Savage Girls and Wild Boys by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER SIX

The Wolf-Children

I: Kamala and Amala

Koko is also creative … She signed ME CRY THERE when she saw a picture of a gorilla in a bath, apparently a cry of sympathy, since she herself hates being bathed. And in a flurry of fury, she once signed PENNY TOILET DIRTY DEVIL when she was angry with Penny, her trainer. Her most impressive conversation is one in which she supposedly apologised for a biting incident which had taken place three days previously. When shown a bite mark on Penny’s arm she allegedly signed SORRY BITE SCRATCH. WRONG BITE. ‘Why bite?’ queried Penny. BECAUSE MAD, Koko replied. ‘Why mad?’ asked Penny. DON’T KNOW, responded Koko.

Jean Aitchison, from The Articulate Mammal

Kaspar Hauser’s story blurred the lines between life and art, as the young man lived out a romance that would not have looked out of place in the writings of Hoffmann or Kleist. The next seventy years were to witness the most famous fictional versions of the wild child myth. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Rudyard Kipling dreamt up Mowgli, the wolf-child of the Imperialist Indian forests; and then, just twenty years later, Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘jazzed’ that story and created Tarzan, the white lord of the African jungle. Then, most strangely of all, just as it seemed as if the myth was passing into the realms of mere fiction, these stories once more came to life in the same jungles of the British Empire, as two wolf-children, wild young girls, were trapped in the Indian forests.

The Reverend J. A. L. Singh had long been a missionary to the aboriginal tribes around Midnapore, a town about eighty miles south-west of Calcutta.1 With his wife he ran an orphanage there, made up of waifs and strays that they had found in the nearby villages. Singh was a man with a vocation, a missionary fired with the call to bring Christ to the jungle, which could have been an Eden, but instead was the home of idolatry and ignorance. Various tribes lived out there: Santals, Koras, Lodhas, Mahatos, Goalas, Urias and Kols.2 These tribesmen were all heathens, but ones who the missionary could see lived according to an honourable and decent moral law. They were not beyond the reach of Christ.

So Singh went out to find them. With up to thirty men, many of them there to hunt for animals to eat or sell, he would make expeditions into the wide jungle – lost in its silence and its leaf-shrouded half-light at noon, its thick gloom at night; armed with rifles; resting after dark in a circle of fire, outside which roamed the wild animals of Kipling’s Jungle Books: bears, wolves, panthers, tigers, snakes. There were other, stranger creatures out there too. On one journey in the late September of 1920, the missionary and his entourage of hunters stopped for the night in a villager’s cowshed. While they rested in the little hut, the villager came to them and declared in fear that there was a ghost out in the jungle.

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