Some were like the first three -‘How the Leopard got his Spots’, ‘The Elephant’s Child’, ‘The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo’-and as a group these stories span the map of the Empire, from the High Veldt to the middle of Australia, from the shores of the Red Sea to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees. After Effie’s death, Kipling added nine others, so the number published in the first edition was twelve-a magic number, as everyone knows. These are stories of origins: ‘How the Whale got his Throat’, ‘How the Camel got his Hump’, ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Skin’-stories that answer the kinds of question children ask, in ways that satisfy their taste for primitive and poetic justice. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them,-the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale. They had to be told just so or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence.
in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told to ‘Effie’ when the first three were published in a children’s magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained: Soon after their arrival, both Kipling and his firstborn child, Josephine, fell ill of pneumonia. It is a haunting image, because what lies behind the Just So Stories is another voyage, across the Atlantic to New York, four years earlier in the winter of 1898-99. He is on a liner sailing from Southampton to Cape Town in South Africa, where the Kipling family had taken to spending the winter. This is Rudyard Kipling, casting his spell around 1902, the year the Just So Stories for Little Children were published. The storyteller has always been a figure of magic, and the circle a magic figure.
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