4. The Family Square

“The Family Square,” an invented family name, refers the period when all four Kiplings were joyfully reunited in India. From the age fifteen to twenty-one, Trix was extremely happy as one side of the square, spending the winter months in Lahore and the hot months in the cool hill stations of Dalhousie and Simla. All four Kiplings wrote articles, stories, poems, and reviews. Trix and Rudyard created poetic parodies from Wordsworth to Whitman, which were published in 1884 in a little book called Echoes. One year later, with encouragement from Rudyard, Trix published “The Haunted Cabin,” a seemingly innocuous ghost story, featuring a little girl and her careless mother. A series of “Plain Tales from the Hills,” was published in 1886-7 in the Civil and Military Gazette. Most of the sharply observed stories were written by Rudyard, but many were written by eighteen-year-old Trix. Published anonymously, all were assumed to be by the same hand. Graceful and clever, Trix rejected numerous suitors, until maternal pressure eventually wore her down, and she accepted a starchy Scotsman, ten years her senior. John Murchison Fleming, always called Jack, came from a solid soldiering family and had little in common with artistic Trix. She married him on her twenty-first birthday, trusting in his assurances that she would learn to love him.