C.S. Lewis

The Story Teller

Derick Bingham

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781845508715

Tarantulas, Ghosts and Stories

Some of the most beautiful sunsets in the island of Ireland are to be found touching the Antrim Hills and the shores of Belfast Lough. The house called ‘Little Lea’ is often touched by the rays of the sinking sun and when C. S. Lewis moved to live there as a boy of seven, open fields lay to the front of the house and ran down to the shores of the Lough.

“I bagsy this attic as my study,” said Clive exploring an attic in the roof, “I will write my stories here.”

“Stories?” you might ask. C.S. Lewis loved stories. Throughout his life he found it really hard to make anything by hand. He had only one joint in his thumb and therefore couldn’t make anything with scissors and cardboard. He longed to make ships and engines from card and paper but it only ended in tears. He could, though, hold a pencil and wrote stories instead. It was a blessing in disguise!

Many years later C. S. Lewis wrote that you can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table. Millions of children were to be very glad that he loved that attic at ‘Little Lea’ for it became the model for the beginning of the adventures into Narnia.

On wet, windy, afternoons as well as on sunlit days the two small boys escaped into a fantasy land; the world they invented was called Boxen. It was a land that animals inhabited as humans inhabit ours. Clive wrote stories of brave mice and rabbits who rode out dressed as armour clad knights - to kill cats.

“Warren, you can add the trains and steamships as we plot Animal Land together,” said Clive to his brother.

The fact was that Warren and Clive hardly ever had a pencil or pen out of their hand. Warren loved drawing steamships and trains and Clive delighted in drawing dressed animals. They drew maps of Animal Land, Warren, of course, mapping the main shipping routes from Animal Land, and the special island they created. It was called India like the country in the real world but this India was a world of their own creation.

Every summer the Lewis family went off to the seaside for a holiday. The boys loved it, and their mother, Flora did too. She was an attractive, university graduate and a highly intelligent woman. She even taught her boys French and Latin.

“To be quite honest I find holidays by the sea very tedious,” their father Albert would tell his friends. He was a busy solicitor, a handsome looking man with a moustache and he could be found, on summer holidays, wandering up and down the beach constantly looking at his watch and obviously longing to be back at work.

“What on earth are you saying, Clive?” Flora asked her little boy on one of their summer holidays.

“He is Jacksie!” answered Clive, pointing to himself.

“Jacksie?” said Flora with exasperation.

“He is Jacksie!” insisted Clive. What was Clive talking about? He was in fact wanting himself to be called after a little dog who had lived near his home and who had sadly got run over.

Amazingly from that moment on Clive refused to be called by any other name but Jack. For the rest of his life C.S. Lewis became known as “Jack’s” to his family and Jack to his friends, so, from now on in this book we will call him Jack too.

“Calm down, Jack, please calm down,” said Flora holding her son close after he woke one night in a cold sweat from some dreams he was having.

“Why do I have these terrifying dreams, mother?” Jack asked.

“What do you see in your dreams, Jack?”

“Huge tarantula spiders!” answered her frightened son. “And lots of ghosts.”

Jack suffered from a very vivid imagination and that very imagination was eventually to turn him into one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century. Fortunately his imagination was not always filled with tarantulas and ghosts.

One day Warren rushed into Jack’s room. “Have a look at this!” he said, excitedly. In his hand Warren had a biscuit tin lid on which he had created a miniature toy garden with twigs and flowers, covered with moss. It fired Jack’s imagination in a very deep way and he called it “The first beauty I ever saw.” For the rest of his life Jack imagined Paradise to have something of Warren’s toy garden.

“Was there ever a house like this house for books?” thought Annie Harper, Jack and Warren’s Governess, who was an excellent teacher. She was right. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books, two deep on the bookcase, in the bookcase in the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high in the attic. Books, books and more books were all over the house for Albert never got rid of any of the books he bought.

Jack was allowed to read any book he liked, and he read them constantly. From the writing of Conan Doyle to Mark Twain, from E. Nesbit and her book The Phoenix and The Wishing Carpet to Gulliver’s Travels, from Beatrix Potter to Longfellow’s poetry, Jack was touched by the power of words. He lived in his imagination.

“You are such a little chatterbox,” said Lizzie Endicott, the boys’ nurse. Lizzie was from County Down and in her the boys saw no flaw. All his life C. S. Lewis could never be called a snob. He never looked down upon people, whatever their background. Less than a mile from his home stood a huge house called “Mountbracken” where some titled relatives lived and he visited often. He never forgot that good people can be found in all sorts of places in life. He knew how to relate to ordinary people as well as intelligent, university types.

Sadly, though, Jack’s snug and peaceful life in ‘Little Lea’, the house of long corridors, sunlit roofs and fascinating attics was shattered by a great loss.

One night he was feeling quite ill and started to cry. His head ached and his tooth throbbed. The pathetic whimpers from the little boys room would have broken your heart.

“Why does my mother not come to me?” he kept crying out as he tossed and turned in bed. “Please get her to come.”

But his mother didn’t come. There were noises coming and going all over ‘Little Lea’. Doors opened and doors shut. There were anxious murmurings of one kind and another and then, at last, his father came. He was crying.

“Jack,” he said, tenderly, “your mother has cancer. There will have to be an operation here in our house. Hopefully it will lead to a cure.”

But it didn’t. Gradually Flora Lewis was overcome by the disease and her two small boys were kept at a distance from her delirium and pain.

“Warnie,” said Jack to his brother, “we need each other more than ever before.”

“I’m here Jack,” said Warren. “You need not be afraid.” The two young brothers grew closer and closer.

“Father’s temper is frightening,” said Jack, as he witnessed his poor father come under the huge pressure of anxiety for his dying wife. Albert Lewis could do nothing to help his wife. Under extreme stress he would say wild things.

Jack prayed to God that his mother would recover. He was sure there would be a miracle. His whole idea of God through his childhood was that God was some kind of magician. He did not know him as Saviour nor as Judge. He had neither fear nor awe nor love for Him and he expected that when He had answered his prayer He would simply go away. But God did not cure Flora Lewis and He also did not go away. Jack was, one day, to come to know Him through Jesus Christ and his whole attitude to God was to change. That day, though, was still a long way off.

Flora Lewis died in 1908 and all Jack’s pain at her death was to surface later in the character of Digory in The Magician’s Nephew. And there was a lot of pain.

Security vanished from Jack’s life when his mother died. She had been an anchor for him, someone to turn to. In her presence he had felt tranquillity and happiness. Later on he reported that “There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was all sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis”.

‘Oldie’ Rules! Not O.K.

The Fleetwood boat slowly moved away from the quay at Belfast. On the deck, waving goodbye to their father, were Jack and Warren Lewis. Jack was on his way to school for the first time. He was about to become what is known as a “boarder”.

“Goodbye Dad, take care,” they shouted.

“Goodbye lads and keep your chins up,” replied Albert Lewis standing sadly in the damp twilight of that September evening in 1908. Poor Jack, he didn’t know the misery that was about to envelop his life.

“Come on Jack! I’ll show you round the ship,” said Warren who had been drawing ships for almost as long as Jack could remember. Eagerly Jack followed looking into every corner of the night ferry as she slipped down Belfast Lough with the lights of Ireland receding.

“I hate these new school clothes, Warnie,” said Jack, pulling at his thick, prickly suit made of heavy serge material, “As for these knicker-bockers, they are buttoned so tightly below my knee they have left a red mark on my leg!”

“Ah Jack, that high and stiff Eton collar may be worn by all public schoolboys but was never made for you!” said Warnie. “Even these stiff new boots of mine make my feet ache!” said Jack.

“These horrid hard bowler hats are just ridiculous, Jack,” said Warren, “but school rules are school rules.”

Soon the boys were in their bunks and when the wind got up in the night the ship began to roll.

Jack proved to be a better sailor than the heavily seasick Warren. They were both glad to disembark around six o’clock in the morning.

After boarding the train at the station they were soon heading south across an England that Jack, amazingly, first found extremely disappointing. As the steam engine pulled them from Fleetwood to Euston the more Jack saw of the country the more he disliked it.

“It’s so flat, Warnie,” said Jack. “No sea. No stone hedges. No white cottages.”

“The fields are much bigger here, Jack,” answered Warnie, “but the haystacks are the wrong shape!” Jack was missing the hills of County Down already. His dislike of England was to last for quite some time.

If Jack first disliked England, he was to actually detest his new school at Wynard in Watford even more. It was a small preparatory school with nine boarders and around nine day boys. It was run by a frighteningly extraordinary man whom the boys nicknamed ‘Oldie’.

“Oh! There you are Rees, you horrid boy,” ‘Oldie’ might say on entering the classroom after breakfast, “If I’m not too tired I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon.” He gave most of his pupils a good drubbing. He would even, at times, make a boy bend down at one end of the classroom and take a run across the room for each stroke given. One boy to whom he gave dozens of thrashings resolved never to make a sound. He never did until the end of the thrashing when a strange rattling cry came out as the rest of the school-boys watched in deathly silence.

‘Oldie’, it would seem, was actually insane and was even known to leap up and dance around the classroom like a performing bear.

There was a lot of arithmetic done at Wynard School and precious little else. At the end of each morning ‘Oldie’ would shout at each pupil, “How many sums have you done, boy?”

“Five,” Warren would answer.

“But you always say five, Warren, every morning,” said Jack to his brother.

“I do indeed, Jack, and I tell the truth but the fact is I do the same five sums every day!”

The teaching staff consisted of only three people, the Headmaster, nicknamed ‘Oldie’, his grown-up son, nicknamed ‘Wee Wee’, and an usher. The ushers by and large didn’t last very long. One, in fact, only lasted for a week! As supervision was extremely slack and very little assistance was given to the boys in doing their endless arithmetic, Jack’s brother had discovered that he could get away with doing the same five sums every day.

The food at Wynard was simply awful. The beds were freezing cold. The toilets were stinking.

Life was thoroughly miserable. “Joy,” C. S. Lewis wrote later, “was not only absent but forgotten.” He later nicknamed the school Belsen, after the German Concentration Camp where dreadful atrocities had happened during the Second World War.

On half-holidays, though, Jack and his friends were allowed to go for walks. They bought sweets in village shops, pottered about along the canal and sat on grassy banks watching for trains coming out of railway cuttings. The life of all the boys, though, was united by a hatred and fear of ‘Oldie’.

At night Jack lay in the great curtainless dormitory at Wynard, gazing out at the night sky as other boys slept. He gazed at the moon and the stars and listened to the wind. At times there were thunderstorms and quite often he saw fog swirling around the school. It all became a world full of mystery and magic to him. Later he was to very skilfully reproduce his memories in creating night scenes in his Narnia stories. Reading these scenes in his books you can picture the heart of winter in Narnia and even feel the freezing cold of the frost and snow.

The cold remote light of the moon often touched everything Jack saw from his dormitory hide out. The moon seemed to turn everything into an enchanted world in his imagination. It is interesting that many of the adventures that C. S. Lewis later wrote about took place by moonlight. Different children who arise in his books all dislike school and often find wonderful adventures at night-time. Take, for example, Jill Pole in her book, The Silver Chair. Jill, commissioned by the Great Lion Aslan to find the lost Prince Rilian had to fly through the night on the back of a great owl. Lewis wrote about Jill’s experiences as she magically flew through the night on the back of the owl that mysteriously lands on her window sill.

“Though the sky was overcast one patch of watery silver showed where the moon was hiding above the clouds ... There was a certain amount of wind - a hustling, rustling sort of wind which meant that rain was coming soon.”

This is just the sort of scene Jack would have gazed at from the dormitory window - many years before he wrote The Silver Chair.

To be able to go home to Ireland on school holidays after a cruel and seemingly endless term was, for Jack, like a release from prison. The joy of being at home at ‘Little Lea’ was a joy that was deeply felt. Fortunately, as well as inevitably, the Wynard school folded in 1910. Albert Lewis had to look for a new school for Jack. To be fair, Albert had no idea what a mess he had made of his first choice. Now he decided to send Jack to board at the large red-bricked Campbell College in Belfast about a mile from his home. Jack could come home on Sundays.

It was a school founded in order to give Ulster boys a public school education without them having to cross over the Irish Sea. It was a busy school with so much coming and going that Jack described it as like living permanently in a large railway station! Jack was twelve years of age when he went to Campbell College and unfortunately there were many fights on which the boys would take bets and a lot of yelling and shouting from the inevitable crowds of spectators who would look on. There was also quite a lot of bullying.

“Grab him!” said the crowd of boys, taking Jack by the arms and dragging him along a lot of corridors. He was taken to a half dark room where several other boys had been “captured”.

“Bend down,” they said to each of their captives and then, as if by magic, each captive disappeared after a shove.

“Now you,” they said to Jack, and suddenly he found himself falling through a hole in a wall into what was the coal cellar. Locked in he heard his captors whooping with pleasure at how many captives they had bagged! Soon a very dirty and cramped Jack Lewis was let out.

It was all very mild in comparison to ‘Oldie’s Belsen’. Jack, in fact, did not suffer very much from bullying. He had an excellent English Literature teacher nicknamed ‘Octie’ who introduced him to a love of poetry which never left him. ‘Octie’ had no idea that the twelve year old boy sitting in his English class would one day become the best selling Christian author of all time. Three dozen of C.S. Lewis’ titles would still be available with over forty million in print at the end of the century. An incredible number of people would come to faith in Jesus Christ through C. S. Lewis’ writing. This, though, was a long way off. Meanwhile, Jack had his mind opened to the beauty and power of poetry as the leaves swirled down from the trees on to the Campbell College green in that autumn term of 1910.

‘Octie’ had a real name which was J. A. McNeill and his influence upon the boy who sat before him was greater than he ever knew.

Half way through his first term at Campbell College Jack took ill and his father, who for some reason was unhappy about the College, brought Jack home for six weeks. They were to be among the happiest six weeks of his life. He and his father drew very close. He read and wrote and drew to his hearts content. His father was out all day. ‘Little Lea’ with its large empty and silent rooms were described by Jack as being like “A refreshing bath after the crowded noise of Campbell”.

As Christmas 1910 began to appear all over Belfast with its twinkling lights and mysterious presents under thousands of Christmas trees, it proved to be a snug and enjoyable time for the Lewis family at ‘Little Lea’.

Little did the family know of the coming war clouds in Europe and that soon on an average day on the Western Front 2,533 men were to be killed in action, 9,121 were to be wounded and 1,164 were to go missing. The British Army would live in candlelit dug-outs and trenches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Basse clay.

Life with Tubbs

“Hand me another cigarette Warnie,” said the thirteen year old Jack. The pair of them felt very sophisticated as they sat in the Lime Street Hotel in Liverpool lolling in comfortable chairs reading magazines as they waited to catch the afternoon train south to school. The long boat journey from Belfast was over and they just loved the morning freedom.

The train arrived, at last. Jack found himself eventually entering the tall, white school building with a headmaster as different from ‘Oldie’ as day is from night. Here he was to be, for a change, well cared for.

“Welcome to Cherbourg, Jack,” said the cheerful Matron on Jack’s arrival with twenty other boarders, “I trust you will be very happy here”.

As it turned out, he was, particularly because the Matron was so helpful to the boys. Kind, considerate, she comforted them. These boys were far from their parents so it was Matron who nursed them when they were sick and encouraged them in their work and school life when they were well. Jack, who had so recently lost his mother, was very fond of the Matron.

Sadly, though, and unintentionally, the Matron did huge damage to Jack’s belief in the basic truths of Christianity. She talked to the boys on all kinds of subjects and always treated them as intelligent people. She was not a Christian but was desperately seeking for a settled faith. She had become deeply influenced by the occult and the whole idea of getting in touch with the spirit world. As she spoke of her interest in spiritualism Jack was suddenly gripped by the whole idea.

“Little by little,” he wrote, “she ... blunted all the sharp edges of my belief... I was soon altering ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel’ ... there was nothing to be obeyed and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.”

Jack was influenced to think along the lines that he needn’t believe anything that was uncomfortable or that he found uninteresting. He would believe in what was ‘comforting’ or ‘exciting’. But Jack recognised in later years that it was not just the Matron who was responsible for his unbelief. He recognised that the evil one, or the devil had influenced him and led him down the wrong path. In the end it was the devil and Jack’s own sinful nature that made him listen to the Matron and her mistaken, sinful view of life.

Although Jack flourished intellectually under the leadership of the Headmaster of Cherbourg, nicknamed ‘Tubbs’, he began to have a depressing and negative attitude to the world in general. His studies in Latin and English flourished under ‘Tubbs’ and he was looked on as a very promising candidate for a scholarship to Malvern College. A gloom, though, seemed to be cast over him.

“Life,” said Jack to a friend one day, “Is only term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work, till we die!”

It is amazing, in life, how one incident can deeply affect a person and their whole attitude to life. He began to have a very deep hatred towards a certain teacher at Cherbourg because that teacher had forbidden him to give anything to a beggar who came...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Tarantulas, Ghosts and Stories
• 2. 'Oldie' Rules! Not O.K.
• 3. Life with Tubbs
• 4. Misery upon Misery
• 5. Happiness Steps Up
• 6. Into The Trenches
• 7. A Fellow at Last
• 8. A Light from Beyond the World
• 9. The Devil at Work
• 10. Talking to Millions
• 11. Through the Wardrobe
• 12. Surprised by Joy
• 13. On to Beauty
• Bibliography
• Thinking Further Topics
• Time Line
• Life Summary
• More Books
• Christian Focus