To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [32]
Women had no role in politics, he firmly believed:
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him Must command but may not govern—shall enthrall but not enslave him.
For someone whose writing was so widely loved, the poet and novelist was a man of many dislikes. Among them were Germans, democracy, taxes, labor unions, Irish and Indian nationalists, socialists, and, near the top of the list, the women he called "suffragines." Women were fated for the gentle role of wives and mothers to Britain's fighting men; enfranchising them would only open the way to further horrors, Kipling feared, such as women becoming ministers and bishops. When family and guests played charades, the Kiplings' young son, John, would mockingly pantomime a "suffragine."
A friend once described Kipling as "a short, wiry, alert man with steely blue eyes peering through his spectacles under bushy eyebrows and bald head, firm chin poked forward. His glasses were part of him, as headlights are part of a car." Central to the writer's life were his beloved children, John, Elsie, and the eldest, Josephine, for whom he began writing the Just So Stories, which would become a part of so many British and American childhoods. Along with his unmatched ability to imagine himself into the mind of a child went a love for everything military: one family photo shows a grinning four-year-old John Kipling shouldering a rifle taller than he is.
Kipling played with his children endlessly; he and his American wife, Carrie, were indulgent, hands-on parents, quite different from the conventional image of emotionally distant upper-class Edwardians, content to put all child care in the hands of a nanny. His love for his children was all the greater because of the devastating impact of losing the six-year-old Josephine to pneumonia on the eve of the Boer War. The affectionate letters he wrote to John and Elsie are sprinkled with spontaneous poems and limericks, with even parental admonitions couched gently: a drawing of a toothbrush and set of teeth to remind John to brush his, and some friendly joshing of John's erratic spelling: "Howe wood yu lick it if I rote you a leter al ful of misspeld wurds?" When John worried that his nearsightedness, apparently inherited from his father, might prevent the naval career he dreamed of, Kipling wrote, "Don't you bother too much about your eyes. They will come all right"
Among the visitors who strolled through Kipling's rose garden was Alfred, Lord Milner, whom the poet declared he admired more than anyone on earth. The two men took turns spending Queen Victoria's birthday, an occasion for fireworks and bonfires called Empire Day, in each other's houses.
After his return home in 1905, feeling his labors in South Africa underappreciated, Milner shunned politics, a brooding lion in exile. He put his financial skills to work on the boards of a mining company and several banks, all of which brought him a good income, but for a man who had started a war and run a country, the business world was a comedown. At home and abroad he continued to write and speak about the great cause of "imperial unity" among Britain, her many colonies, and her grown-up former colonies, like Australia, which were now called dominions. The future French leader Georges Clemenceau described the British as un peuple planétaire, but what would they do, he joked, if another Lord Milner appeared who wanted to control yet another continent, and there weren't any left?
Sharing Milner's enthusiasm for imperial unity