One of my favorite quotes about England, gleaned from my recent visit, this summer, came from the venerable writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, Kim and multiple other classics.
For Kipling, the early motor car was a time machine in which centuries slid by like milestones, revealing England (according to wording on signage in the garage at his Jacobean National Trust house Bateman's, where he lived with his family for the latter part of his life) "a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries . . . a day in the car in an English country is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real."
Rudyard was born in Bombay on December 30th 1865, to John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture and his wife Alice. Rudyard's mother was one four talented and beautiful Macdonald sisters who each married prominent men, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Poynter, Alfred Baldwin and John Lockwood Kipling himself.
I love a writer's house and in particular, his or her desk. Family and friends know me well enough to plan an outing or two with me in tow when there are literary luminary homesteads in the vicinity to tour.
My visit to Bateman's was a bit of a surprise — though a good one. I traveled down to East Sussex to visit my sister-in-law Maria and her husband Mark for an overnight with a carefully planned detour the next day to Charleston, home of Virginia Woolf's artist sister Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group. Maria had taken a day off work to join me in my cultural pursuit.
"I've bad news," she announced when I emerged from my dwindling jet-lagged slumber. "It's closed on Tuesdays." July, in England, is apparently not a busy enough month to forgo a weekday closing for the more remote architectural and cultural treasures.
Luckily, my sister Lindsey had suggested Bateman's as a detour, if we had time. Thankfully, the National Trust's terrific organizational skills made for a fascinating tour with some of the friendliest and most informed volunteer docents I've ever come across.
According to the Kipling Society: "Young Rudyard's earliest years in Bombay were blissfully happy, in an India full of exotic sights and sound. But at the tender age of five He was sent back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea, where he was desperately unhappy. The experience would color some of his later writing."
His dad was an illustrator, museum curator and art teacher in India. He created Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People in 1891. He also produced images for some of Rudyard's most prominent works, including The Jungle Book and a later 1901 novel Kim.
The Jungle Book was published in 1894. Rudyard wrote it while living in the States. He married American, Caroline “Carrie” Balestier, in January 1892 —the sister of his friend, writer and editor Wolcott Balestier. The Kiplings purchased land deep in New England from another of Carrie's brothers, Beatty Balestier, in Vermont.
The Kiplings returned to England after a quarrel with Carrie's family, in 1896, first to Rottingdean in East Sussex, then, seeking seclusion a couple of years after the tragic death of the first of the couple's three children, to the lovely seventeenth century house called Bateman's near Burwash, also in Sussex, where Rudyard spent the rest of his life.
Kipling foresaw the First World War and tried to alert the nation to the need for preparedness. He was employed in writing propaganda material for the British Government during the war years. The Kiplings suffered a second crushing bereavement with the death of their son John, at the age of 18, in the Battle of Loos in 1915.
Above photo only: National Trust
Kipling is considered one of the most prominent literary figures to have lent his voice to the politics of imperialist Europe. In India today, his works are studied as an example of such specific genre. For many years, Rudyard's books and poems were excluded from Indian academic curriculum.
Maria and I sat in the tea room at Bateman's and chatted about recent hot topic Brexit news. I would not have been at all surprised if the man of the house had strolled by, pulled up a chair, poured himself a cup of tea and shared with us his trademark no-nonsense take on the current state of affairs. The world is a vastly different place than it was in the early 1900s. Still, such small corners of England remain the same, despite the political turmoil and cosmopolitan urban influence.
Photo od Rudyard Kipling from 1915 biography by John Palmer, published by Henry Holt and Company in New York: [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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