August 1908

“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.” — Psalm 27:10 (KJV)

Early in 1908 Flora Lewis was found to have cancer. In those days operations were often done at home, and hers was carried out at Little Lea while the household tried to carry on around it. For a while she seemed to get better. Then, in the summer, the disease came back. The house filled with nurses, doctors and the smell of antiseptic. Jack and Warnie were kept out of the sickroom, and nobody explained much. They only knew that everything had changed.

It was a terrible year for their father too. Albert's own father died that spring, his wife was dying through the summer, and within weeks of her death his brother died as well. Under that weight Albert became almost a stranger to his sons: given to outbursts of grief and temper, lost in his own suffering, unable to reach the two frightened boys who were watching him.

Jack prayed. He had been taught that God answers prayer, and he believed it the way a nine-year-old believes things. He prayed that his mother would get well. She died on 23 August 1908, aged forty-six. Then he prayed that she would come back to life. Nothing happened.

Nearly fifty years later, Lewis was careful about how he described this. He did not say it was the moment he lost his faith. He thought he had been treating God less like a Saviour and more like a magician who would do the trick and then go away. When the trick didn't work, he wasn't shattered; he was simply left with nothing. But he believed it laid the foundation for the unbelief that came later.

On the day Flora died, the page on the Shakespeare calendar in her bedroom carried a line from King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.” Albert kept the page. Remember that line. It comes back at the very end of this book.

Jack remembered being taken in to see his mother's body and being horrified: it was not the face he knew. He hated the flowers, the hearse and the black clothes. After that, he and Warnie drew closer together and further from their father. They loved Albert and pitied him, but they stopped trusting him with their real lives. It was the start of a habit of hiding that would last twenty years.

Less than a month after the funeral, Albert sent both boys to boarding school in England. They crossed the Irish Sea on the night boat, and Jack never forgot the misery of it: the smell, the dark, the grey dawn, the feeling of being carried away from everything he knew. The school, Wynyard, was a bad one. Its headmaster beat the boys for little or no reason and taught them almost nothing, and he was later certified insane. Yet it was there, of all places, that Jack was taken to a church where the faith was taught as if it mattered, and for a short time he prayed seriously and read his Bible.

Psalm 27 doesn't promise that you will never feel abandoned. It says what God does when you are: “then the LORD will take me up.” Neither of Jack's parents meant to forsake him, but a child can feel forsaken anyway. If you have lost someone, or prayed hard for something that didn't happen, you are allowed to feel it. Lewis didn't see God's answer for many years. But it came, and later he wrote to grieving strangers with a tenderness that came straight from that wound.

One thing to do this week: if there is a prayer you feel God ignored, write it down. Don't tidy it up. Then talk about it with someone you trust. If grief feels too heavy to carry, tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher or a doctor.