Dear John and Philip,
Concur with you both - I had been going to observe to John,
more or less exactly as he said himself, that other than his pony,
'Dolly Bobs', in India, he never owned a horse for himself and
there is no record of him ever riding in England though very early
on, they had a pony for the children. At Rottingdean before he
went car mad, both he and Carrie used bicycles as their personal
transport - though I don't think they did any serious cycling at
Burwash - it would have been fine coming home downhill (which
happened whichever way you went), butto get anywhere you first had
to make a long trek uphill.
Yours,
Alastair
PS - I hadn't even heard the quote which Philip producd -
where did it come from (apart from Guy Paget)?
On 24/02/2017 05:16, JOHN RADCLIFFE wrote:
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type="cite">
Dear Philip
An excellent quote which I had
forgotten. He understood the appeal of hunting, as in My Son's
Wife and Little Foxes, just as he understood the appeal of polo
in The Maltese Cat, but I don't know of any evidence that he got
on the back of a horse after he left India.
Dogs and cars were a different
matter.
All best. John R
Sent from my iPhone
If Kipling didn’t like horse racing as John Radcliffe
pointed out, he didn’t get personally involved in
fox-hunting either.
When Guy Paget invited
him to come out with the Pychley Hunt
the offer was turned down very firmly.
In his letter of December 1930 he
says: "All the same, you
don't catch me outside a hot
hysterical piece of catsmeat with
leather trimmings ! It's vulgar."
|
Regards – Philip Holberton
