Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was born in India and much of his work reflects the privileged and faintly bizarre life led by his family and their fellow expatriates.

The Just So Stories are delightful little entertainments for youngsters, written for Kipling's eldest daughter, Josephine, and originally accompanied by illustrations by the author himself. In each case once the story has been told there is a short poem at the end putting much of the same information into rhyming verse.

How the camel got his hump tells of how, when animals first started to work for man, the camel kept well out of the way in the desert because he was lazy. When other animals urged him to join in, all he would say was 'Humph.' The others complained to the Djinn, a powerful figure in Muslim mythology, who went to the camel and told him to work. The Djinn did some magic that created a hump and, to make up for the time that had been lost, condemned him to work for three days without eating, living only on what his hump contained.

How the whale got his throat. A small fish kept himself behind the whale's ear and persuaded him to eat a shipwrecked sailor, who was floating on a raft. But the sailor danced and jumped around inside him, refusing to stop unless he was taken back to the coast of his home. The sailor had made the raft into a kind of mesh and jammed it into the whale's throat so that he could only swallow tiny things.

How the rhinoceros got his skin involves a man who made a huge cake. It was stolen and eaten by the rhinoceros, which had smooth skin. There was a heatwave and the rhinoceros took off his skin and went for a swim. While he was in the water the man gathered some crumbs and currants and rubbed them onto the inside of the skin. When the rhinoceros put his skin back on, it itched 'like cake crumbs in bed' and the rhino rubbed himself so much to stop the itching that it made the skin as rough as it is today.

How the leopard got his spots. Once upon a time the zebra and the giraffe were plain-coloured, until they stood under trees and developed their markings, which gave them camouflage. The leopard and his friend the Ethiopian, who was originally sandy-yellow-brownish, stuck out like sore thumbs by comparison. Then the Ethiopian turned himself black and the leopard reluctantly allowed him to use his black fingers to give him spots.

The elephant's child. In the days when elephants didn't have trunks, but noses about the size of a boot, one young, very inquisitive elephant asked what a crocodile ate for breakfast. Eventually he went to the Limpopo River to find out. There he finally met a crocodile, who grabbed him by the nose and, in his determination to pull him into the river, stretched it until it became a trunk.

The cat that walked by himself. In the beginning all the animals were wild - even man. Then he met woman and she showed him the pleasure of living in a warm, dry cave with a fire and meat roasting on it. The animals wanted to make themselves part of this scene - first the dog, then the horse, then the cow. But the cat resisted. Eventually, though, he sought a place in the comfort of the cave and did a deal with the woman, firstly through flattery, secondly through calming her baby with the softness of his fur and then on the condition that he caught mice.

Product Information

 First Day Cover

Specification

Date of issue:        25 October 2007

Designer:               Nick Watton