O Beloved Kids

Synopsis: From 1906 to 1915, Rudyard Kipling wrote a series of letters to his children, his "dear people" as he called them. For Josephine, his daughter, who died at the age of six, the grief of whose loss almost stopped him from continuing with the stories; for his son John, who would become a young officer and be lost in the trenches of World War I (Kipling could not forgive himself for having pushed the lad into the service); and for his second daughter, Elsie, who would marry but had no children of her own.Displaying the same verve and wit as the "Just So Stories", the letters are peppered with many impromptu pen and ink sketches, stories and poems, as well as brilliantly graphic descriptions of travel in Europe, Egypt and Canada. Perhaps most moving are the letters between father and son written by Kipling to his son John, who was to be killed in 1915, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday.

Review: Rudyard corresponds with his children exactly as you would expect, it's a bit like reading his Just So Stories .. they're humorous, sometimes moralistic and occasionally dictatorial. You can't help thinking that Elsie (or Bird) got the best of it, being a girl, not much was expected of her and although she features much less in this book than John does (for the simple reason that Bird was more often at home) when she is sent letters it's usually because she's off skiing or on a jaunt. It's Rudyard's letters to John that the book is mainly concerned with. Whilst John is off boarding at school, Rudyard sends him news from home .. including little humorous stories with sketches to match but often there's a little lecture included (this is when Rudyard puts on what he calls his 'Mr Campbell' persona) and John is urged to study harder and basically buck up and be a good chap. At first I was inclined to be a bit resentful on John's behalf but then I realised that Rudyard only wanted him to be the best that he could be and instill some decent manners into him. These lectures apart, Rudyard writes to his son very much as you would to a friend, treating him almost as an equal (though at the same time despairing of his spelling.) Until I read the foreward (which I never do until the end) Rudyard's allusions to John avoiding 'beastliness' completely washed over me .. I thought he was alluding to the sort of beastliness that went on sometimes at Malory Towers (you know, someone cheating in exams, or stealing someone's pocket money) but apparently he was alluding to homosexuality. Well, again, I guess he was only trying to steer him in, what he thought was, the right direction given the times he was writing in. There's also a few unpalatable racial terms such as you might read, in Mark Twain's work of the same era.

Rudyard was a great patriot and believed fervently in men doing their duty, he wrote pamphlets and made speeches promoting recruitment. As John approached seventeen he was instrumental in pulling strings to get him a commission in the Irish Guards (John had been rejected already by both navy and army, due to his chronic short sightedness) with devastating results. John was killed in the Battle of Loos, during torrential rain, on his first day of combat. His body was never recovered and Rudyard was broken hearted ... 'he did not need the many gloating letters he received holding him accountable for his son's death to consider the possibility of his personal guilt.' In the last part of the book we are able to read John's letters home .. which always start 'Dear old man' or 'Dear old things' and this touch makes the book all the more affecting. Although I'm sure that Rudyard did continue to write to Bird after John's death, John's last letter home, written the evening before his death, is the last letter in the book. He ends it with ... 'You have no idea what enormous issues depend on the next few days. This will be my last letter most likely for some time as we won't get any time for writing this next week, but I will try and send Field post cards. Well so long old dears, Dear love John.' Rudyard wrote an epitaph for John a couple of years later which said .. 'If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.'

I was all the more ridiculously affected by having Daniel Radcliffe in mind whilst reading about John. Daniel played the part of John in the drama My Boy Jack which was on TV a couple of years ago.

The letters are full of fun and, though they are at times a little censorious, it's clear that they were written by someone who loved his children deeply and wanted only the best for them.