In a Hidden Kingdom

Abstract

Kipling’s position in England was an ambiguous one. The move into his new home filled him with excitement: ‘England is a wonderful land. It is the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in. lt is made up of trees and green fields and mud and the Gentry: and at last I’m one of the Gentry!’ (Letters, III.113). As he improved and extended his property over the next few years, his enthusiasm for the land, and his sense of the history underlying it, deepened and intensified. Yet he was unsure about ‘the Gentry’. His estate included an old watcr-mill dating back, he liked to believe, to the thirteenth century, which he decided to put to use, buying a turbine and generator and laying 250 yards of underground cable to supply electricity for the house. These improvements provided the basis for his story ‘Below the Mill Dam’, in which a Grey Cat and a Black Rat, living complacently together in an old nniU, are disturbed by the introduction of new turbines. If the Cat and the Rat represent the old guard, clinging on to unearned privileges hut forced to change their ways when ‘the unvisited darkness of the old mill [is] scattered by intolerable white light’, the light itself stands for the war, which had, Kipling wrote to Norton, challenged every part of the national life ‘to show cause why it should continue on the old unthinking hide-bound lines’ (Letters, III.53).¹ England might be ‘a wonderful land’, but its people had not yet faced the truth of their moral and military weakness. Kipling was still an angry man.