8 Ibid., I, p. 5.
9 Ibid., II, p. 248.
10 Ibid., I, p. 5.
If any star danced at the birth of Clive Staples Lewis on 29 November 1898 in one of the semi-detached Dundela Villas near the outskirts of Belfast, the mists of time – and the predominant drizzle of Northern Ireland – have obscured it.
His brother Warren, three years old at the time, wrote, ‘Of his arrival I remember nothing, though no doubt I was introduced to him, and it was only by degrees that I became dimly conscious of him as a vociferous disturber of my domestic peace.’1
Warren’s natural jealousy of the newcomer died away as soon as babyhood ended, and the encumbrance was able to grow into a companion. Clive seems to have matured with commendable speed, not only talking, but expressing his preferences with typical decisiveness before he was two.
The first ten years of his childhood differed little from that of any average child in a similar period and setting. Early delights were those of rail travel each summer to and from nearby seaside resorts: ‘… the selection of toys to be taken, the bustle of packing, and then the great moment when the cab arrived to take us to the station … Then came the glorious excitement of the train journey, and, supreme bliss, the first sight of the sea.’2
This month by the sea each year was their only holiday, and the single variation came in August 1907 when Mrs Lewis took the two boys to Berneval, near Dieppe, in northern France – Clive’s only holiday abroad until he went to Greece in 1960. Otherwise, as they grew older, they could bicycle out for the day into the country, and occasionally visit friends or relations at no great distance.
About his early years Clive Lewis remembered with most gratitude, after ‘good parents, good food and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in … two other blessings’: first, his nurse Lizzie Endicott, ‘in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw – nothing but kindness, gaiety and good sense … The other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, he never seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates from the first.’3 When they were very young, Lizzie, drying them after a bath one day, threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. The boys decided that Warnie was the ‘Archpiggiebotham’ and Jack the ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and ‘SPB’, names they were to use for one another throughout their lives.*4
The biggest change in their lives during Clive’s first ten years was the building of the ‘New House’ – Little Lea – at 76 Circular Road, Strandtown, and the move into it on 21 April 1905. This was on the very edge of suburbia: ‘On one side it was within twenty minutes’ walk of a tram stop, on the other within a mile of what was indisputably open hilly farm land.’5 And as they both had bicycles, the real country, which they now discovered for the first time, was only a few minutes’ ride away from their own front door. During these early ‘golden years’ before boarding-school Clive developed a passionate love of Co. Down that he retained all his life.
Besides this delight there was, as Warren, or ‘Warnie’ as the family called him, records, ‘the new house itself which, though perhaps the worst designed house I ever saw, was for that very reason a child’s delight. On the top floor, cupboard-like doors opened into huge, dark, wasted spaces under the roof, tunnel-like passages through which children could crawl, connecting space with space.’6 ‘The New House is almost a major character in my story,’ wrote Clive years later in Surprised by Joy. ‘I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.’7 And he in turn wove these recollections into much that he was to write, from Dymer to The Magician’s Nephew.
The house was full of books – ‘I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass’8 – though all of these were the works of novelists, historians, essayists and biographers. Neither of Clive Lewis’s parents ‘had the least taste for that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland. There was no copy of Keats or Shelley in the house, and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am a romantic, my parents bear no responsibility for it.’9
But even from his earliest days ‘Jack’ Lewis (at the age of four he had suddenly announced that his name was Jacksie – soon shortened into Jack – and refused to answer to any other ever after) had been able to find chinks at least in the magic casements, long before he could fling them wide and venture out over the perilous seas in the faery lands forlorn of which he was to add not a few to the literary atlas. To begin with, Lizzie Endicott would tell him fairy tales of her own country – of leprechauns with their pots of buried gold, of the Daoine Sidh, and of the Isle of Mell Moy which was to make him such an enthusiastic reader of James Stephens and the early Yeats.
Then came the early Beatrix Potter volumes, hot from the press. Squirrel Nutkin, his favourite, was published in 1903 before he was five. ‘I liked the Beatrix Potter illustrations at a time when the idea of humanized animals fascinated me perhaps even more than it fascinates most children,’ he wrote in An Experiment in Criticism (1961);10 and he followed up this fascination through the pages of old volumes of Punch with their animal cartoons by Tenniel and Sambourne and Partridge, besides those in Lewis Carroll, and in the old Dalziel illustrations to Mother Goose of which a copy of the 1895 reprint had been given to Warnie.
The first real introduction to romance came by chance, by way of a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which he was able to taste something of the true Logres even through Mark Twain’s vulgar ridicule of the great Arthurian cycle. This was followed by an even more blessed discovery: the monthly Strand Magazine was serializing Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel from December 1905 to December 1906 – a real introduction to the world of chivalry. But more important even than Mark Twain’s perverted Arthuriad and Doyle’s brightly coloured Middle Ages were the serials in the Strand by E. Nesbit with H.R. Millar’s superb and evocative illustrations: Five Children – and It (April to December 1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (July 1903 to June 1904), and The Story of the Amulet (May 1905 to April 1906). ‘The last did most for me,’ he recollected in 1955. ‘It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the “dark backward and abysm of time”.11 I can still re-read it with delight.’