Leading such a turbulent life, both at school and during the holidays, and with less check on one’s evil tendencies than the ordinary bad boy gets under normal circumstances,. it is hardly to be believed that religion played any part in my life. But it certainly did so in a quite unconscious way. ‘Fear God and Honour the King’ was the school motto, and our pride in this showed that we were not entirely heathen. The second commandment was also firmly rooted in our minds. Not in its true affirmative form of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, but in the diluted negative form of ‘Don’t do anything mean. Don’t let anyone down’. And I think that in all our villainies we did try as far as possible to amuse ourselves without injuring others. That’s not much, but it is something.
Owing to my wandering life, my religious education was extremely varied, which was an enormous advantage. Most religious people are shut up in little boxes, and they shut their children up in the same boxes, and they would never dare to peep into other people’s boxes or allow their children to do so.
I received snatches of instruction from many varied Nonconformist sects and from most of the bewildering sects within the Church of England. They each tried to instil their own particular teaching into me, and their efforts produced a contrary result. The one important thing about salvation to each of them was that they were right and all the rest were wrong. And from this I learnt the opposite, and that was that nobody is ever entirely right, and one’s opponents are often very far from wrong.
Later in life I have made a practice of entering every open door and, in this way, have taken part in the services of all the great divisions of the Church in Europe, and I find they all teach the same thing: ‘We are right. The rest are heretics.’ What a lot of hatred is taught in the name of a religion of love!
My kindly guardian’s religious ideas were of the simplest kind. ‘I do not speculate on the number of stars I shall have in my crown, but I do try to love God and to love my neighbour.’ And I am afraid that, in including us under the category of ‘neighbours’, she allowed her love to go to the extent of never saying ‘no’ to anything. If we had been good children we should not have taken advantage of her kindness. But where are these good children? I never meet them.
In touching thus lightly on the only side of life that really matters, I am aware that it is a subject that most well-bred people shy at – till they come to die, and then they make more fuss about it than any of us, as I know from experience. Also, I shall be accused of inconsistency. To be a robber of hen-roosts and ‘the good youngman’ at one and the same time is verging on hypocrisy. Well, I plead guilty to the inconsistency, but not to the hypocrisy.
The point is that I am sorry to say I never was ‘the good young man’, but that is not to say that I was not trying, or at any rate wishing to be. Every one who has ideals fails, because as soon as he reaches what he thought was his ideal he finds he has only reached a point from which he can see something better, and he starts again, to fail again. But he is going forward all the time and in the right direction. Experience of life has convinced me that bad people are not so very bad, and good people are not so very good. We expect too much of each other and are disappointed.
From 43, The Common, my guardian moved to London, where I spent instructive holidays in the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm. Tottenham Court Road was not far away, and with complete freedom of action and no restriction as to time of coming home at night, I learnt a good deal more of London life than the ordinary country boy knows as a rule.
Other holidays I spent in Plymouth, the home of my forefathers, where I enjoyed the advantage of learning to handle a sailing-boat. Certainly I cannot complain that my life was lacking in variety.
Living all my childhood and boyhood by the sea has left me with the love for the sea that increases as the years go on. I remember our first house at Sandown. It had no garden on the side facing the sea because the brine made plant life almost impossible. There was just a tiled courtyard and a few tamarisk bushes, and when there was a big south-easterly gale the wind seemed always on the verge of lifting the roof off, while the spray from the big roaring breakers dashed against my bedroom windows. I never want to be farther from the sea than that.
That is probably the result of thwarted desire. I wished to be a sailor, and they made me a soldier. Doubtless, if I had been a sailor, I should have settled in retirement as far from the sea as possible. I not only failed to realize my wish for a seafaring life, but spent most of my life on or near the Indian frontier, a thousand miles from the sea.
Mingled with my childish memories of the wild sea-waves is always an unfading romantic affection for the rugged old red sandstone cliffs of North Devon, with the jackdaws and seagulls nesting in the crevices and the Atlantic rollers roaring at the foot.
The first break-up of our little band was in 1882, when Kipling left for India to take up an appointment with the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore. Beresford left a short time later to join Cooper’s Hill Engineering College, whence he also eventually found his way to India, in the Public Works Department; and I left at the end of the summer term, 1883, to enter the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
My success at my first try at the Army Entrance examination startled every one, myself no less than the others. I had fairly good brains, but I was an unwilling worker and entirely lacked application. I went up as a sort of forlorn hope and passed, with rather intense competition, half-way up the list. This success was entirely due to the methods of the Headmaster, Cormell Price. You could not fail. I think I can say that without exaggeration, because, although I did not actually go as far as wishing to fail, I certainly had no desire at all to pass.
I had a sort of romantic idea of enlisting as a private soldier and working my way up to Field Marshal. I have to thank Price for saving me from that. I am not suggesting that going through the ranks is a bad way of beginning soldiering. I have several friends who have won their commissions in that way, and, on the whole, they seem to have enjoyed their experiences in the ranks; but it is a big handicap in later life when age and commissioned service are balanced against each other. Then you regret the four years’ seniority you lost by going through the ranks.
At the time I am speaking of, competition for Sandhurst was very severe, and the normal procedure was for a boy to finish his time at a public school and then go for six months, or a year, to a crammer, and then take the exam. Price passed us all into Woolwich or Sandhurst direct from the school and without the delay and expense of cramming.
My year at Sandhurst passed uneventfully. Five or six of us had passed in together from Westward Ho and it was nice to be able to start a new life with a nucleus of old schoolfellows. I am afraid I had not even begun to ‘settle down’ at the age of eighteen, and there were times when it looked as if the authorities might ask me to select some other career than the army. But all’s well that ends well, and I emerged triumphantly in August 1884 with my commission and appointment to the second battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, stationed at Malta.
CHAPTER IV
A START IN LIFE
I SAILED from Woolwich for Malta on board a hired transport on November i, 1884. As my sisters had already gone to join my father in India, I was the last of the family to set out on my adventures, and there was consequently no one to wave a kindly farewell on the quay and no one appeared to care twopence where I was going or what was to become of me.
I was very far from feeling depressed on this account – in fact, I never noticed the omission. It has only occurred to me now, as I set down these reminiscences. Later life has convinced me how much pleasanter it is not to be seen off, or met on arrival. On both occasions one has plenty to do and to think of, and affectionate farewells and welcomes generally mean the loss of a trunk or two.
After an uneventful voyage I reported myself for duty at regimental head-quarters in Ricasoli Barracks, and soon found myself drilling with recruits on the barrack-square, which constituted my chief employment during the first six months of my service.
During