“The careful assignments of School Masters were blotted out by larger and wider markings,” wrote James Hilton, author of the novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
A boy who had been expelled returned as a hero with medals; those whose inability to conjugate avoir and être seemed likely in 1913 to imperil a career were to conquer France’s enemies better than they did her language; offenders gated for cigarette smoking in January were dropping bombs from the sky in December. It was a frantic world: and we knew it even if we did not talk about it. Slowly, inch by inch, the tide of war lapped to the gates of our seclusion.1
The sad fact was that few of the 1912-1913 Malvern College boys would return from Flanders with medals. Most of them, including the untamable Irish Earl, were slaughtered. The poetry would be “in the pity,”2 wrote the great First World War poet Wilfred Owen. In his “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” he wrote:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.3
As the tide of war came closer and closer, the teenager from Ulster was caught in a duality of outer and inner life. Outwardly he felt misery, but in his spirit he was touched at times by unspeakable moments of happiness. These came from a deep awareness of the beauty of nature and from the world of books and imagination. The conclusion Jack came to of his time at Malvern was that, in hindsight, he was extremely tired—tired as a cab horse. His work, the pressures of life under the fagging system, and the whole strain of growing up had exhausted him. He also concluded that he had become a downright intellectual prig. The Enemy had been busy; and as always he had left neither peace of heart nor peace of mind behind him. But the voice of something indescribably beautiful was about to speak to Jack; he was to call it the Voice of Holiness.
Chapter Seven
NO CALLING WITHOUT A CALLER
THE ORCHARDS OF ENGLAND WERE overflowing with fruit. Deep red and yellow streaked apples, dusky skinned plums, and russet coloured pears filled the most heavily wooded county in England, namely Surrey. Its forests contained a wide range of trees—oak, pine, beech, sweet chestnut, juniper, yew, and ash. Some of those woodlands had been in existence since before AD 1600. From the chalk grasslands of the North Downs to the heaths of the London Basin, Surrey was a county of remarkable natural beauty.
Much of Surrey’s fruit had already been gathered; but a sleepless person listening carefully on moonlit nights could have heard the thud of the ripened fruit falling to the orchard floor. Across the county butterflies flitted, especially the heath-loving butterflies, to the delight of all who saw them. Their colours ranged from red to chalk-blue, from grey and brown to white and copper. Any rambler could have disturbed them by his or her footstep.
Jack’s journey from Belfast to Great Bookham in September 1914 was a feast for his eyes. As he walked the paths and lanes of Surrey, he grew to love its countryside with its abundant woodland plants. He revelled in its coppices, woods, and hollows, and enjoyed its heather, gorse, and bracken. He was to know as much happiness in Surrey as he was ever to know on earth.
What had brought about this great turn-around? Where now was the misery of the Ulster misfit, his detestation of the Public School system, the multi-layered anxiety of the growing boy? The answer was in the tall, lean, gentleman who stood waiting for Jack at Great Bookham Station, dressed, as always, in worn-out clothes. His name was William Thompson Kirkpatrick. The former Headmaster of Lurgan College, now living in semi-retirement, took on one or two pupils for private tuition. From September to December 1915, after Warren’s disastrous academic career at Malvern, Mr. Kirkpatrick had tutored Warren. Mr. Kirkpatrick turned Warren’s education around. When Warren sat his entrance examination for the army he was placed twenty-first out of 201 candidates and entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst as a prize candidate in February 1914. Warren advised his father to send Jack to Great Bookham and Mr. Kirkpatrick, and Jack never stopped pleading with his father, by pen and tongue, to take him away from Malvern. Through doubt and hesitation, Albert finally made up his mind to let Jack read for University under the tuition of Mr. Kirkpatrick. Jack looked upon the decision as, humanly speaking, the most fortunate thing that had ever happened to him.
Jack had expected Mr. Kirkpatrick to be a sentimental person. He had heard his father speak of him in such terms, and Jack almost anticipated being hugged by him on arrival. He was in for a shock: a less sentimental teacher had never existed. Mr. Kirkpatrick shook Jack’s hand firmly, and as they walked away from the station Jack tried to make conversation with him. He mentioned that he had found the landscape of Surrey to be much wilder than he had expected. Mr. Kirkpatrick immediately shouted, “Stop!” He asked Jack to explain what he meant by wildness, and on what grounds he had not expected it. Mr. Kirkpatrick demolished all of Jack’s answers to the point at which he asked Jack if he could not see that his remark had been meaningless! Mr. Kirkpatrick did not stop there, but tried to ferret out what Jack’s expectations had been based upon. Had he seen maps of Surrey, photographs, or books? Mr. Kirkpatrick’s conclusion was that Jack did not have any right to an opinion on the subject, due to the fact that he could not produce proof of anything upon which his stated opinion was based. All of this first conversation took place in the space of three and a half minutes; but it set the sail for the rest of Jack’s voyage through two and a half years at Great Bookham.
In a nutshell, W. T. Kirkpatrick taught Jack logic—a process that he simply loved. No doubt Jack inherited this love from his mother. He was no mathematician when it came to calculation, but he did delight in reasoning. Jack, his father, and Warren called Mr. Kirkpatrick “The Great Knock.” I surmise that this title encapsulated how Mr. Kirkpatrick was able to “knock” an argument. This ability marked him in every aspect of his social conversation. He even demanded that his wife’s elderly bridge partners clarify their terms!
The Great Knock’s influence on Jack marked him for the rest of his life. Using Mr. Kirkpatrick’s technique, he soon learned to reason and argue, to formidable effect. “Fame is a vapour, popularity an accident, riches take wing, and only character endures,” said Horace Greeley. Through Mr. Kirkpatrick, the logic of Jack’s character became in-built, enduring to this day. And how! His devastating logic would deeply influence his students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Through his books untold millions of people would be touched. It is estimated that his books have sold 200 million copies, making him the best-selling Christian author of all time. Three-dozen titles are still in print. At the height of the war, millions would listen to the radio as Jack the apologist spoke in defence of the Christian faith. Multitudes of children would learn of Christ through that logic, used in his creative way.
Consider for a moment the fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis being taught logic in the Kirkpatrick home at Great Bookham in the years 1914 to 1916. Jack is a pessimist and an atheist. His teacher is also an atheist. Mr. Kirkpatrick once studied in a Presbyterian seminary; but the only visible trace of his Ulster Protestant past is that he wears more respectable clothes while gardening on Sunday than he does on other days of the week. So, if ever William Cowper’s famous line, “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform” were shown to be true, this was the time. An atheist teaches another atheist how to use logic; and ever since Lewis’s conversion, God has been using the logic of this former atheist behind enemy lines to devastating effect. God does as He pleases, when He pleases, where He pleases, how He pleases, and with whom He pleases. “Let no one get a swelled head if the Lord uses them,” said Stuart Briscoe, “for He uses some mighty strange people.”
Of course, Mr. Kirkpatrick taught
Jack far more than logic. Soon he was able not only to read Greek; he could think in Greek. All of this knowledge was passed on to Jack in a pure, unadulterated Ulster accent. The Iliad, read by the The Great Knock, may not have been in as honeyed an accent as Smugy’s; but to Jack it suited the Bronze Age in which it was written.
Jack’s time at Great Bookham fell into a very pleasant pattern. It was a pattern he tried to continue; but it was often interrupted by life and its responsibilities. Breakfast, with Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s good Ulster soda bread, was at eight o’clock a.m. By nine o’clock a.m. Jack was working at his desk with Mr. Kirkpatrick in a little upstairs study. He read and wrote until one o’clock p.m., happily interrupted by a cup of tea or coffee from Mrs. Kirkpatrick at eleven o’clock a.m. After lunch, he went for a walk at around two o’clock p.m., usually alone. His sense of nature and its moods was acute, and he found talk irritating as he drank in the beauty of the Surrey countryside. He advised any walker in the countryside to keep his mouth shut and his eyes and ears opened. One needed to surrender to nature to enjoy it. Afternoon tea was not later than 4.15 p.m., often taken alone, musing over an ever-present book. Jack loved to read while he ate; not many sixteen-year-olds today would be found musing on Lang’s History of English Literature, reading a translation of Herodotus, or enjoying the writing of Boswell over afternoon tea. Jack would work until the evening meal at seven o’clock p.m. There followed French with Mrs. Kirkpatrick, talk, or further light reading. He was usually in bed by eleven o’clock p.m.
This was Jack’s model for a normal day, though he described it as selfish and Epicurean. Epicureans taught that pleasure, particularly mental pleasure, was the highest good; and Jack had plenty of that at Great Bookham. Life would soon interrupt this pattern in a thousand ways, but Jack found truly great happiness in the peace and quietness of the daily routine in the Kirkpatrick household. At Great Bookham, Jack was not exposed to material wealth. If anything, the household was somewhat frugal. This frugality was perhaps best epitomised in The Great Knock’s habit of rising abruptly from the table and going to an old tobacco jar to rescue remnants of tobacco from former pipes for use again. What Jack found at Great Bookham was a wealth of intellectual pleasure; when he describes the arrival of books in little dark grey paper parcels from Messrs. Denny in The Strand, London, one can almost feel his joy. His reading list at Great Bookham stretches across intellectual continents: Milton, Keats, Shelley, Chaucer, Lang, Stephens, Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Spenser, Sidney, Ronsard, Voltaire, Walton, Mandeville, William Morris, Apuleius, Herrick, Ruskin, the Brontes, Demosthenes, Cicero, Lucretius, Tacitus, Virgil, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Wilde, and Beardsley. Where did it all lead him? What of Jack’s spiritual well being at Great Bookham? Who influenced him most?
It turns out that one of the deepest influences was the poet W. B. Yeats. Jack soon discovered that Yeats seriously believed in magic. Jack was to meet him later in life and to have that fact confirmed. As we have noted already, Yeats was deeply into the occult; and Jack, who had by now discarded Christianity, found Yeats’ belief in another world disturbing. Through further reading of Maeterlinck—with his spiritualism, theosophy, and pantheism—an old, ravenous desire for the occult, first aroused by Miss Cowie the matron at Malvern, rushed into his soul. In that same soul, however, at the same time, another desire arose. It was the longing for what he had known, in his childhood, of joy. Without hesitation, he admitted that the first desire came from the Devil. To Jack, the nature of joy was not coarse, as the occult was. His teenage experiences and temptations had absolutely no relevance to those incredible experiences of joy he had known in childhood. He had discovered early that the world, the flesh, and the Devil could not give him joy. It was a mercy that he made the discovery; and he was just about to make another.
In the Scriptures, we read of God’s intervening in the history of the world through tiny incidents. The beautiful Rebekah goes down to a spring with a jar on her shoulder. “Please give me a little water from your jar,” says Eliezer, Abraham’s servant. She gives it to him and adds, “I’ll draw water for your camels, too.” Her act led to her marriage to Isaac and the protection of the royal line of the Messiah. For Rebekah, her action was merely watering thirsty camels; but it was more, so very much more.
Later in history, a little baby is found crying. What could be more common? From the tears of baby Moses, though, flows the tide of the history of Israel. His tears evoked compassion in Pharaoh’s daughter, and Moses was raised as her son. History shows that Moses was educated in the sciences: mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, philosophy, and law. He was trained in the arts: music, sculpture, and painting. He was taught the protocol of kings, covering the fifteen-hundred-year history of Egypt’s existence. He knew the secrets of the pyramids. In order to free Moses’ own people from the cruel slavery imposed by Pharaoh, God reached into the very family of Pharaoh. The baby who had wept led 2.5 million people to freedom through the Red Sea. Think about that fact the next time you hear a baby cry!
Ruth, the poverty-stricken, barley-gleaning Moabitess “happened” to come to that part of a Bethlehem field belonging to a man called Boaz. The seeming happenstance led to romance and marriage. Ruth’s great-grandson was called David—arguably the greatest poet who ever lived. From that royal line came the Messiah, who was called David’s Greater Son. And all hung on Ruth’s going into one part of a field instead of another.
Paul decided to visit churches he had founded, simply to encourage them. Step by step, he was led to a women’s prayer meeting by the side of a river in Philippi. He sat down and shared the gospel with the women in what was the first Christian service to be held in Europe. One of their number, a businesswoman from Thyatira called Lydia, whose heart the Lord opened, invited Paul to her home. So God opened Lydia’s heart; then He opened her home; and then He opened a continent to the gospel. A woman’s heart was God’s highway to Europe.
In life, what appears to have small beginnings can lead to incredible ends. A NASA astrophysicist told me one day on a jet from Washington to London, “We can prove that butterflies, moving their wings in India, affect the weather in North America.” You could have fooled me!
One awesome evening at twilight on Leatherhead Station platform in Surrey, the door to a new world opened for Jack Lewis. He usually walked to Leatherhead about once a week to have a bathe in the small swimming pool, to look for books, or to get his hair cut; and he took the train back. As he stood with one lone porter on the timbered platform waiting for the train to arrive, his ears tingling with the cold, he turned to the station bookstall. The sky, he would always remember, was green with frost and the Dorking Hills were almost violet in colour. There, lying on the bookstall, in a soiled jacket, was a cheap Everyman edition of a book called Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. The author was George MacDonald. Almost unwillingly Jack bought the book as the steam train arrived slowly. “Bookham, Effingham, Horsley,” called the porter, and Jack Lewis got on board. As the train headed into the gathering darkness, the growing boy, though he did not know it, was heading towards the light. For that night he began reading his new book, which had cost him 1s1d.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), born in Huntley, Aberdeenshire, was a distinctly gifted Christian gentleman. He was a poet, a novelist, and a fantasy writer par excellence; he was a highly successful lecturer, actor, editor, teacher, and preacher; and he was a husband and the father of eleven children. He wrote fifty books, thirty of them novels, which have sold millions of copies. His books never brought him wealth; his novels in particular reflect insights born out of a life of near poverty and poor health. In the midst of it all, he had experienced the touch and blessing of God. George MacDonald was a friend of Lady Byron (the poet’s widow), Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, and other literary figures. If you ever walk in Hyde Park and see the statue of the boy and dolphin, it is worth remembering that the sculptor was Matthew Mo
nroe, George MacDonald’s friend. Monroe used George MacDonald’s son Greville as a model for his statue. Smith Elder published Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women in 1848. It had taken two months to write. George Murray Smith, the head of the publishing company, had been the first person to recognise the genius of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; he also recognised Phantastes’ unique place in English literature. The book certainly found a unique place in Jack’s heart.
What was it that touched him? MacDonald said that his book was a sort of fairy tale for grown people. It is generally agreed that it is not an easy book to grasp; it is full of mythical fantasy and symbolic dream-romance. It is an allegory of the spiritual pilgrimage out of this temporal world into the Kingdom of Heaven. At this stage in his life, Jack had discarded Christianity. He believed that, just as humankind had deified the sun and the moon, so it deified great people. He believed that Jesus was a Hebrew philosopher who had been deified, that the Christian church was a cult, and that Christian truth was superstitious faith. He believed all religions to be mythologies. All these beliefs he had hidden from his father; for the sake of convention, he had even travelled to Belfast from Surrey to be confirmed in the Church of Ireland. In time, however, he admitted to being ashamed of his insincerity.
Within hours of reading Phantastes, though, something strangely new and invigorating began to touch his imagination. Almost daily he enjoyed the woodland air of the beautiful Surrey countryside, but when he began journeying in Phantastes, he felt he was breathing a new air. He called it a sweet air that blew from the land of righteousness. Here was cool, morning innocence; here was goodness. Unknowingly, he had crossed a frontier; he had been carried across it, he admitted, as if he were asleep.
Jack had been charmed and lured by the imaginative worlds of Malory, Spenser, Maurice, and Yeats; but now he was attracted by something completely different. It was called holiness. He described it as being like the sun breaking through fog. It created a bright shadow that touched and transformed everything around him. It was the Divine touching the everyday and ordinary. It was the spiritual touching the material.
A Shiver of Wonder Page 8