243 A Scots word for money or silver.
244 Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.
245 David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.
246 The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.
247 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).
248 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).
249 Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.
250 i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381-2.
251 Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.
252 ibid., p. 164.
253 Luke 14:26.
254 But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.
255 That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).
256 Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.
257 The letter was unsigned.
258 Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.
259 Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8-9.
260 Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.
261 Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5-6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’
262 The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919-91) was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and Vicar in 1956. When he arrived in the parish Holy Communion was celebrated at 8 a.m. and Morning Prayer at 11 a.m. He was responsible for reversing the times of these services.
263 Lewis may have been remembering Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’ (1790), XL, 1: ‘I’ll share the cold blast on the heath.’
264 The four women are characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeltne (1623), Portia the heroine of The Merchant of Venice (1600). Miranda is a character in The Tempest, and Perdita appears in The Winter’s Tale (1623). While Miranda and Perdita grew up in sheltered circumstances and made happy marriages, Imogen and Portia had complicated and eventful lives which nevertheless turned out well in the end.
At the beginning of the year Lewis resigned from the presidency of the. Oxford University Socratic Club. With his help, its founder Stella Aldwinckle had built it into one of the most exciting and best-attended clubs in Oxford. But Lewis was now tired. He had been working since 1938 on his massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and he was in the middle of writing the last Chronicle of Narnia. The Narnian stories were being published at a rate of one per year, and there were three more to go. Yet in resigning as president of the Socratic Club to give himself more leisure, Lewis was unaware of an invitation he would receive from Cambridge University in May 1954. Meanwhile, Stella Aldwinckle met with others of the Socratic Club to decide who should be their new president.
TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Jan 1st 1954
Dear Stella
Thank you for your kind card. And I must ask your pardon for not (I think) having yet ‘placed in your hands’ my resignation from the Presidency of the Socratic. I do so now, wishing you a better and more active man as my successor.
The moment seems a good one for saying how very much I have admired the great work you have been doing in Oxford all these years; a work which, I expect, no one else could have done, and v. few others would have done. I have worked with some who had your energy and with some who had your good temper, but I am not sure that I have worked with any who had both. It has been a great privilege and I have at all times appreciated it more than (I fear) my behaviour showed. May you long continue the work.
Oremus pro invicem.
Yours
Jack
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Jan 1st 1954
Dear Mrs. Shelburne
Thanks for your letter of the 28th, to which I’m afraid I can only manage a v. small answer, for Christmas mails have ‘got me down’. This season is to me mainly hard, gruelling work–write, write, write, till I wickedly say that if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth.
By Jove, I do sympathise with you about the sinus (I am warned by everyone who has ever had it not at any price to have the operation. One doctor said that he wd. like to prosecute any surgeon who did it. This concerns you too!). I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ‘bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should ‘faint’ going home on an empty stomach1