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SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS Almost as soon as he could talk, Clive Staples Lewis announced to his family, pointing to himself: "He is Jacksie" – a creative and independent mind from the start, it seems. And so throughout his life, to friends and family, he was Jack. |
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Left: Jack as a child in Northern Ireland. Used by permission of The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. |
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The Lewises lived near Belfast. Jack was a solitary child, unless he was with his older brother Warren, with whom he wrote stories about a land of animals who talked and wore clothes like humans. The rest of the time he would read, vast amounts, from Squirrel Nutkin to Paradise Lost. "I was living almost entirely in my imagination," he later said. Jack's mother died when he was nine, and "all that was tranquil and reliable disappeared from my life". Four weeks later, he was sent to his brother's boarding school, which he describes in his autobiography as a brutal, stupid regime, calling it a concentration camp. He was thoroughly unhappy at a series of schools, and he was still solitary and unusually clever. Although he had been brought up as a Christian, he became an atheist, and at the same time grew utterly absorbed in the myths of the Norse gods. At 15 he was released from school and went to live with a tutor, WT Kirkpatrick, in Surrey. Kirkpatrick, or "The Knock" as Jack called him, taught him an array of languages and their literature. He also learned a lot from Kirkpatrick's ruthless, razor-sharp logic. Lewis served as an officer in the First World War for four months, before returning wounded. He studied at Oxford University and stayed there as an English lecturer from 1925. He set up house with Mrs Moore, the mother of a fellow officer who had been killed – each had promised to look after the other's parent if one of them died. Jack's relations with his father were increasingly distant, and some have suggested there was something more complicated to his relationship with Mrs Moore than simply adopted son. He certainly looked after her constantly until her death 30 years later. Next: God's quarry – click here! |
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