Just short of his sixth birthday, Kipling and his three-year old sister Trix boarded a boat in Bombay bound for England with their parents Alice and Lockwood Kipling. After a short stay with various relatives, the children were taken to a boarding house in Southsea and left in the care of Sarah Holloway. Six years would pass before either of them saw their mother again. To our twentieth-century eyes such an act is shocking, but it was usual at that time for Anglo-Indian parents to send their children ‘Home’ for a spell to counteract the supposedly negative influence of their Indian servants. A contemporary of Kipling's, Maud Diver, now largely forgotten but hugely popular during her writing life (she was a favourite of the Royal Family), writes of the well-established practice of Anglo-Indian expatriates sending children back to England:

In this respect Lockwood and Alice Kipling were no different from their contemporaries. But for the children, the consequences of such an accepted social practice were devastating. Kipling's sister Trix underscores Kipling's fictionalised children's fears in her account of their Southsea experience. Trix, throughout her life, supported her brother's version of events, the validity of which has been questioned by critics; the pain and trauma of abandonment is terrifyingly present in both her and her brother's fictional accounts.