But even as his fluent pen moved across the page in the Gurney and the bees buzzed outside the window, Lewis knew that the order of his release had been approved. He could be happy in the knowledge that his father did not insist upon his returning to Malvern in the autumn. His first summer term there was also to be his last. The P’daytabird had come up with a scheme which was almost unbelievably good news as far as Jack was concerned. At fifteen years old, he was to be withdrawn from school, and allowed to continue his education under his father’s great master, William Kirkpatrick.
It was the summer of 1914. More than Lewis’s schooldays were over. A whole era, not only in his life, but also in the world, had come to an end. He would always feel that he belonged to that old world. In the barbarous world which was struggling to be born, he would be an alien.
–FIVE– THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917
Shortly before the beginning of his last term as a schoolboy, Lewis had been told that his Belfast neighbour Arthur Greeves was conva-lescing from some illness and would welcome a visit. In 1907, it may be remembered that the telephone had no sooner been installed in the house than young Jacks wanted to speak to Arthur down the line. But their friendship had remained a thing of pure neighbourliness, without blossoming into any sort of spiritual or intellectual intimacy.
It was in April or May 1914, with his head full of the epic of Loki Bound and H. M. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen, that Jack knocked on the Greeveses’ front door and was shown upstairs to Arthur’s bedroom. He found the boy sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of … Myths of the Norsemen.
‘Do you like that?’ he asked.
‘Do you like that?’ Arthur replied.
It was not long before the two boys were exchanging their thoughts about the whole world of Norse mythology, so excited to discover this mutual interest that they were almost shouting. ‘Both knew the stab of Joy, and … for both, the arrow was shot from the North.’1
Lewis had already learnt, in his brother’s company, the joy of what he later termed the first great love, that of Affection. During his conversation with Arthur Greeves, he discovered the second love, that of Friendship. ‘Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.’2
The friendship of his own sex was one of the great sources of Joy in Lewis’s life; and it was always axiomatic with him that friendship began, and perhaps continued, with two men ‘seeing the same truth’. By many people of a less cerebral disposition, it is not considered necessary to agree with their friends on points of literary judgement, or even of theology. Lewis thought that it was; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he thought that he thought that it was. In point of fact, his friendship with Arthur Greeves was to outlast many changes of view on both sides.
The friendship with Greeves occupied a position of unique importance in Lewis’s life, for geographical and practical reasons. Like Lewis, Greeves was the son of a Belfast middle-class household which had nothing to do with the world of Oxford or London, where Lewis was to achieve his fame. Greeves, though highly intelligent and bookish, was not destined to go to university. His friendship with Lewis was kept going by letter. Both were prodigiously fluent and regular correspondents, and their letters to one another continued from 1914 until a few weeks before Lewis’s death in 1963. Sadly, Arthur Greeves’ side of the correspondence has been destroyed, but the Lewis letters to Greeves (published as They Stand Together, 1979) provide an invaluable insight into Lewis’s imaginative growth. The greater part of his intellectual journeyings, as well as many of his emotional experiences, were confided to Greeves. Moreover since Lewis, already a self-confessed follower of the Romantic movement in literature, was highly self-conscious, the letters to Greeves helped him not merely to disclose but also to discover himself. It was in writing to Greeves that he decided, very often, the sort of person he wanted to be. We could very definitely say that if it had not been for Arthur Greeves, many of Lewis’s most distinctive and imaginatively successful books would not have been written. The letters were the dress rehearsal for that intimate and fluent manner which was to make Lewis such a successful author. The early stuff which he wrote for himself, such as Loki Bound, is almost entirely unreadable. In the letters to Greeves, he learnt to write for an audience.
By September 1914, the Archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, and the great European powers had drifted inexorably into war. Warren Lewis, who had been a prize cadet at Sandhurst (21st out of 201 candidates) found himself being rushed through his officers’ training course. By November he was in France with the Fourth Company of the Seventh Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force. It was a war which was to change everything; not only the disputed territories of the Prussian empire, but also much bigger things – like the position of the social classes in Europe and the position of women in society. Ireland, too, was to be changed irrevocably by the turmoil in which Britain found itself.
Jack Lewis, as he entered his teenage years, was put into an idyllic position of isolation, far from Belfast and the Western Front. On 19 September 1914, he stepped off the train at Great Bookham, Surrey, and encountered the legendary Mr Kirkpatrick. The old schoolmaster was sixty-six years old. He and his wife had enjoyed having Warnie to live with them while he prepared for the Sandhurst exams: ‘A nicer boy I never had in the house.’3 But from the beginning, the relationship with Jack was more special.
Kirkpatrick wrote to his beloved pupil Albert Lewis, ‘When I first saw him on the station I had no hesitation in addressing him. It was as though I was looking at yourself once more in the old days at Lurgan.’4 Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert over the years had been fulsome and emotional: ‘A letter from you carries the mind across the vistas of the years and wakens all the cells where memory slept … ’5 His relationship with Albert’s sons was to be more distant and old-fashioned. It was not surprising, therefore, that the boys seized on this to provide yet another example of the P’daytabird getting things hopelessly wrong. Albert recalled being squeezed as a boy by the Great Knock and having his youthful cheeks rubbed by his ‘dear old whiskers’. But when Jack got off the train, his cheeks tingling with anticipation, something very different happened. ‘Anything more grotesquely unlike the “dear old Knock” of my father’s reminiscences could not be conceived.’6
The old man himself confessed to being deeply moved by the appearance of Clive Lewis (as far as history discovers the matter, Kirkpatrick was the only person who ever called Lewis by his baptismal name). But the Knock’s devotion to the boy took the form not of tears and kisses, but of a well-developed act which he obviously enjoyed adopting. Lewis accused his father of transforming the real Kirkpatrick into a figure hopelessly unlike the reality. From all the evidence which