Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories

Women: "we know a great deal more of men than our own sex"

Before he was 17 years old, Rudyard Kipling had returned to the land of his birth, India, to begin "seven years hard" of journalism. He was assistant editor first of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore then of the nationally more prominent sister-paper the Pioneer in Allahabad. Soon enough he found time during long blistering hot days and nights newspapering in "the plains" to write in prose and poetry and also to publish sketches of life in India. *** Working enormously hard throughout 1888 he brought out one book of 14 short stories in prose called WEE WILLIE WINKIE AND OTHER CHILD STORIES. Having proven to himself that he was meant to be a writer of original works and that people would pay to read him, Rudyard Kipling gave up his journalistic position. He traveled eastward by sea, then across the USA and settled in London in 1889 where he was instantly lionized. *** When first published in India the 14 WEE WILLIE WINKIE AND OTHER CHILD STORIES were advertised as "illustrations of the four main features of Anglo-Indian life, viz., the Military, Domestic, Native and Social." They included six tales of illicit English amours in Simla, India's 7,000 foot high summer capital, four tales of ghosts and the supernatural or far-fetched (including "The Man who would be King") and four stories of five-, six- and 14-year old English boys and their adventures in India and/or England. Of these the saddest is "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" about the boy Kipling's own mistreatment during five years in a seaside boarding house and at school in England. *** Some of the flavor of the whole book is given in "A Second-Rate Woman." Set in the high hill station of Simla, this is one of Kipling's several tales down the decades of Mrs Lucy Hauksbee, who epitomizes all that is worst about British "straw widows" who summer in the Himalayas while their absent husbands toil and sweat down in the baking plains. *** Mrs Hauksbee shares a cottage with another straw widow Mrs Polly Mallowe, the latter lazy, growing fat on chocolates but less harsh in her judgments of the British in Simla than is Mrs Hauksbee. At tale's beginning, the object of Mrs Hauksbee's contempt is the Dowd ("dowdy"), Mrs Delville "a second-rate woman," an extraordinarily poorly dressed straw widow herself whose deep grey eyes nonetheless attract men like flies to honey, especially a fat, ageing "Dancing Master, Mr Bent. Bent's wife and baby daughter are away with her mother. Mrs Hauksbee is grooming Hawnsley, a young officer, knocking the rough spots off his manners, looking for a good wife for him. Mix all those ingredients, with the arrival of Mrs Bent and baby and you have four women trying to make sense of themselves and all of them laboring in a dither to save baby Dora Dent who is close to dying from diptheria. All of which wittily, paradoxically somehow proves that we women "... know a great deal more of men than our own sex." -OOO-