Editing Rudyard Kipling (section)

===Education in Britain===
[[File:Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936 writer and Nobel Laureate lived here as a boy 1871-1877.jpg|thumb|left|upright|[[English Heritage]] [[blue plaque]] marking Kipling's time in Southsea, Portsmouth]]
Kipling's days of "strong light and darkness" in Bombay ended when he was five.<ref name="autobio">{{cite web |url=http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/SomethingOfMyself/index.html |title=''Something of Myself'' |last=Kipling |first=Rudyard |year=1935 |access-date=6 September 2008 |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140223004314/http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/SomethingOfMyself/index.html |archive-date=23 February 2014 }}</ref> As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice ("Trix") were taken to the United Kingdom – in their case to [[Southsea]], [[Portsmouth]] – to live with a couple who [[Boarding house|boarded]] children of British nationals living abroad.<ref name="oxdnb">{{cite ODNB |id=34334 |title=Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936) |orig-year=2004 |year=2011 |last=Pinney |first=Thomas}}</ref> For the next six years (from October 1871 to April 1877), the children lived with the couple – Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, once an officer in the [[Merchant Navy (United Kingdom)|merchant navy]], and Sarah Holloway – at their house, Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea.<ref name="Kipling R – A Very Young Person">{{cite web |last=Pinney |first=Thomas |year=1995 |url=http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_veryyoung_notes.htm |title=A Very Young Person, Notes on the text |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |access-date=6 March 2012 |archive-date=20 May 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130520092440/http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_veryyoung_notes.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> Kipling referred to the place as "the House of Desolation".<ref name="autobio" />

In his autobiography published 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered if the combination of cruelty and neglect that he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: "If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of [[bullying]], but this was calculated [[torture]] – religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort."<ref name="autobio" />

[[File:Kiplingsengland3.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|''Kipling's England'': A map of England showing Kipling's homes]]
Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloways' son.<ref name="oxfordchildren">Carpenter, Humphrey and Prichard, Mari (1984). ''Oxford Companion to Children's Literature''. Oxford University Press, pp. 296–297. {{ISBN|0192115820}}.</ref> The two Kipling children, however, had no relatives in England they could visit, except that they spent a month each Christmas with a maternal aunt Georgiana ("Georgy") and her husband, [[Edward Burne-Jones]], at their house, The Grange, in [[Fulham]], London, which Kipling called "a paradise which I verily believe saved me".<ref name="autobio" />

In the spring of 1877, Alice returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers "Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it."<ref name="autobio" />

Alice took the children during spring 1877 to Goldings Farm at [[Loughton]], where a carefree summer and autumn was spent on the farm and adjoining Forest, some of the time with [[Stanley Baldwin]]. In January 1878, Kipling was admitted to the [[United Services College]] at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school recently founded to prepare boys for the army. It proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories ''[[Stalky & Co.]]'' (1899).<ref name="oxfordchildren" /> While there, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence became the model for Maisie in Kipling's first novel, ''[[The Light That Failed]]'' (1891).<ref name="oxfordchildren" />