Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30th 1865,
in India.
His life and his writings have been written about and
discussed extensively. I have read a lot of criticism of him and his works and
I agree with some of it, but he is still one of my favourite authors.
Kipling is also a person of interest because the kind of unseen
influences that I am very interested in appear to have been at work in his
life. This will be the subject of a future article.
In the meantime, there is a big coincidence involving a
place in Hampshire where he stayed as a child. I have mentioned it in another
article, but decided to repeat the story to mark the occasion of the birthday of
a very great author and poet.
It came first as a surprise, then, on reflection, not
such a surprise, when I first learned that Lorne Lodge, the ‘House of
Desolation’ where he and his sister suffered so much as children, was (and
still is) in Campbell Road in Southsea. ‘By chance’, Lorne Lodge is just around
the corner from a house where my family lived for a while when I was 11 years
old. What a coincidence. Although I knew nothing at the time, I always avoided
walking down Campbell Road because it gave me bad feelings.
The name of the people Rudyard Kipling stayed with was
Holloway; by coincidence, when my family left Southsea it was to go to a house
very close to a big thoroughfare called Holloway Road.
