Henry's relatively straightforward realism into the slightly bizarre and obsessive. Along with Rudyard Kipling, another popular British writer of his time, Saki clung to an orderly, even staid view of the world, despite the flaws he saw in it; but while Kipling promoted the values underlying that world, Saki enjoyed teasing them.
Like Kipling, Munro was born in the Far East to well-to-do parents. His father, Colonel Charles Augustus Munro, was an officer in the British military police in Burma; his mother, Mary Frances Mercer, was the daughter of a rear admiral in the British Navy. The Munros' third child in as many years, Hector Hugh was born in 1870. When Mrs. Munro again found herself pregnant, the family returned to England, but she was tragically killed before the baby was born. On a country lane, Mary Munro was charged at by a cow, "an incident that did not prevent her son writing about women skewered by stags or otherwise rent by wild beasts," noted E. S. Turner in the London Review of Books many years later. Colonel Munro sent his surviving children--Ethel, Charles, and Hector--to Pilton, a small village in Devon near Barnstaple, to live with his two sisters and his mother; then he returned to his post in Burma.
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