Then again, there was an element of snobbery in the decision. If the Hamiltons could boast a long line of respectable parsons and even a bishop in the blood, Flora’s mother’s family was even grander. They were related to Sir William and Lady Ewart of Glenmachan House, one of the gracious ‘ascendancy’ mansions with which Ireland had been adorned since the eighteenth century. The Lewises were frequent and welcome guests on this particular ‘rich man’s flowering lawns’: a far cry from the world of Grandfather Lewis’s childhood. The urge to gentrify itself which is endemic in the British middle class made it all the more difficult to contemplate giving the boys anything but ‘the best’. And ‘the best’ in this context meant an English private school.
Neither Flora nor Albert Lewis knew anything about English schools, which was why they consulted Albert’s old headmaster from Lurgan College, W. T. Kirkpatrick or ‘Kirk’. Albert had been one of Kirk’s favourite pupils, as is made clear by the extremely sentimental letters which survive from the older to the younger man: ‘When you recall the days we spent in Lurgan, shall I confess it? Tears dim my usually tranquil vision.’9
As far back as 1900, Kirkpatrick had enlisted Albert’s services as a lawyer in a matter of characteristic pettiness. Kirkpatrick, who was a wealthy man with private means, had retired early (aged fifty-one) and gone to live in England so that his only son could read electrical engineering at Manchester University while still living with his parents at home. Before leaving Ireland he had taken a clock to be cleaned by a man named Brown of Rosemary Street, Belfast. The clockmaker had spoilt the clock and Kirkpatrick had subsequently spent £3. 6s. having it repaired in Manchester. He was now trying to reclaim the money from the Irish clockmaker and was prepared if necessary to go to law.
It was in the course of this strange affair that he made contact once more with Albert Lewis and the flood of his affection, together with an avaricious desire to screw the last penny from the clockmaker, gushed from his pen. ‘It was a privilege to have you for a pupil … I never forget you and never can. I felt instinctively that you had some sparks of the divine fire.’
When Warnie approached the age when he might be sent to school, it was natural that Flora and Albert Lewis should consult the oracle. What about Campbell College, the best school in Belfast? Flora was evidently in favour, having been educated, and well educated, without having to go away. But Kirkpatrick’s advice was firm. ‘Pray convey my regards to your wife. I don’t think she would be satisfied with her boy going to Campbell as a day pupil, and in any case it will be good for the boy himself to be away, and look to his home as a holiday-heaven [sic].’10 This letter was written in October 1904. Kirkpatrick’s view of the matter was itself wildly irrational, for he was obviously capable of retaining in his head a snobbish, headmasterly veneration for English boarding schools and at the same time a healthy Irish vision of how appalling they are. This is revealed in a rather nasty letter he wrote to Albert Lewis somewhat later:
When the black day comes that the mother’s darling must leave home, that he has so long bullied, some school is sought to break the fall. What shall it be? O, there are plenty. Demand soon creates supply. There are schools where everything is done for the little dears, where graduates are kept to help them trundle hoops and wipe their noses, where every luxury is guaranteed. True the charge is a bit stiff, but what of that? What are money considerations when weighed against the tears and sobs of separation? And then there is the appeal to snobbery, which never fails. The boys are all of a nice social grade. So they whisper: but as a matter of fact they are more likely to be the sons of PARVENU shopkeepers and the rich business class.11
Kirkpatrick here, with typical saeva indignatio, fires to left and right. By any rule of logic this should have dissuaded the Lewises from the very idea of an English boarding school, particularly since, when he was asked for the name of a specific prep school (i.e. a school for the seven-to-thirteen age group), Kirkpatrick was unable to supply a single one; nevertheless, in the mysterious way that these things happen, the correspondence of the Headmaster with his beloved old pupil had sealed the fate of the two little boys. But before that was to happen, there was another monumental change in their lives. They moved house.
Albert Lewis was coming up in the world. Little Lea was a substantial house which he had built himself, with the intention of retiring from his solicitor’s practice at the age of about fifty and going in ‘mildly for Literature or Public Life – such as Town Council or Harbour Board’.1
C. S. Lewis recalled that
My father, who had more capacity for being cheated than any man I have ever known, was badly cheated by his builders; the drains were wrong, the chimneys were wrong, and there was a draught in every room. None of this, however, mattered to a child. To me, the important thing about the move was that the background of my life became larger.2
This house, with its long book-lined corridors, its ugliness (‘we never saw a beautiful building nor imagined a building could be beautiful’), and above all its roominess, was the background for all the Lewis brothers’ subsequent imaginative experiences. In memory, they returned to it again and again – above all to the ‘Little End Room’, an attic sitting-room which was created for them as a refuge from the grown-ups. Warnie, however, had less than a month of the new house before being sent away to boarding school. They moved in on 21 April 1905, and on 10 May he was sent off to Wynyard House near Watford. ‘Warren left home for school tonight for the first time,’ Albert wrote in his diary. ‘Fearful wrench for me. Badge behaved very pluckily. Flora took him over. May God bless the venture.’3
In the last resort, the Lewises, like many middle-class parents, had chosen a school for their son ‘blind’, relying not on their own sense or experience but on the advice of an educational ‘agency’ in London called Gabbitas & Thring. This curious institution has the dual purpose of finding both staff to teach in private schools and parents trusting enough to put their children in these teachers’ charge. Since a high proportion of English writers have at one stage or another been obliged to earn their living as schoolmasters, it is not surprising that the agency has been so often mentioned in the pages of mid-twentieth-century literature. W. H. Auden dubbed it Rabbitarse & String, while Evelyn Waugh used it as the catalyst by which his first fictional hero, Paul Pennyfeather, was transformed into an usher at Llanabba Castle. In Decline and Fall, the agency is called Church & Gargoyle.
‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly,’ said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.’4
Wynyard was to turn out to be no better than ‘School’, but this was a fact that Jack Lewis was not to discover for himself until nearly three years had elapsed. Up to that point he had the run of Little Lea; and he was educated entirely at home. His governess was called Miss Harper, and his mother herself took charge of teaching him French and Latin. He seems to have disliked his governess – who was a Presbyterian. A theological lecture interspersed between the sums was one of his first intimations that there was Another World in which Christians were supposed to believe. He preferred the other world of his own invention, and by the time he was nine he had already assembled a considerable œuvre, chiefly relating to Animal-land and the dressed animals, but also