Tales for children

Rudyard Kipling is famous as a storyteller for children, some of whom fell in love with his stories and grew up to be authorities on Kipling. Roger Lancelyn Green became a Kipling enthusiast as a schoolboy 'playing Jungle'; Harry Ricketts heard 'my mother read me the Just So Stories'; Daniel Karlin re-read the Jungle Books 'dozens of times' between the ages of eight and twelve; and Joyce Tompkins thrilled to 'a sense of something wild and deep and old [that] infected me as I listened'. I too read Kipling as a child, taking my first conscious delight in word-play from the Just So Stories and later relishing the rhetoric of the Jungle Books. Yet few children in the twenty-first century know more of Kipling than the Disney cartoon of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera, unless they happen to hear the Just So Stories read aloud by an adult enthusiast or to join the Cub Scouts. This is not because Kipling's stories are too difficult and 'literary' to appeal to children acclimatised to TV and computer games, for children who wouldn't read the Jungle Books listen to them with great pleasure (though I have yet to meet a contemporary child who liked the Puck books).