Having spent the best part of 3 days looking for power of attorney papers [found eventually in the shredder pile] we headed to the mainland Monday morning to finish our tax, hand over the papers, attend a doctor's appointment & bring Gran's car back to the island so she wasn't paying for parking. In the nature of these things great swathes of time are spent waiting... interminably ... & so I grabbed a book from my well read pile of children's classics because all that waiting is not conducive to great powers of concentration, but boredom is lethal. What I grabbed was Rudyard Kipling's
Stalky & Co.
Technically, I suppose, Stalky is a school story... Certainly it is set in a school but me being me Stalky was the very first Kipling I read, though not my first exposure to him. My beloved Aunt could, & did, lie in bed in the dark & reel off verse after verse of All England is a garden, Full of stately views... & so I knew Kipling first as a poet. Only much, much later did I come to The Jungle Book & finally The Just So tales. Naturally the first time I read Stalky a great deal of it went over my head ~ I was that young.
The thing is I belong to the Nowhere Generation. Technically I am part of the Baby Boomer Generation, those children of the post war era who began life in a time of peace & affluence who flowered into Hippies & peace-nicks ~ only I was born @ the tail end, too young for Woodstock & love~ins but old enough to remember the hugeness of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Make Peace, Not War protests, Vietnam on the nightly news & I still think now, as I did then, that lowering the drinking age to appease the young men you want to send to the killing fields was a disgusting thing to do. Shame on our government! My brothers, born 2 to 4 years later, do not share these memories.
So really, I should be a certain kind of person, far more liberal in my outlook & world view than I am but Stalky is symptomatic of a great schism in my life. I understand Stalky's world far better than the one I presently occupy. That 2 years difference is a whole other world. I began school when you learnt to write with a pencil before transitioning to pen & ink, when all the pink bits on the map were *us* ~ the British Empire ~ an Empire, so we were told, on which the sun never set.
There were lots of us grew up thinking *Empire* only to watch England betray the idea of empire for economics & the whole thing crumble & decay into something unrecognizable.
But...Not everybody had my family. My family are story~tellers. They have it down to a fine art. We grew up knowing perfectly well anything we had from my Aunt should be taken with a generous pinch of salt for she was well known to value the Romantic over the Truth but that heady mix also held all the family archives & so I grew up under the shadow of both the Edwardians & the Victorians for the older generation were valued & I am, perhaps, the only one of my siblings old enough to remember a generation of long skirts & high collars, long hair & hairpins & a sense of family that at one & the same time offered security & condensation.
Naturally the family, as a whole, were monarchists & I have, in my possession, transcripts of many of the family papers penned by deceased relatives who forged their way into the unknown to make a new life in a land that was far more jungle than garden, but when I read them it is Kipling's world view I hear for they had a sense of purpose bigger than themselves & politically correct they certainly were not!
However it has left me with a sense of not fully belonging anywhere, straddling the generations, neither wholly modern nor fully prehistoric, but certainly with a huge awareness of the shifts in time & history, & the way we are shaped by our time & place in the grand scheme of things ~ which is why Kipling, a hugely conservative man, is now so derided for his Stalky was certainly a bully & corporeal punishment is definitely out of fashion in our schools. I do wonder though, the sort of experiment that's not ever likely to happen, how this present generation would do if faced with the same sort of challenges because it is far to easy to mock & deride the Kipling sentiments:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating...
Orwell wrote, “every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” And therein lies the ultimate irony. *IF* is the most searched for poem on British poetry sites. For all the wrongness there was an idealism for people to aspire to & people are still drawn to idealism. That is @ the core of humanism ~ that somehow people can be more than they are ~ & certainly of Christianity, which provides a way for us to rise above ourselves.
Ultimately 2 things remain for me about Kipling:
- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ~ George Santayana
&
- eat the meat and spit out the bones.
Seriously, political correctness is a curse. If you focus on stuff like that you miss all the pleasure of something like Stalky which is, @ it's heart, a very, very funny book! If you haven't already, have a read. It's a hoot.
