A Promise at Keble

“When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed.”

— Ecclesiastes 5:4, KJV

Oxford at War

In December 1916 Jack sat the scholarship examinations at Oxford and was elected to a classical scholarship at University College, one of the oldest colleges in the university. There was a difficulty. To matriculate, every Oxford man had to pass an entrance examination called Responsions, which included elementary mathematics, and Jack, who could translate Homer at sight, could not do sums. He failed the mathematics paper in March 1917. He would almost certainly have failed it again. In the end the war solved the problem for him: after the armistice, men who had served were excused the examination.

He came up to University College in April 1917, but there was not much of a university to come up to. The war had emptied Oxford. Most of the young men were in France, the colleges were half given over to hospitals and military training, and the halls where Jack had expected to hear lectures were full of convalescent soldiers. He had only one term as an undergraduate before the army took him. As an Irishman he was exempt from conscription, which never applied in Ireland. He chose to serve anyway. He joined the university’s Officers’ Training Corps, and in June 1917 he was posted to a cadet battalion that was quartered in Keble College, a few minutes’ walk away.

Paddy Moore

The cadets at Keble were billeted two to a room. Jack’s room-mate was Edward Francis Courtenay Moore, always called Paddy. He was almost exactly Jack’s age, and like him he was Irish. He had been born in Dublin and had grown up partly in Bristol, where his mother had moved after separating from her husband. His mother, Janie King Moore, had come to Oxford to be near him during his training, bringing with her Paddy’s eleven-year-old sister Maureen.

Jack and Paddy became friends, and Jack was soon spending his free time with the Moores. Mrs Moore was forty-five, warm, talkative, generous, and in the habit of mothering every young man her son brought home. She had been unhappily married to a Dublin civil engineer whom she called, in letters, the Beast, and she lived on a small allowance from him. She had none of Flora Lewis’s learning. But she had a household, and a kitchen table, and a welcome. To a motherless young man of eighteen, who had been sent away from home at nine and had spent the years since among schoolmasters, it was a great deal.

The Promise

It was at some point in these months that Jack and Paddy made a promise to each other. If one of them was killed in France and the other survived, the survivor would look after the dead man’s parent. We know of the promise from Maureen, who remembered it many years later, and from the way Lewis behaved afterwards, which makes sense only if such a promise was made. It was the kind of pact that many young officers made in that war, half in solemnity and half to keep up their courage. Few of them can have kept it as Jack Lewis did.

A Silence Kept From Albert

Jack’s letters to his father during these months mention the Moores only in passing. His letters to Arthur Greeves say much more, and they hint at feelings he would not put down in plain words. He spent most of his leave before embarkation not in Belfast, as Albert expected, but with the Moores in Bristol. Albert was hurt and puzzled. It was the beginning of a concealment that would grow over the next ten years until it became one of the burdens of Jack’s conscience. The young man who had learned at nine to keep his real life from his father was now hiding from him the most important relationship he had.

Commission and Embarkation

In September 1917 Jack was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. Paddy was commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. They parted in the autumn of that year. Jack was given leave and then ordered to the front. He crossed to France in mid-November and reached the trenches on 29 November 1917, his nineteenth birthday.

Paddy went to France too. In March 1918 the German army launched its great spring offensive, the last throw of the war, and the British line was driven back across the old battlefields of the Somme. Paddy Moore was posted missing in the fighting in late March. Some months later his family was told that he had been killed near Péronne. He was nineteen.

The Vow

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the Preacher, who had seen many vows made and few kept. He warns that a vow should not be made lightly, and that once it is made it should be paid without delay. The promise at Keble was not made to God. Neither young man then believed in God. But it was a promise, solemnly given, and Jack Lewis paid it in full. He paid it for more than thirty years, through poverty and plenty, through his conversion and his fame, at the cost of much of his freedom and of a good deal of his peace. Whatever else may be said of the household that grew out of that promise, it should first be said that a young unbeliever kept his word.