Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part I

There is an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood that is of great interest to me: the miserable years of torment spent in what he later called ‘The House of Desolation’.

He endured five and a half years of calculated neglect, persecution, punishment and humiliation at the hands of a horrible, cruel, religious fanatic of a woman called Mrs Holloway and her awful bully of a son. Some of the damage that this prolonged and constant torture caused was permanent.

He wrote about his ordeal in the short story Baa Baa, Black Sheep, in his novel The Light that Failed and in his autobiographical work Something of Myself. It makes very painful reading, at least for people who have experienced something similar.

This nightmare interlude in Kipling's childhood has also been described and discussed extensively in many biographies, reviews, essays and articles; there is no need to reproduce all the details and cover the same ground here. I just want to concentrate on a few aspects of this case, on some unseen but familiar influences and some connections that I have noticed.

First, a few questions.

Why did Rudyard Kipling's parents send him away?

They were Anglo-Indians, people of British origin living in India. Kipling's father worked in Bombay as an art teacher. It was the custom, the done thing, in those days for British parents living in India to send their children back to England when they reached a certain age. This was for the sake of their health and education and so that they could experience English culture. The parents didn't want their children to go native.

So there is nothing unusual – for the time - about Rudyard and his younger sister's being sent away from their parents. He was almost six years old and his sister Alice, who was known as Trix, was three. It may seem cruel by modern standards, but it was thought to be in everyone's best interests.

Why were the children left with a stranger?

Why indeed.

It seems very odd that the Kipling children should be sent to live with a paid caretaker when there were plenty of relations, including cousins of their own ages, whom they could have stayed with. For example, their mother’s sister had offered to take them in.

This question has been raised and discussed a few times. Some biographers have speculated that it was because Rudyard was a difficult, unruly, not so nice child. He was spoilt, noisy, wilful and aggressive. It has been suggested that Alice, Rudyard Kipling's mother, was afraid that he might transfer his affections to his aunt or other family members. She did mention to a friend that sending her children to a family member might cause problems, which could mean a lot of things. Perhaps none of the possible homes and relatives was ideal, so Kipling's mother found a plausible reason for rejecting them all.

Others say that the Kipling parents wanted to be independent and not beholden to their relatives.

We will never know for sure.

It seems strange to me that the two children were not sent to stay with one of their many family members.

My theory is that it was one of those 'good ideas' that some parents have, ideas that are implanted by something that is setting up its potential victims.

Worse yet, the two children were abruptly abandoned; they were left in the care of a stranger without any warning, preparation or explanation. Of course they were: this increased their suffering, which made them more productive.

Mrs Holloway took in children whose parents were based in India. She advertised her services in a newspaper. She had a house in the seaside resort of Southsea, which is near Portsmouth.

The full details of how the Kipling parents, and perhaps their relatives too, went about looking for someone to take the children are not known. Nor do we know how many candidates were found and considered and why this one was chosen. What is known is that there were warning signals that should have been picked up. Speaking of Mrs Holloway and her son, Trix said, “They heard Auntie's false voice and saw Harry's ugly face and they still left us with them.”

There is a saying that we cannot see others clearly until we see ourselves clearly; I don't think that this applied here. There are such things as unconscious collusion, under-the-table handshakes and unfinished family business; once again, I don't think that they were at work in this case. Sometimes evil casts and hides behind a smokescreen and projects an acceptable image that fools people.

Evil sometimes has a hypnotising, paralysing influence. A journalist who visited Marie Corelli said that his critical faculties stopped working while he was in her presence. I have read that people couldn't think properly when they were in the presence of Adolf Hitler.

Maybe it was all planned and everyone involved was acting out a scripted scenario.

Whatever forces were at work, the result was that Rudyard Kipling was handed over to someone who made his life a living hell for what would seem like a lifetime to a young boy.

To be continued.

Rudyard Kipling around the age of six: