Yet in The Pilgrim’s Regress this dread of hell is tempered with pure humbug, as when John, the Pilgrim, is asked by the Steward (i.e. the Clergy) whether he has broken any of the rules imposed on the human race by the Landlord (i.e. God).
John’s heart began to thump and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easier for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh no, sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you? … He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.4
The caricature of Lewis’s boyhood Protestantism is here unmistakable and, as the mask of the Steward makes clear in his allegory of the matter, the very fact that the doctrine of hell was believed in by decent, amiable people, who enjoyed their beer and their whiskey, made it harder, not easier, for his imagination to absorb. This was the air he breathed as a child, the religion he imbibed with his mother’s milk. Moreover, because, by the turn of the century, the Irish crisis was reaching a head, Protestantism found itself very much on the defensive. It was clear to any intelligent observer that the Catholic Irish wanted Home Rule and that eventually they would get it. But where would this leave the Protestants, and in particular those Protestants who formed the overwhelming majority of the population in the six counties of the North of Ireland? Like the theology, this situation was something Lewis grew up with long before he was able to articulate or understand it. Before he knew what the speeches were about, he was aware of his father, a glass of whiskey and water in his hand, thunderously denouncing the English government; he was aware of his religiously obsessed old grandfather Lewis and servant Lizzie’s dread of the Catholics, who by all accounts were advancing and making gains month by month.
But there was also a growing awareness of Belfast as a place. ‘This was in the far off days when Britain was the world’s carrier and the Lough was full of shipping. The sound of a steamer’s horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood.’5 An early treat was being taken for walks across to Harland & Wollfs the shipbuilders when the White Star Liner Cedric was being built in 1902.6
And as well as the water, Lewis could see hills from the nursery window – ‘What we called “the Green Hills”; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills. They were not very far off but they were to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing – Sebnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.’7
Before leaving the nursery at Dundela Villas, mention should be made of two experiences, unremarkable in themselves but striking for the manner in which Lewis’s imagination has photographed them. The first is one of horror – a book which contained a picture of a midget child, a sort of Tom Thumb, threatened by a stag beetle very much larger than himself. It was a primitive sort of ‘pop-up’ book. The horns of the beetle were strips of cardboard separate from the plate so that you could make them open and shut like pincers. From this early terror, Lewis derived his violent distaste for insects. It was his first experience of real fear and psychological pain, and interestingly enough he associates it in his own writings with his mother: How a woman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed this abomination into the nursery is difficult to understand.
Lewis’s mother is a shadowy figure in his autobiography. Beyond telling us that she was well educated and rather better born than his father, he has almost nothing to say about her as a person. In the Lewis Papers, the compilation of family letters and diaries made by Warren Hamilton Lewis during the 1930s, Mamy as they called her is canonized as we should expect. The strange little association between his own terror of the beetle and the wisdom or otherwise of his mother may be without significance in the story of C. S. Lewis, but there are to be other occasions in his story where love and pain, women and fear are found in conjunction.
His second nursery memory is equally pregnant with association. The sense of longing or Sehnsucht, the dawning of that Romantic yearning which he was to call Joy, began in his memory when the nursery door opened and his brother Warnie brought in ‘the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest – that was the first beauty I ever knew … As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.’8
The comradeship between Warnie and Jacks was deep from the earliest days, and appears to have been largely unaffected by the three-year difference in their ages. Probably the manifest difference in their levels of intelligence helps to account for this since Jacks, by far the cleverer of the two, was from a very early age able to keep up with Warnie’s level of reading, as well as to share his toys and fantasies. Both of them looked back on their nursery days together at Dundela Villas as an idyll. And it was out of that nursery that the passion for reading and writing developed which was to be their most striking characteristic in grown-up days. For C. S. Lewis the man, the happiest times were spent either reading or writing or talking about reading and writing with his brother or brother-substitutes.
An early book-memory for C. S. Lewis was the publication of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin when he was five and Warnie was seven. ‘It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season but that is something like what happened.’ To Beatrix Potter, doubtless, C. S. Lewis owed the inspiration for his earlier essays in fiction, some of which were made when he was five or six. While Warnie, the future soldier and historian, was drawing ships and trains and writing histories of India, Jacks was inventing a place called Animal-land, peopled with ‘dressed Animals’. But these creatures were wholly unlike the subdued, ironical creations of Beatrix Potter. They were full-square portraits of the grown-ups surrounding Jacks and Warnie.
Well before Jacks was seven years old, the two brothers had developed the habit of mythologizing the grown-ups, whose highly coloured antics both amused them and threatened the security of their alliance. They had inherited from their father the power to distort and fictionalize other people so that we, looking back at the Lewis family of that era, have the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between what any of them were actually like and the fantastical shape they assumed in the two brothers’ collective memory. The fact that the grown-ups were always a threat, as well as a comic turn, emphasized the sharp outlines of memory’s caricature.
And the threat which they were hatching all through the nursery years was the threat of school. The choice which lay before Albert and Flora Lewis was whether to educate Jacks and Warnie as Irishmen or whether to turn them into English gentlemen. Several factors must be borne in mind here. One is that the ‘Irish situation’ from the Protestant point of view was getting worse