Ruddy Hell
I might have been a little tough on Rudyard Kipling yesterday. He lost his son in the First World War, and unlike Nemo’s dad, he didn’t find him.
Rudyard used to sit in his house in Kent in the evening and write in his quiet study. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, he could hear the heavy artillery from across the channel, killing other people’s sons.
After the guns fell silent for the last time, he took many trips across to the battered Western Front in the hope of retrieving his son’s body. He never did, but Lieutenant Kipling’s body was finally found and identified in 1992.
Kipling wrote the epitaph on the gravestone of every unidentified soldier as a tribute, and the words, “known unto God” stand etched above every nameless British grave.
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:15 am
It wasn’t Kipling’s fault that it was perfectly acceptable to use that form of address during his lifetime.
It’s not your fault that it’s no longer acceptable, either.
It is what it is. Kipling was genius at times, and a dullard other times, but throughout, he was human. And that describes every man, woman, and child on the planet, so there’s no shame in any of it.
June 4th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
He didn’t write about John, but he gave up skiing, which had been ‘their’ sport, and years later, in a fictional work, he wrote;
‘My son was killed while laughing at some jest, I would I knew
What it was, so it might serve me in a time when jests are few.’
June 5th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
See? Completely human.