The Kilns

“Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”

— Psalm 127:1, KJV

A House on the Hill

After Albert’s death, Little Lea was sold, and the brothers divided what their father had left them. With his share, and with money of Mrs Moore’s from a legacy, Lewis was able to do something the household had never been able to do before: buy a home. In the summer of 1930 they found one. It was a low, brick house built on the site of an old brickworks at the foot of Shotover Hill, about three miles east of Oxford, in the hamlet of Headington Quarry. Two old kilns stood beside it, and gave the house its name. It came with eight acres of woodland, a large overgrown garden, and a flooded clay pit that had become a pond. Lewis loved it at first sight.

The Kilns cost £3,300. Mrs Moore paid the largest part and the brothers the rest, and the house was bought in her name, with Jack and Warnie each having the right to live there for life. After their deaths it was to pass to Maureen. The household moved in on 10 October 1930. Lewis lived there for the next thirty-three years, and he died there.

The Household

It was never a quiet house. Mrs Moore ran it, with a succession of maids and helpers whom she was apt to quarrel with and dismiss. Maureen, by then in her twenties and training as a music teacher, lived there until her marriage in 1940. A gardener and handyman named Fred Paxford joined the household in 1930 and stayed for more than thirty years. Paxford was a gloomy, kindly countryman who always expected the worst and was usually cheerful about it. He became a fixture of Lewis’s life, and there were dogs, cats and at one point a large number of hens.

In December 1932 Warnie retired from the army after eighteen years’ service, as a captain, and came home for good. He was recalled to the colours in 1939 and served briefly in France before being sent home again in 1940, by then a major, and Major Lewis he remained. He was given his own rooms at the Kilns, and he settled into a life of reading, walking, gardening and writing. Over the next few years he sorted and typed out the whole mass of the Lewis family papers, letters and diaries going back to the nineteenth century, into eleven bound volumes. Later he wrote several well-received books on the history of seventeenth-century France, his own great interest. And from the 1940s onwards he served, without pay, as his brother’s secretary.

The arrangement was not always easy. Warnie and Mrs Moore disliked each other. He thought her tyrannical and she thought him idle. He took refuge in his books and in long walks, and sometimes in drink. Jack stood between them and tried to keep the peace. But the brothers were together again, as they had been as boys at Little Lea, and for both of them that counted for more than the friction.

The Pond and the Woods

Lewis loved the grounds of the Kilns. He swam in the pond in all weathers, sometimes punting a flat-bottomed boat across it. He walked in the woods every day. He knew the birds and the trees, and he cleared paths through the undergrowth. Friends who visited remembered him striding about in old clothes, a pipe in his mouth, talking at full speed. It was a quiet, almost rural life only three miles from the city, and it suited him. Many of the landscapes of his later stories have something of the Kilns about them: the woods, the water, the sense of an ordinary English place on the edge of something wild.

Holy Trinity

From the Kilns, Holy Trinity Church was a short walk across the fields. It was a plain Victorian village church built for the quarrymen of Headington, and it became Lewis’s parish church for the rest of his life. He went to the early service of Holy Communion on Sunday mornings, usually at eight, and he sat in a pew near the front, at the side, where he could see the altar and be seen by very few. He did not stay for the later, sung service, because he disliked hymns. He was a faithful, regular, undemonstrative member of the congregation. In time the vicar, the congregation and the village came to know him not as a famous author but as Mr Lewis from the Kilns, who came early, slipped away quickly, and gave generously and quietly to the parish.

The First Christian Book

The first book Lewis wrote as a Christian was written in a fortnight. In August 1932, staying with Arthur Greeves at his home near Belfast, he wrote an allegory of his own journey to faith, modelled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was published in 1933 as The Pilgrim’s Regress. It is not one of his best books. It is too clever, too full of private allusions, and some of its satire is bitter. Lewis himself later thought it was needlessly obscure and uncharitable. But it shows how quickly he set out to put his faith into writing, and how naturally he turned to Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford whom he admired all his life.

His scholarly work went on alongside. In 1936 he published The Allegory of Love, the study of medieval love poetry he had been writing for a decade. It made his name at once among literary scholars and won a major prize. It remains a classic of its field. In 1938 he published his first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, a story of a voyage to Mars. A great deal of Christian thought was hidden inside it, and Lewis was amused to discover that hardly any reviewer noticed.

Unless the Lord Build

The verse at the head of this chapter is a warning to builders. The household at the Kilns was not, on any ordinary reckoning, well built. It was a strange collection of people: an Oxford don, his retired brother, an older woman who was not his mother, her grown daughter, a gloomy gardener and a stream of maids. Its tempers were frayed and its peace was uncertain. Yet it lasted for more than twenty years, and out of it came a stream of books that have been read by millions. Lewis would have been the first to say that it was not his skill as a householder that kept it together. He prayed for that house, and he served it, and he trusted that the Lord was building it even when the builders were at odds. He was right.