July 2025 – A Sahibs’ War
Umr Singh, a distinguished old soldier of the Raj, is the one telling this story, but the setting isn’t his native Punjab. He’s en route for Stellenbosch on the Cape at the time of the Boer War in South Africa, where the events he has to recount have taken place. Nowadays most of us haven’t ever heard much about that period, when England outraged liberal opinion at home and in Europe at large by declaring war against the two Boer Republics: control of the gold and diamonds there was at stake, whatever was argued beside. It makes the setting itself very fresh and the background details intriguing for the reader.
‘A Sahibs’ War’ offers an account of that conflict and of the Boers themselves, farmers and very religious, from a very particular perspective. Umr Singh’s ideas of the proper conduct of war are shaped by notions of honour and of revenge. He speaks to give his personal experience of the circumstances in which a much younger soldier, a ‘Sahib’, that is, an English officer, to whom he’d been close since the man was a small child, had been killed. Umr Singh describes the revenge he himself exacted.
Ever since I read this story, many years ago now, ‘A Sahibs’ War’ has stayed at the back of my mind, troubling me. The feelings it leaves me with are powerful, not least my sensation of unease. This has only grown. When I visited the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein I learned for myself of the brutal indifference visited on the Boer women and children herded by the British into ‘concentration’ camps. Rations were meagre and not appropriate: many children died. For me, this brought into sharp focus the revengeful fury of British generals, at a loss when faced by a guerilla army of Boers. That complicated my impulse to accept Umr Singh’s take on the events he describes. And it made me question the position adopted by the man who created Umr Singh.
Rudyard Kipling was not himself when he wrote this story. In the late autumn of 1901, just before it was first published, he was planning his third extended visit to South Africa since December 1900. The first of these had taken place barely ten months after the death of the child to whom he was so close, Josephine, a death of which he himself had been ignorant: too sick himself with pneumonia even to know she was ill, he recovered only to learn she had already been cremated.
It was in South Africa and by means of identifying closely with British interests there that Kipling found a new focus and a place where he could fight his way back to equilibrium after the devastating double impact of barely escaping death and of losing his child. I don’t need to labour how Umr Singh with his cries of lamentation and his drive to be avenged owe their intensity to Kipling’s personal despair and to his rage. In his weakened state the blackest of the emotions he had known, even going back to his childhood, flooded in. It’s my guess that his vicious portrayal of the Boer family is shaped by such feeling.
June 2025 – Weland’s Sword
Some instinct—Puck perhaps?—took me back to Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill this week. I’d forgotten that ‘Weland’s Sword’, the story it opens with, is set on Midsummer Eve—only a couple of weeks away as I write. I’d forgotten, too, how truly magical, how compelling, is the writer’s evocation of a perfect summer evening. He is casting a spell. Held by it, readers will leave behind all they thought they knew and all they had been taught, trusting instead to the voice of the story-teller.
For child readers, the pleasingly concrete picnic of Bath Oliver biscuits, boiled eggs and salt are probably as powerful an invitation to imagining. What is more, the world of Dan and Una, the children in the story, might fulfil the desire of any heart: their father has written a play specially for them, they’ve been helped with the props and now they are allowed to perform it at Midsummer Eve on their own, in the middle of a fairy ring. At the end of their adventure, their father will be waiting to walk them home.
Kipling did try to create a dream childhood for John and Elsie Kipling, the figures on whom the characters of Dan and Una were based. He did indeed cut down Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for them, even sending to London for a donkey’s head. You might guess that it could have soothed the wounds of his own miserable childhood to be able to create such a different life for children of his own. John and Elsie/Dan and Una wouldn’t need to use their imagination for a means to escape.
You don’t need to be a child to enjoy ‘Weland’s Sword’, though the child in you is likely to be delighted. What strikes me today, as a reader, is the satisfying shift of perspective Kipling produces in me. As Puck explains himself to the children, I too learn to connect the gods of antiquity with the beings that haunt woods and streams. To see that the Old Gods, as Puck names them, were arrivals brought by traders and armies, only to dwindle into ghostly local presences. I learn to banish the notion of ‘fairies’ as cheap fantasy and instead to recognise an enduring connection between the land and spiritual forces that can terrify.
How did Kipling himself come by this insight? I think the seeds were sown in his very early, very happy years in Bombay, as it was then known. As a small child he was taken about by Indian servants and would observe the rituals of diverse creeds. Looking back, in ‘The Wise Children’ he writes with longing of ‘the wayside magic, the threshold spells’ once part of his everyday life. The poem suggests that these spoke to him of a way of being in the world that was integrated. It recognised there were spiritual forces alive in the natural world, though Christian Europe had no place for them.
It was a moment of brilliance when Kipling thought of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Puck as a way to retrieve a sense of those spiritual forces for his readers
May 2025 – The Janeites
If you don’t already know ‘The Janeites’, you might be surprised to find Kipling, ‘the soldiers’ poet’, writing a story about Jane Austen’s novels. But he’s not abandoning his old concern for the experience of men in the ranks. If you pick up ‘The Janeites’ to read it for the first time, you’ll find yourself back in 1920, in a world of ex-soldiers, doing a Saturday cleanup at a Masonic lodge: not a ball or a milliner in sight. As they work away, one of the men, Humberstall, who’s a survivor of shell-shock, is encouraged by a companion to talk about his experiences.
He’s been ’blown up’ twice, that’s to say on two different occasions he’s been one of a group enduring a direct hit from shelling—but that’s not the point of the story. That information, conveyed with oblique tact by a kindly companion, only serves to place him as an ‘innocent’: his mind has been wiped clear by shell-shock, leaving him with the simplicity of a child and a child’s sense of wonder. He is still wondering at his discovery that the power to drop a reference to Austen’s characters creates an immediate bond—across the divides of rank and class—between people who are otherwise strangers. He shares how a mentor opened that fellowship to him during the recent War.
What makes this story appeal to me is the sense of how much was at stake for Kipling in writing it. Look at a timeline and you can trace how his experience of reading Austen was interleaved with his own experience of struggling to recover after devastating loss.
March 1915: he’s reading Jane Austen and announces that for the first time he is sure she’s greater than Scott or Dickens in the way she peoples her novels. He pinpoints the fact that her characters are not invented. Instead they are drawn from her everyday experience, her observations as a woman of exceptional insight. Gifted too with ‘a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel’.
August 1915: his only son, John, is killed in action at WWI’s Battle of Loos.
January 1917: his wife Carrie writes in her diary that in the evenings Rudyard was reading Jane Austen’s novels aloud to their daughter, Elsie, and herself ‘to our great delight’.
1922-23 he is writing ‘The Janeites’.
I see him in 1917, as returning in spirit to March 1915, that time of pleasure and confidence, and to the writer whose realistic insight into ordinary women and men delighted him. At that time John was still alive and their family intact. Now, John dead, by going back to Austen, his father recreates the pleasure her perceptions had given him. He also shares it, by reading her work aloud to comfort his diminished family.
When he sits down to write ‘The Janeites’, in 1922 with the war well past, it is from the well of these experiences, transformed, that Kipling draws the story of Humberstall. For this survivor too, the wonder of Austen’s novels lies in meeting characters whom he can recognise from his own experience. And not just recognise: he can find their counterparts around him: according to their performance, his Austen mentor chalks the names of different characters from Austen on the guns in their battery.
Apr 2025 – The Story of Muhammad Din
As a young man, Kipling admitted that the stories he was writing tended to be disturbing, to have an ‘ugsome’ tone, as he put it to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones. (Yes, the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones the painter: Rudyard was very well-connected through his aunts.)
Did you know that Rudyard’s father noted how even as a young man his son was exceptionally fond of babies?
Today, wanting to introduce a story with a different tone and to introduce you, as it were, to a different Kipling, I remembered ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’.
It’s the most beautiful, delicate rendering of a young child’s behaviour, as observed by an initially indifferent man. That indifference silently gives way, at first in response to the child’s dignity. Every afternoon the man takes care to return the little one’s formal greeting. As time goes on he pays respectful attention to the creativity he sees at play as the child crouches in the dirt. The most tender observation is at work—in both parties. All this in a mere 1,000 words.
The love that small Muhammad Din has inspired is spelled out only indirectly and with exquisite reticence in the last ten lines of the story: strikingly, within those lines, the writer also takes a moment to distance himself from the contemptuous indifference to Indian children shown by another Englishman.
Mar 2025 – At the End of the Passage
There is something very satisfying about a story that really makes you believe in the supernatural experience it describes. It’s like the best ghost stories—though Kipling isn’t presenting us with a ghost. Hummil, the engineer at the centre of the tale, is haunted by a dream that takes him back to a state of terror he had known as a child. Kipling makes us know the power of that terror for ourselves, when he sketches the disturbing image of a human fragment: Hummil is haunted by ‘a blind face that can’t wipe its eyes’. I challenge you not to find the image mesmerising. It can’t be tidied up to make everyday sense.
As so often at this point in his career—he was twenty-five and had burst upon London, becoming famous almost overnight—in this story Rudyard was capitalising on his Indian experience, his USP. The setting he gives his story is highly charged, though not with Indian glamour. The four men who sit round Hummil’s card table are suffering from the unbearable heat. Also from the isolation entailed by their employment as engineer, doctor etc. Though they don’t have much in common, don’t even like each other, this weekly rendezvous at Hummil’s offers them respite from their alien postings: it’s their upbringing and their background, as British administrators, that they have in common. Meanwhile, they are desperately bored and uncomfortable. The dust storms that darken the day outside are no thicker than the tensions in the room.
We soon learn that some men do succumb to the strain of such living conditions: the news that in the past week a colleague killed himself is shared discreetly: such events are no surprise to these men. As readers we might agree to find Kipling’s insistence on their stoical acceptance of their duty and his portrayal of the doctor a bit too much like hero-worship. But his account of Hummil’s torments carries me with him, into a claustrophobic hell of the mind. Something he knew plenty about himself. It was about this time, following his move to London, that he had a breakdown, one serious enough to be advised to take a holiday.
One final point: do notice Kipling’s frugal use of his material. Those lines of poetry that head the tale have been lifted from a poem he’d published six years earlier in Echoes, the collection he put out jointly with his sister, Trix.
And give him his due: he created a new form when he headed his stories with a poem. Look out for those pairs. At first glance you can’t always see how they fit together. He wants you to think.
Feb 2025 – False Dawn
‘Tomorrow I go to a big meeting of the local Masonic Lodge’, wrote Rudyard, early in 1888. ‘Let us hope they’ll give me some decent material’, he went on. ‘I’m in low water again.’ His anxiety was prompted by a big promotion that had made him editor of The Week’s News, a new supplement to the Allahabad Pioneer. He was also expected to provide the paper’s fiction. It was not a good time to run out of his stock of stories. But he got a grip and ‘False Dawn’ was one of the first of a flood of stories he would create in the weeks to follow.
He had to come up with the goods, it was life or death: he knew he had to get his work known outside India if he was to present himself as a successful writer in London and he’d done all he could with the opportunities India offered. Lying awake at night, as he told us, he would ponder what kind of work, what sort of story, would ‘take’ with the reading public in England.
I won’t spoil the story for you by saying too much about it. I still take pleasure in its invitation to enter a world touched with glamour by its Indian setting, even while the author also wants to rob me of any delusions concerning the British inhabitants. I turn to it for an account of extreme experience in the storm, ‘roaring whirling darkness’ and ‘lightning spurting like water from a sluice’, details that give the scale of what is going on between the lovers.
There’s one bit of background that I will add as a footnote: Rudyard had particular reason to be thinking about the psychological stakes around getting engaged. His sister Trix, to whom he was devoted, had recently broken off an engagement that her family had always thought ill-judged. Yet she remained tearful and uncertain, giving John Fleming, her tenacious ex-fiancé, hope and baffling her brother. (After many of these hesitations she went on to marry Fleming, an outcome which brought little happiness to either.)
Jan 2025 – Kaa’s Hunting
What draws me back to this particular Mowgli story? When I came on the Jungle Book as a little girl it opened a door onto a new world, one that was more alive, more radiant with feeling; though I couldn’t have named it, I think I sensed it was more truthful, too. The world I was being taught to inhabit was bleached—blame post-war austerity, the nuns at my convent school, as you will.
I loved the Jungle Book right from the opening incantation
‘Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—’
That tone of magic comes with an undernote of threat, for the herds have to be protected, ‘shut in byre and hut’ from the ‘talon and tush and claw’ of the proud and powerful creatures that stalk abroad. For me, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ creates that sense of ruthless threat, embodying it in Kaa’s terrifying hypnotic power over all other animals, even while holding it in balance. Countering that threat is the care of Baloo and Bagheera, in teaching Mowgli before putting their lives at risk to save him from the bundar-log, the lawless and dangerous monkey people.
Decades after that first reading I spent several years immersing myself in Kipling’s personal experience in order to write Kipling and Trix, my fictionalised account of his life. These days, as a reader, I find myself picking up other patterns in his writing, connections between ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ and his earlier visit to the abandoned ancient city of Chitor, described in Letter XI, of Letters of Marque (1888). Memories of that sinister ruin may lie behind the Cold Lairs of ‘Kaa’s Hunting’. In Chitor he felt a terror, a sense of ancient danger that threatened to overwhelm his very identity: he felt ‘he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or …the Gau-Mukh (river) would continue to pour water until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and crush him flat.’ I find that terror of the loss of self to be echoed in his account of the mesmerising power of the great rock-snake to overwhelm identity in others.
(Letters of Marque are well worth reading for entertainment: they were written as he was sent travelling in Rajasthan, a twenty-three year old, who had made India too hot to hold him.)
As for the bundar-log, I sense they owe a good deal to the child’s pained response to the social world little Ruddy found on arriving in Southsea. Remember ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’? When Auntie Rosa takes steps to have him humiliated among the other boys, Punch can’t contain himself: ‘If I was with my father,’ said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, ‘I shouldn’t speak to those boys. He wouldn’t let me. They live in shops. I saw them go into shops—where their fathers live and sell things.’ It’s not an attractive response, I admit, but it reflects the social stratifications that boy, Ruddy’s stand-in, had been brought up with. At home in India little Ruddy had also grown up hearing talk among adults, Indian and English, that was often intelligent and thoughtful. In later years, now a writer, he didn’t forget the impression made on him as a child when overhearing conversations between the adults who were Auntie Rosa’s friends: perhaps in the limited interests and concerns of the bundar-log, he was recalling those speakers.
Dec 2024 – Beyond The Pale
I feel a bit shy about suggesting ‘Beyond the Pale’: though it could be described as ‘a rattling good yarn’ it is undoubtedly a horror story, one which turns on an image of mutilation that’s hard to forget. Only gradually does the story reveal its depths and resonances. At first reading it appears a tale written to confirm Sahibs in their fears of the apparently uncivilised and unpredictable ways of the Native.
No doubt many subscribers to the Civil and Military Gazette, the newspaper based in Lahore, where Kipling had been employed as a journalist since his late teens, would have taken it that way. But the story, which first appeared in the first Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, was also aimed, like the other tales in that collection, at readers outside India.
Twenty-three when it came out, in later years Kipling described how he had lain awake in those early days, puzzling how to create a product that would ‘take’ as he put it, with a wider reading public, the public at home where he hoped to make his name. No wonder if young Kipling’s Tales tended to the sensational! For Oscar Wilde, ‘as one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity’.
When he spoke of ‘reading life’ I think Wilde was recognising the truthful vision that underlay the all too apparent horror of ‘Beyond the Pale’. Alongside the tiresomely knowing or patronising tones of one authorial voice, we hear another. The voice of ‘The Love-Song of Har Dyal’ sings of passionate longing, a physical longing that is brutally suppressed. Bisesa is no helpless victim, no ‘little Bisesa’ but a sexually experienced woman whose sexual desire is savagely punished. Trejago himself went about the world in hiding, walking Lahore under a burqa, his desires concealed: the injury to ‘his groin’ he receives, from Bisesa’s avenging uncle suggests castration or impotence. It’s a barely spoken critique of the empty social interactions between women and men that are all Trejago can look forward to.
Nov 2024 – Baa Baa Blacksheep
If you haven’t come across this story or even if it’s one that’s familiar from past reading, do click on it here. But first, brace yourself. Its tale of traumatised children is written from the angry heart. It tells of the damage inflicted on little Rudyard and his still younger sister, Trix, when their parents went back to India and the children were left in the power of an ignorant and bigoted foster-mother. We know it’s no more than the truth, though some critics haven’t wanted to believe that; when she was seventy his sister, Trix, confirmed his account in her essay ‘Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’ which was published in Chambers’s Journal.
Kipling wrote Baa Baa Black Sheep when he was twenty-three and had left the home of his parents for a second time, voluntarily on this occasion. That new moment of separation may have prompted him to revisit his shock and confusion as a child. The attempt to capture it in writing disturbed him, for Edmonia Hill, his hostess in Allahabad, noted what an awful temper he developed as he worked on it. In transforming his experience into a story, he did manage to overcome some of his turmoil, not least by giving thought to his little sister Trix and exploring how those years had damaged her. To know more about Trix, I recommend Barbara Fisher’s biography, Trix: The Other Kipling.