THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD 

THERE are certain writers, as different as Dickens from Kipling, who never shake off the burden of their childhood. The abandonment to the blacking factory in Dickens's case and in Kipling's to the cruel Aunt Rosa living in the sandy suburban road were never forgotten. All later experience seems to have been related to those months or years of unhappiness. Life which turns its cruel side to most of us at an age when we have begun to learn the arts of self-protection took these two writers by surprise during the defenselessness of early childhood. How differently they reacted. Dickens learns sympathy Kipling cruelty - Dickens developed a style so easy and natural that it seems capable of including the whole human race in its understanding: Kipling designed a machine, the cogwheels perfectly fashioned, for exclusion. The characters sometimes seem to rattle down a conveyor-belt like matchboxes.

There are great similarities in the early life of Kipling and Saki, and Saki's reaction to misery was nearer Kipling's than Dickens's. Kipling was born in India. H. H. Munro (I would like to drop that rather meaningless mask of the pen name) in Burma. Family life for such children is always broken - the miseries recorded by Kipling and Munro must be experienced by many mute inglorious children born to the civil servant or the colonial officer in the East: the arrival of the cab at the strange relative's house, the unpacking of the boxes, the unfamiliar improvised nursery, the terrible departure of the parents, a four years' absence from affection that in child-time can be as long as a generation (at four one is a small child, at eight a boy). Kipling described the horror of that time in Baa, Baa Black Sheep - a story in spite of its sentimentality almost unbearable to read: Aunt Rosa's prayers, the beatings, the card with the word LIAR pinned upon the back, the growing and neglected blindness, until at last came the moment of rebellion

'If you make me do that,' said Black Sheep very quietly, 'I shall burn this house down and perhaps 1 will kill you. 1 don't know whether I can kill you - you are so bony, but I will try.'

No punishment followed this blasphemy, though Black Sheep held himself ready to work his way to Auntie Rosa's withered throat and grip there till he was beaten off.

In the last sentence we can hear something very much like the tones of Munro's voice as we hear them in one of his finest stories Sredni Vashtar. Neither his Aunt Augusta nor his Aunt Charlotte with whom he was left near Barnstaple after his mother's death, while his father served in Burma, had the fiendish cruelty of Aunt Rosa, but Augusta (' a woman', Munro's sister wrote, 'of ungovernable temper, of fierce likes, and dislikes, imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of, and a primitive disposition') was quite capable of making a child's life miserable. Munro was not himself beaten, Augusta preferred his younger brother for that exercise, but we can measure the hatred he felt for her in his story of the small boy Conradin who prayed so successfully for vengeance to his tame ferret. "'Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn't for the life of me I" exclaimed a shrill voice, and while they debated the matter among themselves Conradin made himself another piece of toast.' Unhappiness wonderfully aids the memory, and the best stories of Munro are all of childhood, its humor and its anarchy as well as its cruelty and unhappiness.

For Munro reacted to those years rather differently from Kipling. He, too, developed a style like a machine in self-protection, but what sparks this machine gave off. He did not protect himself like Kipling with manliness, knowingness, imaginary adventures of soldiers and Empire Builders (though a certain nostalgia for such a life can be read into The Unbearable Bassington): he protected himself with epigrams as closely set as currants in an old-fashioned Dundee cake. As a young man trying to make a career with his father's help in the Burma Police, he wrote to his sister in 1893 complaining that she had made no effort to see A Woman of No Importance. Reginald and Clovis are children of Wilde: the epigrams, the absurdities

fly unremittingly back and forth, they dazzle and delight, but we are aware of a harsher, less kindly mind behind them than Wilde's. Clovis and Reginald are not creatures of fairy tale, they belong nearer to the visible world than Ernest Maltravers. While Ernest floats airily like a Rubens cupid among the over-blue clouds, Clovis and Reginald belong to the Park, the tea-parties of Kensington, and evenings at Covent Garden - they even sometimes date, like the suffragettes. They cannot quite disguise, in spite of the glint and the sparkle, the loneliness of the Barnstaple years - they are quick to hurt first, before they can be hurt, and the witty and devastating asides cut like Aunt Augusta's cane. How often these stories are stories of practical jokes. The victims with their weird names are sufficiently foolish to awaken no sympathy - they are the middle-aged, the people with power; it is right that they should suffer temporary humiliation because the world is always on their side in the long run. Munro, like a chivalrous highwayman, only robs the rich: behind all these stories is an exacting sense of justice. In this they are to be distinguished from Kipling's stories in the same genre - The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat and others where the joke is carried too far. With Kipling revenge rather than justice seems to be the motive (Aunt Rosa had established herself in the mind of her victim and corrupted it).

Perhaps I have gone a little too far in emphasizing the cruelty of Munro's work, for here are times when it seems to remind us only of the sunniness of the Edwardian scene, young men in boaters, the box at the Opera, long lazy afternoons in the Park, tea out of the thinnest porcelain with cucumber sandwiches, the easy irresponsible prattle. 

Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion. 

There's Marion Mulciber, who would think she could ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to a hospital, now she's gone into a Sisterhood - lost all she had you know, and gave the rest to Heaven.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

It requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a marked manner in the middle of the second Act when your carriage is not ordered till twelve.

Sad to think that this sunniness and this prattle could not go on for ever, but the worst and cruelest practical joke was left to the end. Munro's witty, cynical hero, Comus Bassington, died incongruously of fever in a West African village, and in the early morning of 13 November 1916, from a shallow crater near Beaumont Hamel, Munro was heard to shout 'Put out that bloody cigarette.' They were the unpredictable last words of Clovis and Reginald.