Give me the first six years of a child’s life and you can have the rest.
Looking back from this my seventieth year, it seems to me that every card in my working life has been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to play it as it came. Therefore, ascribing all good fortune to Allah the Dispenser of Events, I begin:-
My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchases piled high on the bows of it. Our ayah was a Portuguese Roman Catholic who would pray – I beside her – at a wayside Cross.
Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly gods.
Our evening walks were by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves, which, I think, were called the Mahim Woods. When the wind blew the great nuts would tumble, and we fled – my ayah, and my sister in her perambulator – to the safety of the open. I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs.
There were far-going Arab dhows on the pearly waters, and gaily clad Parsees wading out to worship the sunset. Of their creed I knew nothing, nor did I know that near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they see the bearers of the Dead below.
I did not understand my Mother’s distress when she found “a little child’s hand” in our garden, and said I was not to ask questions about it. I wanted to see that child’s hand. But my ayah told me.
In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.”
So one spoke “English” haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamt in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big Dinners. Once she came back, very quickly, and told me, still awake, that “the big Lord Sahib” had been killed and there was to be no Big Dinner. This was Lord Mayo, assassinated by a native. Meeta explained afterwards that he had been “hit with a knife.”
Meeta unconsciously saved me from any night terrors or dread of the dark. Our ayah, with a servant’s curious mixture of deep affection and shallow device, had told me that a stuffed leopard’s head on the nursery wall was there to see that I went to sleep. But Meeta spoke of it scornfully as “the head of an animal” and I took it off my mind as a fetish, good or bad, for it was only some unspecified “animal”.
Far across green spaces around the house was a marvellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played. That was the atelier of my Father’s School of Art, and a Mr “Terry Sahib” his assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great friend.
Once, on the way there alone, I passed by a huge ravine a foot deep, where a winged monster as big as myself attacked me, and I fled and wept. My Father drew for me a picture of the tragedy with a rhyme beneath:-
This consoled me. I have thought well of hens ever since.
Excerpted from the chapter “A Very Young Person (1865 – 1878)”, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling.
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Looking back from this my seventieth year, it seems to me that every card in my working life has been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to play it as it came. Therefore, ascribing all good fortune to Allah the Dispenser of Events, I begin:-
My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchases piled high on the bows of it. Our ayah was a Portuguese Roman Catholic who would pray – I beside her – at a wayside Cross.
Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly gods.
Our evening walks were by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves, which, I think, were called the Mahim Woods. When the wind blew the great nuts would tumble, and we fled – my ayah, and my sister in her perambulator – to the safety of the open. I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs.
There were far-going Arab dhows on the pearly waters, and gaily clad Parsees wading out to worship the sunset. Of their creed I knew nothing, nor did I know that near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they see the bearers of the Dead below.
I did not understand my Mother’s distress when she found “a little child’s hand” in our garden, and said I was not to ask questions about it. I wanted to see that child’s hand. But my ayah told me.
In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.”
So one spoke “English” haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamt in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big Dinners. Once she came back, very quickly, and told me, still awake, that “the big Lord Sahib” had been killed and there was to be no Big Dinner. This was Lord Mayo, assassinated by a native. Meeta explained afterwards that he had been “hit with a knife.”
Meeta unconsciously saved me from any night terrors or dread of the dark. Our ayah, with a servant’s curious mixture of deep affection and shallow device, had told me that a stuffed leopard’s head on the nursery wall was there to see that I went to sleep. But Meeta spoke of it scornfully as “the head of an animal” and I took it off my mind as a fetish, good or bad, for it was only some unspecified “animal”.
Far across green spaces around the house was a marvellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played. That was the atelier of my Father’s School of Art, and a Mr “Terry Sahib” his assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great friend.
Once, on the way there alone, I passed by a huge ravine a foot deep, where a winged monster as big as myself attacked me, and I fled and wept. My Father drew for me a picture of the tragedy with a rhyme beneath:-
There was a small boy in Bombay
Who once from a hen ran away.
When they said: “You’re a baby,”
He replied, “Well, I may be:
But I don’t like these hens of Bombay.”
This consoled me. I have thought well of hens ever since.
Excerpted from the chapter “A Very Young Person (1865 – 1878)”, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling.