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

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СКАЧАТЬ the Lewis brothers’ subsequent imaginative experiences. In memory, they returned to it again and again – above all to the ‘Little End Room’, an attic sitting-room which was created for them as a refuge from the grown-ups. Warnie, however, had less than a month of the new house before being sent away to boarding school. They moved in on 21 April 1905, and on 10 May he was sent off to Wynyard House near Watford. ‘Warren left home for school tonight for the first time,’ Albert wrote in his diary. ‘Fearful wrench for me. Badge behaved very pluckily. Flora took him over. May God bless the venture.’³

      In the last resort, the Lewises, like many middle-class parents, had chosen a school for their son ‘blind’, relying not on their own sense or experience but on the advice of an educational ‘agency’ in London called Gabbitas & Thring. This curious institution has the dual purpose of finding both staff to teach in private schools and parents trusting enough to put their children in these teachers’ charge. Since a high proportion of English writers have at one stage or another been obliged to earn their living as schoolmasters, it is not surprising that the agency has been so often mentioned in the pages of mid-twentieth-century literature. W. H. Auden dubbed it Rabbitarse & String, while Evelyn Waugh used it as the catalyst by which his first fictional hero, Paul Pennyfeather, was transformed into an usher at Llanabba Castle. In Decline and Fall, the agency is called Church & Gargoyle.

      ‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly,’ said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.’⁴

      Wynyard was to turn out to be no better than ‘School’, but this was a fact that Jack Lewis was not to discover for himself until nearly three years had elapsed. Up to that point he had the run of Little Lea; and he was educated entirely at home. His governess was called Miss Harper, and his mother herself took charge of teaching him French and Latin. He seems to have disliked his governess – who was a Presbyterian. A theological lecture interspersed between the sums was one of his first intimations that there was Another World in which Christians were supposed to believe. He preferred the other world of his own invention, and by the time he was nine he had already assembled a considerable œuvre, chiefly relating to Animal-land and the dressed animals, but also including a number of plays. Those looking in this early juvenilia for signs of the later Lewis will be disappointed. There is none of the sense in it which you get in the Narnia stories of ‘another world’, of the numinous or the strange. Worse, his childish fantasies are really rather dull. What sets them apart is their fluency, and the fact that they reveal him as a precise, attentive reader. ‘My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character. But there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’⁵ He thought this meant he was training himself to be a novelist but it would he truer to see in the juvenilia Lewis training himself to be a critic. The stories and plays are at their liveliest when he is echoing another writer. In the stage directions to Littera Scripta, for instance, a play he wrote much later (at the age of thirteen), there is all the unactable novelistic quality of Shaw: ‘Mr Bar in evening dress is standing in the open drawing-room doorway, with his back to the stage. He is a stout, cheerful little fellow, who carries an atmosphere of impudence and unpaid bills.’⁶

      To the end of his days Lewis was a brilliant parodist – always the sign of a good critic. The stories reveal not that he was trying to escape the grotesque (as he saw it) world of servants and relations, but that he would best come to terms with them when he had re-invented them in the pages of his notebooks. In addition to his parents and Miss Harper, there were Maude the maid, Martha the cook and his old grandfather Lewis, who came to live in the house in April 1907, a prematurely senile presence, muttering psalms to himself in an upstairs bedroom. For much of the time from 1905 until 1907, Jacks was left alone, wallowing in books. When he wasn’t reading he was either missing Warnie, away at school, and writing him letters, or thinking about the games they would play when he got home.

      ‘Hoora!’ he wrote in 1907. ‘Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into my room, we shake hands and begin to talk.’ He wrote that when he was nine, but he could easily have written it when he was twenty-nine or fifty-nine.

      Little Jacks himself we can glimpse in his fragment of autobiography – ‘My life during the Xmas holidsas of 1907 by Jacks or Clive Lewis author of “Building of the Promanad”, “Toyland” “Living races of Mouse-Land” etc. Dedicated to Miss Maude Scott.’

      I begin my life after my 9th birthday, on which I got a book from Papy and a post-card album from Mamy. I have a lot of enymays, however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat. Maude is far worse than Mat but she thinks she is a saint. I rather like Mat, but I HATE Maude, she is very nasty and bad tempered, also very ugly, as you can see in the picture …

      Having disposed of the servants, our young author turns his attention to his parents. ‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectacles, kniting her chief industry etc. etc. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generaly wearing a jersy.’ The thick lips were to strike others later in life. ‘Oh, he was a brute,’ one of his colleagues in the English Faculty at Oxford once recalled. ‘You could always tell when he was going to start an argument, he would push forward his thick lower lip.’

      His knowledge of his close resemblance to his own father was to leave Lewis. Albert would become a more and more fantastical creature in his son’s imagination – perhaps in fact. But in those tranquil Little Lea years before the great calamity befell them all, and before Jacks entered puberty, there were times of great happiness. The leisurely Irish quality of Albert’s life is captured by one of his wheezes about a neighbouring peer who annually allowed a cricket match in his park. The luncheon provided on these occasions was so generous that in the afternoon ‘there were few steady men on the field’. The wicketkeeper was one of the few who had remained sober, and when the drunken batsman lurched out several yards from the pitch to meet his ball and missed it, the wicketkeeper clearly stumped him. ‘How’s that, umpire?’ he said to the umpire, who was steadying himself on a bat. To which the umpire replied, ‘What the hell is it your business? Go on with the bloody match.’

      These were not only the days when such amusing things happened; they were also the days when the family still laughed about Albert’s ‘wheezes’. The house moreover became more and more prosperous and comfortable. In May 1907, a telephone was installed.⁷ The first person Jacks tried to ring was a neighbour of about his age called Arthur Greeves who, like Warnie, was to be a constant in his life. The Greeves family were flax-spinners – the chief industry of Belfast apart from shipbuilding. Jacks’s friendship with Arthur was not to blossom until they were in their teens. In early boyhood, Warnie was really his only friend, the one with whom he shared his fantasies. And it was noticeable that from an early age the younger brother dominated over the elder. There is real forceful bossiness in the letter he wrote to Warnie in May 1907 after the telephone was installed. ‘I have got an adia [sic] you know the play I was writing. I think we will try and act it with new stage don’t say annything about it not being dark, we will have it upstairs and draw the thick curtains and the night one, the scenery is rather hard but still I think we shall do it.’

      Warnie was by now twelve years old and his parents were starting to wonder about where he should be educated after Wynyard. Luckily, advice was to hand from old Mr Kirkpatrick, whose litigious nature had not been satisfied with suing a clockmaker for spoiling his clock. A few years later a parent who had entrusted Kirkpatrick with the tuition of a son had been slow in paying an agreed fee and Kirkpatrick had once more enlisted Albert Lewis’s help as a solicitor to extract the money СКАЧАТЬ