“Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt [Georgie] would ask me why
I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little
more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally
established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what
they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of the prison-house
before they are clear of it.”
Rudyard Kipling as a boy
In 1870, five-year-old Rudyard Kipling and his three-year-old sister Alice "Trix" were sent back to England from India by their parents to live with an English family that none of the Kiplings knew. Rudyard's father and mother had hired this family to raise the two children because they believed that India was no place to raise a proper white British child.
The family the Kipling children were sent to was extremely emotionally abusive, criminally so, and the lives of the two children were hellish. Even so, Kipling remained with that abusive family for five years and his sister stayed even longer. Neither saw their parents, who remained in India, for those first five years.
The first public mention Kipling made of it was in 1888 when he was 23-years-old, and even then the story of the abuse was obscured because it was told in the voice of a fictional child as part of a short story, "Baa Baa Black Sheep."
In 1935 Kipling – world famous for his fiction ("The Jungle Book," for example) and his poetry (Gunga Din and many others) – wrote an autobiography. Most of the first chapter deals with the abuse he suffered from that family as a child. Why didn't Kipling speak out about his abuse earlier?
“Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt [Georgie] would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of the prison-house before they are clear of it.”
––Harry Ricketts, “Rudyard Kipling,” 1999 p. 28 as quoted by DelanceyPlace.com.