C. S. Lewis: A Biography. A. Wilson N.

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СКАЧАТЬ relaying his sunny hope that he would like Wynyard, Jack was writing to Albert, ‘My dear Papy, Mr. Capron said something I am not likely to forget – “Curse the boy” (behind Warnie’s back) because Warnie did not bring his jam to tea, no one ever heard such a rule before. Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply CANNOT wait in this hole until the end of term … Your loving son Jack.’⁴

      But for one reason or another, they stayed. The brothers loathed Capron and his mincing, affected manner of speech. Oh was Eoh, beer was be-ah. For his part Capron persistently picked on Warnie. He asserted that Warnie was lazy, a cheat, and – the final outrage which nearly did cause Albert Lewis to withdraw his sons when he heard of it – that he had a cousin in the Canadian Mounted Police. It is not possible, at this distance, to discover either how Capron dreamed up this fanciful notion, or why it was deemed so offensive.

      C. S. Lewis remained obsessed by Wynyard for the rest of his life. Although he spent only eighteen months as a pupil there, he devoted nearly a tenth of his autobiography to describing it, in the most lurid terms, as a ‘concentration camp’. He went further, and called it Belsen. Wynyard was important as the place where he first became conscious of two things which must have already formed part of the texture of his Irish childhood. Here he met them in unfamiliar English guises: corporal punishment and Christianity. ‘Everyone talks of sadism nowadays,’ Lewis wrote in his autobiography (Do they? the reader naturally replies), ‘ … but I question whether Capron’s cruelty had any erotic element in it.’ The question he does not ask is to what extent Capron’s floggings contributed to his own, Lewis’s, erotic development. Capron flogged the boys indiscriminately – for getting sums wrong (and there were a lot of sums on the curriculum at Wynyard), for breaking the innumerable rules of the place – and sometimes for no reason at all. During one term, Capron’s wife died, and it had the effect of making him even more indiscriminately violent: so much so that his son, known as Wee-wee to the boys, felt obliged to apologize on his father’s behalf – an apology which in itself was an excruciating torture to Jack, who had ‘learnt to fear and hate emotion’.

      Almost the most interesting thing about Lewis’s memories of Wynyard, however, is his assertion that Capron was the first person to teach him undiluted Christianity, ‘as distinct from general “up-lift”’. The impression given in Surprised by Joy is that he grew up in a religiously wishy-washy household. No emphasis is given to his father’s profound piety, nor to the theological preoccupations of grandfather Lewis, who wandered about the corridors of Little Lea muttering psalms. It was at Wynyard that he began seriously to pray, to read the Bible and to attempt seriously to obey his conscience.

      His initial reaction to the school religion, however, was less than favourable. Capron took the boys to worship at the church of St John’s, Watford, an Anglo-Catholic shrine very little different, when judged from the Ulster viewpoint, from the abominations of Rome herself. ‘In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars,’ Jack wrote at the time, ‘the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s table (which they have the vanity to call an altar) and pray to the Virgin.’ But when he looked back on it from the perspective of middle age, and when he had more or less adopted this ‘Romish’ style of religion for himself, he decided that ‘the effect … was entirely good’.⁵

      The psychosexual effects of living under a reign of terror, where everything was punishable by the cane; the effects, moreover, of having been introduced to this system at the very moment when he had lost his mother and begun to ‘fear and hate emotion’ – all these were to make themselves felt in Lewis’s later development. For the time being, he reacted as he was always to react to grown-ups with whom he was unable to make friends. He made Capron into a monster. It may very well be the case that the man was a monster, but since we may only view him through the creative lens of the Lewis brothers’ memory, there is no knowing what he was like in other people’s minds. To judge from the fact that Warnie, of good average intelligence, had sunk back badly in his school work by the time he went on to public school, we may believe them when they bemoan the academic standard at Wynyard House. In memory the place was like Doctor Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa. The tyranny which Capron exercised, not only over the boys but also over his own grown-up children, seems like something in Victorian fiction, though in many ways he sounds more like a character in Ivy Compton-Burnett than one in F. Anstey.

      Both boys were so unhappy at Wynyard that they wrote to their father with the suggestion that they should go to Campbell College, a day school in Belfast. ‘Jack and I have been thinking it over,’ Warnie wrote, ‘and we both think we would like to go to Campbell College. Of course, as you say the boys may not be gentlemen, but no big school is entirely composed of gentlemen, and I think English boys are not so honest or gentlemanly as most Irish ones.’⁶

      Poor Albert was too wrapped up in the after-effects of bereavement to give intelligent attention to the education of his sons. He continued to struggle on with his work in the police courts, and this brought solace. But in solitude he was seized with irrational fears, and hypochondria began to take a grip on him. He was convinced, for example, that he was diabetic, and no number of visits to the doctor, followed by tests and negative results, would put his mind at rest. He was just not in a position to make a decision. He wrote to Capron suggesting that he should withdraw his sons from Wynyard, but not being on the spot, and being constitutionally unable to stray from home to investigate the school for himself, he accepted Capron’s word that all was well. In the event it was to Capron, rather than to his older mentor Kirkpatrick, that Albert Lewis entrusted the choice of Warnie’s public school. Capron made the perfectly sensible suggestion that Warnie should be sent to Malvern College, and in the autumn term of 1909 to Malvern he went.

      This would have been the moment for Jack to leave Wynyard, but Capron was by now in desperate straits and he played on the gullible Mr Lewis to persuade him to leave Jack in his care. In fact, his beatings and canings had grown so extreme that a parent had brought a High Court action against Capron, and the scandal caused by this meant that his pupils dwindled to nine in number, of whom one was Jack. The case was dropped, but it left Capron a ruined man, and in the end, since he was a priest in orders, he looked about for a cure of souls. He became the rector of Radstock in Hertfordshire, and died in 1911 aged sixty. His epitaph was composed of two words – JESU MERCY.

      In 1910, then, C. S. Lewis was separated from one of the great monsters in his life, but memory lovingly cultivated Capron until, larger than life, he was ready to step on to the pages of Surprised by Joy. The very year that Wynyard collapsed, 1910, was also memorable for one of the key theatrical experiences of the Lewis brothers’ lives. In the Christmas vacation, their second cousin, Hope Ewart, took them to see Barrie’s Peter Pan. It is one of the Grand Conspicuous Omissions in Lewis’s autobiography that he says nothing about this experience which, to judge from the Lewis Papers, was momentous. For there was no children’s story more apposite to his life than that of the little boy who could not grow up, and who had to win his immortality by an assertion of metaphysical improbabilities – in this case a belief in fairies.

      After the collapse of Wynyard, Jack achieved his wish of being sent to Campbell College for the autumn term of 1910. It was here that the English master, J. A. McNeill, introduced him to Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum – ‘much the most important thing’ to have happened to him while he was at the school, so far as Lewis himself was concerned. In Surprised by Joy he makes a point about his discovery of that poem which holds good for the development in personal literary taste of many another reader:

      Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poem for classicists, to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homeric echoes … For me, the relation between Arnold and Homer worked the other way. I knew nothing of Homer; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad, I liked it partly because it was for me reminiscent of Sohrab.СКАЧАТЬ