I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all, these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’, and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all) we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol … and the character rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us.66
Like the children at the end of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, ‘we took turn about in digging a hole in the vegetable garden in which to put our toys’, recorded Warnie in his diary on 23 April 1930, ‘and then carried the old attic trunk down and buried them. What struck me most was the scantiness of the material out of which that remarkable imaginary world was constructed. By tacit mutual consent the boxes of characters were buried unopened.’67
Warnie was posted to Bulford on Salisbury Plain in mid-May, but was able to get leave early in June to superintend the final sale of Little Lea, which he left for the last time on 3 June. But little more than a fortnight later their combined house-hunting on the outskirts of Oxford led them to The Kilns, Headington Quarry, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives – and which would become by the end, thirty-three years later, much dearer to Jack who was to know there his greatest happiness and his greatest sorrow near the end of his life.
On 7 July 1930 Warnie wrote in his diary that on the previous morning
Jack and I went out and saw the place, and I instantly caught the infection. We did not go inside the house, but the eight-acre garden is such stuff as dreams are made on. I never imagined that for us any such garden would ever come within the sphere of discussion. The house (which has two more rooms than Hillsboro) stands at the entrance to its own grounds at the northern foot of Shotover at the end of a narrow lane, which in turn opens off a very bad and little-used road, giving as great privacy as can be reasonably looked for near a large town. To the left of the house are the two brick kilns from which it takes its name – in front, a lawn and hard tennis court – then a large bathing pool, beautifully wooded, and with a delightful circular brick seat overlooking it. After that a steep wilderness broken with ravines and nooks of all kinds runs up to a little cliff topped by a thistly meadow, and then the property ends in a thick belt of fir trees, almost a wood. The view from the cliff over the dim blue distance is simply glorious.68
The pool or ‘lake’ in the woods they soon discovered ‘has quite distinguished literary associations, being known locally as “Shelley’s Pool”, and there is a tradition that Shelley used to meditate there’.69
This ideal little estate was duly purchased that July for £3,300, and £200 more set aside for building on two additional rooms – one of which became the new ‘little end room’. The remainder of the lease of Hillsboro was sold fairly satisfactorily in August, and the Lewis brothers, with Mrs Moore and Maureen, and Mr Papworth the dog, moved into The Kilns on 11 October 1930.
Shortage of money unfortunately prevented them from buying the adjoining field for £300, and a few years later an unsightly row of small houses was built on it. The rest of the Kilns environment, however, remained in almost unspoilt beauty until after Lewis’s death, though by then the area at the end of their lane, in a square from the bypass to the London road, was a solid block of development, joining on to the suburbs of Oxford.*
* Dr John Hawkins Askins (1877–1923) – ‘the Doc.’ – was Mrs Moore’s brother. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained his Bachelor of Medicine in 1904. During the First World War he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and he was wounded in 1917. His health seems to have been broken by the war. He was married to the former Mary Emmet Goldsborough, and they had one child, Peony. About 1922 they moved to Iffley, just outside Oxford, to be near Mrs Moore. Lewis was writing about Dr Askins in Chapter 13 of Surprised by Joy where he said he spent ‘fourteen days, and most of fourteen nights as well, in close contact with a man who was going mad … And this man, as I well knew, had not kept the beaten track. He had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, what not?’
* Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), educational pioneer and patron of the arts, read Classics at Trinity College, Oxford. He was Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, 1903–11, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, 1911–23, and Master of University College, 1923–34.
* Herbert David Ziman (1902–83) took a Second in Greats and received his BA from University College in 1924. He was leader-writer for the Daily Telegraph, 1934–9, and literary editor, 1956–68.
† All these pupils were reading Greats at University College. Robert Remington Ware, George Lawrence Capel Touche, and John Hill Mackintosh Dawson took their BAs in 1925.
† Frederick Henry Lawson (1897–1983), academic lawyer, was Lecturer in Law at University College, 1924–5, at Christ Church, 1925–6, Junior Research Fellow of Merton College, 1925–30, and official Fellow and Tutor in Law, 1930–48. Lawson was Professor of Law and a Fellow of Brasenose College, 1948–64.
§ David Lindsay Keir (1895–1973) was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1921–39, President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s College, Belfast, 1939–49, and Master of Balliol College, 1949–65.
* John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was born in Belfast and educated at the Queen’s University, Belfast and Merton College. He was a lecturer in English at Balliol, Merton, and Oriel Colleges, 1923–40, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, 1940–63.
† ‘For five years’ was a mere matter of form. Re-election was almost certain, provided the Fellow fulfilled his duties satisfactorily.
* The favourite walk of the essayist and poet, Joseph Addison (1672–1719). When he was a Fellow of Magdalen, living in New Buildings, he greatly enjoyed the walk that runs northward from the College buildings. On 13 May 1998 a stone tablet was erected in Addison’s Walk to mark the centenary of Lewis’s birth. On it is inscribed Lewis’s poem about the walk – ‘What the Bird Said Early in the Year’ – which can be found in The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis.
* (Sir) John Betjeman (1906–84), Poet Laureate, was Lewis’s first pupil in Magdalen. He would not work, and in the end he failed the University’s Divinity examination and left Oxford without a degree. At first he blamed Lewis for not supporting him, and in some of his poems Lewis is made a figure of fun. However, in time Betjeman admitted that he was himself to blame for his troubles. He was a devoted member of the Church of England. His many volumes of poems include Ghastly Good Taste (1933), Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) and A Few Late