quotes_oct5_2003.htm

‘I have taken your keys away from that fat foreigner, and sent him away; and the studs are in the shirt for mess. Who should know if I do not know ? And so the baby has become a man, and forgets his nurse; but my nephew shall make a good servant, or I will beat him twice a day’…

This is from ‘The tomb of his ancestors’ in ‘The Day’s Work’. John Chinn, the third generation of a soldier family who had served in India with a native regiment of Bhils, in central India, has just arrived as a newly joined subaltern in his father and grandfather’s regiment. The Bhil people believe he is the re-incarnation of his grandfather, whom he closely resembles. Here he is greeted by Bukta, the senior native officer of the regiment, who had known him since infancy.

…He sat up in bed and looked round. There was a murmur of voices from the other side of the nursery door. It was better to face the terrible unknown than to choke in the dark. He slipped out of bed, but his feet were strangely wilful, and he reeled once or twice. Then he pushed the door open and staggered – a puffed and purple-faced little figure – into the brilliant light of the dining-room full of pretty ladies…

This is from ‘His Majesty the King’ in ‘Wee Willie Winkie’.

A small boy falls dangerously ill, and over his sickbed his estranged parents are reconciled.

…At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than anything in the world, because, childlike … (his) … eye could not carry to the tops of the mango trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see … as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart – three foot of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden – he could come into a ready-made kingdom, where everyone was his slave…

This is from “The Son of his Father” in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Little Adam Strickland is growing up in India, among the exotic sights and smells of an Indian garden, surrounded by the friendship and love of his father’s servants. Later in the tale he is whipped by his father for sitting among the horses. As his muslim friends would feel, he is outraged that his honour – his izzat – was damaged when he was beaten before a woman, his nurse. He gets his revenge by making a fool of his father before the servants.