Call Me Jack

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” — Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, a city of shipyards, linen mills and rope works in the north of Ireland. From the hills near his home you could see the giant cranes of the Harland and Wolff yard, where the Titanic would soon be built.

While he was still very small, he announced that he would no longer answer to Clive. He had decided to be named after a neighbourhood dog called Jacksie, and he held out until his family gave in. Jacksie became Jacks, and Jacks became Jack. To the people who loved him he was Jack for the rest of his life. Only the outside world called him Clive, and later C. S. Lewis.

His father, Albert, was a solicitor who worked in the police courts. He was clever and emotional, fond of long words and big speeches, and an anxious man who loved his sons deeply but never found an easy way to show it. His mother, Flora, was quiet, funny and remarkably well educated. She had taken an honours degree in logic and mathematics at a time when very few women anywhere went to university, and she taught Jack the beginnings of French and Latin herself.

His best friend was his brother. Warren, whom everyone called Warnie, was three and a half years older. One day Warnie brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin covered with moss, twigs and flowers: a tiny toy garden. Jack remembered it as the first beautiful thing he ever saw, and it stirred in him a sudden, aching longing he could not explain. That longing came back again and again as he grew up, at the sight of far-off hills, in a story, in a line of poetry. Much later he came to believe it was one of the threads by which God had been drawing him.

Jack was short-sighted, clumsy with his hands because of a defect in his thumb joints, and hopeless at games. So he drew and wrote. He and Warnie invented a whole imaginary world called Boxen, with its own history, maps, politics and even railway timetables. The stories, which still survive, are full of parliaments and cabinet plots.

In 1905, when Jack was six, the family moved into a big new house called Little Lea. It was rambling and draughty, full of long corridors, empty rooms and attics, and above all full of books. They were in almost every room and stacked in the attics, and nobody stopped him reading any of them. On long rainy afternoons he read the old poets and novelists years before any school set them.

The family went to church at St Mark's, where Jack's grandfather was the rector. Jack learned his prayers and said them. Nobody forced faith on him, but there is no sign that it went deep either. He took Christianity for granted, the way he took Little Lea for granted, without asking what it rested on.

One more thing is worth knowing now. Years later Jack wrote about his father in a way that made Albert look a bit ridiculous, and many readers think that was unfair. Albert worked hard to give his sons an education he had never had, and he went on supporting Jack long after most fathers would have stopped. In his later years Lewis deeply regretted how he had treated his father. That regret will come back in this story.

The verse at the top of this chapter is a promise to parents: train a child in the right way, and when he is old he will not leave it. For a long time it looked as if that promise had failed for Jack. But Proverbs is talking about the end of the story, not the middle. If you have grown up around faith and you are not sure yet what it means to you, you are not the first. God is patient with the middle.

One thing to do this week: make a list of three things that have given you that same kind of longing: a place, a song, a story, a view. Next to each one, write one sentence about what you think you were really longing for.