Three events in my life converged in February 1985. Firstly, the eldest of my
five children was born, late but unscathed, in Greenwich hospital; secondly,
I performed in a production of Tom and Viv on Broadway, my first
seminal experience of New York; and thirdly, the American actor, Ed
Herrmann, playing T. S. Eliot in that production, presented me with Angus
Wilson’s biography of Rudyard Kipling. Inside the front cover, Ed wrote:
“Here’s hoping your Rudyard comes to pass.” As I flicked through the
biography’s illustrations, I had the uncanny experience of staring at
myself. My physical resemblance to Rudyard was unnerving – huge eyebrows,
moustache, baldness, myopia – only the colour of the eyes was different. So,
sitting in my apartment in West 87th Street, wrapped in an overcoat to ward
off one of the coldest New York winters, I started to read The Strange
Ride of Rudyard Kipling, and so began a journey that has taken 22 years
and five months to complete. A journey that has led me to the caravan in
which I am sitting now, in a field 100 miles from Dublin on the film set of
My Boy Jack.
Initially, I read Wilson’s portrait of Rudyard with the slightly grimy motives
of the actor on the make – here was a part I could play! But, as I delved
deeper into his life, I discovered that, though I resembled Rudyard
physically, his personality was extraordinarily similar to my father’s. This
discovery was crucial. Writing My Boy Jack, both the stage play and
the screenplay, would transcend pure actor’s greed and become something
intensely personal. If My Boy Jack works on any level, it is
because it is a hybrid of the Kipling family’s experience and my own
family’s experience. My portrayal of Kipling is an unashamed mix of my
father and Rudyard.
My father was a vocational soldier and an army officer for 20 years.
When he retired from the Army in his forties, bored by the inertia of postwar
army life, he went on to run the Hayward Art Gallery for ten years from its
opening in 1966. He was an extraordinary mix of artistic sensitivity and
old-fashioned Victorian values. It was this paradoxical combination that I
immediately recognised in Rudyard – the magical, inventive father, creator
of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, clashing with the
tyrannical apologist for the British Empire. How did these apparently
incompatible extremes sit within one personality? Not comfortably, I
suspect, for Rudyard or my father, but it is a fascinating mix to observe.
My Boy Jack is the story of Rudyard’s “inadvertent complicity” in his
son’s death. Complicity is a provocative word and needs clarification.
Rudyard’s son John (known as Jack) was 17 years and a few days old when
Great Britain declared war on Germany in September 1914. Like the majority
of his peers at the beginning of the First World War, Jack was determined to
fight for King and country, but, like his father, he was profoundly myopic,
so shortsighted that the Army and the Navy rejected him out of hand as “a
danger to himself and to his men” – and this at a time when the country was
desperate for volunteers. But Rudyard was undeterred and utterly determined
that his son should fight, despite his impaired vision, for the values that
he, Rudyard, so publicly espoused. It is impossible to overemphasise the
writer’s status in 1914. He was the voice of the Empire, he had the ear of
the King and the Prime Minister, and was as globally popular (and,
incidentally, as wealthy) as J. K. Rowling is today. Using this massive
influence, he managed to persuade his friend and hero Field Marshal Lord
Roberts to arrange a commission for Jack in the Irish Guards. And so, in
August 1915, Second Lieutenant John “Jack” Kipling crossed the Channel bound
for the Western Front. He took with him a spare pair of specs and a letter
from his father giving him permission to fight under the age of 18. On
September 27, 1915, in the Battle of Loos, Jack was killed on the first day
of his first action, in torrential rain. Anyone who has worn spectacles in
heavy rain will know that Jack will have been unable to see a thing.
The effect on Rudyard was immediate and irrevocable. Guilt, remorse and grief
flooded his writing and physical illness plagued him. He sought atonement by
writing a 700-page history of his son’s regiment, and by pouring his
energies into the War Graves Commission. In 1917 he wrote a simple couplet,
the universal voice of every teenage son killed in the Great War: “If any
question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.” It would be
impossible to condense Rudyard’s sense of guilt more succinctly.
I am not a pacifist. Some wars I believe are just – the need to stop Hitler
was indisputably necessary – but, as an atheist, what I cannot bear is that
every death in war consigns a human being to oblivion. And every individual
death in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Battle of Loos in 1915, sets off a chain
reaction of connected lives damaged and, in some cases, destroyed – families
and friends who struggle for the rest of their lives to come to terms with
that one single loss. Yet on the morning of September 27, 1915, Jack
Kipling’s last morning, 7,500 British soldiers died, each producing his own
chain reaction of collateral emotional damage.
My own family has had its share of premature death. My sister died of a brain
haemorrhage when she was 22, my wife Julia had a full-term still birth,
Julia’s sisters lost their husbands at 47 and 52. I have seen at first hand
the jagged, unpredictable nature of grief and bereavement within a family.
Interestingly, at the very moment when one would expect indissoluble unity,
the reverse can be true. How often does one hear in a notorious murder case
that the parents of the victim have cracked under the strain and separated?
Despite losing two of their three children under the age of 19, Rudyard
Kipling and his wife Carrie’s marriage survived. Their interdependency and
mutual devotion outweighed the strain.
Apart from describing Jack’s journey, the film My Boy Jack
focuses on the family, on what it means and feels like to lose a brother or
a son, the cost to the survivors. It is a story of specificity, about
Rudyard Kipling, a superstar of his generation, but I hope it is also a
universal story, which can speak to any family, anywhere. Remembrance Sunday
rightly focuses on the men who sacrificed their lives, but it is also worth
remembering the cost to the families who struggle to come to terms with the
loss of a father, brother or son.
My Boy Jack, Sun, ITV1, 9pm
