A Shiver of Wonder Read online

  Queen’s University is nowadays famous for its major contribution to world medicine and engineering. In Flora Hamilton’s time the Maths Department had a significant reputation. Flora read Mathematics and Logic. In her first public exam in 1880, she got a first in Geometry and Algebra, and in her finals in 1881, a first in Logic and a second-class honours degree in Mathematics. She took a B.A. in 1886.

  With regard to Mathematics, Flora was extraordinary, and many regarded her as a bit of a bluestocking. Perhaps in her time a more prevalent Ulster view of mathematics was that of Mother Goose:

  Multiplication is a vexation,

  Division’s twice as bad;

  The rule of three perplexes me,

  And practise makes me mad!

  Another unusual aspect in Flora’s make-up was a deep love of literature; few mathematicians carry such a trait. A voracious reader of good novels, Flora saw one of her own stories, “The Princess Rosetta,” published in The Household Journal of London in 1889.

  Albert’s brother, William, had first courted Florence, but she turned him down, telling him she could never love him. From the beginning Albert had to approach Flora very carefully indeed. When he proposed to her in 1886, she offered him only friendship. By now devoted to her, Albert exploited their love of literature as a major link between them. Flora used him as a sounding board for her short stories and articles, and over the seven years following the proposal they wrote many letters to each other. It took a long time to win Flora’s love; but her friendship with Albert began to shift to a fondness for him, and eventually she woke up to the fact that she would be deeply unhappy if they parted. Her feelings for him were deeper than she outwardly demonstrated. Even at the time of their engagement in June 1893, she admitted to him that she was not sure if she loved him, but she was sure that she could not bear not seeing him. So, on 29 August 1894, the pale, gifted, cool-headed, blue-eyed mathematician and the somewhat tempestuous lawyer were married at St. Mark’s, Dundela. They honeymooned in North Wales and moved into Dundela Villas in East Belfast. It was a marriage that was to be marked by deep devotion from each partner. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895; and three years later, on 29 November 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was born.

  In looking at the childhood of C. S. Lewis, all kinds of threads combine to make up the intriguing tapestry that will emerge. It was William Wordsworth who wrote, “the child is the father of the man”; and looking back on his own childhood, he wrote in a section of The Prelude:

  There was a boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs

  And Islands off Winander! Many a time

  At evening, when the stars had just begun

  To move along the edges of the hills,

  Rising or setting, would he stand alone

  Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake,

  And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

  Press’d closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth

  Uplifted, he, as through an instrument

  Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

  That they might answer him. And they would shout

  Across the watery Vale, and shout again,

  Responsive to his call, with quivering peals.

  It is not the fells and water of the beautiful Lake District that touch the very young C. S. Lewis, but a little town called Castlerock in the northwest corner of Northern Ireland. The middle classes of the time, and in particular the middle classes of Belfast, took their children to the seaside for two or three months of the summer. The thinking behind this practise was that fever such as typhoid (an infectious bacterial disease) was more common in the warm weather of the summer than in other seasons. The year before Clive was born, typhoid had affected 27,000 people.

  Over many years, the Lewises were to take a furnished house at Castlerock during the summer months. Albert, who loathed summer holidays, was happier at work; but Flora went with a nursemaid and one or two other servants to Castlerock. Clive and Warren loved the place. The journey begins with a ride in a hansom cab to the railway station. The boys just delight in the train journey that steams its way along the coastline to the backdrop of the nine Glens of Antrim. A high plateau, cut by the deep glens that sweep eastward to the sea, dominates the landscape. They pass gentle bays separated by blunt headlands and exposed moorlands that give way to gentle valleys and wide vistas, that in turn give way to enclosed farmland. Maybe, at Ballymoney Station, they recited the little doggerel much loved by Ulster schoolchildren, referring to actual places in their province:

  If you weren’t so Ballymena,

  And you had some Ballymoney,

  You could buy a Ballycastle

  To be your Ballyholme.

  Castlerock, the Lewis’s summer holiday home, was hugely important in Clive’s spiritual development. What was the little town like in 1905? Again, our Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory of 1905 proves to be invaluable. It tells us that Castlerock is “a pleasant and rapidly-rising watering-place close to the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway Line, advancing in popularity year after year, as shown by the increasing number of visitors who annually patronise it.”

  It has also become a favourite resort for Sunday School excursions. In bygone years its visitors were almost entirely drawn from the City of Derry and Limavady Districts, but that has ceased, and it is now inhabited during the Summer Season by holiday-seekers from England and Scotland. Its residents are well aware that this little watering place is without rival in these parts. Though relatively small, it has a decided look of superiority. With the exception of several blocks of large houses, it is made up of detached villas surrounded with tastefully laid out gardens and grounds. There is also a beautiful strand—behind which are the sand-hills, with their tufts of tall wiry looking grass—which stretches along the coast for nearly a mile, to the mouth of the River Bann, where the two piers—one 1,920 feet, and the other 3,680 feet—extend from the sand-hills seaward. There is good bathing accommodation provided, and boxes are erected among the rocks for both classes of bathers. On the Western side of the town on the bold headlands is situated Downhill Castle, the seat of Sir H. Hervey-Bruce, Bart., HML, who was the last sitting Member of Parliament for the Borough of Coleraine.

  We learn that there is a golf club and a recreation club with facilities for lawn tennis and cricket. There are two schools, namely Castlerock and Articlave. There is a Post Office, a Police Barracks, and Refreshment Rooms at the North Counties Railway Station. There are around fifty inhabitants listed, and thirteen local farming families.

  Clive Lewis took to the water early, and being immersed in water was a pleasure which he would love for the rest of his life. In fact, being in the water was more pleasurable to him than actually swimming. What effect did the sand, the crabs, the rock pools, the boats, and the ambience of Castlerock have upon him? Probably, they were the seeds of his romantic love of “Northerness.” “One of the most important of his feelings was sown during these seaside holidays,” writes his friend, George Sayer.4 Anyone who knows the area would not doubt him. The long skyline, fringed by Downhill and the Mussenden Temple, the distant hills of County Donegal and Innishowen Head, draws the heart and mind like a magnet.

  We have pored over the maternal, psychological, and environmental background to little Clive Lewis’s childhood; we have traced the emotions, the rhetoric, and the literary leanings of his father; we have looked at the brilliant, logical mind of his mother, and the link of literature between them. All these elements are vital in understanding the genius being moulded in the life of C. S. Lewis; but what about the spiritual element?

  C. S. Lewis wrote of three great impressions that touched his childhood that he considered to be absolutely central to what he was about. He records standing by a flowering currant bush one summer’s day, when he had a flash of memory. He remembers a morning at his family’s first home when his brother brought into the nursery a toy garden in a biscuit tin that he had created for Clive. The garde
n was made of tiny flowers, twigs, stones, and moss. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with a sensation. Later, he felt that the nearest thing to it was what Milton called “the enormous bliss” of Eden. It was, Lewis said, a sensation of desire; but it was gone, even before he knew what it was he desired. Passionately, he longed for the longing he had just felt and lost.

  He again glimpsed this desire, this sensation, when reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. He called it “the Idea of Autumn.”5 Perhaps it was a glimpse of the impermanence of things; for later he described this present life as being like an inn by the side of the road; and the idea, he said, troubled him.

  The third experience of this sensation occurred while reading Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf:

  I heard a voice that cried,

  Balder the beautiful

  Is dead, is dead.

  He writes of being again uplifted into the whole realm of northern sky. The sensation of desire was beyond description, except that it was “cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote.”6 The description sounds very like an Irish sky at Castlerock after an Irish shower! He described all three experiences by one word: joy.

  So it was from a toy garden in a biscuit tin at Dundela Villas, from the pen of the most famous Fell Farmer in England’s Lake District, and from a poem about the death of Balder the beautiful that the young C. S. Lewis was touched by intimations of immortality. He didn’t hear of it in a sermon; he didn’t read of it in a Christian book. The momentary state of joy came from what seemed like something very ordinary, something that led into another world—a presently unknown Eden that was simply beyond words.

  Which of us have not had similar moments—moments when we have felt there is something more than the world we live in? We suddenly see something beautiful, and it is so beautiful it makes us ache. Why? Because when it comes, there are within it intimations of something even more beautiful—something unspeakable, even. That there are more beautiful things outside of this world is a truth seriously believed by men and women such as, for example, the Apostle Paul. “I know a man who,” he wrote, “fourteen years ago, was seized by Christ and swept into ecstasy to the heights of heaven. I really don’t know if this took place in the body or out of it; only God knows. I also know that this man was hijacked into paradise—again, whether in or out of the body, I don’t know; God knows. There he heard the unspeakable spoken, but was forbidden to tell what he heard.”7 Explain that!

  The truth is that humankind has not so much lost its way as it has lost its address. What we long for, though often we are not aware of it, is for Eden to be restored. The Scriptures assure us that it will be restored:

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My Holy Mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

  The little seven-year-old boy who, on 21 April 1905, moved with his family into Little Lea on Belfast’s Circular Road would one day be used to show millions where to find their lost address. But first he had to find it for himself.

  Chapter Two

  THE UNBENDING THUMB

  WHAT’S IN A NAME? A whole lot! Take, for example, the humble potato. It was first cultivated some 7,000 years ago on the wind-swept Andes Mountains in South America, at elevations of up to 15,000 feet. Western man did not come in contact with the potato until as late as 1537, when the Conquistadores tramped through Peru. It was not until about 1570 that the first potato made its way across the Atlantic to the continent of Europe.

  As for names given to the potato, they make an interesting study. There are about 3,000 varieties in all. There are, for example, Russets, with some major varieties called Burbank, Centennial, and Morning Gold. In the United States today there are Long Whites, a major variety of which is called White Rose. There are Round Whites, some major varieties of which are called Katahdin, Superior, and Chipeta. There are even Round Reds, with varieties called La Rouge, Red La Soda, and Red Pontiac. In the British Isles there are British Queen, Maris Piper, Jersey Royal, King Edward, and even the Ulster varieties which include Kerr’s Pink. Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to introduce the potato to Ireland. In October 1995 it was the first vegetable to be grown in space.

  Why do I raise the subject of the potato in the life of C. S. Lewis? It was the nickname that Clive and Warren Lewis gave to their father, Albert. They called him “the Pudaita,” or “the Pudaitabird,” or just plain “P.” The spelling reflects the way Albert pronounced the word “potato” in his Ulster accent. Over many years his boys were to collect his sayings, which they copied into a notebook entitled “Pudaita Pie”! In the Lewis household, Albert was not the only one to get an extra name. One day, the little four-year-old Clive Lewis was being very stubborn. He suddenly refused to answer to his name. “He is Jacksie! He is Jacksie!” he insisted, pointing to himself. What had happened? Clive wanted to be called after a little dog which had lived near his home but had gotten run over in an accident. For the rest of his life, C. S. Lewis became known as “Jacks” to his family and “Jack” to his friends.

  Albert’s new nickname, though given in affection, was an indication of something that lay very deep in the Irish psyche. Thirty-one years before the Lewises moved into their new home, blight on Ireland’s potato crop had led to the Great Irish Famine of 1846 to 1850. It took the lives of as many as one million, through hunger and disease, and profoundly changed the social and cultural structure of Ireland. The Famine spurred new waves of immigration and thereby changed the histories of the United States and Britain. As a result of the Famine, Ireland’s population dropped from eight million to five million. The Famine altered agricultural practises that had been going on for centuries; happily, it led to the end of the division of family estates into tiny lots, which were dangerously given over entirely to a potato crop. This little poem remains true to the island of Ireland, North and South, to this day:

  The potatoes they grow small over there;

  The potatoes they grow small over there.

  And they plant them in the fall;

  And they eat them skin and all,

  Over there.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Belfast, the available food was much more varied than it was in the blighted century that had just passed. The Ormeau Bakery was producing its famous fruit loaf and barmbrack. Its baps were part of the very culture of the city—these were cherry buns sprinkled with sugar. They were the inspiration for one of Belfast’s best-known ditties:

  My Aunt Jane she called me in,

  She gave me tea out of her wee tin.

  Half a bap with sugar on the top,

  And three black lumps out of her wee shop.

  Whether Jack and Warren Lewis ever ate the black lumps known as aniseed balls, popular with children at the time, one cannot prove. The city population as a whole certainly had access to fresh fish, “new-laid” eggs, and the ever-popular potato bread, which was in fact griddled bread. Irish hospitality is akin to that of America’s Deep South, and its populace knows something of the truth of the rhyme, “Mrs. Foggerty’s Christmas Cake”:

  There were plums and prunes and cherries;

  There was citrus and raisins and cinnamon too;

  There was nutmeg, cloves, and berries;

  And a crust that was nailed on with glue.

  There were caraway seeds in abundance,

  Such that work up a fine stomach-ache

  That could kill a man twice, after eating a slice

  Of Mrs. Foggerty’s Christmas cake.

  Martha, the cook at the Lewises’ home, was kept busy feeding the household. Albert’s fathe
r lived with the family; he was an elderly deaf man, well known for walking around slowly, often humming psalm tunes. The family also employed a gardener, and their maid was Miss Lizzie Endicott from County Down. Jack’s memory of childhood always held Lizzie as flawless. She was a lady full of fun, kindness, and the common sense that, if the truth is told, is not so common. Jack called Lizzie a blessing, and indeed she contributed much to his young life, giving him knowledge of country ways. It was Lizzie, and not his mother, who usually did the reading and story telling. It was Lizzie who first told him the fairy story of the three bears and many others. She passed on to him the stories she had heard as a child in County Down, stories of Cuchulain (pronounced KooHoolin), known as the hound of Ulster, one of the most famous Celtic heroes of all time. He was the central figure of the Ulster Cycle, a series of tales revolving around the heroes of the Kingdom of Ulster early in the first century. Cuchulain’s story has been described as an old Irish version of the Incredible Hulk: terrifying, possessing superhuman rage, yet when the need arose he could be a gentle, sensitive mortal. He had prodigious strength and remarkable beauty. In the greatest story of the Ulster legends, “The Cattle Raid of Cooley,” Cuchulain stood at a ford on the boundary of the Province of Ulster and defended it single-handedly against the armies of the rest of Ireland. The story is told in the oldest vernacular in Western Europe.

  Other legends Lizzie told included such heroes as the third-century Finn McCool—warrior, chieftain, poet, and seer—who protected Ireland’s coastline from invaders. He is the giant associated in legend with the famous Giant’s Causeway, just along the coastline from Castlerock.

  Jack was so fired up by these tales that on one occasion he persuaded his brother Warren to help him dig a hole in their front garden at Dundela Villas. Jack and Warren had been looking at a rainbow and decided that in their front garden was the spot where the rainbow had ended. On returning home from his office, their father fell into the hole. When he asked his son for an explanation, Jack told him they were searching for a crock of gold! Understandably, Albert accused him of lying. In fact, Jack was doing anything but lying; one of Lizzie’s stories had referred to a crock of gold, and the little boy wanted to find it. Indeed, such stories would one day inspire him to write some legendary tales of his own.