Mrs Moore

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

— James 1:27, KJV

A Household in Oxford

When Lewis returned to Oxford in January 1919, Janie Moore and Maureen came too. Mrs Moore took rooms in the city, and within a short time Jack was spending most of his time outside college hours with them. Undergraduates were required to live in college, so for a while he kept up the appearance of a normal student life while in fact dividing his days between University College and the Moores’ lodgings. As soon as the rules allowed, he moved in with them. For the next thirty years, apart from his college rooms, he had no other home.

It was a precarious household. Mrs Moore had very little money: an irregular allowance from her estranged husband and nothing else. Jack had his scholarship and an allowance from his father, which Albert paid on the understanding that his son was living as a student. The two incomes together barely kept them. In the first years they moved again and again from one set of rented rooms to another, often to cheaper and colder lodgings, with Mrs Moore taking in lodgers to make ends meet. In 1922 they settled in a rented house called Hillsboro on the Western Road in Headington, on the eastern edge of Oxford, and stayed there for eight years.

Lewis did the shopping, washed up, ran errands, tutored Maureen in Latin, walked the dog, and studied when he could find a quiet hour. His diary from these years, which he kept from 1922 to 1927 and which was later published, is full of the minor crises of domestic life: a sick maid, a smoking chimney, a quarrel with a lodger, Mrs Moore’s headaches, money worries. It is also full of reading, walking, conversation and hard work. It is the diary of a man who was very busy, often tired, and not unhappy.

What Albert Was Not Told

Albert was told almost nothing. He knew that his son had a friendship with the mother of a dead comrade, and he did not like what little he knew. But he did not know that Jack was living with Mrs Moore, and he did not know that the allowance he was sending was partly keeping her household. Jack deceived him, sometimes by silence and sometimes by direct lies, and he went on doing so for ten years. Warnie, who was serving abroad, knew more and disapproved.

Lewis came to regard this deception as one of the great sins of his life. He had taken his father’s money under false pretences, he had kept from him the central fact of his life, and he had done it partly out of fear and partly out of contempt. When, after his conversion, he looked back over the years of his unbelief, it was not his intellectual errors that troubled him most. It was this.

What Was the Relationship?

This is the place to ask a question that every biographer has had to ask and none has been able to answer with certainty. What exactly was the relationship between Jack Lewis and Janie Moore?

She was twenty-six years older than he was. She was still legally married. She became, in his letters and in the life of the household, something between a mother, a landlady and a companion. He called her Minto, after a brand of sweets, and in letters to others he often called her his mother. Many people who met them in the 1920s and 1930s assumed that she was his mother, and he did not correct them.

Some biographers believe that in the first years, at least, the two were lovers. They point to the intensity of Jack’s feelings for her in 1917 and 1918, to the secrecy with which he surrounded the relationship, to hints in his letters to Arthur Greeves, and to the fact that a young man of twenty and a lonely woman of forty-six were living together under circumstances that would have suggested an affair to anyone in that age. A. N. Wilson and Alister McGrath both think it likely. George Sayer, who knew Lewis well, came to think it probable too, though he had once doubted it.

Others are certain that it was never anything but a filial relationship. They point out that the household always included Maureen, a child and then a young woman living at home. They note that Lewis never spoke of it in such terms to anyone, and that Warnie, who disliked Mrs Moore intensely and had every reason to suspect the worst, came to see her chiefly as a tyrant in the house, not as Jack’s mistress. Walter Hooper always insisted that the relationship was one of a son to an adopted mother.

The honest answer is that we do not know. There is no letter or record that settles it, and Lewis, who was otherwise remarkably open about his own sins, kept this part of his life closed. If the relationship began as a love affair, it seems clear that it did not remain one, and certainly not after his conversion. What is beyond dispute is what came after. For more than thirty years Lewis supported Mrs Moore, lived with her, served her and nursed her, through her decline into a querulous, demanding and often difficult old age, until her death in 1951. Whatever the relationship was at the beginning, at the end it was a long, costly act of faithfulness.

Not an Easy House

Some of Lewis’s friends found the household baffling and some found it painful. Mrs Moore was generous, hospitable and kind in many ways. She fed half the stray animals of Headington, she was devoted to Maureen, and she worked hard. But she was also possessive, anxious and a constant source of small demands. She liked to have Jack at her beck and call. She would interrupt his work for errands that could have waited, and she seems to have had little interest in his books or his ideas. Friends who came to the house noticed how often Jack was called away from conversation to some domestic task, and some of them resented it on his behalf.

Lewis almost never complained. In his letters he spoke of her with loyalty, sometimes with humour, and later, as she grew old and ill, with patience. He seems to have regarded the burdens of that house as part of what he owed: to Paddy, to her, and, after 1931, to God. It is possible that his long apprenticeship in serving a demanding woman did more for his soul than all his reading. He would later write with unusual insight about the small daily irritations of family life, about the temptation to resent those we live with, and about the way charity is learned at home or not at all.

Visiting the Widow

The verse at the head of this chapter defines pure religion in two ways: caring for the fatherless and the widow, and keeping oneself unspotted from the world. Mrs Moore was not a widow in 1919, and Maureen was not fatherless, but in every practical sense they had been abandoned, and Paddy’s death had taken their last support. A young atheist undergraduate took them in and kept them. He was not, then, practising religion of any kind. But James would have recognised what he was doing. And when Lewis did become a Christian, he did not end the arrangement or try to escape from it. He went on visiting the widow in her affliction, for twenty more years, until she died.