Torquay is such a place that I do desire acutely to upset by dancing through with nothing on but my spectacles.
Rudyard Kipling (1897)
The Miller family’s status in Torquay resulted in them receiving many interesting visitors at Ashfield. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, the world-famous creator of the children’s literary classics The Jungle Book and the Just So stories, and a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, young Agatha’s only recollection of this momentous event were derogatory comments made by a friend of her mother’s as to why the author had ever married his wife, Caroline Baleister, before reaching the conclusion that the couple were the ‘perfect complement to each other’.
The Kiplings had also made themselves deeply unpopular in Caroline’s hometown of Battleboro, Vermont, where the couple settled following their marriage in 1892. They left the country under a cloud after irrevocably falling out with the Baleister family. The quarrel resulted in Rudyard having his brother-in-law arrested for making violent threats, followed by a damaging court appearance and embarrassing publicity. In the autumn of 1896, the Kiplings left this bitter episode behind them and moved to England. They rented Rock House at Maidencombe, Torquay, built on a cliff overlooking a small cove. The author described the villa as ‘almost too good to be true’, and waxed lyrical about the location: ‘I look straight from my work table on to the decks of the fishing craft who come in to look after their lobster pots’. With the publication of his latest work The Seven Seas, Kipling proudly accepted an invitation to spend several days with the naval cadets based on the training ship Britannia at Dartmouth.
Kipling’s enthusiasm for his new home quickly declined as a sense of evil and brooding depression enveloped the household, which would later inspire a short ghost story entitled ‘The House Surgeon’. He revealed a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart: ‘It was the Feng-shui – the Spirit of the house itself – that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips’. For a time, the writer took up the current craze for cycling. The gossip columnist of a local paper reported, ‘I saw Mr Rudyard Kipling careering along the Tor Abbey sands on wheels one day last week’. The hobby ended when he and his wife shared pedalling duties on ‘a tandem bicycle, whose double steering-bars made good dependence for continuous domestic quarrel’. The couple crashed off their ‘devil’s toast rack’ and walked home pushing the bike they dubbed ‘Hell Spider’.
Mrs Miller and her friend may have been unimpressed with the Kiplings, and likewise Rudyard could not bear mingling with the posturing, wealthy residents of the town, but before his unhappy sojourn on the English Riviera came to an abrupt end, Kipling fictionalised his Devon schooldays. Author Eden Phillpotts, famed for his novels set in the locality, sent a copy of his latest book to Kipling, which immediately triggered an idea. Early in 1897, he broached the subject with his editor: ‘The notion of writing a Devonshire tale is new to me but, now I come to think of it, I was educated at Westward Ho! nigh Bideford and for six puppy years talked vernacular with the natives whose apples I stole. What will E.P. give to buy me off?’
The result was Stalky & Co., based on the adventures of himself and his two closest friends at United Services College, an establishment fondly remembered by Kipling as ‘the school before its time’. Founded to prepare boys for a military or naval career, this was never the intention for Kipling, as the college was chosen solely because his mother was a close friend of the headmaster, Cormwell Price. Despite a miserable initiation period at the school, which he later recalled was ‘primitive in its appointments, and our food would now raise a mutiny in Dartmoor [Prison]’, the budding author flourished when the head realised, ‘I was irretrievably committed to the ink-pot’ and Rudyard was appointed editor of the school magazine. A collection of his poems written at the college was published by his parents living in India and he joyously returned to his family and embarked upon a journalistic career. He also drew inspiration from the land of his birth for his early literary successes. His output was stupendous and he became a marvellous storyteller, standing by the maxim that: ‘A word – should fall in its place like a bell in a full chime’.
Kipling’s revered former headmaster, Cormwell Price, accepted an invitation to spend some time at Rock House, where he heard passages from the new book read to him by the excited author. Kipling’s happiness seemed complete when Caroline learned she was expecting their third child. However, by May 1897 the couple were unable to reconcile themselves with the gloomy atmosphere of Rock House and suddenly decided to execute ‘our flight from Torquay’ to seek refuge with relatives near Brighton. John Kipling, the son conceived in Torquay, was doomed to die in action during the First World War. His father had to live with the guilt of his son’s fate after ‘pulling strings’ to arrange for his enlistment after John had been rejected on medical grounds with extremely poor eyesight. Little wonder that when Rudyard made a pilgrimage to his former Torquay home shortly before his own death, the writer detected ‘the same brooding Spirit of deep, deep Despondency within the open lit rooms’.