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

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СКАЧАТЬ his music and the philosophy of his dramatic poems, all other composers seem but caricatures and ghosts.’⁹

      The masters at Cherbourg cannot have failed to recognize that they had in their midst a child prodigy. It would seem too as if this was the period of his childhood when he was most able to mix with other boys on their own terms. He tells us that he made friends with the children at Cherbourg, as he had not at Wynyard. And the school magazine records that he even played for the school cricket eleven (though, given that there were only seventeen boys in the school, it may have been impossible to avoid this). He played twelve innings and his highest score was ten. The author of the sports page described Lewis as a ‘stonewaller … only very moderate in the field’.

      When the time came for him to sit the scholarship examination to Malvern College, Lewis once again fell ill. He had to take the exams in bed, in the school sanatorium. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this, he was awarded a scholarship to Malvern College. The boys of Cherbourg were given a holiday – which took the form of an outing to the British Camp (the Ancient British enclosure to the west of the town where Caractacus made his last stand against the Romans), followed by an excellent tea. At home, his father bought Jack an édition de luxe of Kipling’s works signed by Kipling himself. ‘I am not making too much of the scholarship,’ Albert wrote to his son. ‘It is not the scholarship I am so proud of but the circumstances in which it was won.’ He signed this letter, as he so often and truthfully did, ‘Your ever loving Paps’. But the love was no longer reciprocated. Albert, who was intensely lonely without his boys during the school terms, would wait eagerly for Warnie and Jack to return from Malvern. They would be three chums, all boys together. But this was not what his sons wanted. Albert’s ‘wheezes’, stored up in memory and written down in his notebooks, were not what they wanted to hear.

      He was bursting to tell his tales. Like the occasion in the police courts when he found himself prosecuting a girl called Maria Volento for allegedly assaulting a man in her father’s ice-cream parlour. Assuming her to be an Italian with no grasp of English, Albert was almost certain that she would need the assistance of an interpreter; but he began to question her in English, very slowly, ‘in the best nursery style’.

      ‘Just try to explain in your own words what happened to you last night.’

      Her reply, in the broadest Ulster brogue, was: ‘Thon fella [pointing at the prisoner] clodded a tumbler at me and it wud have hut me only I deuked ut.’¹⁰

      But to his sons, his self-confessed tendency to get hold of the wrong end of the stick was merely exasperating. In addition to conversational crossed wires and misapprehensions, he was capable of pure non sequiturs. ‘Did Shakespeare spell his name with an E at the end?’ asked Warnie. ‘I believe—’ said Jack, but Albert interrupted: ‘I very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all.‘¹¹

      The portrait of Albert Lewis which emerges from Surprised by Joy is devastatingly cruel.

      ‘Liberty Hall, boys, Liberty Hall,’ as he delighted to quote. ‘What time would you like lunch?’ But we knew only too well that the meal which would otherwise have been at one had already been shifted in obedience to his lifelong preference to two or even two thirty; and that the cold meats which we had liked had been withdrawn in favour of the only food our father ever voluntarily ate – hot butcher’s meat, boiled, stewed or roast … and this to be eaten in mid afternoon in a dining room that faced south

      – on a day when the summer sun ‘was blistering the paint’ on the hot garden seats.

      In time, everything about Albert came to annoy Jack and Warnie. When Albert was dead, Jack looked back with nostalgia to ‘home and the way we hated it and the way we enjoyed hating it’. Warnie, likewise, remembered ‘Saturday evening tram-rides and visits to the Hippodrome with late supper afterwards’. But even these were a torment to Jack. He did not really enjoy the popular music-hall songs or musical comedies which gave such innocent pleasure to his father and brother. And when Albert got them tickets for some ‘popular’ opera such as Carmen, Jack could now loftily consider it completely inferior to Wagner. ‘One of the most noticeable results of the advent of Wagner’s works in England is the rather paradoxical fact that he has made much more popular than they formerly were the lyrical operas to which he was so much opposed,’ the young essayist of Cherbourg had written.¹² ‘They’re doing Carmen and Maritana,’ Albert told Jack enthusiastically, ‘and others that you and Warnie would rather like to hear.’¹³ Looking back on it all, Jack was to confess, ‘I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel in the week.’¹⁴

      So much for ‘our father’, as Albert is repeatedly called in the autobiography. In the autumn term of 1913, Jack began his career at Malvern College. The Lewis family’s relations with the school were already strained. Warnie’s career there had on the whole been happy and successful. He had submitted himself to the public-school system, played games and recovered some of the ability (which had been quite lost at Wynyard) of concentrating on academic tasks. He had even had some interesting contemporaries in the school, though perhaps the most interesting, the future novelist Michael Arlen (author of such amusing comedies as The Green Hat), made almost no impression on him whatsoever. In those days Arlen ‘was still an Armenian boy called Koyoumgjain’ and, as Warnie recalled, ‘He made no mark of any kind at school, being merely one of a trinity of “dagoes” of whom the other two were also in my house.’¹⁵

      So successful was Warnie’s career at school that there had even been talk of his becoming the head boy, when, in the summer of 1913, disaster had struck. He was caught smoking (a habit to which both Lewis brothers had been devoted for a number of years now) and asked to leave. After a certain amount of special pleading by Albert Lewis, it was agreed that Warnie would not actually be sacked, on condition that he voluntarily withdrew himself from the school by the next term. It was a great blow to his pride, and potentially a great setback to his professional life. For he had decided (or it had been decided for him) that he should go into the Army, and for this it was necessary to prepare for the entrance examination to the Officer Training College at Sandhurst. Since he could no longer do this at school, where could he go? In his distress, Albert naturally turned to his old mentor Mr Kirkpatrick, who had by then moved to a house near Great Bookham in Surrey. For the first time in years, the brothers were separated. While Warnie went off to stay with Kirkpatrick, Jack began the adventure of public-school life on his own.

      There is perhaps nowhere that the English appear more odious than within the confines of public schools. Lewis, who still nursed all his anti-English prejudice (though the beauty of the Malvern Hills did something to mitigate it), found little to love among his coevals. Above all, he hated the ‘fagging’ system – the notion, abolished now in the majority of boarding schools in England, but still widespread until ten or twenty years ago – that the junior boys of thirteen and fourteen should act as the servants of the older boys of seventeen or eighteen. Warren, who had thoroughly absorbed the public-school ethos, once remarked that ‘if junior boys weren’t fagged, they would become insufferable.’ Jack answered the charge that it was mere pride and self-conceit in the fags which made the fagging system objectionable by transferring it to an adult context.

      If some neighbouring V.I.P. had irresistible authority to call on you for any service he pleased at any hour when you were not in the office – if, when you came home on a summer evening, tired from work and with more work to prepare against the morrow, he could drag you on to the links and make you his caddy till the light failed – if at СКАЧАТЬ