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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       –SIX– THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918

      Lewis and the other boys were about to take part in trench warfare. The training they received was heartlessly casual. After only a few weeks’ drill at Keble, he was given some leave and returned to Univ, the only man in the college. ‘I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to. Some of these rooms were dust-sheeted, others were much as their owners had left them … ’ The important thing was that he did not go home to Ireland during this spell of leave. There were reasons for that. The journey, properly speaking, took two days. The Irish channel was patrolled by U-boats and there was the danger of the packet being hit by a torpedo. But the most important reason was that he did not love his father, and he did not want to go home. Albert Lewis, for his part, though worried sick, and angry that Jack’s brilliant career should be interrupted by the demands of soldiering, could not stir himself to visit his son in Oxford, even though Jack more than once invited him. Albert had a dread which was almost pathological of leaving the office routines. He hated travel. Also, unknown at this point to either of his sons, he had started to drink very heavily. He contented himself with writing letters to his Member of Parliament, Colonel Craig, trying to get Jack transferred to the Royal Artillery.

      It was natural, at this anxious period when the comforts of a true home were precisely what a boy needed, that Jack should have happily joined in with Paddy Moore’s people who visited him regularly from Bristol: his twelve-year-old sister Maureen and his mother Janie, a pretty blonde Irishwoman of forty-five. In August, Warnie got a short spell of leave from the Western Front, and Jack was persuaded to go back to Strandtown to spend the week with him. He had reached the point where he could not bear to see his father à deux, but with his still-loved brother it was a different matter. On 21 August, Warnie went back to France and Jack returned to Oxford for his only piece of practical training for trench warfare – a three-day bivouac in Wytham Woods. It was wet weather – ‘Our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud,’ he quipped to his father. To read on the boat, the P’daytabird had lent him a novel called The Angel of Pain by E. F. Benson which he now wanted back. ‘I will send you the Angel of Pain in a few days: just at present my friend Mrs. Moore has borrowed it.’¹

      Albert could not possibly have guessed that from now onwards Mrs Moore’s presence at Jack’s side was to be almost constant. At the end of September he got a month’s leave, and chose to spend nearly all of it with Paddy Moore and his family at 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. ‘On Monday, a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford went on so merrily that Mrs. Moore took my temperature and put me to bed,’ he wrote home. When the cold was better, he only had a week in which to dash home and see his father.

      The experience of being mothered, for the first time in his life since he was nine years old, was having a profound effect on Jack. The feelings of affection were not one-sided. Jack’s personality, which had so charmed Kirkpatrick, was also having a strong effect on Mrs Moore.

      That October, Paddy Moore and Lewis were parted. Lewis was gazetted to the Somerset Light Infantry and Paddy was assigned to a different regiment. But it was obvious that the links between Mrs Moore and Lewis were not to be severed. She wrote to Albert, ‘Your boy, of course, being Paddy’s room mate, we know much better than the others, and he was quite the most popular boy of the party; he is very charming and most likeable, and won golden opinions from everyone … ’ But from no one more than from Janie Moore herself. Where was Mr Moore, whom she referred to as ‘The Beast’? Somewhere in Ireland, it was thought. Jack was given to understand that he had treated her badly and failed to give her enough money. The Lewis family knew nothing of this and assumed that Mrs Moore was a widow.

      They had no idea that there was any crisis brewing in Jack’s life either of an emotional or of a practical character. In fact, he was about to be sent off to war. The call came in November. He was given forty-eight hours’ leave, after which he would be sent to France. Naturally, he went to Bristol to stay with Mrs Moore, and telegraphed to his father: ‘HAVE ARRIVED IN 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.’ To many parents, the significance of ‘REPORT SOUTHAMPTON SATURDAY’ would have been obvious: Southampton was where the troopships sailed from. But to Irish Albert, who had never sailed from Southampton, only from Liverpool or Belfast, the words meant nothing. He could not allow himself to believe that the words meant what they said. So he wired back ‘DONT UNDERSTAND TELEGRAM, PLEASE WRITE. P.’ By letter Jack spelt it all out. ‘Forty-eight hours is no earthly use to a person who lives in Ireland and would have to spend two days and nights travelling. Please don’t worry. I shall probably be a long time at the base as I have had so little training in England.’

      By the time this letter reached Strandtown, Jack was in France. Albert found the news overwhelming. ‘It has shaken me to pieces.’ He did not realize how it had shaken Jack, nor how his failure to come and say goodbye at that crucial emotional moment had helped to sever a few more threads of affection binding the son to his father and to his home. He could not have seen how much the shape of things to come was foreshadowed in the hasty scribble which he held in his hand as he trudged, half-drunk, from one empty room to the other at Little Lea. ‘Can’t write more now,’ Jack had said, ‘must go and do some shopping.‘ There can have been few other young officers in the British Isles at that period who, with only hours to spare before leaving for an almost certain death in the trenches, were required to perform menial domestic tasks. But it was to be part of Lewis’s relationship with Mrs Moore from the beginning that he ‘must go and do some shopping’.

      By the time of his nineteenth birthday, he was in the front-line trenches, near the village of Arras. Christmas was spent there. Back at Little Lea, Albert spent the day alone. He went to the early service at St Mark’s. ‘At times I was unable to repeat the responses. It is something more than sentiment and early associations that comforts a sorrowful man in this Holy Eucharist and leads him to look forward with firmer faith to the safety and salvation of those he loves … ’² He nevertheless felt furious with Jack for not responding to Colonel Craig’s attempts to get the boy transferred to an artillery regiment. Jack, however, had his reasons. ‘I must confess that I have become very attached to this regiment. I have several friends whom I should be sorry to leave and I am just beginning to know my men and understand the work.’

      School had been a nightmare which everyone expected him to enjoy. No one pretended that you should enjoy the Army, and this mysteriously made it more bearable.³ He found the camaraderie of the men, and of the senior officers, who were not in the least like the bloods of Malvern, much more to his taste. Even the ‘dugouts’ were not as bad as he had feared. ‘They are very deep, you go down them by a shaft of about 20 steps; they have wire bunks where a man can sleep quite snugly and braziers for warmth and cooking.’⁴ The trenches were also a place where ‘a man’, at least this man, could read. That January found him deeply absorbed in ‘Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, which I like even better’.

      In February, he went down with trench fever, or pyrexia – with a high temperature, and many of the symptoms of influenza. He was transferred to the Red Cross Hospital at Treport and wrote home for ‘some cheap edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’.⁵ СКАЧАТЬ