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I never worked less than ten hours and seldom more than fifteen per diem; and as our paper came out in the evening did not see the midday sun except on Sundays. I had fever too, regular and persistent, to which I added for a while chronic dysentery. Yet I discovered that a man can work with a temperature of 104, even though next day he has to ask the office who wrote the article. |
This is from “Seven Years Hard” in Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography. In 1882, at the age of sixteen and nine months, he became half the editorial staff of the Civil and Military Gazette, the main English language newspaper of the Punjab. He acquired a habit of hard work, attention to detail, and a love of journalism, that never left him. Sometimes, though, overtaxed in the fearful heat of the Indian plains, he came close to breakdown. |
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