C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ made Lewis’s double life impossible, and he was forced to give up his room. ‘This week end, as you gather, I am again spending in Univ.,’ he wrote to Greeves on 8 July. ‘Do you know, Ami, I am more homesick for this College than ever I was for Little Lea. I love every stone in it.’⁹

      After a brief leave in Belfast (9–11 August) Jack wrote to his father on 27 August 1917:

You must have been wondering what had come over me, but I hope that the crowded time I have been having since I left home will serve as some excuse. First of all came the week at Warwick, which was a nightmare … We came back on Saturday, and the following weekend I spent with Moore at the digs of his mother who, as I mentioned, is staying at Oxford. I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself. On Wednesday as you know, Warnie was up here and we had a most enjoyable afternoon and evening together, chiefly at my rooms in Univ. How I wish you could have been there too. But please God I shall be able to see you at Oxford and show you my ‘sacred city’ in happier times.¹⁰

‘The next amusement on our programme’, he wrote again on 10 September, ‘is a three-day bivouac up in the Wytham hills. As it has rained all the time for two or three days, our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud. You know how I always disapproved of realism in art!’¹¹

This was followed by an exam on 25 September 1917, which seems to have been little more than a formality. The next day Jack was given a temporary commission in the Army and a month’s leave. Albert Lewis waited in vain for Jack to come home, and he was saddened and puzzled to learn that Jack had gone to Bristol to visit Paddy Moore and his family. ‘I suppose you must have been wondering what had become of your prodigal son,’ Jack wrote to his father on 3 October. ‘We got away from Keble on Saturday, and instead of staying in Oxford with the Moores I came down here to their home in Bristol … On Monday a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford, went on so terribly that Mrs Moore took my temperature and put me to bed, where I am writing this letter.’¹²

      This stay in Bristol was to have far-reaching consequences. Lewis and Paddy, and indeed Mrs Moore too, would have known that the slaughter of young officers at this period in the war was very great and that their chances of surviving the war were slim. However, despite Paddy’s conviction that he would come back, Maureen was to recall hearing her brother and Jack promise one another that if only one survived the war the survivor would look after Paddy’s mother and Jack’s father. Mrs Moore was to mention the promise to Albert Lewis after the war. While Jack was still with the Moores in Bristol Paddy learned that he had been placed in the Rifle Brigade, and he crossed to France ahead of Lewis.

      In the end Jack didn’t reach Belfast until Friday, 12 October, and he was with his father for only a few days. On the 16th he was gazetted into the Somerset Light Infantry, and on Thursday, 18 October he left home to join his regiment at Crownhill, South Devon.

      While at home Jack had talked with Arthur Greeves, and the first suggestion that Lewis’s feelings for Mrs Moore approached infatuation comes in the letter he wrote Arthur from his army base at Crownhill on 28 October.

Since coming back and meeting a certain person, I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try and forget my various statements and not to refer to the subject … And now to tell you all the news. I am quite fairly comfortable here, we are in huts: but I have a room to myself with a fire in it and so am quite snug.¹³

But suddenly the dreaded summons to the front reached him. At 5.55 p.m. on 15 November 1917 Jack wired desperately to his father: ‘Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. Jack.’¹⁴

‘No one in Great Britain getting Jack’s wire would have had a moment’s doubt that he was on the eve of embarkation for overseas service,’¹⁵ wrote Warnie. But Albert Lewis simply wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’¹⁶ Even more desperately Jack wired back at 11.20 the following morning: ‘Orders France. Reporting Southampton 4 p.m. Saturday. If coming wire immediately.’¹⁷

Albert Lewis did not come, and Jack crossed to France on 17 November 1917. ‘This is really a very sudden and unpleasant surprise,’ he wrote to his father from France on 21 November. ‘I had no notion of it until I was sent off on my forty-eight hours final leave, in fact I thought they were ragging me when they told me. I am now at a certain very safe base town where we live comfortably in huts as we did at Crownhill.’¹⁸

Lewis arrived at the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November. To his great surprise he found that the captain of his company, P.G.K. Harris, was none other than ‘Pogo’ who taught him at Cherbourg School. Years before, Lewis said, the flashy Pogo had instilled in him the desire for ‘glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know’.¹⁹ The years since Cherbourg and the war had changed both pupil and master. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy, ‘As I emerged from the shaft into the dug-out and blinked in the candle-light I noticed that the Captain to whom I was reporting was a master whom I had liked more than I had respected at one of my schools. I ventured to claim acquaintance. He admitted in a low, hurried voice that he had once been a schoolmaster, and the topic was never raised between us again.’²⁰ Lewis may never have known of Harris’s heroism. For his bravery at Verchain in October 1918 Captain Harris was awarded the Military Cross; his gallantry at Preseau on 1 November 1918 won him a glowing place in military histories.²¹

Meanwhile, Albert Lewis was very worried about his son and, believing that he would be safer in the artillery than in the infantry, he contacted Colonel James Craig, MP for the East Division of Co. Down, asking if he could get Jack transferred. ‘I am at present in billets in a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,’ Jack wrote to his father on 13 December.²² As Mr Lewis laboured to have his son transferred, Jack fell ill at the beginning of February 1918 with what the troops called ‘trench fever’ and the doctors PUO (pyrexia, unknown origin). He was sent for a pleasant three weeks at No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport.

He remained in hospital for the rest of the month, with one slight relapse early on, writing more and more nostalgic letters to Arthur Greeves about their quiet days together in Belfast and his own brief stay in Oxford. Arthur was worried that, because of Lewis’s love for Mrs Moore, their friendship was imperilled. ‘I must admit,’ Jack wrote to him on 2 February 1918, ‘fate has played strange with me since last winter: I feel I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it … As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills … Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life.’СКАЧАТЬ