Little Lea

“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

A Belfast Family

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in a semi-detached house called Dundela Villas, in Strandtown, on the eastern edge of Belfast. Belfast at the end of the nineteenth century was a city of shipyards, linen mills and rope works, proud, industrious and deeply Protestant. From the hills above Strandtown one could see the great gantries of the Harland and Wolff yard, where a few years later the Titanic would be built. Lewis grew up within sight of the cranes and within sound of the ships’ sirens on the lough, and for the rest of his life he loved the soft, wet Ulster countryside of hills, mists and distant sea.

His father, Albert James Lewis, was a solicitor with a practice in the police courts. Albert was the son of a Welsh boilermaker who had settled in Ireland and done well in the shipbuilding trade. He was clever, emotional, fond of oratory and of long words, a keen reader and an anxious man. He loved his sons deeply and never found an easy way to show it. His wife, Florence Augusta Hamilton, always called Flora, came from a different world. Her father, the Reverend Thomas Hamilton, was rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, the parish church where the Lewis boys were baptised. Flora was quiet, humorous and unusually well educated. She had studied at Queen’s College in Belfast and had taken a degree with honours in logic and mathematics, at a time when very few women anywhere went to university at all. Albert courted her for years before she agreed to marry him in 1894.

There were two children. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born in June 1895, and Clive three and a half years later. While still very small, Clive announced that he would no longer answer to his name. He had decided to be called after a dog of the neighbourhood, Jacksie, and he held out until the family gave in. The name shortened to Jacks and then to Jack, and Jack he remained to his family and friends for the rest of his life. Only the outside world called him Clive, and later C. S. Lewis.

Two Brothers

The bond between the two boys was the steadiest thing in Lewis’s life. Warren, known to the family as Warnie, was his first friend and in many ways his last. In Surprised by Joy Lewis remembered a day when his brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin covered with moss and decorated with twigs and flowers, to make a toy garden. It was the first beauty he could remember, and it stirred in him a sudden, aching longing that he could not explain. Such moments came to him again and again in childhood, prompted by the sight of distant hills, by a story, by a line of poetry. He later gave the experience a name, and he came to believe that it was one of the threads by which God had been drawing him. That longing belongs to his teaching, and it is explored in the companion volume. For his life, what matters is that it was there from the beginning, and that it would not let him go.

The brothers were inseparable when they were together. When they were apart, they wrote. Jack was a bookish, imaginative child, short-sighted, clumsy with his hands because of a defect in the joint of his thumbs, and hopeless at games. He drew and wrote endlessly. Together the two boys invented an entire imaginary world. Jack’s part was a country called Animal-Land, peopled by dressed animals and knights in armour. Warnie’s part was India. In time the two were joined into a single realm called Boxen, with its own history, geography, politics and railway timetables. The Boxen stories, which survive, are full of parliaments and cabinet intrigues. They are not much like the later Narnia books. They are the writings of a boy who listened to the grown-up talk of his father and his father’s friends about politics and the law, and turned it into a game.

The House of Books

In April 1905, when Jack was six, the family moved to a large new house that Albert had built a little further out of the city, on the Circular Road in Strandtown. It was called Little Lea. It was a rambling, draughty, rather badly designed house, full of long corridors, odd corners, empty rooms and attics, and above all it was full of books. Lewis remembered them in almost every room and stacked in the attics, and he remembered that no one stopped him reading any of them. On the long wet afternoons that a Belfast childhood offered in abundance, he explored the house and read. He had found his way into the old poets and novelists long before anyone set them for him at school.

It was a sheltered, privileged and happy world. There were maids, a governess, a nurse called Lizzie Endicott who told the boys Irish stories, and summer holidays by the sea in County Down. Flora taught Jack the beginnings of French and Latin herself. The family went to church at St Mark’s, where Jack’s grandfather preached sermons that the boy found long. He learned his prayers and said them. There is no sign that faith was ever forced on him, and no sign either that it ever took deep root. Like many children of devout households, he took the Christian world for granted, as he took Little Lea for granted, without asking what it rested on.

Albert

Albert Lewis deserves more justice than his younger son, in his later years, was able to give him. In Surprised by Joy Albert appears as a well-meaning but absurd figure, given to rhetorical outbursts, to muddled questions and to misunderstandings that his sons found comic. Many readers, and some of the biographers, have felt that this portrait is unkind. Albert was a man of real intelligence and wide reading. He was generous, he worked very hard to give his sons an education he had never had, and he went on supporting Jack, financially and otherwise, long after most fathers would have stopped. He was also lonely, nervous and stubborn, and when he was most in need of his sons’ affection he was least able to win it.

Lewis came to see this himself. In his later years he spoke with deep regret of how he had treated his father, and friends recalled that it weighed on him more than almost anything else in his past. That regret, as we shall see, was part of what brought him to his knees. It belongs to a much later chapter. In 1905, in the new house full of books, father and sons were still close, and the boy who would one day describe a house with a wardrobe that opened onto another world was simply happy.

The verse at the head of this chapter is a promise to parents. Albert and Flora Lewis did, in their way, train up their younger son in the way he should go. For a long time it seemed that the promise had failed, and that he had departed from it completely. But the book of Proverbs speaks of the end, not the middle. When he was old, he had not departed from it.