Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

for several years, and it had become impossible for Lewis to look after her. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, the Oxford nursing home run by Dorothy Watson. Warnie wrote about Mrs Moore’s first day there, ‘The first news from Restholme is…[Minto’s] “very strong language”: and M wants to know how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned. On the whole the outlook is as black as it well can be.’ ⁹¹

      But there Mrs Moore was to remain for the rest of her life, visited almost every day by Lewis.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD): ⁹²

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 2/5/50

      My dear Arthur

      Once again the axe has fallen. Minto was removed to a Nursing Home last Saturday and her Doctor thinks this arrangement will probably have to be permanent. In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me.

      The other side of the picture is the crushing expense—ten guineas a week wh. is well over £500 a year. (What on earth I shall do if poor Minto is still alive nine years hence when I have to retire, I can’t imagine.) The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday in Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters! God bless you. Pray for me.

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

      [Magdalen College]

      May 6/50

      My dear Arthur

Thanks for your wise and kind letter. Of course you’re perfectly right and I do try to ‘consider the lilies of the field’.⁹³ Nor do I doubt (with my reason: my nerves do not always obey it!) that all is sent in love and will be for all our goods if we have grace to use it aright. And thanks too for your immensely generous offer. I can’t accept it. She is miserable enough without being deprived of my daily visits. When you and I are meant to meet we shall.

      God bless you.

      Yours

      Jack

      

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): ⁹⁴

      [The Kins]

      22/5/50

      My dear Cecil

I had taken it for granted that you wd. hardly be able to come with Owen: and also that you wd. come if, after all, it shd. be possible. In utrumque paratus.⁹⁵

It is the apparent strength of my craft and the apparent lightness of yours that make me so vividly aware of the stout captain in the one⁹⁶ and the mere Bellman (see Hunting of Snark) in the other.⁹⁷ One of the bye-products of your news⁹⁸ was to fill me with shame at the rattled condition in which I then was about troubles quite nugatory compared with yours.

      My hand (such as it is and for so far as it can be) is always in yours and Daphne’s. It is terrible to think (and yet how did we ever forget it) that unless in rare cases of simultaneous accident, every marriage ends in something like this.

      God bless you all.

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO HAROLD GILES DIXEY (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 23/5/50

      Dear Mr. Dixey

Thanks for the trouble you took to tell me you liked the Alcaics.⁹⁹ In a like case I am afraid I shd. have said: ‘I’ll write to that fellow’ and wouldn’t have done it!

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis (= N.W.)

Sheppard’s pictures of paperchases etc. were not at all like my memories of joy in youth!¹⁰⁰

       TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford June 5/50

      My dear Cecil

You know about that Trust of mine wh. Owen calls the Agapargyro-meter?¹⁰¹ If not, v. [ide] the Ramsden chapter in This Ever Diverse Pair.¹⁰² You must be incurring a good many unusual expenses at present: and there may be other—alleviations—wh. you wd. like to incur for Daphne. Will you please write to Owen (he signs the cheques, not I) for any sums you want? The fund is in a most flourishing condition and there is no reason to stint yourself. You understand that nothing you draw impoverishes me, for all the money in that fund is already given away from me, tho’ the question ‘To whom?’ is answered at my direction from time to time.

      We have so ruined the language that it wd. mean nothing if I said it ‘would be a pleasure’. But reverse the positions and yr. imagination will show you how very truly you wd. say, in my place, ‘it wd. be a relief. God bless you both: you are not often out of my mind.

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 9/6/50

      My dear Cecil

Good. Dip and spare not.¹⁰³ I can indeed imagine the heart-rending pathos of this increasing hope: and have often wondered whether our preference (in art) for the tragic over the pathetic is not partly due to cowardice—that the pathetic is unbearable. Still, one’s past agonies of pity and tenderness don’t fester and corrode in memory as their opposites would.

      Still love to both: I wish it were of better quality—I am a hard, cold, black man inside and in my life have not wept enough.

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

      REF.50/19.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 10th June 1950.

      My dear Mr. Allen,

      The precious parcel which your mother mentioned in her last letter has come in safely, and has turned us into capitalists of the richest type. I don’t suppose there is another home in Oxford which contains this fabulous quantity of sugar. Why there should be a shortage of sugar in England is to me a complete mystery: we grow it within the Empire, and at the moment are actually refusing