Fleeing fog and filth

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’.

Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was not until he went to school in Devon that he began to appreciate the English countryside. As a young reporter, he returned to the more exotic surroundings of India, where he honed his skills in the travel articles he wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette. Of strictly limited length, these provided an excellent training in a dense and spare style in which every word had to count. Then it was back to grey, fog-bound London and ‘the gloom of the Pit’. As he wrote in an early poem, not one of his better efforts:

The sky, a greasy soup-toureen,
Shuts down atop my brow.
Yes, I have sighed for London town
And I have got it now:
And half of it is fog and filth
And half is fog and row.







This sense of being suspended between two worlds, while belonging wholly to neither, must have been common among the children of the Empire. In his poem ‘Benefits of Travel’ in Kim, Kipling wrote:

Praised be Allah who gave me two
Separate sides to my head!

In both worlds he was simultaneously an alien and an insider, just as Kim was.