C.S. Lewis

A Biography

A.N. Wilson

For Ruth

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PREFACE – THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

ONE – ANTECEDENTS

TWO – EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

THREE – LITTLE LEA 1905–1908

FOUR – SCHOOLS 1908–1914

FIVE – THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917

SIX – THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918

SEVEN – UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922

EIGHT – HEAVY LEWIS 1922–1925

NINE – REDEMPTION BY PARRICIDE 1925–1929

TEN – MYTHOPOEIA 1929–1931

ELEVEN – REGRESS 1931–1936

TWELVE – THE INKLINGS 1936–1939

THIRTEEN – SCREWTAPE 1939–1942

FOURTEEN – SEPARATIONS 1942–1945

FIFTEEN – NARNIA 1945–1951

SIXTEEN – THE SILVER CHAIR 1951–1954

SEVENTEEN – SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN 1954–1957

EIGHTEEN – MARRIAGE 1957–1959

NINETEEN – MEN MUST ENDURE 1959–1960

TWENTY – LAST YEARS 1960–1963

TWENTY-ONE – FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Sources

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

–PREFACE– THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

A child pushed open the door of the wardrobe so as to hide in it. It was, however, no ordinary wardrobe. It was hung with fur coats. The child pressed on further through the dark recesses of the cupboard, pushing aside the soft folds of fur and discovering beyond them a new world. What crunched beneath the feet was not mothballs but snow. Lucy had discovered Narnia.

Millions of readers throughout the world have been thrilled by this moment in C. S. Lewis’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and have gone on to read the six other stories which he wrote about that other world behind the wardrobe, the world of Narnia. The powerfulness of the stories derives in part from the immediacy of Lewis’s rough-hewn style, but more, surely, from the fact that this image touches something so very deep in so many people.

‘If everything on earth were rational,’ someone remarks in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, ‘nothing would happen.’ Nothing much would appear to have happened in the life of C. S. Lewis, who for his entire adult life was a scholar and teacher at Oxford and Cambridge in England. He did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people. His days were filled with writing and reading and domestic chores. And yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.

This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed. The world has changed more radically in the last hundred years than in any previous era of history. Old values and certainties have been destroyed; religions have collapsed. In such a world, a voice which appears to come from the old world and to speak with the old sureness will have an obvious appeal. Lewis’s attempts to justify an old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy have made him an internationally celebrated and reassuring figure to those believers who have felt betrayed by the compromises of the mainline Christian churches. Lewis, to the amazement of those who knew him in his lifetime, has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers.

It is not the rational Lewis who makes this enormous appeal, the Lewis who lectured on medieval and Renaissance literature with such superb fluency and wide-ranging erudition to generations of English students. It is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation.

Though all Freud’s theories about the origins of consciousness may be disavowed, this remains the century of Freud. We have learnt that our lives are profoundly affected by what happened to us when we were very young children, and that wherever we travel in mind or body we are compelled to repeat or work out the drama of early years. If this were a work of psychoanalysis or literary theory, I should feel compelled to test The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by the theories of the human mind which have been adopted and discarded by psychoanalysts and philosophers in the last hundred years. But these are not areas which admit of rational enquiry, even if I were qualified to explore them, and Lewis himself would have been equally anxious to remind us of the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato which has attempted in the language of metaphysics to account for our sense that we do not belong in this world, that we are pilgrims and strangers here, homesick for another place where one day we shall be truly ourselves.

Two journeys, made in the course of my researches for this biography, have brought home to me more vividly than any others the strange nature of my task.

The first was to Belfast in Northern Ireland. For those who are not Irish, their first glimpse of modern Belfast is a shock. Much of its ancient prosperity, derived from its magnificent shipyards, has gone. There is widespread unemployment and poverty. Walking the streets of the working-class districts of the city one is confronted by distressing images of human irrationality. Even the kerbstones shriek of their religious and political allegiance. Protestant, Unionist streets are painted red, white and blue in praise of the Queen and the Reformation. Catholic, Nationalist streets are daubed white, green and orange for Ireland and the Pope. In no place on earth does it seem truer that Christ came to bring not peace, but a sword. The post offices and police stations are barricaded like fortresses. There is no prospect here of the rational prevailing. Every week that passes, a bomb explodes or a gun is fired because of ancient, atavistic religious prejudice.

It would not be the best place in the world to take a non-believer in the hope of persuading him or her that Christianity was a very ennobling belief, but it is a very good place for a Christian to recognize what a small part reason plays in most human lives; and it might very well prompt the visitor, and even more the resident, to hope that some form of Christianity could be expounded which was the agreed and good thing which all Christians hold in common, the set of unchanging and saving beliefs which Lewis named Mere Christianity.

Driving out of the beleaguered city into the suburbs is immediately to encounter a different, happier world, a prosperous middle-class place which knows no violence; big, comfortable houses built to sustain and celebrate the simple happiness of family life. Down one such leafy road, you will find the house built by a Belfast police solicitor named Albert Lewis in 1905. It was in this lumpy Edwardian villa that C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the most crucial period of their lives. Climbing up the small back staircase, I reached a landing on the second floor of the house, and there at the end of the corridor I found the ‘Little End Room’ where the boys had escaped from the grown-ups and indulged their childhood games.

For Lewis himself, it was not a house with happy memories, for it was here that the catastrophe of his life took place: the death of his mother on 23 August 1908, when Lewis was nine years old. The loss was something which he bottled up within himself, unable to appease it through the emotionally stultifying years of boarding-school education in England. In terms of his emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women. His companion for over thirty years was a woman old enough to be his mother; and when she died it was not long before, like a Pavlovian dog trained to lacerate his heart with the same emotional experiences, he married a woman whose circumstances were exactly parallel to those of his own mother in 1908 – a woman dying of cancer who had two small sons.

Standing in the Little End Room, I realized that I was beginning to come to terms with the Lewis phenomenon, and why it had such a hugely popular appeal. I had thought to go there merely in order to soak up ‘atmosphere’. I realized that what Lewis was seeking with such painful earnestness all his life was not to be found in this house; nor had it ever been, for any of the time he had lived there after his mother’s death. Without the capacity to develop an ‘ordinary’ emotional life, based on a stable relationship with parents, Lewis was driven back and back into the Little End Room, ‘further up and further in’.

It would have been good to see the wardrobe in Belfast, but it was not there. To see that, I journeyed over three and a half thousand miles to a small liberal arts college in the suburbs of Chicago: Wheaton College, Illinois. Between the two journeys I had spent months reading Lewis, and hours talking to those who knew him. An image of what he was actually like, as a man, was by now vividly clear to me. The reasons why many of his Oxford colleagues had disliked him were obvious. He was argumentative and bullying. His jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser. He was loud, and he could be coarse. He liked what he called ‘man’s talk’, and he was frequently contemptuous in his remarks about the opposite sex. He was a heavy smoker – sixty cigarettes a day between pipes – and he liked to drink deep, roaring out his unfashionable views in Oxford bars. This – the ‘beer and Beowulf’ Lewis – was understandably uncongenial to those of a different temperament. But I had also learnt that he was a kind and patient teacher, a loyal friend, a magnificently astute and intelligent conversationalist who had read much and who had the capacity to fire his hearers with a longing to read his favourite authors for themselves. Few of his friends had ever heard Lewis allude to his inner life, and even his religion was more to be taken for granted than to be aired in conversation. The gatherings of cronies in pubs or college rooms had no feeling of an evangelical prayer group. Two members of that celebrated group, known as the Inklings, have told me that there was always an air of English embarrassment when the subject of religion cropped up, and that Lewis’s activities as a religious broadcaster and writer were not something with which his fellow-Christians in the Inklings felt at ease. These men knew almost nothing of the Lewis who had emerged in my reading of private letters and diaries. They knew nothing from him of his childhood trauma, little of his two great emotional attachments to women, and next to nothing of his spiritual journey, even though one of these men, Hugo Dyson, had been responsible in part for persuading Lewis to abandon atheism and become a Christian.

C. S. Lewis the popular Christian apologist, who was reaching so many readers in Europe and the United States, was a phenomenon who had a life of his own in the minds of the reading public. His friends did know that this activity had generated an enormous band of admirers and enquirers, who wrote to Lewis from every corner of the globe and could be sure of getting a written reply.

Lewis did not ask to become a cult figure, but by writing so faithfully to his correspondents, he allowed the cult to build up. For many, including the penfriend he eventually married, the author of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity was a guru or spiritual master who might be expected to provide Answers to Life’s Problems. That is not the title of one of Lewis’s books. It is the title of a book by Dr Billy Graham, the most famous alumnus of Wheaton College, Illinois. As you approach the college, you see on your left an enormous Greek Revival building known as the Billy Graham Center, built in honour of the famous evangelist. It is hard to imagine Billy Graham enjoying C. S. Lewis’s company at any length, though I believe the two met during one of Dr Graham’s crusades in England. Lewis was impatient with puritanism and disliked non-smokers or teetotallers. He liked to talk of books, books, books, and he would not have shared any of Dr Graham’s political enthusiasms. But the wardrobe from Little Lea has come to repose at Wheaton College, Illinois.

The Marion E. Wade Center on the upper floor of the college library is devoted to the memorabilia of various Christian writers: George MacDonald, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren. The library has also recently acquired the papers of that veteran journalist and cynic Malcolm Muggeridge, and here the faithful may see Muggeridge’s portable typewriter kept, like the body of Lenin, in a glass case.

A portrait of C. S. Lewis, painted by T. M. Williams, smiles down on the reading room. It has the same glowing unreality as pious paintings of Thérèse of Lisieux or the Sacred Heart, adorning convent walls in days now gone. Hard by, in a glass display cabinet, are Lewis’s beer tankards and pipes, which in this abstemious atmosphere seem out of place. I worked at the table which, a brass plate informed me, had been in Lewis’s college rooms at Magdalen and subsequently in the dining-room at his house in Oxford, The Kilns. Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot and many other famous people, it was claimed, had used this table. I had been reading Lewis, and talking to those who had known him, for the better part of twenty years, and doing serious research into his life for two years. I have come across no possible occasion when T. S. Eliot, with whom Lewis did not enjoy very cordial relations, would have used this table. What does it matter? The same sort of rationalist objections could be made about supposed relics of the True Cross. A piece of furniture stood in the corner of the room, carved by Lewis’s grandfather. It was the wardrobe. At Wheaton, one has stepped through the wardrobe into the world of make-believe.

Not long before my visit to Wheaton, a book by Kathryn Lindskoog had been drawn to my attention entitled The C. S. Lewis Hoax. It was published in Oregon in 1988 and it makes disturbing reading. Since its central thesis has been disproved, I imagine that it will not be published in Great Britain, though it was bought by a British publisher at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1988. Lindskoog claims that one of Lewis’s feebler posthumous works, a semi-obscene piece of science fiction called The Dark Tower, a continuation of his space trilogy, was not in fact the work of Lewis at all, but a forgery by someone else. A manuscript of this depressing fragment is deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and experts have made it clear beyond doubt that it is written in Lewis’s hand. Nevertheless, Lindskoog’s book is concerned with a much wider issue than the authorship of The Dark Tower. It amounts to one of the most vitriolic personal attacks on a fellow-scholar, Walter Hooper, that I have ever read in print.

As Lyle W. Dorsett, the curator of the Marion E. Wade Center, concedes, Lindskoog has gone too far in her assaults on Hooper’s good name. Her notions of a forged Dark Tower are mistaken, and some of her other assertions – for example, that the title given by Hooper to Lewis’s letters to Arthur Greeves, They Stand Together, is a piece of pederastic argot – are wide of the mark. For those of us who have known Hooper for a very long time, however, there are moments in Lindskoog’s diatribe where we recognize bits of truth. Hooper does, as Lindskoog asserts, like people to believe that he knew Lewis much better and much longer than was really the case.

The details of Lindskoog’s book are unimportant to the general reader. What strikes an outsider is how violently the C. S. Lewis devotees seem to dislike one another. From very early days, there has been a Great Schism in their camp. It is notoriously difficult for those outside the borders of a religious dispute to describe with accuracy the sticking points involved, and if I attempted a detailed analysis of the Lewis feuds I should probably fall into as many errors as if I were to attempt a discourse on the difference between Shiite and Sunni Moslems.

Some of the quarrels had to do with the holdings of Lewis manuscripts. Walter Hooper, an American resident in Oxford, was anxious that a complete Lewis collection, either in original manuscript form or on microfiche, should be available to scholars in the Bodleian Library. The late Clyde S. Kilby, who was largely responsible for building up the Lewis collection at Wheaton, agreed to a proposal that there should be a free exchange between Wheaton and the Bodleian until a dispute arose about some letters. ‘Then all smiles stopped together.’

Walter Hooper, who has had the task of editing most of Lewis’s posthumous works and working directly with Lewis’s estate and publishers, has come in for the brunt of criticism from his fellow-countrymen back across the water, but over the years it has become clear that the quarrels are not merely about Hooper’s own role in Lewis’s life or about the ownership of various bits of paper. Two totally different Lewises are being revered by the faithful, and it is this which makes the disputes so painfully acrimonious. Hooper was for many years an extreme Anglo-Catholic priest, but has subsequently become a Roman Catholic. He presides over weekly meetings of the C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford where papers are read and discussions held by interested parties, mainly students. It is not an exclusively High Church group, but there is a distinctly Catholic bias in Hooper’s interpretation of Lewis which not everyone who knew the man would find completely believable. Most noticeably peculiar in Hooper’s picture of his hero is his belief in the Perpetual Virginity of C. S. Lewis. There is very direct evidence, both from Lewis’s brother-in-law Dr Davidman and from Lewis’s own pen, that Lewis was not a virgin and that his marriage was consummated. It would also be amazing, though no evidence is forthcoming either way, if Lewis’s thirty-year relationship with Mrs Moore was entirely asexual. Ordinary biographical criteria, however, are not allowed by Hooper to apply, since for him Lewis has become a sort of Catholic saint, and one can hardly believe in a Catholic saint both of whose sexual relationships were with women who had husbands still living. Therefore, when Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed that he and his wife were lovers, that they had ‘fallen in love’, that ‘a noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food’, that she was his ‘mistress’, that ‘we were one flesh’, that ‘no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied’, he was in fact writing a work of fiction. Hooper has a natural bent for hero-worship, and because he believes celibacy to be a high virtue he cannot believe that Lewis and his wife were, as the man himself wrote, ‘a sinful woman married to a sinful man’.

In the United States, among Lewis’s Protestant devotees, there is an analogous awkwardness about his passion for alcohol and tobacco. Some of Lewis’s American publishers actually ask for references to drinking and smoking to be removed from his work, and one has the strong feeling that this is not so much because they themselves disapprove of the activities as because they need a Lewis who was, against all evidence, a non-smoker and a lemonade-drinker.

It is the need which awakens the image, and once the image has been set up and revered, and emotion has been poured into it, there is something profoundly painful about the idea of anyone worshipping a different icon, or threatening to demolish all the icons. Lewis idolatry, like Christianity itself, has resorted to some ugly tactics as it breaks itself into factions. Hard words are used on both sides, and there is not much evidence of Christian charity when the war is at its hottest. In their libraries and periodicals, the differing Lewis factions have conceived for one another an enmity which would do Screwtape proud, and it provides a strange parallel to the sort of unhinged sectarian disputes which have dogged Lewis’s native Belfast for the last sixty years.

When we step beyond the wardrobe door, we expect battles. Witches and monsters will threaten our subconscious until we reach the longed-for consummation when change itself stands still and Aslan is King for ever.

A writer who can evoke such reactions is worthy of scrutiny, and scrutiny of a particular kind. When I had seen Belfast and Wheaton, I saw the extent of the problem facing Lewis’s biographer. Some time before, staying in the south of France with Christopher Tolkien, the son of J. R. R. Tolkien, I took down from the shelf a copy of Lewis’s book Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. Here was evidence, if any was needed, of how one of Lewis’s closest friends reacted to his last work of piety. The book is not ‘about prayer’, Tolkien writes in the margin, ‘but about Lewis praying’. ‘But’, he adds on the flyleaf, ‘the whole book is always interesting. Why? Because it is about Jack, by Jack, and that is a topic that no one who knew him well could fail to find interesting even when exasperating.’

I myself never knew Lewis, though I have known many people who did, and I have never failed to find their memories of the man interesting. Like Tolkien, I am puzzled. Why? In the same marginal note, Tolkien continues, ‘The book is in fact entirely egocentric, by which I do not mean that C.S.L. worshipped himself or was a proud or vain man, overesteeming his own worth or wisdom. But I do mean that as must be the case with anyone who essays autobiography, under any form, he found C.S.L. an absorbing topic.’

Lewis was in fact an obsessive autobiographer. Most of his later books are, as Tolkien says, all about himself, and he also wrote copiously on the subject to his many correspondents. Yet few writers have ever been less introspective: this is the paradox. He was not vain, but he had a capacity to project images of himself into prose; sometimes, one feels, without quite realizing what he was doing. It is these images which have such posthumous staying power. For me, the most attractive Lewis is the author of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, a fluent, highly intelligent man talking about books in a manner which is always engaging. This itself is a self-projection. Reading the book, you feel you know what it was like to hear him talk. This is ten times truer of his religious books, and since many readers will associate Lewis’s tone of voice with some of their deepest and most profoundly felt religious moments, there is no wonder that they guard their images of him jealously.

Lewis himself, in his own words that ‘sinful man’, wrote in his most devastatingly personal book A Grief Observed that ‘All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.’

This book is not intended to be iconoclastic, but I will try to be realistic, not only because reality is more interesting than fantasy, but also because we do Lewis no honour to make him into a plaster saint. And he deserves our honour.

–ONE– ANTECEDENTS

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in the city of Belfast. More than most men, he was the product of his upbringing and ancestry. Throughout his adult life he remained constantly preoccupied with his own childhood. Moreover the companion of his infancy, Warren Hamilton Lewis, his elder brother by three years, lived with him for the greater part of his life. Their comradeship outlasted the vicissitudes of love and friendship.

But C. S. Lewis did more than carry the memories of his childhood in Northern Ireland into grown-up life. Many of his most robustly distinctive qualities were manifestly ones of inheritance.

It is always tiresome for a child to be told by older relations that his personal characteristics are the results of genetics. It implies that the child is no more than a collection of bits – one grandfather contributing the nose, another the golfing handicap, an aunt on the mother’s side contributing the ear for languages or the eye for painting. Surely the child must feel he is more than the sum of his ancestors’ parts. And indeed C. S. Lewis was very much more than a mixture of Hamilton and Lewis chromosomes. When we turn back to the close of the nineteenth century, however, and meet Lewis’s grandparents and parents, the family likenesses are too overwhelming to miss.

Lewis’s mother was Florence Hamilton, always known as Flora. Her father, Thomas Hamilton (1826–1905), was a bluff Church of Ireland clergyman whose father had been the Rector of Enniskillen and whose grandfather, the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton, had been the Bishop of Ossory. C. S. Lewis and his brother were rather proud of this episcopal ancestor. They had more ambivalent feelings about their grandfather when they read his surviving writings and papers. He had been a naval chaplain in the Baltic during the Crimean War and he was well travelled in Europe. But his copious travel journals were repulsive to Warren, partly because of their ‘constant and irritating employment of outworn literary cliche’, but more because of ‘his intense religious bigotry, which was not … palliated as being in the spirit of his age’.

Among the beliefs which the Reverend Thomas Hamilton shared with a high proportion of Protestants in Northern Ireland was the idea that the Roman church was ‘composed of the Devil’s children’. Indeed he doubted whether it was possible for a Roman Catholic to be saved. What was so typical of Thomas Hamilton, however, was that he managed to sustain this belief for four years as Anglican chaplain in Rome. While he was there he wrote a long essay entitled ‘What saith the Scripture – an Inquiry of what it is that the Bible teaches concerning the future state of the Lost’. Hamilton advanced the interesting view that, in effect, only the saved survive. When the Bible says that the damned suffer eternal punishment it must mean punishment eternal in its effects. They do not go on suffering continuously. They are snuffed out, they cease to be. Precisely similar preoccupations were to haunt the mind of Thomas’s grandson, Clive Staples Lewis, when he came to write his theological reflections.

While Thomas Hamilton was living in Rome, incidentally, something occurred which entered into family legend and eventually formed a seed for C. S. Lewis’s most famous story. Hamilton’s daughter Flora – C. S. Lewis’s mother – was then a little girl. One afternoon she and some grown-ups escaped the scorching heat of the pavement by walking into a church. Under one of the altars there was the body of a saint lying in a glass case. While no grown-up was looking, Flora distinctly saw this figure open her eyelids. Just as when Lucy comes back from the other side of the wardrobe and discovers that everyone thinks Narnia is a product of her imagination, so the Hamiltons failed to believe in Flora’s ‘miracle’. The difference between Flora and Lucy was that Flora did not herself believe that she had witnessed anything miraculous. ‘I thought it was done by cords pulled by a priest behind the alter [sic].’ Nevertheless, the pattern of the story – a little girl who has seen a wonder in which the rest of her family refuse to believe – is structurally the same as that of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

After their spell in Rome, the Hamiltons returned to Ireland and Thomas Hamilton became the Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, on the outskirts of Belfast, a position which he occupied until his retirement in 1900 (he died in 1905). St Mark’s is an impressively large church designed by the Tractarian architect William Butterfield. By the subdued standards of the Church of Ireland, it is rather ‘High’.

Those who knew Thomas Hamilton, while being a little overwhelmed by his theological pugnacity, were fond of his company. He was flawlessly eloquent, and he was no ascetic. He had a love of hearty eating and drinking, and was addicted to jaunts, his favourite occupation being walking tours with male friends. He could be thunderingly tactless, but he had a heart of gold. His daughter Flora was an intelligent young woman who had gained an honours degree in mathematics at the Queen’s University, Belfast – an unusual achievement for a woman in those days.

In 1894, Thomas Hamilton at length consented to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to a solicitor in the Belfast police courts called Albert Lewis. ‘Rarely has a Jacob served more arduously for his Rachel than did Albert,’ Warren Lewis was to write about his parents’ courtship. ‘And many years afterwards he frequently recited with indignant amusement the various embarrassments which he suffered on those trips.’

Perhaps one reason why the Reverend Thomas Hamilton had doubts about Albert Lewis was that he was only just a gentleman. ‘His grandfather’, C. S. Lewis remembered, ‘had been a Welsh farmer, his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaite & Lewis, ‘Boiler makers, Engineers and Iron Ship Builders’.¹ What we do not learn from Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, is that grandfather Lewis, like grandfather Hamilton, was a fluent writer. Richard Lewis was not just an engineer or a businessman. When he was working for the Cork Steamship Company he spent his evenings reading papers to the men on such subjects as ‘A Special Providence’ and ‘On Jonah’s Mission to Nineveh’ and ‘Whether man will or no’. Richard Lewis wrote, ‘God’s purposes, whether of justice or mercy shall be carried out … True, God has threatened the sinner, but from the character the Bible gives of Him, His threatenings are all to be applied conditionally. His will is that all shall be saved … ’

Richard Lewis did not only write theological essays. He also made up primitive science-fiction stories to amuse his children – stories, for example, in which a Mr Timothy Tumbledown advertises for ‘a good telescope that will show the inhabitants of the moon life size. Also a selenographical machine to enable the undersigned to construct an aeronautic cable from Tycho to Vesuvius as he is anxious to find out the different geological strata of the moon.’

Once again, here are characteristics for which C. S. Lewis was conspicuous latently present in one of his grandfathers. He, like Richard Lewis, was a man whose idea of a good evening’s entertainment was reading a paper on Free Will and Divine Providence and whose private delight was in children’s literature and scientific fantasy.

Albert Lewis, the son of Richard and the father of our subject, is one of the most important characters in the story. He was a ‘character’, and that in two senses. First, he was a strongly marked and in many ways eccentric individual, highly imaginative, bombastic, literate and eloquent. But secondly, and much more confusingly, Albert Lewis also became a ‘character’ in literature. Anyone who has read Surprised by Joy will recognize the portrait of C. S. Lewis’s father as a comic masterpiece. When we turn back from Surprised by Joy to the Lewis family papers we find not that C. S. Lewis has exactly speaking lied about his father but that he has left so much out of the picture and painted it from a position of such uncontrollable prejudice that it is something of a shock to encounter Albert Lewis on his own terms and read his speeches, poems, letters and notebooks.

A clever, highly imaginative boy, Albert had been educated at Lurgan College, County Armagh, where his headmaster, a brilliant young logician called W. T. Kirkpatrick, formed and retained throughout life a high view of his capabilities. Perhaps Kirkpatrick, who himself enjoyed fiercely conducted intellectual contests, was responsible for fostering the direction of Albert’s career. After Lurgan, Albert went down to Dublin to study law at the firm of Maclean, Boyle & Maclean. Initially he intended to read for the Bar but, presumably because his father did not have the means to support him, he returned to Belfast after qualifying in 1885 and started his own law firm as a solicitor. The law for Albert Lewis was to have been the platform or starting point for a career in politics.

We are speaking of a period when the whole land of Ireland, from County Kerry to County Antrim, was part of Great Britain in the way that Scotland and Wales are today. Albert Lewis, like the majority of Irish Protestants, was ardently keen that this state of things should be maintained. The talk of Home Rule for Ireland was by his standards dangerous nonsense. In 1882 he said in a speech in Dublin, when he was only nineteen, ‘I believe the cause of Irish Agitation to be on the one hand the Roman Catholic religion and on the other the weakness and vacillation and the party selfishness of English ministers [i.e. of the Crown].’ The English politician he loathed the most was Gladstone, whom he once called ‘that disingenuous and garrulous old man’ and who in his support for Irish Home Rule was, Albert Lewis thought, being simply mischievous. ‘Mr Gladstone, like another celebrated character, “cries havoc and lets loose the dogs of war”’ – i.e. the terrorists and revolutionaries of Sinn Fein.

But Albert Lewis, in spite of his high promise, was never to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster. He spent most of his career as a prosecuting solicitor in the police courts in Belfast, pouring into the frequently trivial cases which came before him all his gifts of oratory, his considerable powers of argument and debate, and his rich vein of humour. Indeed it was his sense of humour, C. S. Lewis believed, which somehow or other made Albert Lewis’s political career unmanageable.

He was a master of the anecdote, a fund of improbable stories, many of which for him epitomized the tragicomedy of what it meant to be Irish. One of the more bizarre ‘wheezes’ (as he habitually termed these stories and observations) concerned an occasion when he was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which had no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles, and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor of the railway carriage and defecated. When this operation was complete, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not to drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window which read NO SMOKING. For C. S. Lewis, this ‘wheeze’ of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.

Perhaps it was his ability to recite such stories which meant that Albert Lewis would never be a politician. He was a strange combination of rhetorical comedy and inner piety and emotionalism. If Albert Lewis was the mustachioed comedian whose favourite drink was whiskey and water and who could keep any company in stitches with his skills as a raconteur – imitating all the different voices as he spun out his tall stories – he was also the soulful poet who loved to be alone and to confront the mystery of things. As he wrote in 1882:

I hate the petty strifes of men

Their ceaseless toil for wealth and power:

The peace of God in lonely glen

By whispering stream at twilight hour

Is more to me than prelates’ lawn

Than stainless ermine, gartered knee,

I wait Christ’s coronation morn

And rest, my God, through faith in Thee.

Albert Lewis’s piety was deep and unchanging. For all his political distaste for the power of the Roman church, he had none of Thomas Hamilton’s feeling that Catholics were not really Christians. This is made clear by another of his wheezes, written down after he had attended a funeral in Belfast. He came back from the cemetery in a carriage with one Protestant and two Catholics. It had been a Catholic funeral, conducted in Latin, but the Protestant was a man of sufficient learning to have understood the words Pater Noster. Leaning forward to his Catholic friends, this Protestant said – ‘I heard the priest say that old prayer “Our Father”. I should like to ask you a question. Did we steal that prayer from your church or did you steal it from us?’ Albert Lewis was astonished. He said quietly, ‘We both “stole” it from our Saviour … ’ Living in Ulster compelled the serious believer to cling to ‘mere Christianity’, that is, to those parts of the faith which both sides held in common, not those parts of it which were divisive.

This was Albert Lewis, the man who married Flora Hamilton on 29 August 1894. ‘I wonder whether I do love you? I am not quite sure,’ she had written to him the previous year. Although she came to feel that ‘I am very fond of you and … I should never think of loving anyone else’, it would seem as though Albert was ‘the more loving one’. Perhaps because of his gifts as a comedian, or his small stature, or his thick moustaches, Albert Lewis, though a fundamentally serious man, was doomed to be regarded as a figure of fun by those whom he loved best.

–TWO– EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

‘I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten,’ C. S. Lewis was to write in later life. ‘It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through.’ But his own childhood, or the first nine years of it, was happy and not so much forgotten as mythologized.

Albert and Flora Lewis made their first marital home in a substantial semi-detached house called Dundela Villas. They were still within reach, if not in the parish, of St Mark’s, Dundela, the church where they were married and where Thomas Hamilton, Flora’s father, was the parson. Albert’s father, too, was nearby. Their marriage was not, like some unions, a breaking-away from parents and background. Rather it was a strengthening of their roots. Ulster, conservative, Protestant, middle-class Ulster, was the world into which their children were born and to which they completely belonged.

There were two children of the marriage – both boys. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895 and his younger brother Clive Staples on 29 November 1898. The Lewises liked nicknames and pet-names. Flora – itself a variant on her baptismal name of Florence – was sometimes called Doli by her husband. She called Albert Ali or Lal. Warren Hamilton Lewis quickly became Warnie, Badger, Badgie or Badge. Clive Staples was from an early age known as Jacks, Jacko, Jack, Kricks or Klicks, as well as being affectionately referred to by Warnie as ‘It’.

When he began to emerge from babyhood Jacks discovered that he had two great friends – Warnie and their nurse Lizzie Endicott. ‘There was no nonsense about “Lady nurses” in those days. Through Lizzie we struck our roots into the peasantry of County Down.’¹ These peasant roots were as vigorously Protestant as those of the more genteel Hamiltons and the Lewises.

‘Now mind out there, Master Jacks,’ he remembered his nurse saying as she took his hand on a walk, ‘and keep your feet out of the puddles. Look at it there, all full of dirty wee popes.’ He remembered Lizzie taking his hand and peering with him into the filthy puddle, flecked with bits of mud. A ‘wee pope’ in Lizzie’s vocabulary meant anything dirty or distasteful. In later life, when he befriended English Roman Catholics, C. S. Lewis would sometimes try to explain to them what it was like to have been brought up in Protestant Ulster. It was hearing the word ‘pope’ and being supplied by the irrational involuntary part of the brain with an image not of a bishop in a triple crown but of a filthy puddle.² Although C. S. Lewis denied that the ‘Puritania’ of his fantasy The Pilgrim’s Regress was to be identified with the North of Ireland, it plainly was so, even if his parents were not in the narrow sense ‘puritanical’. Heaven and hell, if only in a fantastical way, seemed closer here than they would have done in an English suburb of comparable date and gentility. In the suburb of Strandtown where they were living there was a mad clergyman called Russell. Once when Albert Lewis was smoking a cigarette in the road, he met Russell, who stopped, pointed down and thundered, ‘Plenty of smoke down there,’ then, pointing upwards, ‘None up there!’ and walked rapidly away.³

Yet in The Pilgrim’s Regress this dread of hell is tempered with pure humbug, as when John, the Pilgrim, is asked by the Steward (i.e. the Clergy) whether he has broken any of the rules imposed on the human race by the Landlord (i.e. God).

John’s heart began to thump and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easier for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh no, sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you? … He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.⁴

The caricature of Lewis’s boyhood Protestantism is here unmistakable and, as the mask of the Steward makes clear in his allegory of the matter, the very fact that the doctrine of hell was believed in by decent, amiable people, who enjoyed their beer and their whiskey, made it harder, not easier, for his imagination to absorb. This was the air he breathed as a child, the religion he imbibed with his mother’s milk. Moreover, because, by the turn of the century, the Irish crisis was reaching a head, Protestantism found itself very much on the defensive. It was clear to any intelligent observer that the Catholic Irish wanted Home Rule and that eventually they would get it. But where would this leave the Protestants, and in particular those Protestants who formed the overwhelming majority of the population in the six counties of the North of Ireland? Like the theology, this situation was something Lewis grew up with long before he was able to articulate or understand it. Before he knew what the speeches were about, he was aware of his father, a glass of whiskey and water in his hand, thunderously denouncing the English government; he was aware of his religiously obsessed old grandfather Lewis and servant Lizzie’s dread of the Catholics, who by all accounts were advancing and making gains month by month.

But there was also a growing awareness of Belfast as a place. ‘This was in the far off days when Britain was the world’s carrier and the Lough was full of shipping. The sound of a steamer’s horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood.’⁵ An early treat was being taken for walks across to Harland & Wollfs the shipbuilders when the White Star Liner Cedric was being built in 1902.⁶

And as well as the water, Lewis could see hills from the nursery window – ‘What we called “the Green Hills”; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills. They were not very far off but they were to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing – Sebnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.’⁷

Before leaving the nursery at Dundela Villas, mention should be made of two experiences, unremarkable in themselves but striking for the manner in which Lewis’s imagination has photographed them. The first is one of horror – a book which contained a picture of a midget child, a sort of Tom Thumb, threatened by a stag beetle very much larger than himself. It was a primitive sort of ‘pop-up’ book. The horns of the beetle were strips of cardboard separate from the plate so that you could make them open and shut like pincers. From this early terror, Lewis derived his violent distaste for insects. It was his first experience of real fear and psychological pain, and interestingly enough he associates it in his own writings with his mother: How a woman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed this abomination into the nursery is difficult to understand.

Lewis’s mother is a shadowy figure in his autobiography. Beyond telling us that she was well educated and rather better born than his father, he has almost nothing to say about her as a person. In the Lewis Papers, the compilation of family letters and diaries made by Warren Hamilton Lewis during the 1930s, Mamy as they called her is canonized as we should expect. The strange little association between his own terror of the beetle and the wisdom or otherwise of his mother may be without significance in the story of C. S. Lewis, but there are to be other occasions in his story where love and pain, women and fear are found in conjunction.

His second nursery memory is equally pregnant with association. The sense of longing or Sehnsucht, the dawning of that Romantic yearning which he was to call Joy, began in his memory when the nursery door opened and his brother Warnie brought in ‘the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest – that was the first beauty I ever knew … As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.’⁸

The comradeship between Warnie and Jacks was deep from the earliest days, and appears to have been largely unaffected by the three-year difference in their ages. Probably the manifest difference in their levels of intelligence helps to account for this since Jacks, by far the cleverer of the two, was from a very early age able to keep up with Warnie’s level of reading, as well as to share his toys and fantasies. Both of them looked back on their nursery days together at Dundela Villas as an idyll. And it was out of that nursery that the passion for reading and writing developed which was to be their most striking characteristic in grown-up days. For C. S. Lewis the man, the happiest times were spent either reading or writing or talking about reading and writing with his brother or brother-substitutes.

An early book-memory for C. S. Lewis was the publication of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin when he was five and Warnie was seven. ‘It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season but that is something like what happened.’ To Beatrix Potter, doubtless, C. S. Lewis owed the inspiration for his earlier essays in fiction, some of which were made when he was five or six. While Warnie, the future soldier and historian, was drawing ships and trains and writing histories of India, Jacks was inventing a place called Animal-land, peopled with ‘dressed Animals’. But these creatures were wholly unlike the subdued, ironical creations of Beatrix Potter. They were full-square portraits of the grown-ups surrounding Jacks and Warnie.

Well before Jacks was seven years old, the two brothers had developed the habit of mythologizing the grown-ups, whose highly coloured antics both amused them and threatened the security of their alliance. They had inherited from their father the power to distort and fictionalize other people so that we, looking back at the Lewis family of that era, have the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between what any of them were actually like and the fantastical shape they assumed in the two brothers’ collective memory. The fact that the grown-ups were always a threat, as well as a comic turn, emphasized the sharp outlines of memory’s caricature.

And the threat which they were hatching all through the nursery years was the threat of school. The choice which lay before Albert and Flora Lewis was whether to educate Jacks and Warnie as Irishmen or whether to turn them into English gentlemen. Several factors must be borne in mind here. One is that the ‘Irish situation’ from the Protestant point of view was getting worse and worse: that is to say that the formation of some form of Irish Catholic Republic independent of the English Crown looked more and more likely, and there was no certainty whatsoever at the time that the Province of Ulster (the Protestant six counties of the North) would be any more capable of retaining its links with Great Britain than the counties of the south. To anyone in favour of retaining the Union, but pessimistic about its future, the lure of an English education for their children would have seemed particularly strong.

Then again, there was an element of snobbery in the decision. If the Hamiltons could boast a long line of respectable parsons and even a bishop in the blood, Flora’s mother’s family was even grander. They were related to Sir William and Lady Ewart of Glenmachan House, one of the gracious ‘ascendancy’ mansions with which Ireland had been adorned since the eighteenth century. The Lewises were frequent and welcome guests on this particular ‘rich man’s flowering lawns’: a far cry from the world of Grandfather Lewis’s childhood. The urge to gentrify itself which is endemic in the British middle class made it all the more difficult to contemplate giving the boys anything but ‘the best’. And ‘the best’ in this context meant an English private school.

Neither Flora nor Albert Lewis knew anything about English schools, which was why they consulted Albert’s old headmaster from Lurgan College, W. T. Kirkpatrick or ‘Kirk’. Albert had been one of Kirk’s favourite pupils, as is made clear by the extremely sentimental letters which survive from the older to the younger man: ‘When you recall the days we spent in Lurgan, shall I confess it? Tears dim my usually tranquil vision.’⁹

As far back as 1900, Kirkpatrick had enlisted Albert’s services as a lawyer in a matter of characteristic pettiness. Kirkpatrick, who was a wealthy man with private means, had retired early (aged fifty-one) and gone to live in England so that his only son could read electrical engineering at Manchester University while still living with his parents at home. Before leaving Ireland he had taken a clock to be cleaned by a man named Brown of Rosemary Street, Belfast. The clockmaker had spoilt the clock and Kirkpatrick had subsequently spent £3. 6s. having it repaired in Manchester. He was now trying to reclaim the money from the Irish clockmaker and was prepared if necessary to go to law.

It was in the course of this strange affair that he made contact once more with Albert Lewis and the flood of his affection, together with an avaricious desire to screw the last penny from the clockmaker, gushed from his pen. ‘It was a privilege to have you for a pupil … I never forget you and never can. I felt instinctively that you had some sparks of the divine fire.’

When Warnie approached the age when he might be sent to school, it was natural that Flora and Albert Lewis should consult the oracle. What about Campbell College, the best school in Belfast? Flora was evidently in favour, having been educated, and well educated, without having to go away. But Kirkpatrick’s advice was firm. ‘Pray convey my regards to your wife. I don’t think she would be satisfied with her boy going to Campbell as a day pupil, and in any case it will be good for the boy himself to be away, and look to his home as a holiday-heaven [sic].’¹⁰ This letter was written in October 1904. Kirkpatrick’s view of the matter was itself wildly irrational, for he was obviously capable of retaining in his head a snobbish, headmasterly veneration for English boarding schools and at the same time a healthy Irish vision of how appalling they are. This is revealed in a rather nasty letter he wrote to Albert Lewis somewhat later:

When the black day comes that the mother’s darling must leave home, that he has so long bullied, some school is sought to break the fall. What shall it be? O, there are plenty. Demand soon creates supply. There are schools where everything is done for the little dears, where graduates are kept to help them trundle hoops and wipe their noses, where every luxury is guaranteed. True the charge is a bit stiff, but what of that? What are money considerations when weighed against the tears and sobs of separation? And then there is the appeal to snobbery, which never fails. The boys are all of a nice social grade. So they whisper: but as a matter of fact they are more likely to be the sons of PARVENU shopkeepers and the rich business class.¹¹

Kirkpatrick here, with typical saeva indignatio, fires to left and right. By any rule of logic this should have dissuaded the Lewises from the very idea of an English boarding school, particularly since, when he was asked for the name of a specific prep school (i.e. a school for the seven-to-thirteen age group), Kirkpatrick was unable to supply a single one; nevertheless, in the mysterious way that these things happen, the correspondence of the Headmaster with his beloved old pupil had sealed the fate of the two little boys. But before that was to happen, there was another monumental change in their lives. They moved house.

–THREE– LITTLE LEA 1905–1908

Albert Lewis was coming up in the world. Little Lea was a substantial house which he had built himself, with the intention of retiring from his solicitor’s practice at the age of about fifty and going in ‘mildly for Literature or Public Life – such as Town Council or Harbour Board’.¹

C. S. Lewis recalled that

My father, who had more capacity for being cheated than any man I have ever known, was badly cheated by his builders; the drains were wrong, the chimneys were wrong, and there was a draught in every room. None of this, however, mattered to a child. To me, the important thing about the move was that the background of my life became larger.²

This house, with its long book-lined corridors, its ugliness (‘we never saw a beautiful building nor imagined a building could be beautiful’), and above all its roominess, was the background for all the Lewis brothers’ subsequent imaginative experiences. In memory, they returned to it again and again – above all to the ‘Little End Room’, an attic sitting-room which was created for them as a refuge from the grown-ups. Warnie, however, had less than a month of the new house before being sent away to boarding school. They moved in on 21 April 1905, and on 10 May he was sent off to Wynyard House near Watford. ‘Warren left home for school tonight for the first time,’ Albert wrote in his diary. ‘Fearful wrench for me. Badge behaved very pluckily. Flora took him over. May God bless the venture.’³

In the last resort, the Lewises, like many middle-class parents, had chosen a school for their son ‘blind’, relying not on their own sense or experience but on the advice of an educational ‘agency’ in London called Gabbitas & Thring. This curious institution has the dual purpose of finding both staff to teach in private schools and parents trusting enough to put their children in these teachers’ charge. Since a high proportion of English writers have at one stage or another been obliged to earn their living as schoolmasters, it is not surprising that the agency has been so often mentioned in the pages of mid-twentieth-century literature. W. H. Auden dubbed it Rabbitarse & String, while Evelyn Waugh used it as the catalyst by which his first fictional hero, Paul Pennyfeather, was transformed into an usher at Llanabba Castle. In Decline and Fall, the agency is called Church & Gargoyle.

‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly,’ said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.’⁴

Wynyard was to turn out to be no better than ‘School’, but this was a fact that Jack Lewis was not to discover for himself until nearly three years had elapsed. Up to that point he had the run of Little Lea; and he was educated entirely at home. His governess was called Miss Harper, and his mother herself took charge of teaching him French and Latin. He seems to have disliked his governess – who was a Presbyterian. A theological lecture interspersed between the sums was one of his first intimations that there was Another World in which Christians were supposed to believe. He preferred the other world of his own invention, and by the time he was nine he had already assembled a considerable œuvre, chiefly relating to Animal-land and the dressed animals, but also including a number of plays. Those looking in this early juvenilia for signs of the later Lewis will be disappointed. There is none of the sense in it which you get in the Narnia stories of ‘another world’, of the numinous or the strange. Worse, his childish fantasies are really rather dull. What sets them apart is their fluency, and the fact that they reveal him as a precise, attentive reader. ‘My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character. But there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’⁵ He thought this meant he was training himself to be a novelist but it would he truer to see in the juvenilia Lewis training himself to be a critic. The stories and plays are at their liveliest when he is echoing another writer. In the stage directions to Littera Scripta, for instance, a play he wrote much later (at the age of thirteen), there is all the unactable novelistic quality of Shaw: ‘Mr Bar in evening dress is standing in the open drawing-room doorway, with his back to the stage. He is a stout, cheerful little fellow, who carries an atmosphere of impudence and unpaid bills.’⁶

To the end of his days Lewis was a brilliant parodist – always the sign of a good critic. The stories reveal not that he was trying to escape the grotesque (as he saw it) world of servants and relations, but that he would best come to terms with them when he had re-invented them in the pages of his notebooks. In addition to his parents and Miss Harper, there were Maude the maid, Martha the cook and his old grandfather Lewis, who came to live in the house in April 1907, a prematurely senile presence, muttering psalms to himself in an upstairs bedroom. For much of the time from 1905 until 1907, Jacks was left alone, wallowing in books. When he wasn’t reading he was either missing Warnie, away at school, and writing him letters, or thinking about the games they would play when he got home.

‘Hoora!’ he wrote in 1907. ‘Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into my room, we shake hands and begin to talk.’ He wrote that when he was nine, but he could easily have written it when he was twenty-nine or fifty-nine.

Little Jacks himself we can glimpse in his fragment of autobiography – ‘My life during the Xmas holidsas of 1907 by Jacks or Clive Lewis author of “Building of the Promanad”, “Toyland” “Living races of Mouse-Land” etc. Dedicated to Miss Maude Scott.’

I begin my life after my 9th birthday, on which I got a book from Papy and a post-card album from Mamy. I have a lot of enymays, however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat. Maude is far worse than Mat but she thinks she is a saint. I rather like Mat, but I HATE Maude, she is very nasty and bad tempered, also very ugly, as you can see in the picture …

Having disposed of the servants, our young author turns his attention to his parents. ‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectacles, kniting her chief industry etc. etc. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generaly wearing a jersy.’ The thick lips were to strike others later in life. ‘Oh, he was a brute,’ one of his colleagues in the English Faculty at Oxford once recalled. ‘You could always tell when he was going to start an argument, he would push forward his thick lower lip.’

His knowledge of his close resemblance to his own father was to leave Lewis. Albert would become a more and more fantastical creature in his son’s imagination – perhaps in fact. But in those tranquil Little Lea years before the great calamity befell them all, and before Jacks entered puberty, there were times of great happiness. The leisurely Irish quality of Albert’s life is captured by one of his wheezes about a neighbouring peer who annually allowed a cricket match in his park. The luncheon provided on these occasions was so generous that in the afternoon ‘there were few steady men on the field’. The wicketkeeper was one of the few who had remained sober, and when the drunken batsman lurched out several yards from the pitch to meet his ball and missed it, the wicketkeeper clearly stumped him. ‘How’s that, umpire?’ he said to the umpire, who was steadying himself on a bat. To which the umpire replied, ‘What the hell is it your business? Go on with the bloody match.’

These were not only the days when such amusing things happened; they were also the days when the family still laughed about Albert’s ‘wheezes’. The house moreover became more and more prosperous and comfortable. In May 1907, a telephone was installed.⁷ The first person Jacks tried to ring was a neighbour of about his age called Arthur Greeves who, like Warnie, was to be a constant in his life. The Greeves family were flax-spinners – the chief industry of Belfast apart from shipbuilding. Jacks’s friendship with Arthur was not to blossom until they were in their teens. In early boyhood, Warnie was really his only friend, the one with whom he shared his fantasies. And it was noticeable that from an early age the younger brother dominated over the elder. There is real forceful bossiness in the letter he wrote to Warnie in May 1907 after the telephone was installed. ‘I have got an adia [sic] you know the play I was writing. I think we will try and act it with new stage don’t say annything about it not being dark, we will have it upstairs and draw the thick curtains and the night one, the scenery is rather hard but still I think we shall do it.’

Warnie was by now twelve years old and his parents were starting to wonder about where he should be educated after Wynyard. Luckily, advice was to hand from old Mr Kirkpatrick, whose litigious nature had not been satisfied with suing a clockmaker for spoiling his clock. A few years later a parent who had entrusted Kirkpatrick with the tuition of a son had been slow in paying an agreed fee and Kirkpatrick had once more enlisted Albert Lewis’s help as a solicitor to extract the money from the defaulter. Albert Lewis himself had not required a cash payment for this service. A greater reward, as he told his old teacher, would be to hear Kirkpatrick’s views on the relation between morality and religion. Kirkpatrick wrote back that

it is a subject too wide, too vast, too dependent on time, place, heredity and social conditions to be treated adequately in a letter. It would take a SYMPOSIUM, or, as Cicero preferred to call it, a Convivium, to touch even on some aspects of what must always be the most profoundly interesting of all questions that deal with man’s spiritual nature and future destiny in the world.⁸

Albert had to be content, instead, with receiving Kirkpatrick’s advice about a suitable school for Warnie. Winchester was ‘out of the question’, Cheltenham and Rugby were both possibilities. Indeed, Albert even got to the point of writing to a housemaster at Rugby and seeing if his boy could have a place there. Shrewsbury looked tempting. ‘You will do worse,’ Kirkpatrick advised, ‘especially if your boy is literary.’ It looked, however, as if Rugby would be the school for Warnie. But before that time, the sky darkened over Little Lea, and the paradise which young Jacks was inhabiting there with his parents and brother and servants and books was shattered for ever. For Albert Lewis 1908 was a year of unbelievable sorrows. Flora Lewis became seriously ill, and cancer was diagnosed. Since nurses were required night and day, Albert Lewis was compelled to ask his father, who had been living with the family for a year, to move out of Little Lea. Richard Lewis made the move in March. On 24 March he suffered a serious stroke and on 2 April he died. This was the first death of the year.

Flora lasted another four months. Jack remembered the night when he was ill:

crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too: and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before.

It is hard to know whether it was worse to be Jacks, in the midst of all this suffering, or Warnie, away at school in England and terrified that his mother might at any minute die before he had the chance to see her for the last time.

‘My dear son,’ Albert warned him in a letter written shortly after Warnie’s thirteenth birthday, ‘it may be that God in his mercy has decided that you will have no person in the future to turn to but me.’ Warnie’s response was brave. ‘Write as often as you can and tell me all you can about Mammy. It is beastly for me here not being able to tell what is going on from day to day.’⁹

In the event, she was to die in the summer holidays. By 11 August it was obvious that she did not have long to live. From her bedroom she could hear in the distance the Orange Lodge practising for the Apprentices’ march, blowing pipes and banging drums with what seemed like cruel force. ‘It’s a pity that it takes so long to learn that tune,’ she murmured. By the night of 20 August she had been wandering for a while in her talk, but she suddenly grasped Albert’s hand and said to the nurse, ‘Nurse, when you get married see that you get a good man who loves you and loves God.’

The next night she was more composed, and again Albert sat up with her. ‘I spoke to her (nor was it the first time by any means that a conversation on heavenly things had taken place between us),’ he wrote, ‘sometimes begun by her, sometimes by me, of the goodness of God. Like a flash she said, “What have we done for him?” May I never forget that. She died at 6.30 on the morning of the 23rd August, my birthday. As good a woman, wife and mother, as God has ever given to man.’¹⁰

On Flora’s mantelpiece there was a calendar with a Shakespearean quotation for each day of the year. The quotation for the day on which she died was from the fifth act of King Lear:

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.

Albert, who had lost his father and his wife in the space of four months, was to suffer a third blow only a fortnight later when his elder brother Joe also died.

Albert’s grief over the summer had made him a poor companion to his sons, and he was now in no position, emotionally, to look after them on his own. Perhaps if he had been forced to do so by financial circumstances, things would have been different. ‘His nerves had never been of the steadiest,’ C. S. Lewis mercilessly recalled, ‘and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.’ This disturbing passage in Surprised by Joy implies that in the weeks leading up to Flora’s death, the survivors all hurt one another in an irremediable way. Albert’s outbursts of rage against Jacks were not forgiven. ‘During these months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife.’ It had already been decided that Jacks should accompany Warnie back to Wynyard School.

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