We are speaking of a period when the whole land of Ireland, from County Kerry to County Antrim, was part of Great Britain in the way that Scotland and Wales are today. Albert Lewis, like the majority of Irish Protestants, was ardently keen that this state of things should be maintained. The talk of Home Rule for Ireland was by his standards dangerous nonsense. In 1882 he said in a speech in Dublin, when he was only nineteen, ‘I believe the cause of Irish Agitation to be on the one hand the Roman Catholic religion and on the other the weakness and vacillation and the party selfishness of English ministers [i.e. of the Crown].’ The English politician he loathed the most was Gladstone, whom he once called ‘that disingenuous and garrulous old man’ and who in his support for Irish Home Rule was, Albert Lewis thought, being simply mischievous. ‘Mr Gladstone, like another celebrated character, “cries havoc and lets loose the dogs of war”’ – i.e. the terrorists and revolutionaries of Sinn Fein.
But Albert Lewis, in spite of his high promise, was never to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster. He spent most of his career as a prosecuting solicitor in the police courts in Belfast, pouring into the frequently trivial cases which came before him all his gifts of oratory, his considerable powers of argument and debate, and his rich vein of humour. Indeed it was his sense of humour, C. S. Lewis believed, which somehow or other made Albert Lewis’s political career unmanageable.
He was a master of the anecdote, a fund of improbable stories, many of which for him epitomized the tragicomedy of what it meant to be Irish. One of the more bizarre ‘wheezes’ (as he habitually termed these stories and observations) concerned an occasion when he was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which had no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles, and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor of the railway carriage and defecated. When this operation was complete, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not to drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window which read NO SMOKING. For C. S. Lewis, this ‘wheeze’ of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.
Perhaps it was his ability to recite such stories which meant that Albert Lewis would never be a politician. He was a strange combination of rhetorical comedy and inner piety and emotionalism. If Albert Lewis was the mustachioed comedian whose favourite drink was whiskey and water and who could keep any company in stitches with his skills as a raconteur – imitating all the different voices as he spun out his tall stories – he was also the soulful poet who loved to be alone and to confront the mystery of things. As he wrote in 1882:
I hate the petty strifes of men
Their ceaseless toil for wealth and power:
The peace of God in lonely glen
By whispering stream at twilight hour
Is more to me than prelates’ lawn
Than stainless ermine, gartered knee,
I wait Christ’s coronation morn
And rest, my God, through faith in Thee.
Albert Lewis’s piety was deep and unchanging. For all his political distaste for the power of the Roman church, he had none of Thomas Hamilton’s feeling that Catholics were not really Christians. This is made clear by another of his wheezes, written down after he had attended a funeral in Belfast. He came back from the cemetery in a carriage with one Protestant and two Catholics. It had been a Catholic funeral, conducted in Latin, but the Protestant was a man of sufficient learning to have understood the words Pater Noster. Leaning forward to his Catholic friends, this Protestant said – ‘I heard the priest say that old prayer “Our Father”. I should like to ask you a question. Did we steal that prayer from your church or did you steal it from us?’ Albert Lewis was astonished. He said quietly, ‘We both “stole” it from our Saviour … ’ Living in Ulster compelled the serious believer to cling to ‘mere Christianity’, that is, to those parts of the faith which both sides held in common, not those parts of it which were divisive.
This was Albert Lewis, the man who married Flora Hamilton on 29 August 1894. ‘I wonder whether I do love you? I am not quite sure,’ she had written to him the previous year. Although she came to feel that ‘I am very fond of you and … I should never think of loving anyone else’, it would seem as though Albert was ‘the more loving one’. Perhaps because of his gifts as a comedian, or his small stature, or his thick moustaches, Albert Lewis, though a fundamentally serious man, was doomed to be regarded as a figure of fun by those whom he loved best.
‘I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten,’ C. S. Lewis was to write in later life. ‘It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through.’ But his own childhood, or the first nine years of it, was happy and not so much forgotten as mythologized.
Albert and Flora Lewis made their first marital home in a substantial semi-detached house called Dundela Villas. They were still within reach, if not in the parish, of St Mark’s, Dundela, the church where they were married and where Thomas Hamilton, Flora’s father, was the parson. Albert’s father, too, was nearby. Their marriage was not, like some unions, a breaking-away from parents and background. Rather it was a strengthening of their roots. Ulster, conservative, Protestant, middle-class Ulster, was the world into which their children were born and to which they completely belonged.
There were two children of the marriage – both boys. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895 and his younger brother Clive Staples on 29 November 1898. The Lewises liked nicknames and pet-names. Flora – itself a variant on her baptismal name of Florence – was sometimes called Doli by her husband. She called Albert Ali or Lal. Warren Hamilton Lewis quickly became Warnie, Badger, Badgie or Badge. Clive Staples was from an early age known as Jacks, Jacko, Jack, Kricks or Klicks, as well as being affectionately referred to by Warnie as ‘It’.
When he began to emerge from babyhood Jacks discovered that he had two great friends – Warnie and their nurse Lizzie Endicott. ‘There was no nonsense about “Lady nurses” in those days. Through Lizzie we struck our roots into the peasantry of County Down.’1 These peasant roots were as vigorously Protestant as those of the more genteel Hamiltons and the Lewises.
‘Now mind out there, Master Jacks,’ he remembered his nurse saying as she took his hand on a walk, ‘and keep your feet out of the puddles. Look at it there, all full of dirty wee popes.’ He remembered Lizzie taking his hand and peering with him into the filthy puddle, flecked with bits of mud. A ‘wee pope’ in Lizzie’s vocabulary meant anything dirty or distasteful. In later life, when he befriended English Roman Catholics, C. S.