The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson

Author:Juliet Nicolson [Nicolson, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780802118462
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The writer Rudyard Kipling promoted two views: cherishing the values of the past, he also welcomed the exciting opportunities of the new. It was in 1902 that he moved into Bateman’s, a fine seventeenth-century house sitting ‘like a beautiful cup on a saucer’ in the heart of the valley of the river Dudwell near Burwash, just over the county border from Sassoon’s Kentish home. Kipling found Bateman’s ‘a good and peaceable place’, a balm for the misery he had suffered since his daughter’s sudden death three years earlier. Josephine, for whom the Just So Stories had been written, had contracted pneumonia at the age of seven and had not recovered. The pain of the tragedy never left him.

The house, reached from ‘an enlarged rabbit hole of a lane’, had been built by a local ironmaster when the Sussex Weald, rich in charcoal, had been a centre for the ancient English iron industry. Several dozen generations had worked that soil and been buried beneath it, and Kipling immersed himself in its ancient history. The deep-rooted certainty of the past soothed his troubled present, and at the same time provided him with imaginative richness for his writing. In the poem The Way through the Woods he celebrated the way the presence of the past in an ancient landscape is retrievable deep within the trees:

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools

Where the Otter whistles his mate.

(They fear not men in the woods

Because they see so few.)

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet

And the swish of a skirt in the dew.

In the stories he continued to write for his other two children, John and Elsie – Puck of Pook’s Hill, and the later Rewards and Fairies – he demonstrated what T.S. Eliot called ‘the contempo-raneity of the past.’ After long absences abroad, particularly in India, Africa and America, he revelled in having exchanged the geographical breadth of the Empire for the historical depth of England. In some ways he resembled Sassoon, for his experiences in other countries made him something of an outsider, just as Sassoon’s sexual feelings (and his family’s wealth) made him feel different from others. This ‘outsiderishness’ seemed to give both writers, as it did Leonard Woolf, an imaginative objectivity which, fuelling the creative process, led them to write about a lost, decent England.

Unlike Thomas Hardy, who lamented the decay and passing of the Dorset of his childhood, Kipling was determined to celebrate and preserve history for the present. In the story ‘Cold Iron’ the earth god, Puck, tells the children that he has seen slaves sold at Lewes Market with rings in their noses; similarly, Kipling’s own children were accustomed to seeing squealing be-ringed pigs displayed for sale there in 911. The stories are filled with descriptions of lead windows in Chichester Cathedral, tales of the local mill-wright, details of the art of wood-carving – all bringing the deep past of the countryside magically alive.

Kipling could be judgemental about all strata of society.

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