Fleeing fog and filth

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’.

Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was not until he went to school in Devon that he began to appreciate the English countryside. As a young reporter, he returned to the more exotic surroundings of India, where he honed his skills in the travel articles he wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette.