Dear Alastair,
Your guess is fully right. "Hobson-Jobson" in its EUROPE article says: "A "Europe morning" is lying late in bed, as opposed to the Anglo-Indian's habit of early rising."
See also in "From Sea To Sea" No 4:
The conclusion of the meal was a half-guinea pineapple and a _siesta_. This is a beautiful thing which we of India—but I am of India no more—do not understand. You lie down and wait for time to pass. You are not in the least wearied—and you would not go to sleep. You are filled with a divine drowsiness—quite different from the heavy sodden slumber of a hot-weather Sunday, or the businesslike repose of a __Europe morning__. Now I begin to despise novelists who write about siestas in cold climates. I know what the real thing means.
Yan S.
A> Kipling uses the expression "Europe morning" in his Motoring Diary for
A> their trip home from France in March 1911. Can anyone tell me what he
A> might have meant? I suspect it may have meant 'a lie-in' or ' an idle
A> morning'., but I've never heard the expression used elsewhere, nor
A> anywhere else in Kipling's writing.
A> The previous day, they had had a rather 'fraught' trip fom
A> Aigues-Mortes, across the Camargue (most emphatically not like the
A> race-track in the opening pages of /The Bull that Thought /on which the
A> Kipling narrator proved to M. Voiron that his car was indeed capable of
A> whatever the figure was). The car had got bogged down through trying to
A> take a short-cut through a village, and it had taken three hours to get
A> her out. As a result they didn't reach their hotel "(dead)" until 9 p.m
A> .presumably hoping for some dinner. Whether they got it, or what they
A> got, he doesn't record, but the next day's entry starts "Put in Europe
A> morning at Hotel Metropole: having gone to bed at 11 p.m.".
A> My reading of this is that they were all pretty knackered the night
A> before, and made a very slow start the next day.
A> Anyone got any ideas, please? It occurs to me that it might be the
A> matutinal equivalent of a siesta - itself a nasty European habit. but I
A> don't know . . . .
A> /Alastair Wilson/
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