All posts tagged Young Men at the Manor

Puck of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling (1906)

‘Ah, Sussex! Silly Sussex for everlastin’,’ murmured Hal…

In 1902 Kipling moved to Bateman’s, an impressive Jacobean mansion in the depths of the Sussex countryside. As Charles Carrington’s biography makes clear, the move, and even more so the publication of many of his Boer War stories in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904, marked a kind of ending of his intense involvement with Imperial politics. From the poems Recessional (1897) and The White Man’s Burden (1899) through to the stories and poems he wrote about the Boer War (1899 to 1902), the years at the turn of the century had marked the high tide of jingoistic feeling in Britain, and of Kipling’s involvement with and embodiment of it. The end of the war was followed almost immediately by the death of Kipling’s close friend, Cecil Rhodes – who had lent the Kiplings a guest house in South Africa where they had become used to spending every winter. Rhodes was the most unashamed exponent of the Imperialist vision and his death marked the end of an era.

Although Kipling continued to write patriotic and pro-Imperial poems and stories, the move to Bateman’s marked new beginnings. He threw himself into exploring the geography and history of the area and, by extension, of England itself, reading local histories and the Domesday Book. He delighted in the new technology of the motor car, buying a number of early models, hiring a chauffeur-cum-engineer, and working car travel into a number of his Edwardian stories. He continued his love affair with the Navy, accepting offers to watch manoeuvres and writing poems and stories accordingly.

But it was to English history that he really turned his focus, devoting his phenomenal ability to absorb a wealth of technical and factual information onto English history and specifically local Sussex history, researches which found their outlet in the form of a historical fantasia for children.

The resulting book of short stories starts with two very white, very middle-class children, Dan and Una, rehearsing a child’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a meadow near their parent’s house in rural Sussex, on Midsummer Night’s Eve, and in a fairy ring. The conjunction of these elements unwittingly conjures up Puck, the elfin fairy figure from Shakespeare’s play. He introduces himself to the startled children as the last of ‘the Old Things’ which used to inhabit England, the last of ‘the Hill Peoples’.

In the chapters that follow Puck introduces a procession of typical figures from English history – a Roman centurion, a Saxon monk, a Norman knight, a Viking sea captain, a medieval artist, and so on.

1. Weland’s Sword

Having conjured up Puck the children quite quickly accept him and listen as he explains how ‘the Peoples of the Hills’ came and went over thousands of years of English history; and of one particular god, Weland the Smith, who arrived with the Vikings and vaunted his pride and strength, before slowly (over a thousand years!) dwindling into an old man, a peripatetic blacksmith, who wants to be dismissed from his trade, and from England, but requires a mortal man to give him genuine thanks before he can depart. Puck tells how a mortal monk, Hugh, forced a rude peasant who got his horse shoed by Weland for free and walked away cursing, to come back and thank the smith properly. How these thanks magically freed Weyland who, out of gratitude, made Hugh a marvellously strong sword over which magic runes were chanted. Before Weyland disappeared into the dark woods never to be seen again.

At the end of each story Puck gives Una and Dan a leaf of ash, oak and thorn, and it makes them forget the whole episode – so they don’t reveal things to the grown-ups!

Illustration to Puck of Pook's Hill by Arthur Rackham

Illustration to Puck of Pook’s Hill by Arthur Rackham

2. Young Men at the Manor

The children are fishing in the stream when they are surprised to find Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a knight in armour, on his war horse. He reminds the children of John Everett Millais’s painting, Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857).

Dalyngridge tells his story. He was young and only newly knighted when he came over with William the Conqueror, fought at Hastings in the retinue of  Engerrard of the Eagle who was killed and replaced by his son, Gilbert. Wandering away from the fight, he was attacked by a Saxon who he should have recognised, because it was no other than Hugh (with Weyland’s sword) – but Dalyngridge knows him because they both lived for a while in a monastery in Normandy. They fight till Hugh’s sword flies out of  his hand but makes a kind of singing, groaning noise that scares both men. Dalyngridge gives Hugh his life. Hugh brings him to the nearby manor house where a) Hugh collapses of his wounds b) Dalyngridge is rudely seized by Saxons who threaten to hang him if Hugh doesn’t recover. Dalyngridge’s master, Gilbert de Aquila, rides up with his men and laughs at Dalyngridge’s predicament. They free him and say he can keep this manor if he manages to survive and master the Saxons and manage it for one calendar month.

Well – he does manage, and the characters are contorted to demonstrate a whistle-stop tour of medieval chivalry. Turns out that Hugh sleeps every night in Dalyngridge’s company, knowing that if any Saxon kills Dalyngridge, he (Hugh) would be immediately killed: in effect, he gives himself as a hostage for Dalyngridge’s wellbeing – without letting the latter know. And Dalyngridge chivalrously refuses to sleep in the main hall to respect the sensitivities of the beautiful Lady Ælueva, the Saxon lady of the manor who is distraught that they have been conquered. Only after months of demonstrating his chivalry and only after he has managed to unite his own Norman followers with the Saxon men of the manor in joint defence against thieves and cattle rustlers, does Dalyngridge prove himself, and does the Lady meekly ask him to come and sleep in ‘his’ hall. Gilbert de Aquila returns, laughing and mocking, reveals the truth about Hugh’s giving himself as a hostage, gives the manor definitively to Dalyngridge, and knights Hugh for his loyalty.

The point of these complex events is to show that conquered and conquerors quickly bond and unite through the gentilesse of chivalry. They also show – as almost all the stories do – the importance of loyalty, of pledging loyalty to a friend, to a comrade in arms – and then sticking to them through thick and thin.

3. The Knights of the Joyous Venture

The children are pretending to be explorers in a little dinghy on the stream when Sir Richard Dalyngridge appears again. He tells them what happened a generation later, after he married Lady Ælueva, had several sons, and grew old. When she died he decided to go on pilgrimage and Hugh came along. They go on board a merchant ship going to collect wine from Boulogne but it loses its way in the mist in the Channel and is attacked by a Viking ship. Hugh and Dalyngridge are taken prisoner and carried off on a long sea voyage south, past Madeira and Spain – where the king is fighting the Moors – and on down the coast of Africa to a place where the Africans have a custom of leaving gold on the shore if the Vikings will do battle with the aggressive gorillas which terrorise them. Both Dalyngridge and Hugh are injured rescuing the gold from the gorillas, but their bravery makes the bandy-legged Viking captain, Witta, love them and honour them.

After loading all the gold aboard they make their way back north, using the magical pointing iron (compass) of the Yellow Man (Chinaman) who Witta had on board, until Witta lets them ashore at Pevensey, kissing them and lading them with gold. They all love each other. The message is that, though conflict, fighting and suffering together, men forge bonds deeper than words.

4. Old Men At Pevensey

Dalyngridge and Hugh go back to their respective manors but find they are now old men and their sons have inherited and taken over in their absence. So they stay with de Aquila in his castle at Pevensey. This is a long complicated story in which the old men realise that de Aquila’s clerk, Gilbert, has been taking down quotes of de Aquila’s, designed to make him seem treacherous. At the time King Henry (who became king in 1100 – hence our heroes are old men) is fighting off a rebellion of  his barons, and also worried about a possible invasion from Normandy by his brother Duke Robert. Pevensey is the gateway to England. They discover de Aquila’s clerk Gilbert has been working for a cowardly knight called Fulke to take down evidence against de Aquila which Fulke can use to poison the king’s mind. But when Fulke arrives with the king’s command that de Aquila report to the fighting in the west, de Aquila refuses to go and, with Hugh and Dalyngridge’s help, they trip and stun Fulke, strip him of his armour, tie him and dangle him down a well which hangs over the sea. As the tide rises they force him to tell the full story of his rotten cowardly life to be taken down by Gilbert who – his treachery revealed – is in terror of his life. When Fulke’s young son runs in Fulke begs and pleads he’ll do anything as long as they let his son live.

So de Aquila eventually decides a) they’ll get copies of Fulke’s treachery made and distribute them widely if any harm comes b) they will kill Fulke’s son if any harm comes; therefore c) Fulke must put things right with the king and redeem de Aquila’s reputation. Fulke agrees, they let him go and never hear anything more. Some time later, King Henry crosses the sea to Normandy and thrashes his brother Robert. And with that Puck throws at Dan and Una leaves of Oak, Ash and Thorn, they forget the encounter, and so we leave the company of Sir Richard Dalyngridge.

5. A Centurion of the Thirtieth*

Introducing Parnesius, an officer of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion — the Ulpia Victrix – in his bronze armour and great bronze helmet with its red horse tail. Here Una is showing him a child’s toy catapult.

Like so many Kipling ‘stories’, this is really a potted biography, going into great detail about his upbringing on Vectis (the Isle of Wight), his father, mother, nurse and brother; the trip they took to Aquae Sulis (Bath), his decision to become a soldier and his father pulling strings to send him to training school at Anderida (Pevensey). A fire breaks out and he gets his cohort up to fight it, and turns out to be witnessed by Maximus, Theodosius’s right hand man in the ‘Pict Wars’. He takes his cohort for its first march from Pevensey to just under Pook’s Hill where – even in Roman times – there was a good forge kept by a one-eyed Greek smith they nicknamed Cyclops (Kipling’s stories are always stuffed with lots and lots of circumstantial detail, in an effort to compensate for the lack of actual story). Here a legionary cheeks him and Parnesius knocks him over and is about to chastise him when Maximus appears again, saying, ‘Kill him’. Parnesius refuses and Maximus says Parnesius will never rise in his army. We now find Maximus creepy – [this same Magnus Maximus (though it isn’t explained in the story) will lead a rebellion against the Emperor Gratian and rule as Western Emperor from 383 to 388].

No, Parnesius’s destiny will be to march his cohort north and spend his career guarding Hadrian’s Wall against the painted people (the Picts).

6. On the Great Wall*

Parnesius takes up his story where he left off, giving a brisk account of marching his cohort north through England, the landscape becoming bleaker and more rugged, until they reach the Wall. This is described wonderfully.

‘Just when you think you are at the world’s end, you see a smoke from East to West as far as the eye can turn, and then, under it, also as far as the eye can stretch, houses and temples, shops and theatres, barracks, and granaries, trickling along like dice behind — always behind — one long, low, rising and falling, and hiding and showing line of towers. And that is the Wall!’
‘Ah!’ said the children, taking breath.
‘You may well,’ said Parnesius. ‘Old men who have followed the Eagles since boyhood say nothing in the Empire is more wonderful than first sight of the Wall!’
‘Is it just a Wall? Like the one round the kitchen-garden?’ said Dan.
‘No, no! It is the Wall. Along the top are towers with guard-houses, small towers, between. Even on the narrowest part of it three men with shields can walk abreast from guard-house to guard-house. A little curtain wall, no higher than a man’s neck, runs along the top of the thick wall, so that from a distance you see the helmets of the sentries sliding back and forth like beads. Thirty feet high is the Wall, and on the Picts’ side, the North, is a ditch, strewn with blades of old swords and spear-heads set in wood, and tyres of wheels joined by chains. The Little People come there to steal iron for their arrow-heads.
‘But the Wall itself is not more wonderful than the town behind it. Long ago there were great ramparts and ditches on the South side, and no one was allowed to build there. Now the ramparts are partly pulled down and built over, from end to end of the Wall; making a thin town eighty miles long. Think of it! One roaring, rioting, cockfighting, wolf-baiting, horse-racing town, from Ituna on the West to Segedunum on the cold eastern beach! On one side heather, woods and ruins where Picts hide, and on the other, a vast town — long like a snake, and wicked like a snake. Yes, a snake basking beside a warm wall!

As usual with Kipling, there is a lot more local colour and circumstantial detail than plot. Parnesius gets friendly with Pertinax, another officer about his age, and they both go hunting north of The Wall, with a one-eyed Pict named Allo.

Allo was painted blue, green, and red from his forehead to his ankles.

The tribesmen decorated their bodies with tattoos. Hence the Roman name for them – Picts, or ‘painted ones’. On one hunting trip they come across a fleet of ships drawn into a bay; they are the Winged Hats, the pagans from the Continent. Retreating, they are astonished to run into the General Maximus. He explains that he needs to extract a lot of soldiers from The Wall for his campaign to conquer Gaul. He offers Parnesius and Pertinax control of The Wall, in return for troops. Our boys say they want permission to conciliate the Picts, not antagonise them e.g. stopping systematically burning their heather (they harvest bees and honey, apparently). Maximus says they can do whatever they like, as long as they give him three years of peace.

7. The Winged Hats*

Parnesius and Pertinax spend two days at the lavish gladiatorial games Maximus throws for his official visit to Segedunum at the East end of The Wall. There they meet bloated Rutilianus, the General of The Wall, who happily gives our lads control if that’s what Maximus wants. Then our boys watch as Maximus strips the Wall of all its best men and equipment and sails away. Parnesius describes his policy of befriending the Picts, even sending them corn. The ships of the Winged Hats are the real worry. Even when Maximus wins Gaul to become the Western Emperor, he still won’t send back the troops Parnesius says he needs. Allo is their emissary into the courts of the Picts but the Picts are themselves harried by the Winged Hats. Then news comes that Maximus is dead, defeated and executed by young Theodosius. No help will come. Knowing this the Winged Hats attack The Wall from both ends and there is an almost science fiction-feeling sequence as Parnesius and Pertinax fight on although the towers along the Wall fall one by one, getting closer and closer. At the last, as they are expecting to die in the final assault and massacre, they are surprised that two Legions from Theodosius have arrived and saved the day. The cavalry have arrived.

The emperor’s secretary, Ambrosius, tells Parnesius and Pertinax that they are welcome to stay on to serve their new ruler – but they both take the offer to retire with honour to their families, having saved the Wall and saved Britain. Duty. Loyalty. Solidarity.

A Soldier’s View

In his biography of Kipling, Charles Harrington, who served in the Great War, emphasises what a powerful effect these three Roman stories had on those, especially the boys, who read them.

In the whole range of Rudyard Kipling’s work, no pieces have been more effective in moulding the thought of a generation than the three stories of the centurions defending Hadrian’s Wall during the decline of the Roman Empire. ‘There is no hope for Rome,’ said the wise old father of the centurion. ‘She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain.’ The story of the centurion’s task is told as a panegyric of duty and service, which press their claims all the more urgently when leaders fail to lead and statesmen study only their own careers. It strengthened the nerve of many a young soldier in the dark days of 1915 and 1941…
(Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work by Charles Carrington, Penguin paperback edition, p.446)

This aspect of Kipling’s work, its embodiment of ideas of duty, service and endurance, which influenced a whole generation at the turn of the century and beyond, is what is so difficult for us to capture and be aware of nowadays; and why Carrington’s biography – and personal testimony – is so valuable.

8. Hal o’ the Draft

Sir Harry Dawe was known as Hal o’ the draft as a boy because he was always drawing. He is a medieval architect, responsible for designing some of the classic churches and colleges in Oxford, as well as Dan and Una’s local church, St Bartholomew’s. Dan and Una come across him and Puck in the Little Mill, and he tells them he was born at Little Lindens farm, which you can see from the Mill. This feels a particularly local story, exploring or evoking the landscape and buildings right next to Dan and Una’s house, the mill, the stream, the willows on the way to Little Linden.

The old farm-house, weather-tiled to the ground, took almost the colour of a blood-ruby in the afternoon light. The pigeons pecked at the mortar in the chimney-stacks; the bees that had lived under the tiles since it was built filled the hot August air with their booming; and the smell of the box-tree by the dairy-window mixed with the smell of earth after rain, bread after baking, and a tickle of wood-smoke. The farmer’s wife came to the door, baby on arm, shaded her brows against the sun, stooped to pluck a sprig of rosemary, and turned down the orchard. The old spaniel in his barrel barked once or twice to show he was in charge of the empty house. Puck clicked back the garden-gate… They perched themselves arow on the old hacked oak bench in Lindens’ garden, looking across the valley of the brook at the fern-covered dimples and hollows of the Forge behind Hobden’s cottage.

Only half way through the text does Hal begin his actual ‘story’. His master at Oxford tells him to return to his home village and repair the church. He comes down full of pride and boasting and finds all the local families reluctant to help, especially John Collins the forge-master. He is joined by a man on the King’s Commission to get cannon and ‘serpentines’ for the Navy, Sebastian Cabot, who also finds the villages incompetent and recalcitrant. Troubles pile up: the boat bringing stone from France is forced to dump it overboard when attacked by a pirate; then all the peasants working on the church swear they were chased out by the devil and refuse to return to work.

Sebastian conceives a plan which is to tell everyone he and Hal are travelling to London, make a big deal of saying farewell to everyone, setting off, then… hiding the horses and doubling back to the village that night. Here the sneak into the church and stumble over 20 good serpentines and two cannon. So: the church was the useful warehouse for John Collins arms smuggling racket; no wonder the whole village tried to sabotage Hal’s efforts to renovate it. Upstairs in the tower they find a crude Devil costume made from a cow’s ski, and are just pondering it all when Collins himself and half the village men arrive to arrange transport of the guns to Rye here they’ll be sold to the Channel pirate, Andrew Barton.

Goaded by their boldness, Sebastian runs down the tower stairs wearing the Devil costume, roaring and scaring all the village men off into the night. Then he and Hal ride to the house of the local squire, Sir John Pelham. When he stops laughing, Pelham points out that he is good friends with the lead smuggler John Collins, and comes to a happy compromise: he will ride with Hal and Sebastian back to the village and help Sebastian claim his lawful guns – but won’t indict half the village for ‘a little gun-running’.

When Hal, Sebastian, Sir John and his men and their wool carts lumber into the village, Hal is astonished at the conspirators’ brazenness: not one bats an eyelid as the guns are loaded and taken away, and John Collins has the cheek to offer the use of his own stronger carts to transport them – for a fee, of course!

‘That was all! That was Sussex — seely Sussex for everlastin’!’

9. ‘Dymchurch Flit’

It is September (the stories follow the progress of the year from Midsummer’s Eve). Una and Dan are with Old Hobden at the oast house, watching him roast potatoes when an old friend, Tom Shoesmith, appears at the door. The two old Sussex men swap memories and anecdotes, establishing local colour and context for half the length of the text before anything like a ‘story’ appears.

During the Reformation, while the humans were burning each other at the stake and smashing images in churches, what Shoesmith calls ‘the Pharisees’ and seems to mean the ‘fairies’, revolted by human behaviour, gather on Romney Marsh wanting to escape Old England. A representative comes to talk to old Widow Whitgift who lives by Dymchurch under the Wall, a Seeker who answered dreams and riddles, with two sons, one blind, one dumb. The Pharisees work magic to persuade her sons to take them over the seas in their old boat, and she gives her permission.

So the Pharisees / fairies / People of the Hills all crowd into the boat and are ferried out of England, with only Robin / Puck to console the old Widow till her blind son and dumb son return three days later. Old Tom says he and Hobden must yarn some more but first he must take the children back to their house and on the way, Una guesses that Tom is Puck in magic form.

10. The Treasure and The Law

The children meet Kadmiel, a giant of a man with a strong voice and big beard. He is a Jew, born in Moorish Spain at the time of King John (died 1216). He depicts the life of Jews at the time, forced to walk the streets in rags and often subject to brutal attacks by ‘the people’ – but at home able to light the ceremonial candles and dream of being Princes and Kings. In fact, they are often money-lenders to kings and Kadmiel sheds light on the origins of Magna Carta. He is invited by one of the many Jewish merchants he meets at his father’s house, Elias, to return to the latter’s home in Bury, in the north of England. Much satire on the complete absence of learning and wisdom among the English, all too quick to anti-Jewish violence. But the weak King John is forced to conciliate the Jews because he needs their money. Elias of Bury tells Kadmiel his secret, that once he was taken prisoner while trading along the Channel and thrown into a safe room at the castle of Pevensey. In it was a well going down into the tidal sea, and the Gentiles laughingly threw him in for a while and it was here that Elias discovered the gold which featured in the earlier story The Knights of the Joyous Venture.

Elias smuggles some of the gold out and makes big promises to King John to lend him all of it – giving John hope that he can buy an army to crush his rebellious nobles – for Elias gets into the habit of going trading to Pevensey once a year, putting up in the well room and sneaking small amounts of gold out. Elias has a wife, Adah, who wants to be one of the women of the court and so is pressuring Elias to make a deal with the king. But Kadmiel is also in contact with one Langton, a cleric, who represents the barons, and Kadmiel gives him a lot of money to change the last, fortieth, clause of the Magna Carta which the barons are putting to John, changing it from the original ‘To no free man will we sell, refuse, or deny right or justice’ to ‘To none will we sell, refuse, or deny right or justice’ i.e. making it a universal declaration of justice for all.

This is the point of the story and the reason it is placed last, and any accusation of anti-Semitism in the passing details of the tale are rebutted by the overall point of it. It was a Jew who ensured the foundation of England’s freedoms. Kadmiel then compounds his achievement by going to Pevensey, dropping magic potions in the wells which give the inhabitants the temporary symptoms of the plague so they all run out screaming and uses the time to empty all the gold from the tidal well into a little rowboat, which he rows out to sea and drops it all over the side. Why? To prevent Elias getting hold of it and loaning it to King John who would use it to raise an army, defeat the nobles and overthrow Magna Carta, the foundation of English freedom.

Now, at the very end, we realise the stories (well, some of the stories) are part of an over-arching narrative: the Norse god Weland made the sword which Hugh used to defeat the gorillas in Africa and get hold of the gold which was transported by Vikings back to Pevensey where a Jew found it and used it to found England’s freedom.

‘Well,’ said Puck, calmly, ‘what did you think of it? Weland gave the Sword. The Sword gave the Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It’s as natural as an oak growing.’

It’s actually – like most of Kipling’s tales – quite a contorted set of events – but one which, unexpectedly, confirms our very modern sense of England being a bastard, mongrel, multicultural and multi-religious society.

Poems

As was his firm practice by now, Kipling prefaced all of the stories with poems specially written for the volume. They are in his usual ballad format, but understandably not so booming or Biblical as during his High Imperial phase. Of the sixteen or so poems in this volume, my favourite is Harp Song of the Dane Women, lamenting that every spring their menfolk are stirred to leave them behind and go a-viking.

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in –
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Bound on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken —

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters,
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables —
To pitch her sides and go over her cables!

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow:
And the sound of your oar-blades falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow!

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

a) This strikes me as capturing the bleak, hardy spirit of the Viking world very well (see my review of Robert Ferguson’s history of the Vikings and of the Icelandic Sagas).

b) The form – three line stanzas using the same rhyme – is notably different from his four-line stanzas, subtly conveying the sense of an alien, non-Saxon culture.

Nature

Kipling paints the small English landscape well.

They were fishing, a few days later, in the bed of the brook that for centuries had cut deep into the soft valley soil. The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; foxgloves growing lean and pale towards the light; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. In the pools you could see the wave thrown up by the trouts as they charged hither and yon, and the pools were joined to each other — except in flood time, when all was one brown rush — by sheets of thin broken water that poured themselves chuckling round the darkness of the next bend.

The stories deliberately follow the progress of the year from Midsummer Eve to the end of November, allowing Kipling plenty of opportunity to describe sun and shower, tree and leaf, rain and shine.

Parochialism

The word ‘parochial’ comes from the Latin parochia, the word for the smallest administrative unit of the Christian church – in England, translated as ‘parish’. A parochial point of view, taken metaphorically, means a blinkered or limited view of an issue; literally, it means interested only in the parish, and Kipling applies this literally. Though the yarns range from the north of England to the Gold Coast of Africa, the setting, the frame of each story and the book, is extremely parochial – just a few buildings, fields and streams of Sussex. Kipling has his peasant Tom Shoesmith say:

‘I’ve heard say the world’s divided like into Europe, Ashy, Afriky, Ameriky, Australy, an’ Romney Marsh.’

And he makes a point of having several characters (Hal and Hobden) use the expression ‘go into England’, meaning to leave the parish, as if the rest of England is a foreign country.

‘I’ve been into England fur as Wiltsheer once.’

Nobody could accuse Kipling of not taking the broader view: his writings of the previous five years had ranged over America, South Africa, India and the Far East and addressed the fate of global empires. This massive shift of attention to explore his own country, county and parish seem strangely fitting and appropriate.

Related links

A big thank you to the University of Adelaide for making most of Kipling’s works available online in such a stylish design.

Other Kipling reviews

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by Simon on October 15, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 15, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/puck-of-pooks-hill-rudyard-kipling/

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