Debits and Credits (book) explained

Debits and Credits is a 1926 collection of fourteen stories, nineteen poems, and two scenes from a play by Rudyard Kipling, an English writer who wrote extensively about British colonialism in India and Burma. Four of the poems that accompany the stories are whimsically presented as translations from the "Bk. V of Odes" by Horace, but are actually poems by Kipling imitating the style of the Roman poet.

Contents

Stories

The story of Adam and Eve retold in the style of a Muslim fable

Weekend sailors turned naval officers discuss their patrolling of the coast over dinner

An account of the generous hospitality of a Masonic Lodge in wartime

A tale of school life, in which Stalky & Co discover Uncle Remus and outrage a new master

An old Sussex woman talks about the love of her life and the price she paid for loving him

A still-bewildered old soldier recalls how he came to join a 'secret society' of Jane Austen admirers and gives his own unique take on her oeuvre

A stranded motorist meets an exiled American who explains his passionate objection to Prohibition

A story about an uncannily intelligent bull with a flair for the bullfight

After the war, a soldier reveals the true cause of his "shell-shock"

A tale of school life, in which Stalky & Co bait their English master with the Curiosities of Literature and the Baconian theory

An Australian soldier avenges his friend by waging war on the home front

A fantasy in which St Peter and the administrators of Heaven struggle to cope with the surge of souls from the war

In a mediaeval abbey, an artist shows some doctors an early microscope, which provokes debate

A story about respectability and mother-love

Poems

Play Fragments

External links