C. S. Lewis: A Biography

–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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