Kim

So you want to know more about Kim. Here’s a few excerpts to set you going:

He turned and looked at the girl, who was still there, but hadn’t been there before and didn’t seem to be there all the time. This was trickery worth anything else! She was still looking at him, and Henry had the horrible sensation that she had been observing him the whole time.

She just grinned and shrugged her shoulders, as if she had just done something really clever and made it look ever so casual.

“MMMMagic,” she hummed.”

♣

“Nobody took any notice of this awkward, scrawny, little girl, any more than they took any notice of him. She stood out as much as any fox in a London garden.”

♣

“He looked at this girl who might be a boy, who might be nine years old or fourteen, who might be Indian or cockney, or both, but above all was a Londoner, and knew once again he was being lied to. Or, at least, he felt he knew she might be lying.”

♣

“Rebelling against the Mayor’s orders, she was sat astride the lion on its stone platform at the base of Nelson’s column, that hero of Trafalgar, and she looked for all the world as if sat there, she could control the whole square and maybe in some small way Soho or even the immensity of the old smoke London herself. What Henry did not know was that it had taken Kim a good ten minutes to kick off all the irritating foreigners and tourists and from then she had had to struggle hard for some time in order to maintain control. But finally she had been successful, so much so that the other children had retired from taking turns on assaulting her position and moved on to the other lion across the base of the plinth.”

♣

“How can a spy pursue the game, when she is always pestered by little boys and their boy friends,” she complained.

♣

“Truly speaking Kim had had no previous experience in the area of amateur dramatics, but her constant story telling and chameleon like character promised her every success. Kim could lie like a Londoner.”

Kim is a character who has some echoes from her namesake in Rudyard Kipling’s novel. In this book she is in fact a boy who has various very curious adventures in India at the time of the British Empire.