For the reason Oxford was so empty was that it was 1917, and nearly all the young men were in Flanders and France, fighting in the trenches. The war was going badly for the Allies, and conscription had by now been introduced. Since he was an Irishman, Lewis was not obliged to enlist, but he volunteered to do so. This meant that, although he was technically a student, he was in effect a trainee officer in the British Army. The Dean of the college refused to map out any plan of reading for Lewis ‘on the grounds that the Corps will take me all my time’.
Still, in that first Oxford term at Univ, there was a chance to wander about and drink in the atmosphere of the place. One alumnus of the college had been Percy Bysshe Shelley – another atheist poet. He had actually been sent down from Oxford for his atheism, but after his death the college had accepted a remarkable statue of him which is housed beneath a blue dome. Lewis believed that Greeves would have loved it. ‘I pass it every morning on the way to my bath. On a slab of black marble, carved underneath with weeping muses, lies in white stone the nude figure of Shelley, as he was cast up by the sea – all tossed into curious attitudes with lovely ripples of muscle and strained limbs. He is lovely.’ Then – since the thought of naked loveliness will obviously raise the question of whether Lewis has masturbated recently, he adds, ‘No – not since I came back. Somehow I haven’t thought of it.’
As well as naked figures in marble, there were naked figures in the flesh at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, a stretch of the River Cherwell where men could bathe ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’. It was to be one of his favourite spots for many years to come. And, as well as the newly discovered delights of architecture, there were libraries and bookshops such as he had never known before.
It was a beautifully, unreally happy first term, made the more poignant by the knowledge that sooner or later training would start in earnest and he would be sent off to the Western Front. On 3 June, he passed Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, in the street and would dearly have loved to speak to him.34 But by 10 June term was over and he was moved to Keble College, which had been requisitioned as a military barracks. ‘It is a great change to leave my own snug room at Univ for a carpetless room, with beds without sheets or pillows, kept miserably tidy and shared with another cadet, at Keble,’ he wrote. The other cadet was a schoolboy who had only just left Clifton College in Bristol. Like Lewis, he was an Irishman, but that was not the reason he had been put to share with him. It was simply that their names came together on the alphabetical list. The other cadet, ‘though he was a little too childish’, was ‘quite a good fellow’. His name was Edward Francis Courtenay Moore, known to his friends as Paddy. Lewis could not possibly have guessed that this purely casual arrangement was to be one of the most important things which ever happened to him, something which was to shape and influence the rest of his life.
–SIX– THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918
Lewis and the other boys were about to take part in trench warfare. The training they received was heartlessly casual. After only a few weeks’ drill at Keble, he was given some leave and returned to Univ, the only man in the college. ‘I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to. Some of these rooms were dust-sheeted, others were much as their owners had left them … ’ The important thing was that he did not go home to Ireland during this spell of leave. There were reasons for that. The journey, properly speaking, took two days. The Irish channel was patrolled by U-boats and there was the danger of the packet being hit by a torpedo. But the most important reason was that he did not love his father, and he did not want to go home. Albert Lewis, for his part, though worried sick, and angry that Jack’s brilliant career should be interrupted by the demands of soldiering, could not stir himself to visit his son in Oxford, even though Jack more than once invited him. Albert had a dread which was almost pathological of leaving the office routines. He hated travel. Also, unknown at this point to either of his sons, he had started to drink very heavily. He contented himself with writing letters to his Member of Parliament, Colonel Craig, trying to get Jack transferred to the Royal Artillery.
It was natural, at this anxious period when the comforts of a true home were precisely what a boy needed, that Jack should have happily joined in with Paddy Moore’s people who visited him regularly from Bristol: his twelve-year-old sister Maureen and his mother Janie, a pretty blonde Irishwoman of forty-five. In August, Warnie got a short spell of leave from the Western Front, and Jack was persuaded to go back to Strandtown to spend the week with him. He had reached the point where he could not bear to see his father à deux, but with his still-loved brother it was a different matter. On 21 August, Warnie went back to France and Jack returned to Oxford for his only piece of practical training for trench warfare – a three-day bivouac in Wytham Woods. It was wet weather – ‘Our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud,’ he quipped to his father. To read on the boat, the P’daytabird had lent him a novel called The Angel of Pain by E. F. Benson which he now wanted back. ‘I will send you the Angel of Pain in a few days: just at present my friend Mrs. Moore has borrowed it.’1
Albert could not possibly have guessed that from now onwards Mrs Moore’s presence at Jack’s side was to be almost constant. At the end of September he got a month’s leave, and chose to spend nearly all of it with Paddy Moore and his family at 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. ‘On Monday, a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford went on so merrily that Mrs. Moore took my temperature and put me to bed,’ he wrote home. When the cold was better, he only had a week in which to dash home and see his father.
The experience of being mothered, for the first time in his life since he was nine years old, was having a profound effect on Jack. The feelings of affection were not one-sided. Jack’s personality, which had so charmed Kirkpatrick, was also having a strong effect on Mrs Moore.
That October, Paddy Moore and Lewis were parted. Lewis was gazetted to the Somerset Light Infantry and Paddy was assigned to a different regiment. But it was obvious that the links between Mrs Moore and Lewis were not to be severed. She wrote to Albert, ‘Your boy, of course, being Paddy’s room mate, we know much better than the others, and he was quite the most popular boy of the party; he is very charming and most likeable, and won golden opinions from everyone … ’ But from no one more than from Janie Moore herself. Where was Mr Moore, whom she referred to as ‘The Beast’? Somewhere in Ireland, it was thought. Jack was given to understand that he had treated her badly and failed to give her enough money. The Lewis family knew nothing of this and assumed that Mrs Moore was a widow.
They had no idea that there was any crisis brewing in Jack’s life either of an emotional or of a practical character. In fact, he was about to be sent off to war. The call came in November. He was given forty-eight hours’ leave, after which he would be sent to France. Naturally, he went to Bristol to stay with Mrs Moore, and telegraphed to his father: ‘HAVE ARRIVED IN BRISTOL ON 48 HOURS LEAVE. REPORT SOUTHAMPTON SATURDAY, CAN YOU COME BRISTOL? IF SO MEET AT STATION. REPLY MRS MOORE’S ADDRESS 56 RAVENSWOOD ROAD REDLANDS BRISTOL.’ To many parents, the significance of ‘REPORT SOUTHAMPTON SATURDAY’ would have been obvious: Southampton was where the troopships sailed from. But to Irish Albert, who had never sailed from Southampton, only from Liverpool or Belfast, the words meant nothing. He could not allow himself to believe that the words meant what they said. So he wired back ‘DONT UNDERSTAND TELEGRAM, PLEASE WRITE. P.’ By letter Jack spelt it all out. ‘Forty-eight hours is no earthly use to a person who lives in Ireland and would have to spend two days and nights travelling. Please don’t worry. I shall probably be a long time at the base as I have had so little training in England.’
By the time this letter reached Strandtown, Jack was in France. Albert found the news overwhelming. ‘It has shaken me to