To the end of his days Lewis was a brilliant parodist – always the sign of a good critic. The stories reveal not that he was trying to escape the grotesque (as he saw it) world of servants and relations, but that he would best come to terms with them when he had re-invented them in the pages of his notebooks. In addition to his parents and Miss Harper, there were Maude the maid, Martha the cook and his old grandfather Lewis, who came to live in the house in April 1907, a prematurely senile presence, muttering psalms to himself in an upstairs bedroom. For much of the time from 1905 until 1907, Jacks was left alone, wallowing in books. When he wasn’t reading he was either missing Warnie, away at school, and writing him letters, or thinking about the games they would play when he got home.
‘Hoora!’ he wrote in 1907. ‘Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into my room, we shake hands and begin to talk.’ He wrote that when he was nine, but he could easily have written it when he was twenty-nine or fifty-nine.
Little Jacks himself we can glimpse in his fragment of autobiography – ‘My life during the Xmas holidsas of 1907 by Jacks or Clive Lewis author of “Building of the Promanad”, “Toyland” “Living races of Mouse-Land” etc. Dedicated to Miss Maude Scott.’
I begin my life after my 9th birthday, on which I got a book from Papy and a post-card album from Mamy. I have a lot of enymays, however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat. Maude is far worse than Mat but she thinks she is a saint. I rather like Mat, but I HATE Maude, she is very nasty and bad tempered, also very ugly, as you can see in the picture …
Having disposed of the servants, our young author turns his attention to his parents. ‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectacles, kniting her chief industry etc. etc. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generaly wearing a jersy.’ The thick lips were to strike others later in life. ‘Oh, he was a brute,’ one of his colleagues in the English Faculty at Oxford once recalled. ‘You could always tell when he was going to start an argument, he would push forward his thick lower lip.’
His knowledge of his close resemblance to his own father was to leave Lewis. Albert would become a more and more fantastical creature in his son’s imagination – perhaps in fact. But in those tranquil Little Lea years before the great calamity befell them all, and before Jacks entered puberty, there were times of great happiness. The leisurely Irish quality of Albert’s life is captured by one of his wheezes about a neighbouring peer who annually allowed a cricket match in his park. The luncheon provided on these occasions was so generous that in the afternoon ‘there were few steady men on the field’. The wicketkeeper was one of the few who had remained sober, and when the drunken batsman lurched out several yards from the pitch to meet his ball and missed it, the wicketkeeper clearly stumped him. ‘How’s that, umpire?’ he said to the umpire, who was steadying himself on a bat. To which the umpire replied, ‘What the hell is it your business? Go on with the bloody match.’
These were not only the days when such amusing things happened; they were also the days when the family still laughed about Albert’s ‘wheezes’. The house moreover became more and more prosperous and comfortable. In May 1907, a telephone was installed.7 The first person Jacks tried to ring was a neighbour of about his age called Arthur Greeves who, like Warnie, was to be a constant in his life. The Greeves family were flax-spinners – the chief industry of Belfast apart from shipbuilding. Jacks’s friendship with Arthur was not to blossom until they were in their teens. In early boyhood, Warnie was really his only friend, the one with whom he shared his fantasies. And it was noticeable that from an early age the younger brother dominated over the elder. There is real forceful bossiness in the letter he wrote to Warnie in May 1907 after the telephone was installed. ‘I have got an adia [sic] you know the play I was writing. I think we will try and act it with new stage don’t say annything about it not being dark, we will have it upstairs and draw the thick curtains and the night one, the scenery is rather hard but still I think we shall do it.’
Warnie was by now twelve years old and his parents were starting to wonder about where he should be educated after Wynyard. Luckily, advice was to hand from old Mr Kirkpatrick, whose litigious nature had not been satisfied with suing a clockmaker for spoiling his clock. A few years later a parent who had entrusted Kirkpatrick with the tuition of a son had been slow in paying an agreed fee and Kirkpatrick had once more enlisted Albert Lewis’s help as a solicitor to extract the money from the defaulter. Albert Lewis himself had not required a cash payment for this service. A greater reward, as he told his old teacher, would be to hear Kirkpatrick’s views on the relation between morality and religion. Kirkpatrick wrote back that
it is a subject too wide, too vast, too dependent on time, place, heredity and social conditions to be treated adequately in a letter. It would take a SYMPOSIUM, or, as Cicero preferred to call it, a Convivium, to touch even on some aspects of what must always be the most profoundly interesting of all questions that deal with man’s spiritual nature and future destiny in the world.8
Albert had to be content, instead, with receiving Kirkpatrick’s advice about a suitable school for Warnie. Winchester was ‘out of the question’, Cheltenham and Rugby were both possibilities. Indeed, Albert even got to the point of writing to a housemaster at Rugby and seeing if his boy could have a place there. Shrewsbury looked tempting. ‘You will do worse,’ Kirkpatrick advised, ‘especially if your boy is literary.’ It looked, however, as if Rugby would be the school for Warnie. But before that time, the sky darkened over Little Lea, and the paradise which young Jacks was inhabiting there with his parents and brother and servants and books was shattered for ever. For Albert Lewis 1908 was a year of unbelievable sorrows. Flora Lewis became seriously ill, and cancer was diagnosed. Since nurses were required night and day, Albert Lewis was compelled to ask his father, who had been living with the family for a year, to move out of Little Lea. Richard Lewis made the move in March. On 24 March he suffered a serious stroke and on 2 April he died. This was the first death of the year.
Flora lasted another four months. Jack remembered the night when he was ill:
crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too: and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before.
It is hard to know whether it was worse to be Jacks, in the midst of all this suffering, or Warnie, away at school in England and terrified that his mother might at any minute die before he had the chance to see her for the last time.
‘My dear son,’ Albert warned him in a letter written shortly after Warnie’s thirteenth birthday, ‘it may be that God in his mercy has decided that you will have no person in the future to turn to but me.’ Warnie’s response was brave. ‘Write as often as you can and tell me all you can about Mammy. It is beastly for me