©Calyx Mary Hamer at Swindon festival of Literature
If you can keep a shocking story going
when Kipling is as unfashionable as a punkhawalla in the drawing room,
If you can travel the world in pursuit of your story,
But maintain a love for your subject;
If you can wait ten years for the novel to come to fruition,
Or uncover inequality, parental abandonment,
Or light a feminist torch for Kipling’s forgotten sibling,
And yet don’t moralise, nor impose twenty-first-century morals on the nineteenth:
If you can dream—and take the reader into a very foreign world;
If you can think—what must Trix have thought?;
If you can relax in Ruddy’s bathtub
And not feel too guilty;
If you can bear to hear the truth about children
sent away to strangers,
Or feel their pain as they were separated from each other,
And weave a story which shows Ruddy getting first chance over his sister :
If you can make Trix take centre stage for the first time
reveal how each stunted step of her way reduced her to madness ,
And yet return with warmth to Ruddy
‘right up there with Shakespeare’ in your view;
If you can inhabit their world
so alien to us now,
And hold a torch of truth for Kipling and Trix
to keep their memory alive’
If you can talk of Kipling being part of our language,
and when the crowd asks,
cite—’the female of the species is more deadly than the male’,
as an example of his ‘phrase-making’,
If you can keep an audience at the Swindon Arts Centre enthralled;
as the public were once for the merest tidbit of this literary superstar
then you have proved his relevance,
and your story has been heard,
And—which is more—you have shared the magic of your Kipling & Trix!
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