by A. N. Wilson
–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. Pr
obably 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