August 1908

“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”

— Psalm 27:10, KJV

The Illness

Early in 1908 Flora Lewis fell ill. The doctors found cancer. In those days an operation for cancer was often performed at home, and Flora’s was carried out at Little Lea, with the household doing its best to go on around it. For a while she seemed to rally. She was taken to the seaside to recover, and Jack went with her. Then, in the summer, the disease returned. The house filled with nurses, doctors and the smell of antiseptic. Normal life stopped. The boys were kept out of the sickroom and did not understand what was happening, except that everything had changed.

It was a terrible year for Albert. His own father died in the spring of 1908. His wife was dying through the summer. Within weeks of her death his brother Joseph died too. Albert was a man of strong feeling and little self-command, and under the weight of these losses he became, for a time, almost a stranger to his sons: given to outbursts of grief and temper, absorbed in his own suffering, unable to reach the two frightened boys who were watching him.

A Prayer That Seemed to Fail

Jack prayed. He had been taught that God answers prayer, and he believed it, in the way a nine-year-old believes. He prayed that his mother would be made well. When she died, on 23 August 1908, he prayed that she would be restored to life. Nothing happened.

Looking back nearly fifty years later, Lewis did not describe this as the moment he lost his faith. He was careful about it. He thought that the prayer had not really been addressed to the God of the Christians at all. He had approached God, he said, not as a Saviour or a Judge but as a kind of magician who would do what was asked and then go away. When the magic did not work, he was not shattered; he was simply left with nothing. But he came to believe that the episode laid a foundation for the unbelief that followed. A child who has asked God for something with all his heart and been refused learns something, even if he does not yet know what he has learned.

Flora was forty-six. On the day she died, the leaf on the Shakespeare calendar in her bedroom carried a line from King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.” Albert kept the leaf. More than half a century later, Warren had those words cut on his brother’s gravestone.

The End of a World

Lewis wrote, looking back, that his mother’s death took from him every certainty and every settled happiness he had known. It is the kind of judgement that can sound like the exaggeration of a memoir, but it is borne out by everything that happened next. The two boys, he said, drew closer together and further from their father. From then on they had, in effect, only each other. They loved Albert and pitied him, but they no longer trusted him to understand them, and they began to keep their real lives from him. It was the beginning of a habit of concealment that would last for twenty years.

There is a tender detail from those weeks. Lewis remembered being taken into the room where his mother lay dead, and being horrified by what he saw: not the face he had known but something strange. He also remembered hating the paraphernalia of the funeral: the flowers, the hearse, the black clothes. He was a sensitive child, and the outward show of death seemed to him an assault. Long afterwards, when he came to write about grief, he wrote with the knowledge of someone who had first met it at nine years old and had never quite recovered from the meeting.

Sent Away

Less than a month after Flora’s death, Albert did what many fathers of his class would have done. He sent both boys to boarding school in England. Warnie had already been at Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, for three years. Now Jack went with him. They crossed the Irish Sea by the night boat from Belfast to Fleetwood, and took the train south. It was the first of many such crossings, and Lewis never forgot the misery of them: the smell of the boat, the dark, grey dawn over Lancashire, and the knowledge that he was being carried away from everything he knew.

Wynyard was a small private school run by a clergyman named Robert Capron, whom the boys called Oldie. It was, by every account including Warnie’s, a bad school. Capron was a brutal and erratic man who beat the boys for little or no reason and taught them almost nothing. The school was dwindling, and within two years it would close. Capron was afterwards certified insane. In Surprised by Joy Lewis gave Wynyard a bitter nickname taken from the Nazi camps, which he regretted, and which shows how deeply the place had hurt him. The detail most worth remembering is a different one. At Wynyard, for the first time, Jack was taken regularly to a High Church parish where he heard the Christian faith taught as if it mattered. He began to pray seriously and to read his Bible. For a short time, in that unhappy place, he was something like a believing boy.

What the Psalm Promises

The verse at the head of this chapter is from Psalm 27. Its words are almost too apt. Jack’s mother had been taken, and his father, in grief, had withdrawn and sent him away. Neither parent had meant to forsake him, but in every sense a child can feel, he was forsaken. The psalmist does not say that this will not happen. He says what God does when it does: “then the LORD will take me up.”

For many years nothing in Lewis’s life looked like the fulfilment of that promise. He lost what little faith he had and went on to deny that there was any God to take him up. But the psalm does not set a timetable. Thirty years later, a middle-aged man who had once prayed for his mother’s life would write to bereaved strangers with a tenderness that came from his own wound. The child who was carried across the sea in the dark had been taken up after all. He simply did not know it yet.