How does Kipling in"The Gardener" describe the contemporary society? write.
Answers
Explanation:
First published McCall’s Magazine, April 1925, illustrated by Arthur E. Becher; also in Strand, May 1925, with eight-line epigraph, illustrated by J. Dewar Mills, and headed by an editorial comment:
Few stories ever roused so much discussion and divergence of opinion as that by Mr. Kipling entitled ‘They.’ The following story will be likely to excite as wide a controversy.
Collected in Debits and Credits (1926), followed by the poem “The Burden” ,
The story
Helen Turrell, a well-off single woman of good family, is living in the country village where she grew up. She goes to the south of France for her health, and later returns with baby Michael. She explains that he is the son of her recently dead scapegrace brother and a sergeant’s daughter, who has entrusted him to Helen to bring up. When Michael is six, she tells him that though she is his aunt, he may call her “Mummy” at bedtime. He is furious when he finds that she has explained this to her friends. At 10, he realises that he is illegitimate, and fears that she might reject him, but their bond grows closer than ever.
He grows up and wins a scholarship to Oxford, then World War I breaks out and he joins the Army instead. He is sent to the western front and before long is killed. His body is covered in rubble and he is posted “missing.” No news is received until after the Armistice, when Helen is officially informed that he is now buried in a military cemetery at Hagenzeele. She goes to see the grave.
On the way, Helen sees a Lancashire woman who has hysterics because she does not know where to look for her son’s grave, and cannot provide the necessary information to find it. Then Helen meets Mrs Scarsworth, who is visiting a neighbouring cemetery on behalf of friends, but confides that this is a cover for her own loss of a secret lover. Helen’s response is inarticulate and Mrs Scarsworth takes offence.
Next day, Helen goes to the cemetery, where she sees a man planting flowers on the graves. She asks him where to find her nephew: ‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’ When she leaves, she sees him at work again, and the story ends: “and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.”
Notes
The composition of “The Gardener” is well documented. By Kipling’s usual standards it was rapid. On 14th March 1925, after a visit to the war cemetery at Bois Guillaume near Rouen, he wrote in a letter to Rider Haggard:
Went off to Rouen Cemetery (11,000 graves) and collogued with the Head Gardener and the contractors. One never gets over the shock of this Dead Sea of arrested lives … [Pinney ed., Letters, vol. 5, p. 212].
On the same day, Kipling wrote in his diary [TS, “Rudyard Kipling’s Motor Tours,” Wimpole papers 25/8, Special Collections, University of Sussex Library]: “Have begun a few lines on the story of Helen Turrell and her ‘nephew’ and the gardner [sic] in the great 20,000 cemetery.” The next day he was working on it again, and commented “Not a very bad beginning.” On the 16th he wrote that he and his wife had moved to Angers, where he planned to work on the story again, as he would do at Angoulême on the 19th. By the 22nd they had reached Pau, where he “finished rough draft. At least something done and don’t think it will be very bad.” Next day he “got it finished enough to send … for typing. A good job not so badly done.” On the 27th, Mrs Kipling wrote in her diary that it was “finished”. The manuscript shows little difference from the text as published. Changes between magazine and book versions were few and almost all were trivial.
Kipling had been recruited to the War Graves Commission in 1917. He composed epitaphs for it and wrote a booklet The Graves of the Fallen [published anonymously by H.M. Stationery Office]. Over the next few years he would make several tours of the battlefields, but unlike Helen he and his wife never found a grave for their son John, missing since September 1915.
ORG quotes an article by B.S. Browne in the Kipling Journal 136, Dec. 1960:
This story was wrung out of Kipling, firstly, by the fact that his son was posted missing after the battle of Loos in World War I and his body never recovered: it is this experience that he reproduces on pp. 405 and 406. Secondly it arose out of the fact that he was appointed a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission and so was enabled to describe intimately the conditions under which our war cemeteries were erected and then visited by the relatives of “the Fallen” after the war, as is described on pp. 407 to the end. The writer of this note had to do with the organization of large parties of relatives to the War Cemeteries in the early twenties, the time of this story, and can testify to Kipling’s unfailing accuracy in all his details and to the great comfort brought to the mourners, as testified by their faces, after they had visited “their grave.”