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

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СКАЧАТЬ would be to hear Kirkpatrick’s views on the relation between morality and religion. Kirkpatrick wrote back that

      it is a subject too wide, too vast, too dependent on time, place, heredity and social conditions to be treated adequately in a letter. It would take a SYMPOSIUM, or, as Cicero preferred to call it, a Convivium, to touch even on some aspects of what must always be the most profoundly interesting of all questions that deal with man’s spiritual nature and future destiny in the world.⁸

      Albert had to be content, instead, with receiving Kirkpatrick’s advice about a suitable school for Warnie. Winchester was ‘out of the question’, Cheltenham and Rugby were both possibilities. Indeed, Albert even got to the point of writing to a housemaster at Rugby and seeing if his boy could have a place there. Shrewsbury looked tempting. ‘You will do worse,’ Kirkpatrick advised, ‘especially if your boy is literary.’ It looked, however, as if Rugby would be the school for Warnie. But before that time, the sky darkened over Little Lea, and the paradise which young Jacks was inhabiting there with his parents and brother and servants and books was shattered for ever. For Albert Lewis 1908 was a year of unbelievable sorrows. Flora Lewis became seriously ill, and cancer was diagnosed. Since nurses were required night and day, Albert Lewis was compelled to ask his father, who had been living with the family for a year, to move out of Little Lea. Richard Lewis made the move in March. On 24 March he suffered a serious stroke and on 2 April he died. This was the first death of the year.

      Flora lasted another four months. Jack remembered the night when he was ill:

      crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too: and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before.

      It is hard to know whether it was worse to be Jacks, in the midst of all this suffering, or Warnie, away at school in England and terrified that his mother might at any minute die before he had the chance to see her for the last time.

      ‘My dear son,’ Albert warned him in a letter written shortly after Warnie’s thirteenth birthday, ‘it may be that God in his mercy has decided that you will have no person in the future to turn to but me.’ Warnie’s response was brave. ‘Write as often as you can and tell me all you can about Mammy. It is beastly for me here not being able to tell what is going on from day to day.’⁹

      In the event, she was to die in the summer holidays. By 11 August it was obvious that she did not have long to live. From her bedroom she could hear in the distance the Orange Lodge practising for the Apprentices’ march, blowing pipes and banging drums with what seemed like cruel force. ‘It’s a pity that it takes so long to learn that tune,’ she murmured. By the night of 20 August she had been wandering for a while in her talk, but she suddenly grasped Albert’s hand and said to the nurse, ‘Nurse, when you get married see that you get a good man who loves you and loves God.’

      The next night she was more composed, and again Albert sat up with her. ‘I spoke to her (nor was it the first time by any means that a conversation on heavenly things had taken place between us),’ he wrote, ‘sometimes begun by her, sometimes by me, of the goodness of God. Like a flash she said, “What have we done for him?” May I never forget that. She died at 6.30 on the morning of the 23rd August, my birthday. As good a woman, wife and mother, as God has ever given to man.’¹⁰

      On Flora’s mantelpiece there was a calendar with a Shakespearean quotation for each day of the year. The quotation for the day on which she died was from the fifth act of King Lear:

      Men must endure

      Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.

      Albert, who had lost his father and his wife in the space of four months, was to suffer a third blow only a fortnight later when his elder brother Joe also died.

      Albert’s grief over the summer had made him a poor companion to his sons, and he was now in no position, emotionally, to look after them on his own. Perhaps if he had been forced to do so by financial circumstances, things would have been different. ‘His nerves had never been of the steadiest,’ C. S. Lewis mercilessly recalled, ‘and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.’ This disturbing passage in Surprised by Joy implies that in the weeks leading up to Flora’s death, the survivors all hurt one another in an irremediable way. Albert’s outbursts of rage against Jacks were not forgiven. ‘During these months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife.’ It had already been decided that Jacks should accompany Warnie back to Wynyard School.

       –FOUR– SCHOOLS 1908–1914

      Presumably there is no paediatrician or child psychologist in the world who would recommend that a nine-year-old boy, within a fortnight of his mother’s death, should be sent away from home; and not merely sent away from home, but sent to another country, to a school run on harshly unfeeling lines. But this is what happened to C. S. Lewis. The experience was made all the more painful by his father’s sobbing on the quayside in Ireland as he bade the boys farewell, and by the boys’ not having the ability to express whatever it was they felt. Forty years later, Jacks said he had felt merely ‘embarrassed and self-conscious’, and hated the discomfort of his school uniform – an Eton collar, a black coat, knickerbockers which buttoned at the knee.

      After an overnight crossing of the Irish Sea, during which Warnie was seasick, they arrived at Liverpool, and C. S. Lewis ‘reacted with immediate hatred’ to the sight of England. With a deep part of himself, he was always to remain a stranger there. As the train made its progress from the North of England down to London, he felt he was entering a world of Stygian dullness. The English accents all around him ‘seemed like the voices of demons’.¹

      At Euston, they changed trains, and made the short journey – some twenty minutes – to Jack’s first school, Wynyard House, Watford, in the county of Hertford.

      It was an unprepossessing place, being merely a couple of semi-detached, yellow-brick, suburban houses. There were fewer than twenty pupils, eight or nine of whom, like the Lewis brothers, were boarders. In his first letter home to his father, Jack was prepared to look on the bright side. ‘I cannot of course tell you yet but I think I shall like this place,’ he wrote. ‘Misis [sic] Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.’² This remark was an understatement. The headmaster of Wynyard House, the Reverend Robert Capron, was a bad-tempered and capricious man who was especially unkind to those boys whom he suspected of having low social origins. The boys called him Oldie. He was rather a handsome figure in a vaguely Teutonic mould, with a short grey beard, moustaches and thick grey hair. ‘I have seen him’, Warnie remembered later, ‘lift a boy of twelve or so from the floor by the back of his collar, and holding him at arm’s length as one might a dog, proceed to refresh the unfortunate youth’s memory by applying his cane to his calves.’³ It is hard to tell whether Warnie had told his parents of the horrors of Wynyard House and they had ignored him, or whether it took the more trenchant СКАЧАТЬ