Mary Postgate was a lady’s companion, ungraceful and unloved. The reference from Lady McCausland said she was: “thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and lady-like,” and no fault was later found with it. She is also the only woman in any of Kipling’s stories to experience an orgasm.
Here’s how it happened. Before the first world war Mary had been hired as a lady’s companion to Miss Fowler a year before the household was augmented with with an eleven-year-old orphaned nephew of Miss Fowler’s, Wynn. He was a domineering, bullying brute, and the childless, orphaned, Mary Postgate loved him extravagantly.
Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her ‘Gatepost’, ‘Postey’ or ‘Packthread’, by thumping her between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in the air, at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s. Later on he filled the house with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless laughter.
So the odious young man becomes a solicitor, and when the war breaks out, signs up for the flying corps. He is killed in a training accident before he can even get to France: one foggy day his plane falls out of the sky, very close to their village.
‘I never expected anything else’, said Miss Fowler; ‘but I’m sorry it happened before he had done anything.’
The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it.
‘Yes’, she said. ‘It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.’
But they do not weep, and they are quietly contemptuous of the antics — the extravagant grief — of another village mother of the better class who has lost her son.
Five days after the funeral, it is still grey and rainy. Mary Postgate has spent all morning carting Wynn’s childhood belongings to the “Destructor” — the big incinerator at the bottom of the garden: his civilian clothes are going to Belgian refugees; his uniform to one of the Vicar’s nephews. But his books, his toys, his childhood clothes and cricket bats — all are to be burned and every hope that he might return is to be burned up with them. At lunchtime she goes down to the village for paraffin. While she is there, a single German aeroplane flies over in the rain and fog and drops one bomb.
Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet drying before the fire, ran out, lifted something from the ground, and flung the sheet round it. The sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform too, as she bore the load into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt, aged nine, whom Mary had known since her perambulator days.
‘Am I hurted bad?’ Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden’s dripping hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she could shut her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.
Back at the the destructor, Mary gets the fire going despite the attentions of the persistent rain. Then her attention is drawn by a noise, and she sees there is a German airman, curiously broken, but still alive at the foot of an oak tree. He begs her for help and a doctor in broken English and French. She replies, in broken German, that she has seen the dead child. She goes back to the house, and fetches a revolver, loaded with special bullets “forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised enemies”. But she only points it at the dying German and tells him again that she has seen the dead child. She does not shoot, but continues to stoke the fire in the cold hard rain.
Now Wynn was dead, and everything connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the oak would die too … Tea would be at five. If It did not die before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change. Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn’s things were burning quite well in spite of the hissing wet. The exercise of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of her bones. She hummed — Mary had never had a voice — to herself. She had never believed in all those advanced views — though Miss Fowler herself leaned a little that way — of woman’s work in the world; but now she aw there was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was *her* work — work which no man, least of all Dr Hennis, would ever have done …
She leaned on the poker and waited, while and increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.
“Go on”, she murmured half aloud. “That isn’t the end.”
Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot. “*That’s* all right”, she said contentedly …”
Leaving the corpse in the undergrowth she returns to the house through the chilly rain and “scandalises the routine” by having a long hot bath before tea. Afterwards Miss Fowler looks at her lying on the sofa, relaxed as a cat, and is moved to call her “quite handsome” in that moment.
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What is to be said about this? It’s a story in which art struggles with crude propaganda, and for the most part wins. We believe entirely in Mary Postgate’s back story, and in her hatred and cruelty. It’s even possible that a woman so thoroughly repressed in every way could only have an orgasm as Mary does. But Kipling intends it for admirable, too. Her kind of hatred is an example to the women of England.
The poem1 that concludes the story is horrible. Chesterton could have done it better than the five quatrains all ending “When the English began to hate”. It wasn’t our fault, you see: the Germans made us hate them. It’s a pure revenge fantasy, in which our hatred is ennobling and righteous, and all because a German bomb killed an English child.
Bombing did very little material damage in the first world war. I have a friend who numbers among her ancestors the German pilot who was the first man ever to drop a bomb from an aeroplane. It didn’t kill anyone. The one small bomb and one small death of *Mary Postgate* are hardly worth counting in comparison with what was to come. But Kipling grasped very early that the technology would allow anyone to kill civilians at long range, and apparently without risk. It turned out that the inhibition against doing so had not been entirely moral. It had been technological, too.
The British were quick to exploit the possibility that Kipling saw: Churchill urged the use of poison gas from aircraft against Kurdish villages in the early 1920s. But the systematic use of bombs against civilians had to wait for the Spanish Civil War, and Guernica. It was never a terribly effective weapon, militarily. It might be said to have lost Hitler the battle of Britain, when he stopped bombing fighter airfields and switched to bombing London. But the emotional impact was huge. The story the British told themselves after the war was not of the terrible, pointless devastation wreaked on German cities from 1943 onwards, but of our own resilience and bravery in the Blitz.
When I was at prep school, the two old boys of whom the school was proudest were John Betjeman (who came to visit in a helicopter) and Leonard Cheshire — Leonard Cheshire VC — who flew indiscriminate bombers against civilians in the first part of his war career; then pathfinder mosquitos, which were used to make bombing more accurate and so discriminating; finally, he was an observer of the bombing of Nagasaki.
The courage of the bomber pilots (on both sides) can hardly be grasped. Of the 17 pilots who returned from the dambusters raid, three survived the war. The airman who was awarded his VC alongside Cheshire had tried to put out a burning fuel tank in the wing of his bomber over Germany by crawling out on the wing at 140 miles an hour, in the dark, 20,000 feet up. He held on to the front of the wing with one hand but the fire extinguisher fell from the other, and he was horribly burned. He had already been wounded by shell splinters in the attack that set the fuel tank on fire. His parachute was also damaged, but when he fell off the wing it worked well enough that he only broke his ankle on landing. The next morning, he crawled to a village for help. Unlike Mary Postgate, they did not kill him. He survived the war, and became a whisky salesman.
I still think he was a war criminal, though. I’m glad he wasn’t killed. I wouldn’t want him to stand trial, and he will always be an example of bravery. But the deliberate mass murder of civilians must be a war crime, whether it’s done with rifles, machetes, gas or high explosive.
Perhaps, though, the use of atom bombs to annihilate entire cities returned the bomber to a legitimate military use. The threat of nuclear war has kept the peace in Europe ever since. And if it fails to do so some time in the future, none of us will be around to argue the point.
But I think the real moral of Mary Postgate is that neither “blood” (as Kipling used the term) nor morality constrained the English from atrocity, even if we were restrained by the standards of some other European nations. What kept the English gentlemanly — if we follow Kipling — was the fact that no one had ever really hurt them back. For centuries, war had been a business carried on abroad. The sense of superiority that this bred was easily mistaken, not least by the English themselves, for a moral quality. But do we need decency to behave decently? Won’t snobbery sometimes help a little, too?
down here, alas.
That is a truly shocking story