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Folio society kipling1/4/2024 ![]() ![]() We feel he means it he's at once on our side. Kipling talks to us like an uncle reading to us at bedtime, calls us "Best Beloved". "You are hurtig be!"įrom the start the story is intimately told. Then she would hold her nose and squawk loudly as only elephant's children do in such circumstances. Suddenly, she had Crocodile eyes, Crocodile hands, Crocodile voice, and every word was spoken between clenched Crocodile teeth, unless, of course, she was speaking as the Elephant's Child. At the point when he lowers his head closer to the Crocodile's "musky, tusky mouth", my mother would become the Crocodile. ![]() and I'll whisper." This is the moment we were waiting for. When finally the Elephant's Child does meet the Crocodile somewhere "in these promiscuous parts", and asks the question he's been longing to ask all this time and that no one will answer, the Crocodile tells him: "Come hither. With a trumpeting voice reminiscent to me at the time of all the ancient aunts I knew, my mother would point dramatically towards Africa, and intone: "Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out." So off goes the Elephant's Child, eating melons and throwing the rind away because, at the time, he has only "a blackish, bulgy nose" and can't pick it up. I looked forward eagerly to the Kolokolo Bird's mournful cry in answer to the Elephant Child's perfectly innocent question about what the Crocodile has for dinner. She became in voice, in gesture, each of the parts of the Elephant's Child's family: his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, who spanked him for his "satiable curtiosity", spanked him "with her broad, broad hoof" his hairy uncle, the Baboon, who spanked him "with his hairy, hairy paw". So why did this story resonate so particularly for a boy of five or six? Perhaps because there were so many different characters to play. And it was the story of "The Elephant's Child" that we clamoured for most. ![]() She would read us Just So Stories so often that we knew them almost by heart. But compared even with them, Kipling was always the master of laughing words. The poetry of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear – both also great favourites of my mother for our bedside reading – had the same effect on me. She made the words (how Kipling loves to play with the sounds and rhythms of words) sing on the air, and she made them laugh too. And because all these stories are "told" as opposed to "written" (although the writing is sublime it is what makes the stories feel so wonderfully "told") every one of them felt personal, and as if newly invented by my mother each time she told them to us. She played the whole orchestra, every instrument from the kettle-drum to the piccolo she was the conductor and the composer. She just had to open the book and she would become by turns every character inside those pages: she was Rudyard Kipling telling the tale she was the Camel acquiring his hump, the Rhinoceros getting his skin, the Elephant's Child growing his trunk – by Crocodile means – and she was the Cat that Walked by Himself. So my elder brother Pieter and I were for a while, for that critical time when reading to children in bed is so important, the only audience she had. But by the time I was born, my mother had stopped acting to become a full-time mother. My mother was an actress, who had performed in rep all over the country, including a season or two at Stratford. My copy of Just So Stories, in its brick-red cover with the Elephant's Child straining away with all his might to escape the jaws of the Crocodile on the banks of "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River", the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake in close attendance, was the first book I truly loved. ![]()
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