However unfashionable or ‘problematic’ he may be, Kipling remains one of the great exponents of the short story. He was more than a writer of empire: he could turn his hand to psychological naturalism, historical fiction, supernatural fantasy and satire. Having started life in India, he considered England “the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have been in”, and it’s this outsider’s perspective that allowed him to find spiritual magic in the rural Sussex where he made his home. ’They’ is a ghost story of sorts, in which a motorist stumbles on a blind woman who appears to offer a refuge to the spirits of lost children. Or rather, her house and garden do. Kipling wrote several stories about the ‘soul of a place’, how it may have good or unhappy colours. He was no less haunted than his characters when he wrote ’They’, for he was mourning the loss of his young daughter, Josephine, who had died in 1899. The narrator is charmed by the unseen, laughing, affectionate children in the garden, and it’s only late in the story that he realises that they are not what he assumed. Kipling, at least in his later stories, is a subtle writer who asks some effort of his readers. That effort is well rewarded with ’They’. Admirers of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets may recognise the source for some of its famous imagery:
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
– T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’
First published in August 1904 in Scribners Magazine. Collected in Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling, Macmillan & Co., London, October 1904
A Personal Anthology 