They were jealous of their time together. In early days, there was a significant little quarrel between Maureen Moore, her mother and Lewis. An unshakable part of the Sunday routine was that Maureen should be sent out to church in the morning, leaving her mother and Lewis for a precious hour together on their own. She did not much enjoy going and had from the first resented her mother’s being prepared to allow life to revolve around Jack. Maureen’s life had never been stable, but since Lewis had come on the scene, what stability it once possessed had been lost for ever. Since 1919, she had been moved from school to school, and from lodging house to lodging house: Bristol, Eastbourne, London, Oxford. Her mother was prepared to take her anywhere, so long as she could be near Jack.
One week, she decided to rebel against the church routine. Why should she always go to church alone? Her mother and Jack never went to church. She refused to go. Their reaction was vehement. She must go out and leave them alone. Unwillingly, furiously, she went. In later years, when Lewis himself had become a regular churchgoer, Maureen wistfully looked back on this apparent over-reaction and wondered if it was the beginning of his return to the practice of Christianity. As a child, it did not occur to her to ask why a young man might wish sometimes to be left alone with her mother.9
In addition to what Maureen, or Oxford, might make of the relationship between Lewis and Mrs Moore, there was the question of what Belfast would make of it. Although Lewis did his best to conceal from his father the full extent of his involvement with Mrs Moore, Albert was no fool; and as a police-court solicitor he naturally viewed the thing in a lurid light.
‘If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind-hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill I should not be so uneasy,’ he wrote to Warnie. ‘Then there is the husband who I have always been told is a scoundrel – but the absent are always to blame – somewhere in the background, who some of these days might try a little aimiable [sic] blackmailing.’10 Warnie, when he got this letter, was ‘greatly relieved to hear that Mrs. Moore HAS a husband’. He made two sound points in reply to his father’s fears. ‘(1) Mrs. Moore can’t marry Jacks (2) Mr. Moore can’t blackmail him because “IT” hasn’t enough money to make it a paying risk.’11
Jack, for his part, felt an intense awkwardness about the fact that he had, in effect, cut loose from home and thrown in his lot with Mrs Moore and Maureen. Guilt made him hostile, and the more conscious he became that his father disapproved of the Mrs Moore set-up, the more venomous his hostility became. ‘Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent for some time; has he committed suicide yet?’ he asked Greeves in one letter of June 1919, and in July he wrote, ‘I hope you are avoiding my father as much as possible.’12
As the summer term at University College came to an end, the question had naturally arisen of where, and with whom, Jack would spend the Long Vacation (from June until October). He wanted to be with Mrs Moore, but could not admit the extent of his involvement with her. Why could he not come to Ireland as usual? was the cunning request of both Albert and Warnie, neither of whom liked the sound of Mrs Moore at all. Jack parried, ‘Where could you pass your holiday better than in Oxford? The three of us could certainly spend our afternoons in a punt under the willows at least as comfortably as we did at Dunbar and the Mitre, honoured with so many famous ghosts, would be an improvement on the Railway Hotel.’13
He felt torn. He both did, and did not, want to admit to himself that the childhood days at Little Lea had come to an end. In the event the vacation was a compromise, with Jack moving to and fro between his two homes, trying in each to pretend that the other did not exist. At the end of July, he and Warnie made a visit to Gastons to see the Kirkpatricks, and on their way back stayed in London to see a show – The Maid of the Mountains, with Bertram Wallis and José Collins. They then went back to Ireland together. In spite of various happy outings with their mother’s relations, the Ewarts and the Hamiltons (and a jaunt to Island Magee), the atmosphere at home was tense. A major quarrel developed between Jack and his father, and by the end of August Jack had returned to Oxford to reside in ‘lodgings’ – Uplands, Windmill Road, Headington – with Mrs Moore and Maureen. The quarrel rumbled on by letter throughout the late summer and early autumn. ‘I must ask you’, Jack implored, ‘to believe that it would have been easier for me to have left those things unsaid. They were as painful to me as they were to you.’14
It would be fascinating to know from Jack’s tutors at University College how much any of these tensions were reflected either in his work or in his general demeanour during tutorials and at college meals. But no such record survives. All we know is that by the spring of 1920 he was ready to sit Honour Moderations, and to be placed very surely in the First Class. ‘I was very sorry to hear that I had allowed you first to learn the news about Mods from a stranger,’ he wrote home to his father. ‘I had put off writing until I was clear of Oxford.’15
This letter, like nearly all the letters he wrote to his father at this period, reflects an agony of guilt about their quarrel and separation. The guilt was something which he was never, quite, able to expunge. He always regarded this spell of angry estrangement from Albert as ‘the blackest chapter of my life’.16
‘Clear of Oxford’ in that last letter meant that he was enjoying a walking holiday in Somerset ‘with a friend’. The friend, of course, was Mrs Moore. By the end of his next term, when he had started to study ancient history and philosophy for Greats, Lewis was completely wrapped up in a happy combination of academic work and domestic absorption in Mrs Moore’s doings and affairs. Ireland, which was in the grip of a civil war which threatened to destroy the entire Protestant population, seemed remote during the happy Oxford summer of 1920. ‘I cannot understand the Irish news at all,’ he wrote airily.17 This was the period when he came closest to an estrangement not only from the P’daytabird, but also from his beloved brother Warnie. Snatching a bit of leave from the Army, Warnie arrived in Oxford and was surprised to read, ‘I am afraid this is rather an unfortunate day for you to come up as I am taking a child’ (Maureen, of course) ‘to a matinee and shall not therefore be able to see you until rather late.’ This from his closest companion and friend. No feeling of apology accompanied this note, left at Warnie’s hotel, because by now Jack took it for granted that Mrs Moore and her family took precedence over everything. He added insult to injury by saying ‘another time if possible you should warn me for duty earlier.’ Seeing his brother had become a ‘duty’.18
Warnie was nevertheless insistent about keeping open lines of communication with Jack, and in September 1920 he made Jack come on holiday with him to Ulster. Dreadful rows took place during this time between Jack and his father. When the boy had gone back to Oxford his father licked his wounds in the pages of his diary.
I still think I was very badly – not to say insultingly and contemptuously treated by Jacks. It is questionable whether I did a wise thing in submitting as I did, but it would have made me miserable for the rest of my life to have had an open rupture and forbidden him the house. But such weakness with some natures is traded upon and made to justify further insult and disrespect.19
There can be little doubt, once he lost control and tempers flared, that Jack Lewis could take a delight in tormenting his victim. One of his more sinister dreams, recorded at about this period, was of Mrs Moore and himself in a street off the Cowley Road, one of the poorer,