Mrs Moore

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” — James 1:27 (KJV)

When Jack went back to Oxford in January 1919, Janie Moore and Maureen came too. As soon as the university rules allowed, he moved in with them. For the next thirty years he had no other home.

They were poor. Mrs Moore had an irregular allowance from her estranged husband; Jack had his scholarship and an allowance from his father. They moved again and again between cheap rented rooms, and Mrs Moore took in lodgers. Jack shopped, washed up, ran errands, tutored Maureen in Latin, walked the dog, and studied when he could find a quiet hour. Even so, he took three Firsts, the highest grade Oxford gives: two in classics and philosophy, and one in English, a whole degree he finished in a single year. It still didn't get him a job, and for two more years the household scraped by.

Albert was told almost nothing. He didn't know that Jack was living with Mrs Moore, or that the money he sent was partly keeping her household. Jack deceived him, sometimes by silence and sometimes with direct lies, for about ten years. Later Lewis counted this as one of the great sins of his life. When he looked back on his years of unbelief, it wasn't his wrong ideas that troubled him most. It was this.

So what was the relationship? Every biographer has asked, and none can say for certain. She was twenty-six years older than him and still legally married. He called her Minto, after a brand of sweets, and often referred to her as his mother, and many people assumed she was. Some biographers think that in the early years they were lovers. Others are sure it was always like a son and an adopted mother. No letter or record settles it, and Lewis, who was otherwise open about his sins, never explained it. The honest answer is that we don't know. If it began as an affair, it seems clear it did not stay one, and certainly not after his conversion.

What nobody disputes is what came after. For more than thirty years Jack supported her, lived with her and looked after her. It wasn't an easy house. She was generous and hardworking, but also possessive and anxious, forever calling him away from his work for errands that could have waited. Some friends resented it for him. He almost never complained. Later he wrote with unusual wisdom about the small irritations of family life, and about how love is learned at home or not at all. He learned it in that house.

In May 1925 the job finally came: Jack was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, to teach English. Albert was overjoyed, and Jack wrote him one of the warmest letters he ever sent. It still said nothing about Mrs Moore.

James says pure religion is looking after orphans and widows in their trouble. Mrs Moore wasn't technically a widow, but in practice she and Maureen had been abandoned, and Paddy's death took away their last support. A young atheist took them in, and James would have recognised what he was doing. But this chapter shows the other side too: the same young man was lying to his own father. You can be doing something good and something wrong at the same time. God sees both, and he wants both brought into the light.

One thing to do this week: is there something you are hiding from a parent or someone who loves you? If it is safe to do so, take one honest step: tell the truth about one thing, or talk to a trusted adult about how to.