A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  The Reeves’s Muntjac, or barking deer, the smallest of England’s resident deer, is now possibly the most widely distributed in the country. The deer’s summer coat is a bright, strong chestnut-red, while the chin, throat, underside of the tail, and region between the hind legs are often white. Recently-cut deciduous forests, with cover of bramble, box, gorse, rhododendron, bamboo, and fern, readily support this versatile deer. They seem to vanish at the height of summer, when the vegetation is thickest.

  The least common of Britain’s wild deer population is the Chinese water deer. They were first introduced in the 1870’s and kept in London Zoo. The majority today can be found residing in close proximity to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, most of them having descended from escapees. It has been suggested that government officials working in Woburn during the Second World War were less than diligent in closing the gates! The summer coat is a rich chestnut to a ginger red. They are considered solitary animals, interacting closely only during the rutting months.

  In the warm summer of 1918, Jack Lewis was to be found wandering through bracken in the grounds of Ashton Court, Long Ashton, Bristol, relishing the deer park. At times he found himself coming face to face with a stag, peering at him through branching antlers. After examining Jack, it would snort, kick up its heels, and bound away. Like Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, Jack found more solace with animals than with humans at this time in his life.

  Jack was convalescing at Ashton Court, originally a fifteenth century castle. He simply did not fit into the surrounding life of the billiard-playing, noisily shouting, tunelessly whistling young soldiers who were convalescing with him. His recent war experiences caused him to suffer from nightmares that would recur for years. Did he feel at times, perhaps, like the poet Wilfred Gibson?

  We who are left, how shall we look again,

  Happily on the sun or feel the rain,

  Without remembering how they who went

  Ungrudgingly, and spent

  Their all for us, loved too the sun and rain?

  A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings,

  But we, how shall we turn to little things,

  And listen to the birds and winds and streams

  Made holy by their dreams,

  Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?1

  One thing is certain: in the summer of 1918, Jack Lewis was a lonely young man. As an invalid in Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London, he went to Great Bookham to visit The Great Knock. One can only imagine their conversation and wonder how Mr. Kirkpatrick’s logic handled the slaughter that was still piling up the dead in France. How did his thinking react to the rendezvous with death at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, or Arras? The battle of Verdun alone, which lasted from February to December 1916, caused an estimated 700,000 casualties.

  When Jack returned from Great Bookham, he wrote to his father about the visit, pleading with him to come and see him. Jack admitted in the letter to being homesick. More importantly, Jack also admitted that he was not always what he should have been in his relationship with his father. From the letter it is obvious that he had a deep desire to see his father and to hold on to as much of his old home life as possible.

  Albert resisted what was probably the warmest letter he was ever to receive from his son. This resistance hurt Jack deeply, so it is understandable Mrs. Janie Moore soon filled the gap in his desperately lonely life. She called on him in London while visiting her sister at the War Office. When Jack found it impossible to be sent to a convalescent home in Ireland, he chose to go to Ashton Court in Bristol to be near to her. He still faced the possibility that he might have to return to those long and crowded trenches of France, with their screaming shells and mercilessly raking bullets.

  News eventually came of the fate of Jack’s friend and Janie’s son, Paddy Moore. He had last been seen on 24 March, defending a position against superior numbers of the enemy. After he had been taken prisoner, he had overthrown his guards and got back to his own lines, only to be sent over again. He was wounded in the leg, and as he was being bandaged he was shot through the head and died instantaneously.

  Now Jack Lewis and Janie Moore were drawn even closer, and Jack did not forget his promise to look after her. Was he in love with her, infatuated with her? Or was she simply like a second mother? It is a question only he could fully answer.

  He was twenty, she was forty-six. He called her Mother, or Minto, and she called him Boysie, and C.S. That she was extremely kind, well read, very hospitable, often autocratic, distinctly anti-Christian, and heartbroken, is indisputable. Now four months into his convalescence, Jack pointed out to his father that his friends were laughingly suggesting that his Irish father was a mythical creation; but still Albert did not go to see his son.

  The Irish proverb states, “It’s a long road that has no turning.” Suddenly, Jack’s tortuous road in life turned around what was for him a very pleasant corner. The publisher Heinemann accepted a collection of his poems entitled Spirits in Bondage. Jack had been writing the poems since he was fifteen; he shaped together his collection at Ashton Court and then sent it to Heinemann. Jack actually went up to London and met the great Mr. Heinemann himself. Heinemann informed Jack that the novelist John Galsworthy, author of The Forsythe Saga, had seen the typescript of Jack’s book and wanted to publish one of his poems in his new magazine Reveille.

  The overall message of his poems is deeply pessimistic, and speaks of a “Lord” who knows no pity and has a diabolical, malevolent nature. If there was a God—and the poet Jack did not believe there was—He was outside the world of humankind and did not care about our world.

  Jack’s fifty-two poems, written between Easter 1915 and his going up to Oxford in 1917, had been called originally The Metrical Meditations of a Cod. Anybody from Ulster will tell you that calling someone a “cod” covers anything from eccentricity to self-deprecation. In truth, it is an affectionate term for behaviour that is endearing, though it may be slightly embarrassing. It seems to me that Jack was doing what a lot of Ulster people do. They know they have a talent, but they try to hide it under a cover of self-deprecation in order to protect themselves from those who do not like “tall poppies.” This “poppy” who had emerged from the trenches of France would grow very tall indeed; but it would take a long time before his fellow Ulstermen would appreciate his genius. He wrote Spirits in Bondage under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, admitting he wanted anonymity from officers and men in the army who might criticise him. Jack would have to travel much further down life’s road before he would become immune to what the critics thought of him.

  A happy outcome of Heinemann’s interest in Jack’s little book of poems was Albert Lewis’s attention to and encouragement in the project. It brought a temporary reconciliation between them. However, after two more moves in his convalescence, one to Perham Down in Hampshire and the other to Eastbourne in Sussex, Jack found he was unable to get leave to go home to Belfast in December 1918. To almost indescribable international relief, the Armistice had been signed in November; but was any kind of truce possible between the often strange and distant father and his deeply hurting son? To Jack’s surprise, leave was suddenly granted, and he took the journey home, unannounced. What were his feelings as the Irish shoreline came in sight once more? How did he react in his spirit as he viewed again the Holywood Hills on the portside of the ferry?

  As the ship docked at the old familiar port of his school day voyages and he travelled through East Belfast, did Jack wonder how he would be received? As he saw the tower of St. Mark’s, Dundela, did he reflect on his atheism? As he came near Campbell College, did he think long thoughts on his past, closer relationship with his father? Across his native Province, tens of thousands of homes had been emptied of the flower of Ulster’s manhood. Enlistment in the war had been huge; a multitude of men had “taken the shilling”—an earnest (token), pronounced in Ulster ern’st—from Recruitment Sergeants. At Christmas 1918, the enlistment song must have had a ghost-like ri
ng across all the hills of Ireland:

  Don’t take the shillin’ lad;

  Don’t for heaven’s sake.

  Don’t take the shillin’ lad,

  Or your mother’s heart will break.

  You’re the only son that’s left to me;

  Don’t let us part.

  Don’t take the shillin’ lad,

  Or you’ll break your Mother’s heart.

  Thoughts of his blue-eyed mother must have filled his mind as he entered the familiar gate of Little Lea. The guns of Arras were silent now; the torment of shelling and slaughter were over. It was the morning of 27 December, and he was back in Ireland. Remembrance of the birth of the Prince of Peace had just passed; Jack Lewis, who now called that Prince a pitiless Lord, had come home.

  Warren Lewis noted in his diary that day that he, Jack, and his father had lunch and then went for a walk. Warren described the experience as if an evil dream of four years’ duration had vanished, and they were back in the year 1913. That evening, the first together in a long time, they had dinner with champagne. As the New Year opened upon a heavily bloodstained Europe, Jack’s thoughts turned again to Oxford.

  He returned on 13 January 1919 to a University haunted with sadness. Jack attended the first meeting of the Junior Common Room. The minutes were read of the last meeting, held in 1914. There were many empty places. The poet Vera Britten wrote some evocative words that reflect the sadness of the Oxford in which Jack now lived. Vera had achieved the success of getting to Oxford University; but she gave up her longed-for education to become a first-class nurse in the most dreadful conditions. At Etaplas, in 1917, she wrote these words:

  But still the stars above the camp shine on,

  Giving no answer for our sorrow’s ease.2

  The stars still shone above Oxford; but they still were silent as to why some lives were taken, and some were not.

  Jack was now keen to plunge into his academic work and was relishing the beauty of Oxford in that first post-war winter. Together with other ex-soldiers, he was mercifully excused the formerly compulsory Responsions exam, with its dreaded mathematics. He was able to take up again where he had left off, reading Classical Honour Moderations, in which he took a First. This was an examination in Latin and Greek, involving the study of Homer, Virgil, and other great classical writers, poets, orators, and historians. He sat the examination in 1920. He then turned to his final Honours School, usually called “Greats.” This was an in-depth study of Greek and Roman civilisation, with a study of Greek or Latin historians and philosophers (including Plato and Aristotle) in the original languages. On top of all this study, Jack was required to study modern philosophy from Descartes onwards. He took a First in Literae Humaniores (the name for the whole Arts course) in 1922.

  After taking his First, Jack competed by examination for a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was unsuccessful. If the disability in his thumbs had led him into writing, this failure led him to take a degree in English Literature and Language, and consequently to write his future significant works in English literary criticism. Truly, failure can lead to our greatest achievements.

  In October 1922 Jack entered Oxford Honours School of English Language and Literature, and completed a formidable year of intense studies. He was required to study Anglo-Saxon (Old English), Middle English, and Modern English Philology. He had also to take a paper called Modern English that required a historical knowledge of English from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. He took a First on 4 August 1923.

  There are highs and lows through these years of study in Jack’s life. The former mentioned rift with his father worsened; Mrs. Moore was at the heart of it. Albert felt that the kind-hearted Jack was being cajoled by the woman’s suffering. Janie Moore and her daughter Maureen, whom Jack now regarded as family, moved to 28 Warenford Road, Oxford, to be near him. After a year in college, Jack moved there to live with them. Over the next four years they lived in eight different houses; they were to live in rented houses for eleven years. Albert was jealous of Mrs. Moore’s place in his son’s life. Jack’s visits to Ireland became less frequent; and in July 1919 he had a serious quarrel with his father over money. Warren considered Jack’s relationship with Mrs. Moore a mystery. The whole disagreement became ugly, and Jack later viewed his treatment of his father as abominable, and as a sin. The truth is that his father was by no means easy to handle, and that the faults were not all on Jack’s side.

  However, there were highs, too, in those first years at Oxford. One of them was the beginning of his life-long friendship with Arthur K. H. Jenkin. Arthur, a man from Redruth in Cornwall, was later to become a journalist and a broadcaster. He was to be famous as a writer of books on Cornwall, particularly his one-thousand-page, sixteen-part series Mines and Miners of Cornwall. Arthur was known as “the Voice of the Tinners.” Dr. Jenkin, who died in 1980, taught Jack Lewis something extremely precious: how to look away from self, and enjoy a thing for what it is. It was a zest, Jack said, for “the quiddity of things”; i.e., the inherent nature or essence of something or someone. Jack was later to apply this ability to the worship and contemplation of God. To put it simply, we often look up, and then we spoil what we’ve been enjoying by looking in. Jack explained this error brilliantly, applying it to poetry: he said we make a spectacle of the poet, rather than making him a pair of spectacles.

  Jenkin and Jack went for glorious walks and bicycle rides together, enjoying whatever atmosphere offered itself at that particular moment—whether it was a dripping wood, a windy ridge, or a moonlit deer park. If anything was ugly, Jenkin taught Jack to look for its quiddity!

  Two more men who became lifelong friends entered Jack’s life at this time. The first was Owen Barfield, who went up to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1919. Jack said that his friendship with Owen was like two raindrops joining on a window. They deeply shared their interests together, but Barfield looked at them from a different angle. Night after night they would argue, far into the night. Even as they took walks in the country they would have intellectual dogfights. Lewis always held Barfield in deep affection, even though Barfield was never afraid to interrupt Jack when he was in the full flow of an argument. Barfield always tried to make Jack define what he was saying. Barfield, deeply into the relationship between words and their meaning, was to write many books. Jack was to dedicate his children’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Barfield’s daughter, Lucy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to his son, Geoffrey.

  Through Barfield, Jack met his friend Alfred C. Harwood, who had gone up to Christ Church College in the Hilary Term of 1919. Later to become a publisher and marry The Honourable Daphne Olivier, Harwood had an outstanding characteristic: he was implacably imperturbable. He must have been greatly tested in the heated and constantly argumentative world of his immediate friends.

  Harwood and Barfield started something special in Jack’s life that would bring him some of the happiest hours he ever spent. These were Walking Tours, in which several friends would arrive at a pre-arranged place by train or car and then go walking for several days. They would spend the night in small hotels or village pubs and, after the exhilaration of a long day’s walk and before a blazing fire, their animated conversation would range from this world to the next.

  Jack deeply enjoyed these times and felt that he did not deserve such pleasure. No doubt, during these golden hours of his life, his thoughts turned to his fellow soldiers of the recent war. Maybe the army chaplain, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, otherwise known as Woodbine Willie, said it best:

  There are many kinds of sorrow

  In this world of Love and Hate;

  But there is no sterner sorrow

  Than a soldier’s for his mate.3

  Jack Lewis was to reach grand heights as a writer; but great intellectual though he was, his pleasures were simple. Maybe we ought to call them profound: love of nature, affection for friends, and appreciation of the sheer art of conversation by a roaring fire or on a w
indy hillside. His walking-friends all preferred to walk on soil that was chalky, because such soil is dry; and they liked the grass to be short under their feet. Arthur Harwood did most of the planning for these walks, and Jack humorously called him “lord of the walks.”

  Jack also found that good music brought nourishment to his spirit, and he would go to concerts with Maureen Moore or others of his circle of friends. Long after the performance, the thrill of the music stayed with him.

  Jack had now obtained three First Class Degrees; he had won the Chancellor’s Prize for an English essay; gifted and sympathetic friends surrounded him; but he was also surrounded by poverty. He entered one of the lowest points in his life. He did not have a suitable job, and he began suffering from indigestion, headaches, and panic attacks. In his diary he mentioned, even, that he pondered death. But for his father’s generosity, he would have been unable to continue at Oxford. At this time he was passed over for many fellowships.

  On his spiritual journey Jack had retreated from any idea of the supernatural and tried to live by good sense. He had also withdrawn from any consideration of the occult and romanticism. This withdrawal was due to his meeting both a tragic Irish parson who had lost his faith and Janie’s brother, Dr. Robert Moore, who had lost his mind. At this time, Jack believed that the doctor had lost his mind through flirting with, amongst other things, theosophy, Yoga, spiritualism, and psychoanalysis. Having to hold the doctor to the ground on one occasion was, for Jack, a distinctly frightening experience. The doctor died soon after of a heart attack. Jack turned away from any idea of immortality, and the joy he had known he now looked upon simply as an aesthetic experience. When his friends Barfield and Harwood became followers of the doctrines of Rudolph Steiner and Anthroposophy, he was genuinely shocked. He strongly disagreed with Anthroposophy, the doctrine of immortality, reincarnation, and Karma, seeking to optimise physical and mental health and to place man in union with God.