Page 141 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Kipling’s days of “strong light and darkness” in Bombay ended when he was five years old.
As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice (“Trix”) were taken to
England—in their case to Southsea, Portsmouth—to live with a couple who boarded children of
British nationals who were serving in India. For the next six years, from October 1871 to April
1877, the two children lived with the couple, Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, once an officer in
the merchant navy, and Mrs Sarah Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge at 4 Campbell Road,
Southsea. In his autobiography, published some 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with
horror, and wondered ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect which he experienced
there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: “If you
cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to
sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and
retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was
calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon
found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort”.
Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs. Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually
marry the Holloway son. The two Kipling children, however, did have relatives in England
whom they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana
(“Georgy”) and her husband at their house, “The Grange,” in Fulham, London, which Kipling
was to call “a paradise which I verily believe saved me.” In the spring of 1877, Alice returned
from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers, “Often and often
afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being
treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally
established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they
betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it”.
In January 1878, Kipling was admitted to the United Services College at Westward Ho! Devon,
a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the British Army. The school proved
rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his
schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. (1899). During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love
with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned).
Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light that Failed (1891).
Near the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get
into Oxford University on a scholarship and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance
him, so Lockwood obtained a job for his son in Lahore, Punjab (now in Pakistan), where
Lockwood was Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling
was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette.
He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October. He described
this moment years later: “So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years
older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour
of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that
made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born
boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.” This arrival changed Kipling, as he
explains: “There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these,
my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength”.

8.1.2 Back to India

The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, the newspaper which Kipling was to call “mistress
and most true love”, appeared six days a week throughout the year except for one-day breaks
for Christmas and Easter. Stephen Wheeler, the editor, worked Kipling hard, but Kipling’s need

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