by A. N. Wilson
–FOURTEEN–
SEPARATIONS
1942–1945
Among the many changes wrought in Oxford lives by the war, not the least was the arrival of evacuees from London. Once it had become clear that the Luftwaffe intended to bomb London flat, children in the capital were sent into the country. Many of them were separated from their families for several years, and acquired a taste for country life which in some cases made their return to the cramped conditions of city living difficult. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags describes amusingly the lengths to which some people might be prepared to go to avoid having children billeted on them. Mrs Moore’s attitude to the situation was quite different. Maureen was now married and lived with her schoolmaster husband in Worksop; Jack was much of the time in college or out on his lecture tours. The Kilns was in danger of being not only lonely but also understaffed. The indispensable Paxford, for example, had been seconded for work in the Cowley motor factory, and gardening was now in the hands of a woman whom Mrs Moore did not especially like. When the possibility arose that she might be sent some convent schoolgirls from London to share her life at The Kilns, she leapt at it, and the first ‘consignment’ arrived in 1940, leaving in 1942. It would seem that they did not fit particularly well into The Kilns and its routines. Then, in the summer of 1942, the convent sent another girl, June Flewett, who was in her sixteenth year, to be interviewed by Mrs Moore as a possible replacement.
June Flewett was a pretty, fervently devout young Catholic girl whose favourite books were The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain and Out of the Silent Planet. She had no idea who resided at The Kilns apart from Mrs Moore, with whom she found an instant rapport. The blonded hair, the cigarette dancing about on her lips and seldom removed, the Irish voice – all these features charmed June Flewett, as did Mrs Moore’s sense of humour and the ramshackle but pleasant household – the hens, the garden, the acres of woodland, the lakes, the dogs and cats. In the background, there were two slightly peculiar overweight gentlemen, one of whom was Mrs Moore’s ‘son’.
One of the first questions Minto asked was about ration books. Could June please surrender her ration book as soon as possible, so that they could use it to buy chicken food? She said she would be very happy to do so, and went home to her parents, extremely excited that she had found such a pleasant ‘billet’. The idea was that she should spend the term living with Mrs Moore and then take the exams to get into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. That summer, however, the Reverend Mother of her convent decided to move back into the London suburb of Hammersmith, and June had to write to Mrs Moore to say that she would not be coming to The Kilns after all. ‘I can’t tell you how disappointed I am,’ Minto wrote back. ‘I shall miss “my children” awfully though I know you girls naturally prefer to go to your own school at Hammersmith and to be at home as well.’1
Since Minto had already appropriated June’s ration book, it was arranged that she should continue to supply the Flewetts with fresh eggs for the next six months. This she did throughout the winter of 1942-3, though it is not at all clear how she managed to post the eggs on their journey of fifty-five miles without them breaking. These were the days when most families in London were getting by with one powdered egg per week, so the Minto egg benefaction was received by the Flewetts with something like rapture. In response to their thank-you letters, Minto invited June to come and stay for the summer holidays before she went up to RADA. She knew they would be ‘great friends. You like the country and the animals as we do.’2 June came and stayed for three weeks.
This time, she had more chance to observe Mrs Moore’s ‘son’ and his brother. Their routines were guarded jealously by Minto, as they both called her, and she tried to make sure that Jack – her ‘son’ – was never disturbed when he was working. In the course of those three weeks, June, who was just sixteen, fell in love with Jack.
The undercurrents of worry and unhappiness which were possessing the household did not reach her. ‘Things are pretty bad here,’ Lewis was writing to Greeves not long afterwards. ‘Minto’s varicose ulcer gets worse and worse, domestic help harder and harder to come by. Sometimes I am very unhappy, but less so than I have often been in what were (by external standards) better times.3
As far as Minto was concerned, the domestic crisis was solved by the arrival of young June, who was so bright, so good-humoured, and who only occasionally could be seen to sit giving Jack rather soulful looks. At the end of her three-week stay, June was asked by Minto to stay on and help in the house. She accepted. For the next eighteen months she was to relieve Jack of many of his domestic worries, cleaning, scrubbing, cooking, doing out the hens, and being a general dogsbody for Minto. Of course, Minto did not always keep to her own rules, and the cries of ‘Barboys’ whenever she wanted something from Jack were frequent. ‘The great thing,’ he told himself, ‘if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.’4
To June’s eyes, there had never been a more devoted son than Jack was to his – as she now learnt – adopted mother. In particular, she was struck by their evening routines. Minto was by now becoming very decidedly an old woman, with aching legs and persistent little bouts of illness. Jack was always kind with her, always gentle. Every evening he went to her bedroom to get it ready; then, when he had turned down the sheets and lit the light and helped her into bed, he would always sit with her, sometimes reading aloud, sometimes chatting until it was time to say good-night. June noticed how tenderly he kissed Minto and, however demanding she was, how patient and solicitous was his response.
She was also struck by his extreme kindness to the houseboy, or gardener’s mate, who had been supplied to them by the social services department. This young man had the mental age of an eight-year-old child. He was illiterate and wanted to learn to read. Every evening Jack made cards showing letters and pictures and words; every evening for two months he recited the alphabet with this young man. He did not make much progress.
It was only after she had been living for a little while at The Kilns and absorbing its strange routines and atmospheres that June Flewett realized that ‘Jack’, with whom she had fallen so much in love, was the same person as the author and broadcaster whom she so much idolized.
June Flewett’s ‘crush’ on Jack was one of the many realities which went, barely digested, into the third of his outer-space novels, That Hideous Strength, where it appears as Jane Studdock’s hopeless devotion to Ransom. Twice as long as its two predecessors, That Hideous Strength occupied Lewis, in the midst of many other concerns, for the last two years of the war. From an aesthetic point of view, it is much the least successful book of the trilogy, and by far the most self-indulgent. All his passing concerns – affectionate memory for the Great Knock, loathing of his more ‘progressive’ Magdalen colleagues, dread of State Socialism, genuine fear that England was going to be ‘developed’ and ruined by those who did not care for its natural or historical heritage, and many things beside – were poured into its overloaded pages. It is above all a book drenched in admiration for Charles Williams. It has been called ‘a Charles Williams novel written by C. S. Lewis’.5 What could be more Williams-ish than the sudden swoop from a depiction of ordinary, provincial, middle-class English life in the first chapter to the discovery that in a wood adjacent to a twentieth-century college, Merlin’s uncorrupted, undead body has been sleeping since the close of the Dark Ages? What more Williams-ish idea could be found than that when Merlin awakes, full of knowledge which has been lost to mankind, there should be a cosmic struggle between the forces of Right, led by our old friend Ransom (from the Perelandra and Malecandra voyages, now renamed Mr Fisher-King), and the mad scientists. Mr Fisher-King, of course (as all readers of Williams’s Taliessin poems or listeners to Wagner’s Parsifal would expect) is a wounded figure
, sustained by a diet of bread and wine.
The trouble with That Hideous Strength, as with Perelandra, is that Lewis has attempted the impossible; in the end, the seriousness of the cosmic struggle is not something which he can put into words. This is not simply attributable to literary boldness, as it was in the case of Perelandra. Rather, it is that Lewis the satirist cannot resist letting his own ribald loathing of fat bossy women and atheistical science dons intrude into the high cosmic themes. The book is full of good things, but it is not a whole. And it is not made clear, either as an allegory or in terms of sheer factual narrative, how Merlin and Ransom conquer the Satanic employees of NICE.
The general thrust of the book is that science is getting out of hand:
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction … The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances were the first essential for progress. And now all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power [i.e. witchcraft and ‘forbidden knowledge’] … 6
Reading the book today, one is struck by how much Lewis, paradoxically by the very fact that he is so conservative, anticipates many of the modern ‘environmentalist’ objections to scientific development. Though no advocate of nut cutlets and sandals, he had a profound and immediate objection to experimentation on animals which anticipated much of the modern animal rights movement, just as there is much that the Green Party and the Friends of the Earth would find to admire in his horror at the spoiling of that wood behind the college.
But although the plots of Devine (now Lord Feverstone) to ruin England for the sake of Forbidden Knowledge and to colonize the universe for Satan are horrifically well evoked, they are but one disparate element among many in this book. There are the Charles Williams characters hovering around the figure of Fisher-King at St Anne’s – a woman called Grace who really brings Grace, for example. Then there are elements from Lewis’s own nursery-style fantasies, such as Mr Bultitude the bear, based on the bear he had met the day he became a Christian at Whipsnade. The tramp the scientists mistake for Merlin has strayed in from E. Nesbit, while Merlin himself is a portrait of Yeats as Lewis remembered him. (Another ‘portrait’ in the book is the character of McPhee, who is more or less the same as the Great Knock as he appears in Lewis’s autobiography. As if these were not enough for the mixture, Lewis adds Tolkien’s legend of Numenor and the True West, but spells it Numinor, obviously under the impression that this has something to do with the ‘numinous’. Tolkien, who disliked the book strongly, was understandably irritated that his own mythology should have been adopted and distorted in this way.
But one cannot finish the science-fiction trilogy in a purely negative spirit. The books fail because of the size of the attempt. If That Hideous Strength lacks the imaginative cohesion of Lewis’s later fiction, it yet remains a great achievement. There are so many moments which are not merely ‘good’ but which are also distinctively Lewisian and which come from the depths. Who but he could have written ‘The voice … seemed to be sunlight and gold. Like gold not only as gold is beautiful but as it is heavy: like sunlight not only as it falls gently on English walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it’?7 Who but he – in quite another vein – could have supplied us with the particular quality of the comedy in ‘While she was speaking, Miss Hardcastle was undoing her belt, and when she had finished she removed her tunic and flung it on the sofa, revealing a huge torso, uncorseted … rank, floppy and thinly clad; such things as Rubens might have painted in delirium’?8 Though Lewis’s cooking may be rough, you never forget its flavour.
How Lewis’s colleagues responded to being guyed in That Hideous Strength may be readily imagined. One old don, a fellow of Magdalen in those days, once advanced to me the preposterous notion that Lewis was ‘the most evil man he had ever met’. On further enquiry, it transpired that what this man meant was that he could not share Lewis’s religious opinions. ‘Using his cleverness to corrupt the young’, he called it – a criticism which, it occurred to me, had been levelled at Socrates. Until meeting him, I had not realized the deadly accuracy of Lewis’s portraits of the dons in That Hideous Strength. The ‘examinee’ is a particularly recognizable figure.
His education had been neither scientific nor classical – merely ‘modern’. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) … 9
The suggestion that such figures, as well as being men of straw, were potentically Satanic did not make him popular with those dons who were already jealous of his popular success.
But in spite of that, or perhaps in a ghastly way because of it (‘It is difficult not to hail as a Friend the only other man in College who really sees the faults of the Sub Warden’),10 the war was a period when Lewis knew much happiness. Tolkien’s letters – profuse monologues to his sons serving in the armed forces – Lewis’s own letters to Greeves, Warnie’s diaries and the memories of those who were there, all paint a picture of wartime Oxford in which comfortable and comradely routines were all the more sweet for the contrast they presented with the surrounding fear and dreariness of the war. As Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, then in the RAF, ‘I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.’11
With the increased workload caused by the absence of academic colleagues in the services, and with their own war-work, the Inklings did not meet on so regular a basis as in peacetime, but they were often together. Even something so tedious as fire-watching, staying up at night to watch for an air-raid in their capacity as Home Guard officers or ARP wardens, had a kind of comic richness when shared with clownish companions. The early part of the war, for example, had seen Lewis – ‘save the mark! a Home Guard’ – spending ‘one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle’. Still, having to stay up until one thirty or two a.m. had its consolations if the irrepressible Dyson could be there, booming out, ‘Well, masters, we hear our charge. Let us go sit here upon the Church bench till two and then all to bed.’
Dyson was a bottomless well of apt or comically misapplied Shakespearean quotations. If driving him in a car, one never approached a roundabout or considered overtaking the vehicle in front without his crying out, ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute!’ His most usual preface to going to the lavatory was ‘Let’s briefly put on manly readiness, And meet i’ th’ hall together.’
One of the high points in the stage-struck June Flewett’s time at The Kilns was the night in June 1944 when Jack took her to Nevill Coghill’s production of Measure for Measure, performed in the cloisters at Christ Church. Three seats were placed like thrones in the front row for June, Jack and Nevill. Roger Lancelyn Green, a pupil of Lewis’s and his future biographer, played Elbow the constable. John Wain, another pupil, and a future Professor of Poetry, novelist and poet, played Claudio. The part of Angelo was played by a young man called Richard Burton. It was a perfect, almost midsummer night; the stars were bright in a clear sky. For the first time, June Flewett saw her hero not as Jack the patient domestic drudge of The Kilns, but as an urbane, grown-up man at ease with his friends. And perhaps he was never more civilized, less inclined to shout, than when in the company of Nevill Coghill, a fellow-Irishman who valued, and had taught him to value, ‘traditional sanctity and loveliness’.
Some of his other companions June Flewett did not meet at all. She was not a witness, for example, to his increasing devotion to Charles Williams, a hero-worship which some of Lewis’s other friends fe
lt to be in danger of exciting ridicule. ‘He emanates more love than any man I have known,’ Lewis told Greeves. ‘As soon as he begins talking, whether in private or a lecture, he is transformed and looks like an angel.’ To a younger friend, Lewis went further, saying, ‘If you were going up the High in a bus and saw Charles Williams walking along a pavement among a crowd of people, you would immediately single him out because he looked godlike.’ As it happened, Peter Bayley, the pupil to whom this remark was addressed, had seen Williams from the top of a bus. ‘To my eye,’ he recalled, ‘he looked like a clerk or craftsman in a small line of business – perhaps a joiner, or a carpenter; but I thought there was nothing godlike or angelic about him.’12
Tolkien rather resented the fact that the tradition of his quiet lunchtime drink with Lewis on Mondays at the Eastgate Hotel, which went back nearly a decade, was now broken in upon by Williams. What had been a sacrosanct meeting à deux, when the friends mulled over their mutual loathing of fellow-members of the English Faculty, or their interest in different branches of Tolkien’s mythology, now became a dose of Coinherence, the Omnipotence, Angelicals, and the whole bundle of Williams’s mystical, self-educated and vaguely occult preoccupations.
For Williams himself, the time in Oxford was enormously productive. In 1943, he had published by far his best book, a thoroughly original, imaginative and yet scholarly reading of Dante called The Figure of Beatrice. By the end of that year, he was reading aloud to the Inklings some draft chapters of a new novel, All Hallows Eve, which must have one of the most dramatic openings in fiction: the heroine is flitting about her old haunts in London, not yet realizing that she has just died. Some of the ideas for this book, and indeed the whole of the first bit of dialogue in Chapter One, came to Williams in discussion with a new member of the Oxford English Faculty, Helen Gardner, who had recently returned not only to her old college of St Hilda’s, but also to the practice of the Christian faith. She and Williams used to go to the same church for mass: St Cross. She was one of the many people who would have acknowledged the truth of Lewis’s words, ‘Women find [Williams] so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked.’13 Williams introduced Helen Gardner, among many others, to his idea of Substitution: that you do not merely pray for a sufferer, you ask to take their suffering upon yourself.
