that the Trade blows through:

To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond,

And the tree-toad’s chorus drowning all—

And the lisp of the split banana-frond

That talked us to sleep when we were small.

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.

And Earth accepting shall ask no vows,

Nor the Sea our love, nor our lover the Sky.

When we return to our Father’s House

Only the English shall wonder why!

The Times January 18th, 1936

MR. RUDYARD

KIPLING

_____

STORY-TELLER AND

POET

_____

AN INTERPRETER OF

EMPIRE

One of the most forcible minds of our time has ceased to work with the death early this morning of Rudyard Kipling.

Whether the mind of Rudyard Kipling was a great mind; whether he could be called a great man; whether he lacked in width of vision what he had in intensity; whether his achievement in self-expression will tend in the future towards the good which he ardently, single-heartedly, desired for the world – all these are questions which it is impossible to consider under the blow of a great loss.