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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Amid the mudflats

On the Estuary (Radio 4), Woman's Hour (Radio 4)

We were taken back to New Year’s Eve 1899 — Kipling reporting on complaints from the soldiers fighting in the Boer War that they were running out of supplies, the country rotting because of its ‘material luxury and overmuch ease’, and worries about the flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe creating job shortages and exorbitant rents. It’s rather reassuring to discover that we’ve been making a mess of foreign policy since records began. Kipling complains that the government warlords have ‘chucked men and guns and brigadiers into South Africa and expected them to evolve into something like an army’.

When Queen Victoria dies everyone rushes out to buy mourning and the streets become ‘a vast sea of black crêpe’. The new King marches alongside the German Emperor in the funeral procession from Victoria to Paddington. But Kipling comes to fear ‘the Teuton’, who ‘has his large cold eye on us and prepares to decimate us when he feels good and ready’. By 1912 he can see what lies ahead. Ada meanwhile sinks into frustrated boredom. ‘The problem is in me,’ she writes. ‘I potter about in sheer hatred of everything there is to do. And yet I don’t do anything.’ I rather wish we had heard more from her and less of Kipling, whose voice is so well known. What did she think of votes for women? And how does she learn how to cope without a cook, maid and nanny?

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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