There were scarecrows in the fields around my grandmother’s house too. And straw bales that I would haul about and arrange into forts with the handful of other local children. But it was always the beguiling woods that held the greatest appeal, where I wanted most to walk. Sometimes we would, the whole extended family, go together, Uncle Gordon and me pressing ahead. He still lives in that same cottage, and laughed when I saw him last a couple of years ago, recalling how I always led us along the most tricky paths; I was able to duck beneath the branches of blackthorns while he would be skewered on their spines. The swathes of stinging nettles were far easier for our sticks to deal with – we could bash them down, uncovering half-forgotten tracks that reached in front of us like the ghost road in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Way through the Woods’:
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods.
The eerily atmospheric poem prefaces the short story ‘Marklake Witches’ in Kipling’s 1910 Rewards and Fairies, a collection of stories grouped together like those in its predecessor Puck of Pook’s Hill, with each tale fronted by a related verse. In the books, the eponymous sprite from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is roused to spin yarns, with the help of characters summoned from the past, to bring alive a history of England – or at least a version of it that Kipling has fashioned – to two Sussex children, Una and Dan. ‘I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days,’ says the now aged Puck as he introduces himself.††
‘Marklake Witches’ is itself a story of no little poignancy, in which Una meets Philadelphia Bucksteed, the high-spirited, sixteen-year-old daughter of a Napoleonic-era squire. We learn of the girl’s irritating cough, and the illicit efforts her nurse makes to enlist the local ‘witch-mater’ to cure her, aided by an affable French prisoner of war who is something of a medical innovator and turns out to be René Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope. As adult readers (I’m not sure the subtext would be obvious to a child), the tragedy is that we know the vibrant, thankfully unaware, Philadelphia is dying from consumption – which is why her after-dinner rendition of ‘I have given my heart to a flower’ so overwhelms her father and a visiting general. On being introduced to her new Napoleonic friend, the Edwardian Una comments about Marklake: ‘I like all those funny little roads that don’t lead anywhere.’ Given that the poem informs us in its opening line that the woodland way was shut ‘seventy years ago’, we can deduce that the estate of Philadelphia’s father has long gone, like the teenage girl whose tale is being told by her swish-skirted shade.
H. R. Millar (1869–1942), illustration from Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by Rudyard Kipling (Wikimedia Commons)
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (today Mumbai) in 1862, yet educated back in England, to which he was shipped, at the age of five, by his parents. He spent the next six unhappy years being boarded with a bullying foster family in Southsea, before going on to a military school in Devon, and then returning to India where he worked as a journalist and where his first successes as a writer were to come. This was followed by further spells in London and Vermont where, by this time married, he wrote The Jungle Book. Now famous, he returned once more to Britain, settling in Torquay, and then in Sussex; these wanderings, and his troubled childhood, perhaps go some way to explaining his desire to construct his own mythic version of a history of England, the country in which he was thereafter to remain.
While on a winter visit back to the States in 1899, Kipling, along with his six-year-old daughter, Josephine, contracted pneumonia. Kipling recovered from the illness, though it took him months; his daughter – for whom he had earlier written The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories – was not so lucky. A charming gold-framed pastel drawing of young Josephine hangs in one of the bedrooms of his Jacobean Sussex house, Bateman’s – she looks out of the frame, intent on something unseen – alongside a monochrome photograph that shows the pretty, smiling little girl, then aged three, being held by her doting father.
A hint of this personal tragedy is present, I think, in Kipling’s depiction of the life-affirming Philadelphia in ‘Marklake Witches’. His younger daughter Elsie, the only one of Kipling’s three children to survive him, recalled in her memoir:
There is no doubt the little Josephine had been the greatest joy during her short life. He always adored children, and she was endowed with a charm and personality (as well as an enchanting prettiness) that those who knew her still remember. She belonged to his early, happy days, and his life was never the same after her death; a light had gone out that could never be rekindled.
In common with many other Victorian and Edwardian writers of note, Kipling occasionally turned his hand to supernatural tales, a good number of which reflected the mysticism of India. A few though take place in Kipling’s adopted Sussex, the land of Puck – among them a work of utmost poignancy that reveals the depth of his sorrow following his daughter’s death.
Kipling’s ‘They’ first appeared in the August 1904 edition of Scribner’s Magazine, and was anthologised later the same year in Traffics and Discoveries. An illustrated standalone version was published by Macmillan in 1905, which indicates the story’s popular appeal – George Bernard Shaw, for example, sent a copy of Scribner’s to the leading actress of the age, Ellen Terry, wondering whether she would consider playing the part of its main female character if Shaw could persuade Kipling to adapt the story into a play; she declined, stating that it was ‘wondrously lovely’, but that the ‘stage would be too rough for it I fear’.‡‡
In ‘They’, Kipling writes beautifully about the wooded enclaves of the Sussex countryside. Clues in the text point to the story being set somewhere around the hinterland of the village of Washington, a few miles north of Worthing and forty miles west of Bateman’s. When we are first introduced to the narrator it is very late spring, for – despite the brightness of the sun, at least where it’s able to puncture through the tunnels of hazel, oak and beech – there are reminders of the fleetingness of the seasons and the implacability of time in the already gone-over spring flowers: ‘Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together.’
The narrator freewheels his vehicle along a leaf-strewn track, descending into sunshine and a vision of an archaic house set among a great lawn populated by topiary horsemen and their steeds. Stopping his car in the grounds of this idyll of Old Albion, the protagonist spies two children watching him from one of the house’s upper-floor windows, and hears juvenile laughter coming from behind a nearby yew peacock. The owner of the Tudor mansion appears, a redoubtable blind woman (we learn in passing that she is Miss Florence) who we half-expect to berate the motorist for his noisy intrusion. The narrator expects to be scolded too and begins his excuses about taking a wrong turn, though the lady isn’t at all bothered, and instead hopes an automobile demonstration can be put on for the elusive children.
‘Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice – quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but –’ she threw out her hands towards the woods.