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Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Kipling, Rudyard

Kipling, Rudyard

Puck of Pook’s Hill, [33] 72; Indian stories and poems, [54] 34 & [55] 42; Captains Courageous, [56] 86; Kim, [57] 40

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Sugar Dreams

John Conyngham on Rudyard Kipling and life in a hot climate

Even if the south-eastern seaboard of Africa has never been a Bloomsbury, it has had its moments. Angus Wilson’s mother was a Durban girl, and Fernando Pessoa spent his schooldays there. But given the few exceptions, that littoral has hardly been bookish. Among the 250-strong community in which I grew up, all but about thirty were Zulu-speaking workers and their families, many of whom were illiterate. Of the remainder, most were Indian tractor drivers and mechanics and their wives and children, who spoke Tamil and Telugu by choice. That left only a handful of us who had English as our mother tongue. And that linguistic ratio was repeated across much of the surrounding countryside.
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Dream of Old England

Andrew Sinclair on Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill

A picture in our little house and a book excited me. There was a coloured print of Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan hose and doublet, sword and feathered hat, explaining his faraway adventures to two children on a beach. And there was the magic of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, where the young brother and sister act A Midsummer Night’s Dream and meet the pixie Puck, who tells them of the people of the Hills of Old England, imps and trolls and brownies and goblins, who live by Oak, Ash and Thorn. And he relates the history of Ancient Britain in fairy story and fact.
20171201130504 Anna Trench illustration - Andrew Joynes on Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

Harvey Learns the Ropes

Andrew Joynes on Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

When he gave Captains Courageous to me, my father described the opening episode of the book: a teenage boy falls overboard from a transatlantic liner at night and is hauled into a dory by a deckhand from a Grand Banks fishing schooner. Unsurprisingly, the story resonated with me immediately, for to the child’s mind the story of Captains Courageous is one of rescue. A boy falls into the sea, has adventures and forms friendships, and in due course is returned to his grieving parents.
20170901124115 Photograph, Rudyard Kipling - David Gilmour on the Indian stories and poems

Scandalous Tales from the Hills

David Gilmour on the Indian stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was thorough and blatant in his search for characters and ‘copy’ when he was in Simla. Soon after arriving in the hills he would spend an afternoon loping alongside his mother’s rickshaw, ‘learning most of the scandal’ in the town. Then he would spend his time talking ‒ and above all listening ‒ to anyone from whom he could acquire ‘goodish material’ and any ‘curious yarns’.

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