The Kipling he knew as a boy in Sussex

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 21

The Kipling he knew as a boy in Sussex

By

STAN DARLING

Raymond Coppard reckons the sight was “as good as looking at the comet, really.” The 88-year-old Upper Riccarton man is talking about something he used to see from his boyhood house in England Sussex — the sight of motor car headlights coming up the hill to Rudyard Kipling’s estate near Burwash. Kipling had the first car in the district. "He always had a chauffeur drive his cars,” says Mr Coppard, whose family emigrated to New Zealand and settled in Temuka in 1911. "We could see the beam from his lights coming up the hill.” Mr Coppard’s father leased the mill farm on Kipling’s estate of Bateman’s for a few years. The Christchurch man remembers those days well. Kipling was always friendly and used to invite the children over to the

big house at Christmas for parties with his own young children, John and Elsie. % The Coppard farm was just beyond the great writer’s gardens. There were three cottages and a flour mill on the River Dudwell. Raymond’s father grew hops and other crops on his farm, and sometimes used to run the flour mill to grind his own corn. Raymond was his eldest son. He can remember helping out at the mill, cleaning the grinding stones as a boy of about 10. Mr Coppard was born at Dallington, a village only a few miles from Burwash. His grandfather had a farm nearby, a place he and a brother used to visit by walking over the paddocks and through the forest, where nesting pheasants were kept by a keeper. That forest shortcut was below Brightling Needle, a tall observa-

tory built on a rise by unemployed men. Mr Coppard remembers Kipling as a near-sighted man who always used to peer over his spectacles. He squinted at you. “He was not a very tall man,” says Mr Coppard. “You could hardly see his eyes open.” The young boy would see the writer often as he came over to the big mill pond to inspect his turbine. Kipling had installed it to generate electricity for his house, which he had restored and expanded from a farm house into a fine estate. The Coppard farm never had electricity in those days. Raymond Coppard almost came to grief in the pond when he and a brother were playing with boats. He has never been

able to swim, and that day the boats became tangled. They tugged at the boats, and Raymond went headlong into the pond. He grabbed hold of some roots and held on tight until his mother came to his rescue, forcing him to be sick to get rid of the dirty water he had swallowed. Mr Coppard remembers his grandfather on his farm, always wearing a knee-length white smock as he did his rounds. The boys walked over to his farm on Sundays to walk with him to church in Burwash. On those days, his grandfather was "dressed to the nines in a black swallow-tail coat” as they walked past Kipling’s house on their way to the village. When his father decided to

bring the family to New Zealand in 1911, when Mr Coppard was only 14 years old, Kipling asked about the family’s plans. His father told Kipling that it would be a bit of a change. Kipling had said to him: “Good gracious, whatever would you want to go there for? Australia is the place you want to go.” Raymond Coppard was too young to have any memorable discussions with Rudyard Kipling, and he has only read a few poems by him. He was always too busy working to be a great reader. It has only been in the past year, when he has had trouble getting around, that he has read widely. He thinks he must have read more books recently than he had in all the years before. Mr Coppard worked on a sheep station near Waiau when the First World War began and

immediately joined up. In England, he spent several leaves in Sussex, seeing family and friends. He never attempted to see Kipling again. It didn’t seem the proper thing to do, and anyway Kipling’s son John had been killed in the war. Kipling lived at Bateman’s for 34 years, until his death in 1936. His wife died three years later, after bequeathing the estate to the National Trust as a memorial to her husband. The house has about 60,000 visitors a year during the seven months it is open to the public. Captain Edward Parsons, an Auckland resident who also grew up near Bateman’s, wrote about his youthful observances of Kipling and Sussex in “The Kipling I Knew,” published last year. His grandfather had been born in Bateman’s, where his parternal great-grandfather used to live.

Mr Coppard read about the book in "The Press,” and got in touch with Captain Parsons, letting him know that the author was not the only living New Zealander who had known Kipling. He has read the book with great pleasure three times. Each time, it has taken him right back to his boyhood.