Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  I am afraid that from my description this may sound a typical guide book village: as a matter of fact there is nothing really curious enough in it to attract the tourist, and it is more completely tucked away than anywhere. Wherever you look, through every V left by two meeting gables, you see the hills, so close that they seem to go straight up and the rare paths in the heather look perpendicular: it gives one a great sense of snugness. Only from the little garden at the back of the hotel do you get an unexpected view across to the cliffs by Watchet and the Bristol Channel. Nobody talks loud, nobody walks fast, rooms are deep and shady, chairs have their backs well broken so that you can’t sit down without an ‘Ah!’, hotels are never crowded at Dunster. It has a personality as definite as, though antithetical to, Doagh. It has changed hands only once; from the De Mohuns to the Luttrells in almost mediaeval times. It’s off the main road: nobody goes there: when I saw the car towed off to Minehead I had a notion that nobody ever leaves it either. Oh what a place for a soak—but not for a ‘day of rest’ with the P’daytabird.

  After an excellent dinner we strolled: Aunt Annie and I both climbed the nearest ridge—a very stiff scramble—and left the uncles behind, being rewarded with a fine view over Exmoor and the Channel: then, after the evening beer in the little garden, to bed.

  Next morning was very warm again: the male section of the party—one of them most unwillingly, to wit myself—walked to Minehead to see if the car was done: the mechanic thought it would be quite alright. We drove it back and decided to take the road after lunch. The P’daytabird was now quite in love with Dunster (which he called ‘Dernster’, ‘Deemster’ and other weird names) and was still talking of a day of rest. I noticed that he was usually in love with somewhere we had left: after anything good he could hardly be brought to admit merits anywhere else, and when he was, the whole process began over again. Thus for the first days, if you ventured to praise anything, you were told it was not to be compared with the Welsh mountains: after that it was Dunster that blotted every other halt: then Land’s End: when I left him he had settled down to the view that ‘none of these places come up to’ Salisbury.

  But to proceed, we ran very comfortably through Minehead and immediately began to climb, tho’ still on tolerable surfaces. We passed one barrier and saw the first real Exmoor ahead—tremendous mountains and awful gradients: but we weren’t there yet and dropped into Porlock, a very pleasant town at the bottom of the moors. All though Devon and Cornwall a valley and a town are synonymous: ‘they all live in holes’ as Uncle Gussie said. At Porlock we had [a] choice of two roads: one the ‘old’ road and the other a private venture which the local lord of the soil supports by a shilling toll.

  We paid our toll and Uncle G. was just changing gear in preparation for the next appalling hill when it stuck again. Telephoned back to Minehead for the same mechanic. More buttoning up of coats and stiffening of upper lips as per previous night. Aunt Annie and I went and looked at the Church—we found it cooler both psychologically and physically—for the sun was terrific (none of your traveller’s advice here!). Apparently there is a bar that fits into a hollow cylinder where the gear works: and the Wolseley people ‘have a catch of’ making everything a perfect fit: which means that everything is just a little too tight when the metal gets hot. The bar was reduced by sand paper when the relief car came, and we had no more trouble with it. We were held up there for some three-quarters of an hour, greatly to the annoyance of the other traffic: and the heat as we stood still made us very glad to be in motion again.

  Our objective was now Lynmouth, a very short run which would be occupied entirely in climbing up and down over the next shoulder of Exmoor into the next hole. Let me here solemnly warn you against ever attempting this ride on the Dawdle. The toll road is generally detestable in surface and hardly anywhere—after the first hundred yards—broad enough for two cars to pass: it ascends at a gradient which is habitually worse than Broadway hill and which seems all but impossible, especially at the inner corners of the twenty odd hairpin bends by which it reaches the top. The humourist who owns it has also left it without any kind of barrier at the outside, and everywhere the banking is all wrong.

  I must confess that mountain scenery is often seen most impressively when I for one wd be least ready to enjoy it. To look back as you attack an almost perpendicular corner, down an enormous cliff: to see other hills piled up on the far side of the gorge and, in their unusual perspective from such a position, giving the whole scene a gauchmaresque appearance: to look forward at the same moment and see the road getting even worse ahead to the next bend: to remember that the cheery man from the garage told us that a car backed over into the sea further along this road a few days ago: to wonder what exactly you’d do if one of those char-a-banc came down—on my life I had the wind up.

  We did reach the top somehow, where nature played another practical joke by plunging us into a cold winter’s day with a misting rain. It was fine here all the same: an enormous stretch of moor all round you, and a car going all out over a single road, which was not straight if it was rough. It reminded me of the opening chapter of Meriman’s Sowers. The descent from this into the next hole was even worse than the ascent. You just wind down the cliff edge on a road about seven ft wide, which touches, at times, the pleasant gradient of 1/41/2. That’s not my own conjecture, it’s from some guide book of Uncle H. The view over the sea below you wd be very fine—on foot.

  We were exceedingly glad to drop into Lynmouth, a little town wedged into this next wooded gorge round the edge of a broad, brown, stony river: the heights all round are perhaps too beetling, and to live there permanently would be like living at the bottom of a well. Our hotel had a veranda above the river, where we sat very pleasantly after the four o’clock and watched a water rat manoeuvering from stone to stone.

  I had to share a room with Excellency here, and I am not likely to forget the fact that it was the scene of a typical episode. We all walked out after dinner and up the road which we were to follow next day. Uncle Hamilton and I outstripped the others. It was a fine evening, delightfully cool and dewy. The road was good: it wound up the sides of big gorges that kept opening out of one and other into mysterious and chaotic landscape—‘forest on forest piled’. Looking back you saw the sea in the V shaped opening between the hills. Whenever you were still the sound of that stream under the trees many feet below and the EEE-eee of bats worked a kind of counterpoint on the general theme of silence. We walked faster: we talked most entertainingly. Finally we reached the top where these valleys, getting shallower and shallower, at last come out on the surface of the moor. We sat under a haystack enjoying the smell and the air of a good starless, moonless English country night.

  We arrived back at the Hotel about eleven, and, incredible to relate, our Uncle gave me a drink. But when I reached my room, ’twas to be greeted by the O.A.B. in shirt and ‘drawers’ with the apostrophe ‘Jacks, why did you do it?’ How much real nervousness, how much pique and desire for drama went, and in what proportions, to making up a scene at once ridiculous and unpleasant, I cannot say. But the sound of the stream under our window drowned the puffings and blowings of the O.A.B. In fairness I should record how earlier that day, P’daytism had blossomed into something like grandeur: which it reaches at times, because of rather than in spite of its absurdity. After arriving there had been some discussion as to which hotel we should lie in. Aunt Annie suggested that the one we finally chose was rather too big. O.A.B.: ‘IT’S NO BIGGER THAN WE ARE.’ If only he had the right, no one could quarrel with his power to assume the grand manner.

  I find that I have very few distinct images left of the next day’s run, but I know that it was wild and beautiful. From this [point] onwards all the roads are bad. We ate Mittagessen [lunch] at Clovelly. It carried the West Country tradition of living in holes to its logical conclusion, consisting simply of a stairway some 250 yards long with whitewashed houses on each side, ending in a cove and a jetty. The local tramway
consists of a dozen well cared for donkeys on which lazy people travel up and down: goods are carried or trailed in a kind of wooden sledge. The bump bump from step to step is one of the most characteristic sounds of the place. Commercial enterprise has made the place convenient as a halt, for there are several eating places varying from the trimly modest and artificially rural where you can get galantines, salad and wines, to the frankly ‘vulgar, easy, and therefore disgusting’ where you can get—I suppose—mutton pies and brandy balls.

  The O.A.B. strongly disapproved of going down to the cove before lunch, or indeed afterward over that infinite staircase: and it certainly was a very slippery and tedious journey of which you could say in Miltonic phrase

  ‘Each stair mysteriously was meant, nor stood

  There always’—where one’s foot expected it.

  Arrived at the beach, he sternly refused the unanimous advice of his companions to facilitate his ascent by mounting one of the donkeys. Doubtless because he thought it unbecoming to his dignity: we continued to press him, for precisely the same reason: but he would not. After a hearty lunch, we proceeded.

  This day we passed into Cornwall. I have always imagined Cornwall a place of rocky heights and gulfs. At first I was very disappointed: for, to be candid, it is so like county Down or parts of Antrim that it felt uncanny. The same absence of bright colours, the same cottages, the same sloping, somewhat bare hills, grey rather than green. The only thing that disturbs the illusion is the continual engine houses of the tin and copper mines . . . some in use and more half decayed. I can hardly remember a landscape which had not a dozen of these silhouetted on the horizon: they rather increase the general celtic dreariness and ‘oddness’ (you know what I mean) which bring it so close at times to our own country—a thing by the by far more insidious than the sensuous idleness of richer scenery. Are any ‘flower coloured fingers’ of the tropics half so numbing as the tepid morsels of putty that such places ‘put down into your brain’?

  The hills never rise into mountains, but are heaped together like eggs as far as the eye can reach, and the road winds on and on between them. The gates are coming off their hinges: the loose stones that divide the fields are all getting scattered. ‘They’ll do rightly—ach, never bother your head.’ Then every little while you drop on one of the mining settlements: a valley probably, not unlike the back areas in France, splashed with great dirty pools and ringed round with enormous conical piles of shingle: and narrow gauge railways threading in and out like fussing insects among the debris. Why does a metal mine have such a glamour and a coal mine not?

  The show parts of Cornwall—the parts one has read about—are all on the coast. We lay this night at Tintagel, storied name. There is a generally diffused belief that this place is connected with King Arthur: so far as I know from Malory, Layamon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, it is not: it is really the seat of King Mark and the Tristram story. This has not however deterred some wretch, hated by the muse, from erecting an enormous hotel on the very edge of the cliff, built in toy Gothic, and calling it the King Arthur’s Hotel. The interior walls are made of cement with lines stamped on them to represent stone. They are profusely illustrated with toy armour from Birmingham: a Highland target, suitable for Macbeth, jostles a reproduction of late Tudor steel plate and is lucky to escape a Cromwellian helmet for its next door neighbour. In the centre of the lounge, with the Sketch and Tatler lying on it, is—of course—THE Round Table. Ye Gods!! Even the names of the Knights are written on it. Then there are antique chairs—on which very naturally we find the monogram K. A. stamped.

  I have not yet exhausted the horrors of the place: I was glad to see a book case in the lounge. All the books were uniformly bound, and I was surprised to see such unlikely titbits as the Ethics of Aristotle and the works of the Persian epic poet Firdausi. I solved the mystery by finding out that they were a uniform series of Lubbock’s Hundred Best Books!!! How I abominate such culture for the many, such tastes ready made, such standardization of the brain. To substitute for the infinite wandering of the true reader thro’ the byways of the country he discovers, a char-a-banc tour. This whole place infuriated me.

  But the coast was wonderful: very like the Antrim coast only better: foreland after foreland stretching away on each side, and just in front of us, joined by a narrow ridge of rock and grass the huge Tintagel rock. There is a little sandy bay between it and the mainland. There are some remains of fortification on it, but not very old: nature has however so marked it for a stronghold that I could imagine its having been a fort almost immemorially.

  In the evening I extracted honey even from the hundred best books by reading an excellent play of Molière’s. I cannot remember the title but it is the one from which the famous phrase ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin’ comes. Do you know him at all? We left Tintagel after breakfast. By the way it is of course pronounced Tingtagj-le: which was a sufficient reason for the P’daytabird’s insisting on calling it TIntagEL, with a hard G. I find (like Bozzy) that ‘I have preserved no record of the O.A.B.’s conversation during this period’.

  We passed through a perfectly abominable town, Redruth. It was about here that a stinging rain, that might equally be described as a fast moving fog, attacked us. At Penzance we put up our side screens and excluded the view but nothing would deter Uncle Hamilton from going on to Land’s End: I indeed thoroughly agreed, but I was his only supporter. Of the last bit of England I saw nothing. Hot clothes began to steam under the screen and hood: outside there was only a genuinely celtic greyness: the road winds abominably and has no surface. My chief recollection is of Aunt Annie shouting ‘Gus, don’t run into that post!’ We began to pass several hotels, nearly every one of which announced that it was the ‘last hotel in England’. Some of them looked as if this was perfectly true. Our Uncle scorned them all and drove ahead till we reached the real end of the world where the road stops on a cliff outside the really last hotel.

  It was pouring with rain and blowing a terrific gale. It is a place well worth seeing. The cliffs go down sheer, and one is so to speak in a salient. The same driving mist continued all the time we were there, clearing up for ten minute intervals with extraordinary suddenness every now and then. When this happens the blue suddenly leaps out of the grey and you see the clouds packing all along the cliff for miles, while a light house or some rocks about three and a half miles out turns up from nowhere. Indeed the appearance and disappearance of this place is what I most remembered. It has almost the regular phases of a revolving light: first the blank mist—then the outlines rather ghostly in it—then golden—then quite clear with hard outlines and waves breaking on it—then blurred again and so back into the fog. Watching it from behind the thick plate windows of the very snug hotel, I found there was something curiously soporific about it—this most ‘debatable land’ that comes and goes, as if it winked at you with confiding solemnity. Whenever the rain thinned we went out and climbed as near the cliffs as was safe and watched the enormous breakers.

  We had—A big lacuna occurs here: some pages of journeying have been lost and you will perhaps be relieved to hear that I do not propose to rewrite them. Dartmoor and New Forest must remain unsung. Three more vignettes I give and then I will leave the tour.

  The first is simply to record our monster run in one day from Lyndhurst in the New Forest, thro’ Camberley, Maidenhead and Oxford to Warwick, including our only headlight voyage.

  The second is a good P’daytism—or shall I report as Minister of Experimental Philology a new word for an old thing—shall a P’daytism be a Balloon play or Ballonenspeil?—which occurred at Warwick. Uncle Hamilton could get no cover for the car which had to spend the night—a threatening night, in an open yard. When I lamented this fact, the O.A.B. replied ‘Ah well, the holiday’s nearly over now’. This remark contains so many distinct trains of thought and pure P’dayta ethics that you may spend a wet afternoon in disentagling them.

  My third—as the Acrostics say—is connected with a
certain Cathedral city in the North Midlands where I found the masterpiece of comic or satiric statuary. It represents a little eighteenth-century gentleman with a toy sword. I cannot explain how cunningly a kind of simpering modesty is combined with a certain profound vanity in this figure. Perhaps the eyes looking down the nose and the smug smile have something to do with it—perhaps it is the stomach thrust forward or the conventionally statuesque pose of the feet, as if to support a figure of heroic proportions, and then at once belied by the stiff little doll to which they really belong. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps it owes something to the colossal figure on the other pedestal, older and less ingenious work, obviously meant to be the centre and obviously made into the fool of the piece by its compulsory second. At any rate the effect is too funny for laughter: real genius went to make it. Need I add that the town was Lichfield and that the statue bore the mystic name—BOSWELL.

  From Lichfield I returned to Oxford by train: I am going home in a few days, but you had better send your next as usual to Univ. I was delighted with your letter and have much to say in answer which must at present wait. I liked particularly your description of the rains—I can see that. Just one word about Paradise Regained—surely the real reason for the shrinkage of Satan is the very proper one that since the great days of P. Lost, he has spent sixty centuries in the Miltonic Hell? It comes out in his great speech beginning ‘’Tis true—I am that spirit unfortunate.’ . . .