Читать книгу C. S. Lewis: A Biography - A. Wilson N. - Страница 9

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 Jacks, who was infinitely more articulate, and used to all home comforts, to protest at Capron’s ways. Only a fortnight after relaying his sunny hope that he would like Wynyard, Jack was writing to Albert, ‘My dear Papy, Mr. Capron said something I am not likely to forget – “Curse the boy” (behind Warnie’s back) because Warnie did not bring his jam to tea, no one ever heard such a rule before. Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply CANNOT wait in this hole until the end of term … Your loving son Jack.’⁴

But for one reason or another, they stayed. The brothers loathed Capron and his mincing, affected manner of speech. Oh was Eoh, beer was be-ah. For his part Capron persistently picked on Warnie. He asserted that Warnie was lazy, a cheat, and – the final outrage which nearly did cause Albert Lewis to withdraw his sons when he heard of it – that he had a cousin in the Canadian Mounted Police. It is not possible, at this distance, to discover either how Capron dreamed up this fanciful notion, or why it was deemed so offensive.

C. S. Lewis remained obsessed by Wynyard for the rest of his life. Although he spent only eighteen months as a pupil there, he devoted nearly a tenth of his autobiography to describing it, in the most lurid terms, as a ‘concentration camp’. He went further, and called it Belsen. Wynyard was important as the place where he first became conscious of two things which must have already formed part of the texture of his Irish childhood. Here he met them in unfamiliar English guises: corporal punishment and Christianity. ‘Everyone talks of sadism nowadays,’ Lewis wrote in his autobiography (Do they? the reader naturally replies), ‘ … but I question whether Capron’s cruelty had any erotic element in it.’ The question he does not ask is to what extent Capron’s floggings contributed to his own, Lewis’s, erotic development. Capron flogged the boys indiscriminately – for getting sums wrong (and there were a lot of sums on the curriculum at Wynyard), for breaking the innumerable rules of the place – and sometimes for no reason at all. During one term, Capron’s wife died, and it had the effect of making him even more indiscriminately violent: so much so that his son, known as Wee-wee to the boys, felt obliged to apologize on his father’s behalf – an apology which in itself was an excruciating torture to Jack, who had ‘learnt to fear and hate emotion’.

Almost the most interesting thing about Lewis’s memories of Wynyard, however, is his assertion that Capron was the first person to teach him undiluted Christianity, ‘as distinct from general “up-lift”’. The impression given in Surprised by Joy is that he grew up in a religiously wishy-washy household. No emphasis is given to his father’s profound piety, nor to the theological preoccupations of grandfather Lewis, who wandered about the corridors of Little Lea muttering psalms. It was at Wynyard that he began seriously to pray, to read the Bible and to attempt seriously to obey his conscience.

His initial reaction to the school religion, however, was less than favourable. Capron took the boys to worship at the church of St John’s, Watford, an Anglo-Catholic shrine very little different, when judged from the Ulster viewpoint, from the abominations of Rome herself. ‘In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars,’ Jack wrote at the time, ‘the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s table (which they have the vanity to call an altar) and pray to the Virgin.’ But when he looked back on it from the perspective of middle age, and when he had more or less adopted this ‘Romish’ style of religion for himself, he decided that ‘the effect … was entirely good’.⁵

The psychosexual effects of living under a reign of terror, where everything was punishable by the cane; the effects, moreover, of having been introduced to this system at the very moment when he had lost his mother and begun to ‘fear and hate emotion’ – all these were to make themselves felt in Lewis’s later development. For the time being, he reacted as he was always to react to grown-ups with whom he was unable to make friends. He made Capron into a monster. It may very well be the case that the man was a monster, but since we may only view him through the creative lens of the Lewis brothers’ memory, there is no knowing what he was like in other people’s minds. To judge from the fact that Warnie, of good average intelligence, had sunk back badly in his school work by the time he went on to public school, we may believe them when they bemoan the academic standard at Wynyard House. In memory the place was like Doctor Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa. The tyranny which Capron exercised, not only over the boys but also over his own grown-up children, seems like something in Victorian fiction, though in many ways he sounds more like a character in Ivy Compton-Burnett than one in F. Anstey.

Both boys were so unhappy at Wynyard that they wrote to their father with the suggestion that they should go to Campbell College, a day school in Belfast. ‘Jack and I have been thinking it over,’ Warnie wrote, ‘and we both think we would like to go to Campbell College. Of course, as you say the boys may not be gentlemen, but no big school is entirely composed of gentlemen, and I think English boys are not so honest or gentlemanly as most Irish ones.’⁶

Poor Albert was too wrapped up in the after-effects of bereavement to give intelligent attention to the education of his sons. He continued to struggle on with his work in the police courts, and this brought solace. But in solitude he was seized with irrational fears, and hypochondria began to take a grip on him. He was convinced, for example, that he was diabetic, and no number of visits to the doctor, followed by tests and negative results, would put his mind at rest. He was just not in a position to make a decision. He wrote to Capron suggesting that he should withdraw his sons from Wynyard, but not being on the spot, and being constitutionally unable to stray from home to investigate the school for himself, he accepted Capron’s word that all was well. In the event it was to Capron, rather than to his older mentor Kirkpatrick, that Albert Lewis entrusted the choice of Warnie’s public school. Capron made the perfectly sensible suggestion that Warnie should be sent to Malvern College, and in the autumn term of 1909 to Malvern he went.

This would have been the moment for Jack to leave Wynyard, but Capron was by now in desperate straits and he played on the gullible Mr Lewis to persuade him to leave Jack in his care. In fact, his beatings and canings had grown so extreme that a parent had brought a High Court action against Capron, and the scandal caused by this meant that his pupils dwindled to nine in number, of whom one was Jack. The case was dropped, but it left Capron a ruined man, and in the end, since he was a priest in orders, he looked about for a cure of souls. He became the rector of Radstock in Hertfordshire, and died in 1911 aged sixty. His epitaph was composed of two words – JESU MERCY.

In 1910, then, C. S. Lewis was separated from one of the great monsters in his life, but memory lovingly cultivated Capron until, larger than life, he was ready to step on to the pages of Surprised by Joy. The very year that Wynyard collapsed, 1910, was also memorable for one of the key theatrical experiences of the Lewis brothers’ lives. In the Christmas vacation, their second cousin, Hope Ewart, took them to see Barrie’s Peter Pan. It is one of the Grand Conspicuous Omissions in Lewis’s autobiography that he says nothing about this experience which, to judge from the Lewis Papers, was momentous. For there was no children’s story more apposite to his life than that of the little boy who could not grow up, and who had to win his immortality by an assertion of metaphysical improbabilities – in this case a belief in fairies.

After the collapse of Wynyard, Jack achieved his wish of being sent to Campbell College for the autumn term of 1910. It was here that the English master, J. A. McNeill, introduced him to Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum – ‘much the most important thing’ to have happened to him while he was at the school, so far as Lewis himself was concerned. In Surprised by Joy he makes a point about his discovery of that poem which holds good for the development in personal literary taste of many another reader:

Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poem for classicists, to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homeric echoes … For me, the relation between Arnold and Homer worked the other way. I knew nothing of Homer; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad, I liked it partly because it was for me reminiscent of Sohrab.⁷

Doubtless all this was true, but like so much else in the autobiography it throws dust in the reader’s eyes, and withholds from us the great, obvious fact about Sohrab – the fact about it which must have made its immediate and colossal appeal to Jack Lewis when he read it on the verge of his adolescence. It is the story of a father and son who have been separated. The father, without realizing Sohrab’s identity, accepts the challenge of the Tartar chieftain, who is in fact his son. On the misty banks of Oxus, fog-bound as Belfast in November, father and son fight their archetypal combat, and the son is slain. There was quite as much in this story as there was in Peter Pan for young Jack to feast upon. After only a few weeks of Campbell, however, he fell ill. Poor health had always dogged his childhood. It could be said that he had come to regard periodic bouts of illness as the norm. Even in the days of his mother’s lifetime, there had been delicious periods of fever and bad throats during which he was laid up, able to do nothing – what did he ever like doing better? – but read. At Wynyard, his health had become even worse, and in 1909 there had been an operation on his adenoids. In November 1910, Albert Lewis withdrew Jack from Campbell and decided that he should go to school in the same town as Warnie. He was not old enough yet to go to public school.

Gabbitas & Thring were once again consulted, and this time they came up with Cherbourg, a small preparatory school directly overlooking the College where Jack was destined one day to be a scholar. In January 1911, the two brothers set off for Malvern.

These Malvern days had, for them both, a quality of bitter-sweet when they looked back on them from the perspectives of manhood. Great Malvern is a Victorian spa town, nestling on the sunless side of a magnificent row of hills which stretch from the south-western tip of Worcestershire into Herefordshire. Those who built the town were either European mountain-dwellers (Swiss, Austrian, German) or English people who wished to recapture their own pleasure in the Alps or the Tyrol. Fanciful gables and evergreen gardens adorn the suburban roads. Opposite the Gothic railway station which (until a regrettable fire in 1985) was redolent of a mountain halt in the Vaud Canton, towers the Gothic splendour of the Ladies’ College, formerly the Imperial Hotel where Victorian gentlefolk came for the water-cure. The list of those who submitted to this obviously bogus therapy (it involves being wrapped in a wet sheet and exposed to the open air) is impressive, and includes Tennyson and Thackeray. It was the popularity of Malvern as a health spa which made parents of the middle classes believe that it would be a suitable place for their children to be educated. Hence the presence there of the Boys’ College (where Warren Lewis was), a sham medieval structure founded in 1862 in imitation of the older public schools, as well as a number of similar establishments for girls, and a host of little preparatory schools. To this day, these spawn all over the hillside as a puzzling testimony to the fact that English parents do not enjoy the company of those whom they have taken the trouble of bringing into the world.

Cherbourg, the school where Jack Lewis spent the period from January 1911 to June 1913, was a large white stucco building overlooking the College. Its architecture was reminiscent of villas on the Italian lakes. There were seventeen boys, three assistant masters, and a matron called Miss Cowrie, to whose lax religious views (she dabbled with theosophy and what Lewis later called ‘the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition’) readers of Surprised by Joy are invited to attribute the loss of the author’s boyhood Christian faith. This is the chapter of Lewis’s autobiography which rings least true. Three things, he tells us, contributed to the collapse of the Christianity which he had imbibed from Oldie Capron at Wynyard. One was the wishy-washy spiritual nonsense of ‘dear Miss C.’; another was the alleged sophistication of a young master called ‘Pogo’, who was ‘dressy’ and told the boys all about the famous actresses in London. The third factor was his advance in studying the classics.

Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion … The impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand religions, stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe this exception?⁸

While this third objection to Christianity rings true as a thought which troubled him at the age of twelve, the other two do not. We feel too strongly the presence of the middle-aged Lewis looking back on the Peter Pan, pubescent boy-Lewis and being horrified by his ‘loss of faith, of virtue, of simplicity’. The passages, for example, where he describes his longing to abandon Christianity because of an over-scrupulous terror that he was not sufficiently concentrating on his prayers, while they may be true in general, are far too specifically recalled to be plausible. The details are too sharp. His saying that he hates himself for becoming at this period a ‘prig’ and a ‘snob’ is really another way of saying that he hates himself for having grown up at all.

For the truth is that he was an intelligent and gifted boy, whose range of reading and whose capacity to appreciate literature (and, to a lesser extent, music) were uncommonly advanced. For him, the great personal ‘renaissance’ or imaginative discovery of this period of his life was what he came to call Northernness. What he means by this is expounded in one of the most eloquent passages in Surprised by Joy:

A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless Twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity … and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago, (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes.

This aesthetic experience which came upon Lewis ‘a’ most like heart-break’ was prompted merely by glimpsing in some literary periodical the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and an Arthur Rackham illustration to that volume. In the decade before the First World War, when a Victorian passion for all things Teutonic and Northern still gripped the British middle class, it is hardly surprising that all this should have come Lewis’s way. This was the era of the haunting music-hall song ‘Speak to Me, Thora’, the sentiments of which exactly coincide with Lewis’s boyhood epiphany:

I stand in a land of roses,

But I dream of a land of snow.

When you and I were happy

In the days of long ago …

He had only to read the words Twilight of the Gods and he was able to recover ‘the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country’.

None of this would perhaps have taken root so forcefully in the imagination had Albert Lewis not been a man of some musical taste, who took the boys to the opera and the ballet whenever they were performed at the Belfast Hippodrome, and who also gave them a gramophone. It was through gramophone-record catalogues that C. S. Lewis first discovered Wagner, and his essay on ‘the great Bayreuth Master’, written when he was barely thirteen, is by far the most remarkable production of his early years – a thousand times more impressive than his plays or his Animal-land fantasies.

One sees what the middle-aged Lewis meant about the twelve-year-old being a prig and a snob. All the same, the expressions of that priggishness and snobbery are well turned, as when he says of Wagner that ‘He has not been, nor ever will be, appreciated by the mass: there are some brains incapable of appreciation of the beautiful except when it is embodied in a sort of lyric prettiness.’ What impresses about the essay is the thoroughness with which Lewis, merely by listening to gramophone records and following the stories, had learnt to appreciate the great Wagnerian Ring cycle and Parsifal, ‘his last and greatest work’. He disdained Tannhäuser, in which Wagner was ‘led away into the tinselled realms of tunefulness’, but considered Tristan unsur-passed as drama by anything the world had ever seen. ‘Once having grown to love Wagner’s peculiar richness of tone and the deep meaning of 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 last he dismissed you unthanked with a suitcase full of his clothes to brush and clean and return to him before breakfast, and a hamper full of his foul linen for your wife to wash and mend – and if, under his regime, you were not always perfectly happy and contented, where could the cause lie except in your own vanity?¹⁶

It is interesting, incidentally, that someone who could see so clearly what was wrong with the fagging system in the course of this devastating analogy could not see that to all intents and purposes this was what the privileged classes were doing to the lower classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Coming at a moment of particularly rapid physical growth in Lewis, the whole school system exhausted him. Like his frog-hero, Lord John Big, ‘weary and depressed by over-work, despirited [sic] by his failures on the field and unpopular among his fellows who could not bear the comparison with so deligent [sic] a classmate, he led an unpleasant life. He returned home for his first holyday [sic] full of knowledge, bearing more than one prize and sadly broken in spirit.’¹⁷

Lewis’s cleverness, his academic ability, probably made it harder for him to settle into the rough and tumble of life at Malvern. He had grown used to small schools and (at Cherbourg) to being the much-prized prodigy. At the Coll (as the boys called Malvern College) numbers were much greater, and different standards applied. To be popular there, you needed to be good at games and preferably, if you were young, pretty. Lewis appears to have had no trace of homosexuality in his make-up, and he had no wish to become a Tart, as the more desirable younger boys were called. He was physically clumsy. He once remarked that his whole life would have been different if he had not had thumb joints which did not bend in the middle. This physical peculiarity, inherited from his father, made him a poor craftsman, and did not improve his skill at catching balls when they were thrown at him.

Yet however much he loathed the boorishness of his fellow-collegians (and he was nearly always to dislike colleagues), Lewis did find things to love about Malvern. First, there was the Latin master, Harry Wakelyn Smith, known to the boys as Smugy. (The first syllable was pronounced to rhyme with fugue.) Not only did he improve Jack’s Latin and start him on the road to Greek with the Bacchae of Euripides (a play Jack was to love for the rest of his days); more important than that, his lessons were little outposts of civilization in an otherwise barbarous world. Smugy was a greasy-haired, bespectacled figure, vaguely frog-like in appearance, who was a friend of the composer Sir Edward Elgar, many of whose finest pieces of music had been composed when walking or riding on the Malvern Hills. Once, on a walk, Jack came upon the cottage where Elgar had lived. Smugy ‘told us that Elgar used to say he was able to read a musical score in his hand and hear in his mind not only the main theme of the music, but also the different instruments and all the side currents of sound. What a wonderful state of mind!‘¹⁸

Smugy’s grateful pupil was to remember the honey-toned manner in which he read aloud the poets: not just Virgil, Horace and Euripides, but the great English poets too. ‘He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Of Milton’s “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,” he said, “That line made me happy for a week.”’¹⁹

Malvern had its good points. ‘If I had never seen the spectacle which these coarse, brainless English schoolboys present, there might be a danger of my sometimes becoming like that myself.’ Apart from Smugy’s classroom, the other welcome refuge was the well-stocked College library, known as the Gurney. There in the summer term, with bees buzzing at the open windows, Lewis discovered the Corpus Poeticum Boreale. He followed up Smugy’s suggestion and began to read Milton on his own. He read Yeats, and wrote home eagerly to Papy, or the P’daytabird as the boys had started to call Albert,^* for a Yeats of his own.²⁰ Through Yeats he discovered Celtic mythology, while on his own he continued to be possessed by Northernness, and moved on from Wagner to read Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Myths of the Norsemen and Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race. He was even composing a Northern tragedy of his own, in the form of a Euripidean drama. It was to be called Loki Bound. Lewis’s Loki rebels against the All-father Odin, not out of pride and malice, as in the Prose Edda, but because he loathes the cruelty of the world which Odin has made. He is the first of the great anti-father figures in Lewis’s poetry. In the drama he stands against Thor, a brutally orthodox oaf who, in his loyalty to Odin, reflects the unthinking conservatism of the powerful older boys at the Coll – ‘bloods’ as they were called.

But even as his fluent pen moved across the page in the Gurney and the bees buzzed outside the window, Lewis knew that the order of his release had been approved. He could be happy in the knowledge that his father did not insist upon his returning to Malvern in the autumn. His first summer term there was also to be his last. The P’daytabird had come up with a scheme which was almost unbelievably good news as far as Jack was concerned. At fifteen years old, he was to be withdrawn from school, and allowed to continue his education under his father’s great master, William Kirkpatrick.

It was the summer of 1914. More than Lewis’s schooldays were over. A whole era, not only in his life, but also in the world, had come to an end. He would always feel that he belonged to that old world. In the barbarous world which was struggling to be born, he would be an alien.