The Kipling File Read online

  Back in Allahabad, I constantly told myself that India was my home, not England, but could not rid myself of the feeling that I was living in exile. Unlike other boys from the outposts of the Empire—who soon formed friendships at school and became part of one group or the other, sharing the group’s esprit de corps that made their bond with their schoolmates stronger than with the family they had left behind—I remained a loner. My consuming passion for natural history, moths and butterflies, in particular, was the passion of a loner. Although I mostly kept to myself during my Cheltenham years, I never doubted that I was capable of deep friendship with another person when the right one came along, even if such a friend had so far eluded me.

  Allen was unaware that Ruddy and I had already corresponded with each other. At the beginning of the year, he had written a humorous letter to me, saying that as ‘RK’ he was being congratulated on some of my Latin verses that had appeared in the Pioneer under my initials ‘KR’. I had replied in the same light vein, sensing another loner behind the levity and was then invited to stay with him if I ever came to Punjab, the last of our Indian conquests.

  *

  The train left Allahabad station late in the afternoon. After passing Aligarh, we left the East India railway system for the Sind, Lahore and Punjab Line at Ghaziabad. In more ways than one, indeed, this line has profited from the experience of its predecessors and prides itself on the fact that its accommodation for native travellers is particularly good. Amongst the other boons that this line has brought, it has adopted a plan of setting down and taking up passengers at convenient places, even where there are no stations: a proceeding greatly facilitated by its very slow rate of speed.

  Night fell as the train pulled out of Ghaziabad, and it was in darkness that we passed Meerut, with its sinister memories of the Mutiny, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur. The almost-thirty-hour farther train journey to Lahore was comfortable and pleasant. There were refreshments, from morning tea through to evening dinner, a fan with a tub of ice under it for cooling during the day when it became warm, the services of a barber, which I gladly availed of in the morning to have a shave, and stories from Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library series, when the outside vista did little to engage my interest.

  Within a couple of hours of entering Punjab, I had determined that its countryside was not so different from that of Oudh. The land varied from wretchedly poor fields, growing Cassia Officinalis, to irrigated fields covered with splendid crops of young wheat. Sometimes I saw land on which had fallen, as far as I could judge, the same calamity as in Oudh—a blight on the surface of the soil, indicating the presence of chemical substances fatal to vegetation except the intrusive prickly poppy (Argemone mexicana) that takes possession of all waste places. The most conspicuous plant of cultivation was the tall pigeon-pea, the shrub covered with yellow leguminous flowers, always a precarious crop so far north, as it cannot stand much frost, but very valuable when it does succeed.

  As the train approached Ambala, my disappointment at not getting a glimpse of the distant Himalayas, hidden behind a curtain of haze, was amply compensated by a stunning sunset later in the evening. A blood-red glare shot up from the horizon. Partridges, inky black against the intense red, floated out towards the sun. The Siwalik Hills turned to opal and wine-red, and the brown dust, thrown up from the hooves of returning cattle, flew up pure gold.

  I know that God reveals Himself in these ocular moments. I am singularly fortunate to have been blessed by such visions of God’s overwhelming presence more than once in my life. The first occurred when I was sixteen. I have written about it earlier in ‘The Meaning of Life’, a monthly leaflet I have been publishing since my return from India, fifteen years ago, for those, as it says on the masthead, who try ‘to look through Nature up to Nature’s God’. It was during an afternoon’s walk in the woods near our home in Kent during the spring school vacation. I had just sat down on a carpet of bluebells in a clearing next to a giant oak tree and a patch of ripening blackberries, glossy purple clots studded with red-and-green beads. Bluebottles were weaving a gauze of sound around me when a swarm of butterflies—I recognized monarchs, Apollos and swallowtails—began to swoop and circle above the blackberry patch, the speckled sunlight filtering through the foliage revealing the full range of nature’s coloured landscapes on their wings. And it is in that moment when I felt nature part its screen and grant me that rare sight into the unseen.

  My third and last such experience, to which I’ll come later, was in Simla when I was passing through a forested wood on my way home one late summer afternoon. It is curious that in all these years the three experiences were as if erased from my mind, remembered only when I began writing this memoir. And yet, unbeknown to me, they have been a beacon for the course my life has taken, bringing it to moor at a remote village in Norfolk with easy access to my beloved woods, turning me from a newspaperman into a writer of natural history, a theologian of ‘Nature’s God’ who, for the three briefest of moments in his life, was also His mystic.

  Did I share such experiences with Ruddy, I have been asked. Did he not, that most rational of men, scoffer at the intangible and the ineffable, make fun of my vague longings? Yes, I did, I answer. The trick lay in the timing: it had to be when his savaging wit was at rest, when he was more vulnerable to the presence of night in his soul, the darkness he rarely revealed to anyone but himself, and that, too, in jottings which found a place in his fiction or, more likely, ended up in the wastepaper basket. Ruddy is not just glittering surface, a lack of depth concealed by the felicity of his language, as some have maintained. He has hidden spiritual depths, even if they are of an inferior sort, fascinated with the occult and the dark arts rather than the higher reaches of the spirit.

  Given the purpose of my visit, I thought it prudent to ignore Ruddy’s invitation to stay with him and put up instead at the Punjab Club. I did not know how he would react to Allen’s message and whether he would be inclined to shoot the messenger, an awkward situation for both of us if I was a guest at his home. My first meeting with Ruddy then took place next morning at the offices of the Gazette.

  It was a warm spring day and on the recommendation of the club secretary I decided to stroll down the Mall to the CMG office. A retired major of the Indian army, the secretary was a man in his mid fifties with the regulation swagger in his greying moustache, his once-trim body beginning to accumulate rolls of fat around the waist and the neck. Dressed in grey slacks, white shirt, regimental tie and a blue blazer, which soon made him perspire, he needed to purchase jars of Crosse & Blackwell pickles and Keen’s Mustard, available in a speciality shop on the Mall, and decided to accompany me.

  The Mall was a broad thoroughfare, flanked on both sides with new municipal and other important buildings in various stages of construction. The administrative centre of our rule in Punjab was thus no more than a straggling growth of single-storeyed buildings in the imperial ‘Mughal–Gothic’ style, spread widely over large dusty spaces. They were ill lit by night and unattractive by day, except where some buildings of the preceding era still survived. I am speaking of new Lahore, of course, British Lahore, our Lahore, and not the closely crowded, old, native, walled city north of the Mall which few British had ever entered, or wished to, unless it was on official municipal or police business.

  A taciturn man, the secretary was not the best guide to British Lahore. He became lively only when the information he could convey about the city pertained to military matters.

  ‘If you keep on going east on the Mall, Mr Robinson, then five miles down the road and after crossing the Bari Doab canal, you will come to the cantonment of Mian Mir. An infantry battalion and an artillery battalion are permanently stationed there. Currently, it is the East Lancashires, with whom I have had the privilege of serving, and units of the Royal Artillery.’

  ‘When the train pulled into Lahore railway station last evening, I did notice that unlike Bombay’s open, luxuriant Victoria Terminus, Lahore station is built li
ke a fort,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes, Mr Robinson, we in the Punjab are the outpost of the Empire. We are the buffer between the Indian heartland and the Russian designs and the Afghan unrest beyond the North-West Frontier. The security of the railway network is vital to our rule. The Lahore station is built not only per the needs of the railway and the convenience of the passengers but also as a structure that can be defended. It is a railway station, yes, but at the same time, it is both an expression of the need for our security and a physical contribution to that security.’

  The secretary stopped in front of the Ajaib Ghar—the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum where Ruddy’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the curator. The secretary had not stopped because of an interest in cultural artefacts but to draw my attention to a huge cannon placed in the open space in front of the museum. The gun, the Zamzamah, mounted on a plinth, was the biggest I had seen. To fans of Ruddy’s fiction, of which there are hundreds of thousands scattered all over the English-speaking world, the site where the gun stands now, a hundred yards from its original location, is where we first encounter the boy Kim, in Ruddy’s justly acclaimed novel of that name. I was intrigued by the old cannon, which appeared to have seen much service.

  ‘It has indeed!’ the secretary said, encouraging me to step closer to examine the long barrel made from an alloy of copper and brass.

  ‘The Persian inscription upon it gives the date of casting as 1762. Before, it stood in front of Delhi Gate, off the walled city. Feel the inside of the barrel.’

  The cold metal was deeply scarred and gashed.

  ‘The Muslims, and the Sikhs after them, fed the Zamzamah with odd-shaped pieces of metal and rock when they ran out of shot. In any event, Mr Robinson, I can tell you from my experience that it is a devil of a task to train niggers to take care of their fighting equipment.’

  I noted that the major used the word ‘niggers’ for India’s peoples. The word has gained wide currency among the Anglo-Indians (as we British in India call ourselves) after the Mutiny of 1857. My family has continued to use the earlier ‘natives’. We have never shared the repugnance for the natives that increased markedly after the Mutiny was crushed and there was a hardening of conviction among the Anglo-Indians that Indians could never be trusted. Growing up, I was aware that our family was one of the very few in Allahabad which was regarded by other Anglo-Indians as not pukka in this respect, as one which cannot be fully trusted not to ‘let the side down’. Ten minutes later, we reached the office where the secretary bid me goodbye and expressed the hope that we could have a drink together in the evening at the club.

  The newspaper was produced in a couple of bungalows echeloned upon a strip of land. The bungalow in which the editorial staff of two, Wheeler and Ruddy, worked, was on a mud plinth and approached by a flight of steps. I could hear the rattle of the printing presses from the neighbouring bungalow where the paper was printed. Since the CMG was an evening paper, the presses could only be printing an outside order. No newspaper, including my own Pioneer in Allahabad, could pay its way on advertisements and sales alone and needed other printing jobs to survive.

  Stephen Wheeler, the editor of the CMG, was down with a bout of malaria and I was shown to the office of ‘Kipling Sahib, the assistant editor’, by the Sikh watchman.

  The short, bespectacled youth who bounded up from his chair to greet me was the worst-tailored Englishman I had encountered since I left England’s shores. Scruffy, with not an inch that seemed to fit him, Ruddy made a bad first impression: a very small, very untidy and very mousey-looking young man, with exceedingly bright eyes shining watchfully behind round wire-framed spectacles.

  I confess I mentally took a step back when he rushed towards me, his arms outstretched from the elbows. For a moment I thought he might even hug me. Closer up, the second impression was even worse than the first. A receding hairline presaging premature baldness, a squat body and a stoop acquired through much bending over the office desk made Ruddy look ten years older than his age, which was twenty at the time. His skin was sallow, the right cheek marked by red tracings left by Lahore sores that are caused by a parasite carried by the sandfly. Mark you, Ruddy was not ugly, merely odd-looking: the oddness underlined by startlingly bushy eyebrows riding above his spectacles and his rather sudden and eccentric movements. When he extended his hand to shake mine, I noticed that the white cuff of his shirt, peeping out from under a tatty, full-sleeve, navy-blue lambswool sweater, was spattered with plentiful ink spots. Later, when we were working together, I came to dread the amount of ink he used to throw about. He had a habit of dipping his pen frequently and deep into the inkpot, and as all his movements were abrupt, almost jerky, the ink would splatter. When he darted into my room, as he did, about one thing or the other in connection with the contents of the paper, a dozen times in the morning, I had to shout to him, ‘Stand off!’ Otherwise, I knew from experience that the abrupt halt he would make and the flourish with which he placed the proofs he was holding before me would send ink—he always had a full pen in one hand—flying all over me.

  In summer, when mustard-coloured cotton trousers and a thin vest constituted his usual office attire, he would be spotted all over like a Dalmatian by the day’s end. Driving or sometimes walking home in his light attire plentifully besprinkled with ink, his bespectacled face peeping out from under an enormous mushroom-shaped pith hat, Ruddy was a quaint-looking object. Compared to his generosity in splattering ink, his habit of tapping with his fingertips on tables, chairs and desks during a conversation—urging the speaker to quickly finish whatever he was saying and let Ruddy take centre stage—was a minor aggravation. The charm of his manner, however, was such that within half a minute of listening to him, you forgot his annoying mannerisms and even what he looked like. Once Ruddy began to speak, his whole appearance was transformed by the power and flow of his speech. The sentences that came out of his mouth were completely formed, without the involuntary ‘Mmm’, ‘Ehh’ and other vocal hesitations and clearings of the throat that punctuate the speech of most people. Behind the oversized glasses, his eyes would flash with the self-assurance of a man feeling his most alive when he engages with the world in his chosen métier and is confident in the possession of a unique gift . . . In Ruddy’s case, words.

  Later, when we worked together, I marvelled at the ease and the same felicity with words with which Ruddy knocked off a poem in response to some piece of news on the wires to fill an empty space in the Gazette. He had the buoyancy of a cork, just bubbling over with poetry. He would think for a moment and then say,

  ‘I have it. How would this do? Rum tiddy um ti tum, Tra la la ti tum ti tum,’ or words to that effect hummed in notes suggesting a solo in a bugle. I never had to worry about him delivering. I simply held open the requisite space in the paper and within twenty minutes Ruddy returned with completed verses. He would hand it to Rukun Din, the daytime foreman, who would say, ‘Your poetry very good, sir. Just coming proper length. One-third column, just proper!’

  If Ruddy’s poems have a lilting musical beat, as many have remarked, this is because he often conceived them as melodies and sang as he wrote.

  After he had welcomed me with great warmth and affectionately complained about my not informing him of my arrival and putting up at the club and not at his home, I thought it politic to get the unpleasant subject of the reason for my visit to Lahore quickly out of the way.

  ‘Ruddy,’ I said, ‘I am so glad to finally meet you: someone I have so far only admired in print. But I must tell you that this is an official visit. I am a messenger for our boss, Allen, who feels you may be slacking off. He has heard that you are averse to routine.’

  I had barely finished before a waterfall of words came cascading around my ears.

  ‘Averse to routine, am I? The whole settlement and routine of the old rag from the end of the leader to the beginning of advertisements is in my hands and mine only—my respected chief, Wheeler, contributing
a blue pencil mark now and then and a healthy snarl just to soothe me.’

  I signed with my hands, asking him to lower his voice. One did not know if one or more of the native staff could overhear Ruddy’s disloyal diatribe. Heedless, his eyes flashing, Ruddy was oblivious to my warning.

  ‘Some thirty papers go through my hands—Hindu papers, scurrilous and abusive beyond everything, local scandal weeklies, philosophical and literary journals written by babus in the style of Addison, native Mohammedan, sleepy little publications, all extracts, Indigo papers, tea and coffee and jute journals and official gazettes—all have to be disembowelled. Moreover, I correct the blunders of our correspondents, men spread all over India—bad grammar, vulgarities, indecency—and then set right the misprints and bad lettering. All local notes come to me and have to be ingested. I must pick up information about coming polo matches, garden parties, official dinners and dances, to insert in the local column. Slacking, indeed! It makes me sick to my stomach!’

  I tried to calm him, assuring him of my personal regard for his commitment to work, as much as to his literary gift. I said I was sorry that Allen was misinformed and sorrier that he had thought it fit to send me to Lahore as his messenger. Ruddy’s flame was as quick to fizzle out as it had been to flare up.

  ‘Sod Allen and sod Wheeler! Let you and me repair to the club for a couple of beers and a spot of lunch. Mind you, I don’t do this every day. Don’t have the frigging time. Your visit is a special occasion. You cannot imagine how much I long for a kindred spirit whom I can really talk to. In Lahore, there are no books, no pictures and no conversation worth listening to. Here, every man is in some service or the other, with a serious profession, needed to administer the Empire. Older men invariably talk about their own work or pay or prospects, and younger men talk about their horses—in a country where every Englishman owns at least one horse this is natural but monotonous. And then I insist that after lunch you pack your bag and come and stay with us.’