Three Years

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: … A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

— Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4, KJV

A Late Happiness

Lewis was nearly sixty when Joy came home to the Kilns, and he had never expected to be married. He found, to his own amazement, that he was happy in a way he had not been since childhood. He told friends so, simply and without embarrassment. He had not known, he said in effect, that such happiness was possible, and he had certainly not expected it to come to him so late, or in such circumstances.

Joy brought the Kilns to life. The house had been neglected for years. Mrs Moore had not been able to look after it in her last decade, and the two brothers had not much cared. There were holes in the carpets, broken windows, threadbare furniture and damp in the walls. Joy, once she could move about, set about putting it right. She had the house redecorated, the carpets replaced and the heating improved. She took charge of the accounts and of the household staff. She discovered, to her indignation, that poachers and trespassers had been using the Kilns woods for years, and she saw them off. Paxford, who had run the place in his own way for nearly thirty years, did not altogether like the change. Warnie did. He and Joy became firm friends, and he was delighted to see the old house come back to life.

A Marriage of True Minds

The two of them were extraordinarily well matched. Joy was the only person Lewis had ever met, apart from a few of the Inklings, who could argue with him on equal terms, and she did so constantly. She was quick, funny, sharp-tongued and sometimes rude. Several of Lewis’s friends disliked her, and some thought she was bad for him. Others saw that she made him happy, and loved her for it. She helped him with his writing, read his drafts, made suggestions and criticisms, and encouraged him. Lewis said that Till We Have Faces owed a great deal to her, and his later books bear signs of their conversations.

They also prayed together, went to church together, and read together. Joy shared her husband’s faith wholeheartedly. Their marriage was, in the fullest sense, a Christian one.

Ireland

In July 1958, with Joy strong enough to travel, the two of them went to Ireland for a belated honeymoon. It was the first time Lewis had ever flown. They visited Arthur Greeves and other old friends and relatives, and toured the countryside of Lewis’s childhood: the hills and coast of County Down and further afield, as far as Donegal. Lewis showed Joy everything he had loved as a boy, and Joy, who had grown up in the Bronx, loved it too.

Work in Those Years

Lewis went on working. In term he was in Cambridge during the week, and he came home to the Kilns as early as he could on Fridays. In 1958 he published Reflections on the Psalms, a book written for ordinary readers about the difficulties and the delights of praying the Psalms, and in 1960 The Four Loves, a book about affection, friendship, romantic love and charity. In the summer of 1958 he recorded a series of talks on the four loves for an American religious broadcasting organisation. Some American listeners were shocked by his frankness about sex, and the talks were not widely broadcast at the time. He also wrote a sequel to the Screwtape letters, in the form of a toast proposed by the senior devil at a dinner for young tempters, which was published in an American magazine in 1959.

The Cancer Returns

In October 1959 a routine examination at the hospital showed that the cancer had come back. There were new tumours in Joy’s bones. The doctors said that she could be given treatment that might hold it back for a time, but that it would not cure her. Lewis wrote to friends with a heavy heart. They had known it might happen. Knowing did not make it easier.

Greece

Joy had always wanted to see Greece. For a scholar of classical literature like Lewis, it would have been the journey of a lifetime too, and he had never made it. In the spring of 1960, with the doctors’ reluctant agreement, they went. They travelled with two old friends, Roger Lancelyn Green, Lewis’s former pupil, and his wife June. From 3 to 14 April they toured Greece and the islands: Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes, Crete and Knossos. Joy was in pain much of the time and could not walk far, but she was determined to see all she could, and she saw a great deal. Lewis, who had read about these places all his life, saw them at last, with his wife beside him.

Green kept a diary of the trip, and later dedicated his biography of Lewis to the memory of Jack and Joy and of what he called their tour of the Greek islands. Everyone who was there remembered it as a time of great happiness, in spite of everything. It was the last journey Joy ever made.

The End

After their return Joy’s condition grew worse quickly. In the early summer she had a major operation. Early in July she was taken into the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. Lewis was with her as much as he could be. On 13 July 1960 she died, with him at her side. She was forty-five.

Before she died she received absolution from Austin Farrer, one of the most distinguished theologians in England, who had become a close friend of them both. Lewis afterwards told friends that at the end she had been at peace with God. Her body was cremated at the Oxford crematorium, where Farrer took the funeral service, and her ashes were scattered in the rose garden there. Lewis wrote a short poem for her memorial plaque, which can still be read there.

A Time to Dance

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of the seasons God appoints for every purpose: a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Lewis and Joy had been given a time to dance. It lasted a little over three years after the bedside wedding, and four from the day in the register office. It was brief, and it was overshadowed from beginning to end by the knowledge of her illness. But they took it as a gift, and they were glad in it. When it ended, the time to weep began, and Lewis entered it more completely than he had ever entered anything.