Just So Stories, A Selection, by Rudyard Kipling
“But different folk have different views;I know a person small –She keeps ten million serving-men,Who get no rest at all!She sends ‘em abroad on her own affairs,From the second she opens her eyes –One million Hows, two million Wheres,And seven million Whys!
For a man who spent so much of his life traipsing between far-flung places in the world, it strikes me that Rudyard Kipling seemed to hold “home” in high regard. It was circumstance rather than wanderlust that spread his life around the globe, and his attentions continued to revolve around the places and people that signaled comfort.
Perhaps this spirit was driven by the discomfort of his early life. Born in India, Kipling was shipped off to England for schooling at the tender age of five and, rather tragically, experienced a miserable, desolate boarding life in the tense home of a couple who accommodated children for British nationals abroad.
Kipling eventually returned to India as a young man and took work as an assistant editor at a local paper, a job secured for him by his father in Lahore. He spoke fondly of joining his family for annual vacations to Simla (now Shimla), the summer capital of British India, recalling:
“My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy – every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn – thirty more of them ahead! – the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.”
Life went on. Kipling began writing for himself. He married and had children. They moved to the United States, where they had a “good wholesome life” in Vermont, then back to England, and travelled frequently to South Africa. A few phrases in that Simla recollection, though, seemed to be defining visions of bliss: “whatever [place] my people went to” ... “the long talks of us all together” …and, of course, “whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.”
With a head full of “play-work” (great phrase!), is it any wonder he was a superb storyteller?
The first set of Just So Stories was created, not with pen to paper, but the old-fashioned way, with words to ears. Kipling spun these tales for his daughter, Josephine (known as Effie), to help her drift off to sleep at night. Effie was so enamored with his original telling that she would stop to correct him if the story veered off script. They had to be told just so.
When Effie died of pneumonia, contracted on a trip the two of them made to the United States from England in 1899, Kipling channeled his loss into completing the collection, accompanied by an equally captivating set of illustrations and poems.
Kipling loved fall in the US, and I’m delighted to be publishing this reading in November, on the birthday of a loved one who cherished the Just So Stories. As we’ve just crested the peak of this magnificent season, I have a fresh appreciation for the brilliance in Kipling’s description of the season:
“A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.”
Please enjoy this selection…
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