by C. S. Lewis
We had to begin by climbing the ‘warm green muffled Cumnor hills’: a long pull, all on foot. You have a fine, but conventional view of Oxford as you look back: but we really enjoyed nothing until beyond Cumnor we sunk into the long grass by the side of the road under one of the deplorably rare trees and tackled our luncheon basket. A local pub supplied beer for me and lemonade for the children, and we had a basket of cherries.91 After this it became better and when after a long and pleasant decline through corkscrew lanes full of meadowsweet (that’s the white, dusty stuff with a nice smell, you know) we reached Bablocke Hythe, it was quite delightful. Beyond this the country is very flat, but tree-y: full of villages rather too ‘warm and muffled’: they make you feel like a bumble bee that has got into damp cotton wool.
Our objective was a cottage in Strandlake about the letting of which during the summer Mrs Moore was going to see. Here (tho’ our purpose failed) we were rewarded by meeting a wonderful old woman, the owner, Mrs Penfold, who talked of her husband as ‘Penfold’ without the Mr, just like a character in Jane Austen. This I am afraid you will hardly credit, but it is true all the same. Although flat and almost too blankety for a man to strike a match in, this country is much favoured of the Muse.
A few miles beyond us was Kelmscott, where Wm Morris lived and built that ‘red house’ whose brick nudity first defied the stucco traditions: from it, all the pretty villas of our day are directly descended. A little to our right at Stanton Harcourt (where Jenkins is always going to take me) is an old Manor with a tower room where Pope wrote his famous parody—which he called a translation—of the Iliad. And of course, as you know, every mile smells of Arnold. We were not far from ‘the Fyfield elm’: we had ‘crossed the stripling Thames’ and saw in the distance near Cumnor what I took for the ‘plot of forest ground called Thessaly’.
Oh by the way I have found the ideally bad edition of [Matthew Arnold’s] Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy. It was lying in Blackwells between grey boards with very black type: illustrated with photographs—one to almost every two stanzas. For ‘what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries’ you had a bed of rushes taken close, as you would for a plate in a natural history handbook, with a water rat in the middle: but best of all—there’s a line somewhere I can’t remember, about a ‘battered merchant-man coming into port’: for this we had two cutter racing yachts!! How are such things possible: and yet people will buy this and like it and be very proud of it. I am writing in our little strip of garden at five past ten and it is getting too dark to see: I will in and drink some of the eveningmilch . . .
The steps by which you became a Miltonian are very interesting. Can one quite have done by labelling him a republican and a puritan? Puritanism was after all (in some of its exponents) a very different thing from modern ‘dissent’. One cannot imagine Milton going about and asking people if they were saved: that intolerable pride is the direct opposite to sentimentalism. He really had the vices and virtues of the aristocracy—writing for ‘fit audience tho’ few’. He always seems to look down on the vulgar from an almost archducal height. ‘How charming is divine philosophy. Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose.’ The dull fools are the ordinary mass of humanity, and though it has its ridiculous side, that deliberate decision of his, taken at my age ‘to leave something so written that posterity wd not willingly let it die’ takes a little doing. Paradise Regained I only read once: it is a bit too much for me. In it the Hebrew element finally gets the better of the classical and romantic ingredients. How can people be attracted to things Hebrew? However, old Kirk really summed up Milton when he said ‘I would venture to assert that no human being ever called him Johnnie’.
By the way, on a ride the other day I passed an inn which the landlord had seen fit to call ‘The Olde Air Balloon’. What a splendid name for the P’daytabird—who, by the way, is threatening to come here in a few days, thanks to the persistent endeavours of Uncle and Aunt Hamilton, backed, according to his account, by your advice. I wish you’d mind your own business, Master P. B. I have told him I’ve been moved out of College, so the business resolves itself into my presenting my abode here as ordinary digs—and keeping him out of them as much as may be. Luckily Pasley will be up for his viva and ‘a friend sharing with me and working very hard’ ought to be a sufficient deterrent. I think too, that if I walk the Old Air Balloon out here in the present insupportable heat, once will be enough for him.
The temperature is over 90 in the shade: even the water at Parson’s Pleasure has reached 71. Though still the only comfortable place (where I spend many a happy hour) this takes the real bite and shock out of a bathe. One great beauty at present is that they are mowing the meadows on the far side, and as you splash along with your nose just above the dark brown water, you swim into the smell of hay. But to expiate over the delights of an English river would be really unkind to you.
You will probably await my next with interest, in which you will hear of the success or failure of the paternal visit. What an anachronism he will be here . . .
[On 20 July 1921 Mr Lewis set off from Belfast with Augustus and Annie Hamilton on one of his very rare holidays. Travelling in the Hamiltons’ car, they traversed Wales and arrived in Oxford on 24 July.]
TO HIS BROTHER: from 28 Warneford Road
7 August [1921]
You heard in my last letter of the consternation into which our little household was thrown by the threatened and hardly precedented migration of the P’daytabird. I have so much history to record that I must bustle on from that point. By rights I should tell you of all the preparations that were made: how Pasley came up at a whistle, like the faithful comrade in arms he is, to be the man who was digging with me and to ‘lend artistic verisimilitude’: how the little back room was dressed up in the semblance of an undergraduate’s digs, where women never set foot. But the story would be too long. The gods spared me the need of this Palais Royal farce with its uneasy tendency to degenerate into something more like Grand Guignol.
It so worked out that the Irish party only stopt at Oxford for their midday eating and then took me with them for a week. My compulsory holiday took me through so much good country and supplied me with such a rare crop of P’daytisms that it gives me really too much epic matter to write about. I shall try to give you any information that may interest you as prospective pilot of the Dawdle through the same parts: but of course you must not take it for as accurate as Michelin.
The first and by far the funniest piece of scenery I saw was my first glimpse of the Old Air Balloon himself, outside the Clarendon in Cornmarket. You’ve no idea how odd he looked, almost a bit shrunk: pacing alone with that expression peculiar to him on a holiday—the eyebrows half way up his forehead. I was very warmly greeted by all; and with the exception of Aunt Annie, we took a short stroll before lunch. I was in a great flutter for fear of meeting some fool who might out with any irrelevance, but everything passed off well.
I learned that he found the heat intolerable, that he had not slept a wink since he left home, that he had a feather bed last night at Worcester—which Uncle Hamilton thought a great joke. He seemed dazed by his surroundings and showed no disposition to go and see my rooms, tho’ he observed that College had ‘treated me very shabbily as they distinctly mentioned free rooms as one of the privileges of scholars’—a statute by the by completely unknown at Oxford, however familiar at Leeborough. We lunched heavily at the Clarendon: I succeeded in getting some cold meats (suitable to a shade temperature of near 90) in spite of the frequently advanced proposition that it would be ‘better’ (how or why?) for us ‘all to have the table d’hôte’.
We addressed ourselves to the road as soon as the meal was over. Uncle Hamilton’s car is a 4-seater Wolsley: I have forgotten the horse power. It is pale grey and wears a light hood. Our direction was South and West, so we ran out over Folly Bridge and towards Berkshire, thro’ pleasant but tame wooded country. The weather was oppressively hot, even in an open car which our uncle keeps almo
st permanently over thirty-five miles an hour: when you dropped to twenty at a turn or a village a stifling heat leaps up round you at once. This first run was almost the only one where Excellency [Mr Lewis] sat behind me, and it was about half an hour south of Oxford that he made his first mot, and one of the best of his life, by asking ‘Are we IN CORNWALL YET?’ Honest Injun, he did!
I don’t know if you have a map with you: we drove by Nailsworth, Cirencester, Tetbury (I think) to Malmesbury (‘MAWMSbury, Gussie’ from the O.A.B.) where we hoped to lie. The people here have a very barbarous, uncivil custom of closing hotels, even to resident visitors, on a Sunday—this being Sunday. In this quandary various proposals were raised: the P’daytabird was in favour of going on to Bath and going to the largest hotel there—being reduced to a painful uneasiness when we told him that he could get supper, not dinner, of a Sunday evening in these small towns. Here and elsewhere through the tour Uncle H. displayed great skill in his family tactics of amusing all parties with a frivolous appearance of a discussion while he was preparing his own plans.
It ended by our pushing on to a place called Chippenham, which we made about five o’clock, and, liking the house where we had tea, we took rooms for the night. Aunt A. and I were sent to look at them, and the O.A.B., despite of all his pother of the feather bed overnight refused (of course) to look at them. ‘If they satisfy you, Annie, they’ll satisfy me.’ Chippenham is one of (I suppose) a thousand English towns that one has never heard of, but once having seen, remembers kindly. It is perhaps about the size of Wrexham, but as different as the south from the north. Here are quiet streets with nice old ivied houses, at a strange variety of levels, so that you can look into their gardens, with a little river running through them, and very fine trees. These streets widen occasionally into what are called squares, being, after the manner of English country towns, any other shape in Euclid rather than a square.
Our hotel was very comfortable and nearly empty. After dinner of course we ‘strolled’. I had some Leeburian talk with the O.A.B. and afterwards some, of another sort, with our uncle—about God: a monstrous unlikely subject under such conditions. He finds the proof of intelligible work, of a mind something like his own in the universe, because the universe does after all work: it is not all higgledy piggledy. The conversation was perhaps not worth saving, but he has great merits as a talker: he has many gaps in his thinking, but it is all absolutely his own—he never takes anything over. If he covers familiar ground he still uses maps of his own making.
I found him a wonderful antidote to the P’daytabird: the latter was made happily miserable by a Salvation Army band which played the Dead March from Saul up and down the streets—why I don’t know. When we got back to our hostel we sat for a time in the dark hall on a very comfortable sort of benching, and the O.A.B. offered us drinks.
Uncle H. wd have some beer and so would I. O.A.B. (in his ‘desperate’ voice): ‘I’ll have a bottle of soda water. Here! Waitress: two half pints of bitter beer and a bottle of soda water—(pause)—and if you’d just put a little Scotch whiskey in it.’ (The waitress goes and returns.) ‘Here you are Gussie. Is that my soda water?’ Waitress: ‘Yes sir—with the whiskey in it.’ O.A.B.: ‘Hm’h.’ (Roars of laughter from Uncle H.) This was truly in our best manner, wasn’t it?
The next morning I was early astir, after an excellent night and a bath, to buy some aspirin surreptitiously at the nearest chemist’s, having had a headache the night before: but I never used it again. What is pleasanter than a hotel breakfast in a strange town—porridge, crisp fried fish, and an ample plinth? I have never outgrown the child’s belief that food grows better with every mile further from our usual table (except tea, which I can never get good outside my Oxford residentiary).
On this second day I had a typed itinerary to keep me right: the Oxford journey, being unrehearsed, was not on it. In our seats at about ten. We drove through a hilly country, the weather being a little cooler, by Bath, Farrington Gurney and Chewton Mendip to Wells. The landscape has everything, tho’ on a small scale: rocks, hills, woods and water. Chiefly you run along the sides of winding valleys. The villages and their churches are very pleasant.
At Wells I distinguished myself in a way to make you laugh: (should I remind you that it is the Cathedral city of the diocese of Bath and Wells?) We were not quite certain of our whereabouts, and seeing a military looking old gentleman standing on the pavement, I lean out and shout ‘What’s this place, sir?’ M.O.G. (in a tone of thunder) ‘The City of Wells!’ A minute later an irreverent little boy jerked a finger at the M.O.G. and informed us ‘E’s the Mayor’.
The whole street seemed to be in laughter. As Uncle H. said, it must have been the word ‘place’ which stuck in his gorge: we should have asked ‘What great city are we now approaching?’ I profited however by this lesson, and after Uncle H. had given me an itinerary and a look at the maps he had I steered our course very satisfactorily. The P’daytabird only advanced so far as to get hold of the Michelin every day and look up hotels: usually he looked up some place he thought suitable to lie at: very often it was wrong—once or twice it was a place we had stopped at the night before.
We lunched at Wells after seeing the Cathedral. I do not know whether such things come into your horizon: I at any rate am no architect and not much more of an antiquarian. Strangely enough it was Uncle H. with his engineering more than the O.A.B. with his churchmanship that helped me to appreciate them: he taught me to look at the single endless line of the aisle, with every pillar showing at once the strain and the meeting of the strain (like a ships frame work inverted): it certainly is wonderfully satisfying to look at. The pleasure one gets is like that from rhyme—a need, and the answer of it following so quickly, that they make a single sensation. So now I understand the old law in architecture ‘No weight without a support, and no support without an adequate weight’. For the rest, Wells is particularly rich in a wilderness of cloisters all round the Cathedral where one can cut the cold and quiet with a knife. There is a fine castle with the only real drawbridge I ever saw, just across the Close.
We lunched pretty well in this city (I daren’t call it a town) and were on the road by two. Henceforward the P’daytabird nearly always took the front seat since this seemed to please him. We ran through Westbury, Cheddar (‘Are we in Cheshire, Gussie?’ asked the Balloon), Axbridge, Highbridge, Bridgewater etc., into Somerset. All this was country I knew (towards the end), having stayed twice in the village of Old Cleeve: for this reason I had been able to name Dunster to Uncle H. as a likely stopping place. I had at first been rather troubled lest my apparent knowledge of the place should lead to long and tedious questioning from the P’daytabird: but I found him advancing from his own resources that I had got to know it while stationed at Plymouth (‘They’re both in Devonshire aren’t they?’)—and did not pursue the subject.
Here it begins to be very beautiful. Through the village of Nether Stowey we climbed up through the Quantocks: they are a tremendous barrier of moor, with the most wonderful valleys, called ‘combes’, running up them. From the high ground we looked down into the last valley in Somerset—a little piece of ground that I love as well as any I have ever walked in. On your right is the Bristol Channel with the faint line of the Welsh coast beyond it. Ahead are the enormous hills of [the] Devonshire border, the beginnings of Exmoor, with Minehead just this side of them where they go down to the water. On the left are the lower moors, known as the Black Hills, and all between the pleasantest green country with no end of red iron streams, orchards, thatched villages and buried lanes that wind up the hills in leafy cuttings.
I pointed the Welsh coast out to the O.A.B. He replied, ‘Ah, the thing’s got twisted. It ought to be round to our left.’ How I should like to draw a P’daytamap of England! It was a curious sensation for me to scoot down the Quantocks into Williton and on through Washford, passing at forty miles an hour through country that I had often walked.
We made Dunster at about 4 o’
clock, and had our first engine trouble just as we drew up at the Luttrell Arms: my ignorance reduces me to saying that it ‘was the gear jammed somehow’. Later on you may be able to gather what was really the matter. Uncle H. treated the business with admirable sang froid: his faculty of never being ruffled is a great virtue in a companion, and if life was confined to this kind of intercourse I really think it would cover all his other sins. The O.A.B. insisted on standing by with an expression like a pirate flag, making irritating suggestions: I made one or two attempts to remove him, in sympathy with our uncle, but of course they were unsuccessful. Later on he discussed the situation with me in private. I remarked that Uncle Gussie took it very well. O.A.B.: ‘Ah Jacks, you don’t know the fellow as I do. Making a mess of things like this just hits him on his sore point: he’s as vain as a peacock. He’s just fuming under the surface. That’s why I waited: just to smooth things over.’ Why by the way is any misfortune that happens to anyone but himself always described in P’daytesque as the sufferer’s ‘having made a mess of something’? It was finally arranged to have the car towed into Minehead, about two miles further on, where there is a well appointed garage: Uncle Hamilton was afraid that he would have to get a new part from Birmingham: the P’daytabird was strongly in favour of taking a ‘day of rest tomorrow’.
For the present, however, we could do nothing but wait: and it was fortunately in the most delightful place. One of the many mountain valleys that I mentioned before ends in a small wooded hill attached to the main mountain by a sort of isthmus. The little hill is crowned by Dunster Castle: the village of Dunster winds up the isthmus, consisting chiefly of a very broad lazy street with old houses. The Luttrell Arms itself is a sixteenth-century building with embrasures for musketry fire on either side of the porch. Just opposite its door is a curious octagonal erection with a tiled roof, used I suppose for market purposes in wet weather. It was ‘pierced by a ball’ from the Castle during the Civil Wars. I remarked that this gave one a visible specimen of the trajectory of the old cannon: to which Uncle Hamilton very shrewdly replied that unless one knew whether it was aimed at the thing or not, it told one nothing.