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

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СКАЧАТЬ Warnie’s level of reading, as well as to share his toys and fantasies. Both of them looked back on their nursery days together at Dundela Villas as an idyll. And it was out of that nursery that the passion for reading and writing developed which was to be their most striking characteristic in grown-up days. For C. S. Lewis the man, the happiest times were spent either reading or writing or talking about reading and writing with his brother or brother-substitutes.

      An early book-memory for C. S. Lewis was the publication of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin when he was five and Warnie was seven. ‘It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season but that is something like what happened.’ To Beatrix Potter, doubtless, C. S. Lewis owed the inspiration for his earlier essays in fiction, some of which were made when he was five or six. While Warnie, the future soldier and historian, was drawing ships and trains and writing histories of India, Jacks was inventing a place called Animal-land, peopled with ‘dressed Animals’. But these creatures were wholly unlike the subdued, ironical creations of Beatrix Potter. They were full-square portraits of the grown-ups surrounding Jacks and Warnie.

      Well before Jacks was seven years old, the two brothers had developed the habit of mythologizing the grown-ups, whose highly coloured antics both amused them and threatened the security of their alliance. They had inherited from their father the power to distort and fictionalize other people so that we, looking back at the Lewis family of that era, have the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between what any of them were actually like and the fantastical shape they assumed in the two brothers’ collective memory. The fact that the grown-ups were always a threat, as well as a comic turn, emphasized the sharp outlines of memory’s caricature.

      And the threat which they were hatching all through the nursery years was the threat of school. The choice which lay before Albert and Flora Lewis was whether to educate Jacks and Warnie as Irishmen or whether to turn them into English gentlemen. Several factors must be borne in mind here. One is that the ‘Irish situation’ from the Protestant point of view was getting worse and worse: that is to say that the formation of some form of Irish Catholic Republic independent of the English Crown looked more and more likely, and there was no certainty whatsoever at the time that the Province of Ulster (the Protestant six counties of the North) would be any more capable of retaining its links with Great Britain than the counties of the south. To anyone in favour of retaining the Union, but pessimistic about its future, the lure of an English education for their children would have seemed particularly strong.

      Then again, there was an element of snobbery in the decision. If the Hamiltons could boast a long line of respectable parsons and even a bishop in the blood, Flora’s mother’s family was even grander. They were related to Sir William and Lady Ewart of Glenmachan House, one of the gracious ‘ascendancy’ mansions with which Ireland had been adorned since the eighteenth century. The Lewises were frequent and welcome guests on this particular ‘rich man’s flowering lawns’: a far cry from the world of Grandfather Lewis’s childhood. The urge to gentrify itself which is endemic in the British middle class made it all the more difficult to contemplate giving the boys anything but ‘the best’. And ‘the best’ in this context meant an English private school.

      Neither Flora nor Albert Lewis knew anything about English schools, which was why they consulted Albert’s old headmaster from Lurgan College, W. T. Kirkpatrick or ‘Kirk’. Albert had been one of Kirk’s favourite pupils, as is made clear by the extremely sentimental letters which survive from the older to the younger man: ‘When you recall the days we spent in Lurgan, shall I confess it? Tears dim my usually tranquil vision.’⁹

      As far back as 1900, Kirkpatrick had enlisted Albert’s services as a lawyer in a matter of characteristic pettiness. Kirkpatrick, who was a wealthy man with private means, had retired early (aged fifty-one) and gone to live in England so that his only son could read electrical engineering at Manchester University while still living with his parents at home. Before leaving Ireland he had taken a clock to be cleaned by a man named Brown of Rosemary Street, Belfast. The clockmaker had spoilt the clock and Kirkpatrick had subsequently spent £3. 6s. having it repaired in Manchester. He was now trying to reclaim the money from the Irish clockmaker and was prepared if necessary to go to law.

      It was in the course of this strange affair that he made contact once more with Albert Lewis and the flood of his affection, together with an avaricious desire to screw the last penny from the clockmaker, gushed from his pen. ‘It was a privilege to have you for a pupil … I never forget you and never can. I felt instinctively that you had some sparks of the divine fire.’

      When Warnie approached the age when he might be sent to school, it was natural that Flora and Albert Lewis should consult the oracle. What about Campbell College, the best school in Belfast? Flora was evidently in favour, having been educated, and well educated, without having to go away. But Kirkpatrick’s advice was firm. ‘Pray convey my regards to your wife. I don’t think she would be satisfied with her boy going to Campbell as a day pupil, and in any case it will be good for the boy himself to be away, and look to his home as a holiday-heaven [sic].’¹⁰ This letter was written in October 1904. Kirkpatrick’s view of the matter was itself wildly irrational, for he was obviously capable of retaining in his head a snobbish, headmasterly veneration for English boarding schools and at the same time a healthy Irish vision of how appalling they are. This is revealed in a rather nasty letter he wrote to Albert Lewis somewhat later:

      When the black day comes that the mother’s darling must leave home, that he has so long bullied, some school is sought to break the fall. What shall it be? O, there are plenty. Demand soon creates supply. There are schools where everything is done for the little dears, where graduates are kept to help them trundle hoops and wipe their noses, where every luxury is guaranteed. True the charge is a bit stiff, but what of that? What are money considerations when weighed against the tears and sobs of separation? And then there is the appeal to snobbery, which never fails. The boys are all of a nice social grade. So they whisper: but as a matter of fact they are more likely to be the sons of PARVENU shopkeepers and the rich business class.¹¹

      Kirkpatrick here, with typical saeva indignatio, fires to left and right. By any rule of logic this should have dissuaded the Lewises from the very idea of an English boarding school, particularly since, when he was asked for the name of a specific prep school (i.e. a school for the seven-to-thirteen age group), Kirkpatrick was unable to supply a single one; nevertheless, in the mysterious way that these things happen, the correspondence of the Headmaster with his beloved old pupil had sealed the fate of the two little boys. But before that was to happen, there was another monumental change in their lives. They moved house.

       –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 СКАЧАТЬ