Christmas Eve arrived and with it a knock on the front door of Little Lea. In the post was an envelope with the name Clive Staples Lewis typed on its front. On the back was Oxford University’s logo, stamped deep into a yellow wax seal.
Right there in the entry foyer, with ancestors’ portraits watching over them, Jack’s father ripped open the letter that would seal Jack’s doomed fate. Jack would be brave; he would stand and accept the verdict.
Albert Lewis read aloud the words.
Dear Mr. Clive Staples Lewis,
Congratulations on your admittance to Oxford’s University College . . .
Jack’s tight fists of dread unfolded. He was stunned, but he also knew these were odd times. The war raged, and there were fewer men to attend university. Most British boys of his age were already in France. Oxford must need students; the result was that Jack Lewis was admitted.
In the summer—Trinity Term—of 1916, Jack moved to the spired city of Oxford. After he ambled from the train and through the gates of University College with the azure arms of a cross between five martlets, he was escorted by a tall and thin porter to his rooms. It was a gabled college with an emerald green quad surrounded by a tawny stone cloister, iron lanterns, and gargoyles. Jack reveled in the deep medieval feel of it all.
Jack followed the skinny porter, who looked as if he might break if he touched his toes. They walked along stone hallways, up a narrow winding staircase to a dimly lit residence hallway. The porter opened a door and stepped in. Jack followed and was about to drop his pack when he stopped mid-step to stare. This was a plush two-room residence with warm wood paneling. Covering the walls were oil paintings of old men in professors’ cloaks. Bookshelves heavy with books crowded every corner, leaving no room for more. There was a study and a separate bedroom Jack could see behind an open door. He dropped his duffel bag, unsure if he should tell the porter that this fancy room could not possibly be his.
To boot, in the center of the room, proud and large, stood a piano.
This young man had quite obviously taken Jack to the wrong room.
Jack looked to the porter already halfway out the door. “This can’t be right. It’s brilliant, but it can’t be mine. This must be for a . . . wealthier student. I think you might have me confused with someone else.”
The porter stopped and looked at Jack, his eyes narrowing like a crow eyeing a shiny object he may or may not dive to retrieve. “Yes. It was another student’s room, but he’s been sent to the front lines. It’s yours for now.”
The porter shut the door. Jack sat on the large wooden desk chair with the plush cushioned seat and stared out the iron mullioned window to the green quad where students hurried this way and that, carrying books and smoking cigarettes on a summer afternoon. The war raged far away while he sat in the two-room suite with a piano and shelves extravagant with books.
Until then, Jack had considered the war a nuisance, something that kept everyone from getting on with their lives, a bother that kept Warnie from him. But this room—it had belonged to a boy who now most likely sat in a trench somewhere in France. A boy who might not return to university or to his family.
Jack’s mind coiled around the opposing worlds of horrifying war and this warm, book-rich room. He decided right then he would not shelter in luxury, evading what his brother and other students were enduring, and he’d enlist in the British army.
An Irishman, Jack could have avoided serving in the military, but he joined the Officer’s Training Corps. During the rigors of marching and artillery training, he had to move his rooms to Keble College. There he was assigned a roommate named Paddy Moore, and they became good mates. Together they promised each other that if anything happened to either one of them, they would take care of the other’s family.
Meanwhile, Jack’s studies at Oxford took precedence. The military training was an added duty. It never felt truly likely that he would be sent.
War was merely an idea, an event far off. That is until Jack’s nineteenth birthday, when he found himself in France’s Somme Valley on the front lines, a member of the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry.
When the shelling began, war was no longer an idea or a scene in a book or something Jack acted out with his chivalrous mice in a Belfast attic.
*
Fear trembled through the earth as well as his heart as Jack hunkered down in a muddy trench near his mate Laurence. Jack’s wool uniform was tight, his hat tilted to cover his forehead and keep him warm along with his lit cigarette. The dissonant explosions, screams, buzzing, and pounding echoes resonated through the air. Jack bent lower, awaiting orders from his lieutenant, when something whizzed so near his ear, he froze up. More accurately, it whistled past him. It was a sound like nothing he’d ever heard.
A bullet. It had missed his head by an inch at most, and after it had passed, a thought flew through Jack’s mind. This is war, just as Homer wrote about.
The cold, the wet mud, the marching; it was what Jack had prepared for during his training, yet he was completely unprepared for the reality.
Now that he was on the front lines, his body could do nothing more than go along for the ride. He had never been out of Ireland or England, yet there he was, crouched in a trench with Laurence, the mud thick and dense beneath their feet, the frost biting and frigid. They were hunkered down so low that all he could see were the muddy wood slats of the trench walls, while above them the war raged with sounds like nothing he’d heard before.
The trench was as real as cold, thick mud, as real as hand-grenade blasts nearby, as real as marching to another miserable battlefield until he was marching while asleep, waking to his feet and worn boots still moving, as real as the sleepless fear that crawled through the trenches like smoke. The green grass of England was replaced by a scorched and barren landscape. He wriggled along the ground to inspect barbed wire, slept sitting straight up against a cold muddy wall. This landscape was far away from his university rooms of dark paneled walls, innumerable books, and a piano waiting to let loose its music. But just as he did at university, Jack carried a notebook inside his pocket. He scribbled in it whenever he could, often lines of poetry.
A few months after his birthday, Jack woke in his barracks with a fever and hallucinations: vivid images of a frozen wasteland inhabited by wolves and dryads; the stars trembling in the firmaments and the earth opening in jagged chasms. Faces, distorted and half animal, emerged and faded. His body trembled as if someone was lifting him like a child and shaking him. Jack didn’t know what was real or what was imagined. Eventually they sent him to a hospital and called it trench fever, a disgusting disease caused by lice. Kind nurses tended to his every need, wiping his fevered forehead, bathing him, feeding and caring for him. How he missed his mother those months of illness and all his life.
Lying in the hospital bed one afternoon, a nurse with whom he had interesting discussions about literature brought Jack a different book by George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin.
Jack consumed the story as if it were his last meal. One George MacDonald book after another followed: Lilith, At the Back of the North Wind, The Golden Key. He returned to what had sustained him in past times of fear and sorrow—reading and writing, poetry and myth—until finally he took pen to paper and wrote more poetry.