A Shiver of Wonder Read online

  In Isaiah we read the words of God as He pleads, “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord, ‘though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool’” (Isaiah 1:18). God allows us to ask why. He also gives us answers.

  The vulnerable Jack was now confronted with the God-Man and the men-gods. In a very real sense, he began to experience the truth of Benjamin Disraeli’s words: “Man is made to adore and obey; but if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities and find a chieftain in his own passions.”

  Slowly but surely, Jack became an atheist. He was influenced by the argument of Lucretius:

  Had God designed the world, it would not be

  A world so frail and faulty as we see.

  Because Jack’s experience showed him a fractured world, he reckoned a perfect God could not have created it; so he gave up his belief in God altogether. As with any teenager, his sexuality began to assert itself. Jack struggled for some time with sexual temptation which produced sever guilt and despondency. His friend, George Sayer, has written about how Jack found very little spiritual support during this time from either his schoolmasters or the clergymen.6

  In reaction to the guilt he was experiencing, Sayer explains, Jack now went in for “bravado, blasphemy, and smut, startling and even shocking the boys who knew him best.”7 He also fell under the influence of a young schoolteacher whom he called Pogo, who was somewhat like a P. G. Woodhouse character. He began to imitate this man-about-town, Pogo. He put a lot of emphasis upon clothes. He wore ties with pins in them, low-cut coats, loud socks, and brogue shoes. He became foppish, caddish, and snobbish. By now he was smoking regularly.

  Were his days all misery? No, but he was generally pessimistic. For him, the time between his childhood and adolescence was a sort of Dark Ages. Throughout his childhood, his father had stressed the need for ceaseless work and struggle, else disaster would overtake one’s life; this reminder only added to the gloom.

  Jack and Warren’s practise of smoking and reading magazines and books in the Lime Street Hotel in Liverpool, after arriving on the night ferry from Ireland, was a mild form of teenage rebellion against Albert and their school regime. They would sit in the hotel until the last possible train south to Malvern. Jack described his mind at this time as being vulgar. He acknowledged that he had lost his faith, his virtue, and his simplicity.

  But he still looked forward to his school holidays. His father enjoyed the mixture of music and comedy acts at the Belfast Hippodrome on a Saturday night, but Jack, who accompanied him with Warren, had no relish for it. The Hippodrome, which is no more, was on Great Victoria Street. It was host to many famous stars, including Sir Harry Lauder. General Booth of the Salvation Army preached there on 19 June 1908 in front of a crowd of fifteen hundred. It cost £5 to hire the Hippodrome; and, according to the Salvation Army Adjutant to the Belfast Citadel, that cost was too high, and the offering did not meet the extra expense!

  The famous theatre and its shows did not capture young Jack Lewis half as much as did the glorious supper that awaited him on his return to Little Lea at around ten o’clock. He was back in the land of porridge that sticks to your ribs; of newly-baked soda bread, split while still warm and served with lashings of butter and strawberry jam; and Ulster’s wheaten bread, a version of soda bread, made with whole wheat flour. The cook at Little Lea, Annie Strahan, was famous for her raised pies, and Jack relished them on a Saturday night. Baked in a mould (probably only to be seen now in National Trust houses) and eaten cold, those raised pies were a significant bite. Jack boasted that no modern English boy would have any idea of the pie and neither would the general public in Ulster. Annie’s pies were much better than the ones sold in the shops. Ulster’s tradition of fine home cooking continues in the twenty-first century. To Jack, Annie Strahan’s cooking was the best he ever tasted.

  If Annie’s comforting pies lifted his spirits, the departure of Miss Cowie from Cherbourg did not. She was harshly dismissed for being found holding Jack in her arms—something she did with the boys in the school, and with total motherly innocence. She was sacked also for siding with Jack when he objected to his letters being censored by a schoolmaster. Miss Cowie may have unwittingly brought evil into Jack’s life, but she also brought much good. As a highly sensitive teenager, he was touched deeply by her absence. The additional departure of a male teacher whom he had liked added to his sense of loss.

  Were there any gems that appeared during Jack’s Dark Ages? There was certainly a very memorable one. We have already discovered that the word which Jack used for his inner imaginative world was “Northerness.” He loved the counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry, and later County Donegal, because they were more “Northern.” Soon he came under the influence of Wagner’s Ring, which inspired him to write a remarkable heroic poem. In a Belfast music shop he found, gloriously, a gramophone record of the third act, The Ride of the Valkyries.

  In his schoolroom Jack discovered a periodical with the title Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. Again, the words triggered his Northerness, and he was engulfed by “a vision of huge, clear spaces, hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern Summer, remoteness, severity.”8 The memory of joy came back, and how he longed to find it!

  Jack’s cousin Hope Ewart was now married and living in Dundrum outside Dublin. Jack was delighted when he found a complete copy of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, in her home. Deeply coveting the book, he managed with Warren’s help to get a cheaper copy at 7s6d. He cycled around the Wicklow Mountains, looking for scenes that might fit Wagner’s world. Nature came to mean much more to him, bringing him joy. He wrote that for him joy was always a desire for something in the past, further away, or still to come. Even the mood of a natural scene became important to him; its smell and touch were vital. He began to read widely about Norse mythology, but he believed the gods he found there to be false.

  God does not allow everything in our unconverted days to go to waste. Despite Jack’s faults, God was working in his life, teaching him something of the nature of worship. In time he came to believe fervently that we should thank God more for who He is than for what He does for us. As the great Searcher of Souls sought out Jack Lewis, He taught him many lessons. One day the glory of God would uniquely capture his heart and mind; God would draw him from the false to the true, and Jack would know how to communicate the difference to millions of people. The Creator of great things was moulding this Northern writer for even greater things.

  Jack later regretted his teenage apostasy; but in the far country the prodigal learned what his Heavenly Father’s heart was truly like. One day, the High Gates would be opened to him.

  Chapter Six

  THE GATES OF HIS SECLUSION

  IN SEPTEMBER 1913 THE SEED-EATING birds of Britain, such as the goldfinch and linnet, were feasting on the seedling thistle-heads. As the fields were being ploughed, the lapwings were crying along with the screeching black-headed gulls behind the plough. Missel thrushes were feeding in the tops of the tall bushes. Robins were back, their sweet, clear little songs ringing out as they searched for worms in the newly turned potato plots.

  The time of migration from Britain’s shores had come. The cuckoo had gone at the end of July, followed by the nightingale in August. A search across the country would have revealed that the willow and reed warblers, the black cap, and even the little chiffchaff could no longer be heard singing in the lanes and woods. They had responded to the call from other shores.

  The lines from telegraph poles in villages, towns, and cities were threaded like pearl strings with swallows. With their domestic cares slackened, the swallows raised a sweet and melodic song that was extremely soothing to the ear. In the blue vault of the sky above Malvern, they were wheeling in ever widening circles. As the air grew colder, the insect life for which they were hawking was getting thinner. Soon there would b
e a hint of frost in the air, and the swallows would be off to Africa. They did not intend to spend the winter in England.

  There was no such escape for Jack. From September 1913 to July 1914 he attended Malvern College; and such was his misery that it was only when he threatened to shoot himself that his father took him away. Although he was to later admit that his description of Malvern in his autobiography was overcharged, nonetheless his unhappiness there was acute.

  One of the very first duties required of him at Malvern was to find out what Club he was in. The Club was a unit to which boys were consigned for compulsory games. When Lewis found the notice board where the Club lists were posted, it was surrounded by a crowd of boys further up the hierarchy in the college. He had to squeeze himself through the crowd and then face the task of reading through five hundred names to find his own. He had only ten minutes before he had to fulfil another important task and was forced away from the board. He went back to his college house sweating. It was a great relief when a boy to whom he gave the nickname Freeble shouted that he could tell Jack his Club, since it was the one to which he, Freeble, also belonged. It was B6. Jack felt hugely privileged that Freeble should condescend to help him. On half-holidays, when Jack went to the B6 notice board to see whether his name was down to play that afternoon, he discovered with joy that it never was. He truly hated games.

  It was not until several weeks had passed that Jack discovered Freeble had lied. Jack’s name had appeared several times on another notice board, and he was now accused of skipping Clubs. As punishment the head of the college flogged him in the presence of the assembled prefects. Summoned to his flogging by a boy who was the emissary for the college president, Jack was told in no uncertain terms that he was a nobody and that the college president was the most important person that existed. It was not a joyful beginning to life at Malvern College. He had gone there full of excitement and expectations. The athletes and prefects of Malvern were called Bloods, and he had held them in awe. As the governing class of Malvern, they had seemed like gods to him. They were a privileged hierarchy; and now he learned from them that he was a nobody.

  On his first day Jack was sent to sit with about a dozen new boys in a large, dark room. They felt apprehensive and talked in whispers as they sat on a bench around a table clamped to the floor. They were all waiting to see if they would be among the few chosen to be given a real study. As he waited, Jack began to notice that serious moral problems existed in his new academic setting. He discovered that very questionable practises existed among some of the older boys in their interaction with the new students.

  In his autobiography, with irony and sarcasm, Jack poured scorn on the public school system as he found it. Understandably, he did not think it came up to its aim, to prepare boys for public life. Others who knew Malvern around Jack’s time think he exaggerated about the conditions but admit that homosexual practises did in fact exist among the students. It would be wrong to judge the English public school system solely on Jack’s view of it. A more balanced view has been portrayed by R. F. Delderfield’s novel To Serve Them All My Days, published in 1971.

  Jack grew to hate the elitism he found in the Public School System. He regarded the social climbing and orthodoxy within its conventions as spiritually deadening. These deadening influences persisted from a child’s first day at school. Watching the nervous strain of boys as they went out to be coached at games, feeling that their very future depended on their performance, Jack could not subscribe to the glorified position the games were given in the schools. That he himself was no good at games was beside the point!

  At Malvern a House Master’s signature was necessary if one was to be excused from playing in a compulsory game. So forgers emerged, and forging signatures made them steady pocket money. All elements of playing a game simply for the sake of playing were removed. Boys even patrolled the crowds at matches, to make sure that anyone whose support was not enthusiastic enough was duly punished.

  Of all the boys attending Malvern at this time, one untamable Irish Earl defied its oligarchy. By night the pipe-smoking Earl slinked off without permission to a neighbouring city, always carrying a revolver. His habit was to load only one chamber of the gun. At times he would rush into a boy’s study and, pointing the revolver at him, fire off all the empty chambers. A boy’s life depended on the Earl’s accurate counting. Jack called him Ballygunnian, and liked him because he didn’t care about not being part of the Malvern pecking order.

  Jack came to hate Malvern. Outwardly, he could cover up his misery, loneliness, and sense of desolation, just as he had hidden his loathing of adult parties in East Belfast. He could flow along, with the help of his storytelling and mimicry of people, especially teachers. There was lots of pretence, grimacing, slinking, and evasion. He was often told to “take that look off your face.” Whatever look he had assumed, and however smutty and foul his language was at times, it all hid a deep unhappiness.

  Of course, as always, he had his better moments. He excelled in much of his schoolwork. In his first term, within a few weeks of his arrival on 19 October, he was sent to the Headmaster—not for breaking a rule or for skipping a Club, but for writing an outstanding poem entitled Carpe Diem? After Horace. By all accounts it was a masterpiece for a boy of his age.

  Beyond his best expectation and hope, at Malvern Jack had one of the greatest teachers that he would ever know. A friend of the great English composer Sir Edward Elgar, Harry Wakelyn Smith was Jack’s Form Master. He was fifty-four years of age, an eccentric, with grey hair, a white moustache, large spectacles, and a wide mouth. He was thin and wore a billowing gown, an old fashioned turned-up collar, and a bootlace tie. He called his pupils “gentlemen,” and treated them as such. In turn they responded by behaving like gentlemen in his class. This well-mannered, courteous, brilliant schoolmaster, known to the boys as Smugy, took up where Lewis Alden of Campbell College had left off.

  Smugy had an outstanding gift for reading poetry. He had a tongue that seemed to be touched with honey, and his poetry-reading style fell between speech and song. Smugy’s enchanting reading was to influence the way Jack Lewis read poetry for the rest of his life. The cadence of Smugy’s voice, his sensitive ear for the music of poetry, the gentlemanly manner of his teaching, and his great ability to analyse the grammar and syntax of a poem, were meat and drink to the scared, lonely misfit that was the fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis. Smugy would invite groups of boys to his house for tea; and in class he would take time to sit beside each boy to have an individual conversation with him, advising and encouraging him. Despite the soaring emotions Smugy released in his readings, he was a stickler for scholarly detail. When he read a poem, syntax and beauty were synonyms. He made accuracy a bulwark against uncouthness. He also made Jack’s year at Malvern more bearable.

  Another sanctuary for Jack’s troubled spirit was what was known as “The Grundy,” the school library. A boy was not faggable when he was inside the library. Within public schools in England, fagging was a system whereby younger boys acted as servants to the older boys. Duties ranged from keeping the older boy’s kit clean and tidy, to helping him with his exam revision. In return the senior boy was supposed to protect the youngster. Fagging was supported because it was thought to encourage an ethos of service similar to that found in the army and navy. It was seen as a means of instituting group conformity and loyalty. The general bullying of weaker boys by those older or stronger was seen as preparing boys for manhood and leadership. It also helped to save the school the expense of employing more domestic servants. In the United States the word “fagging” is now used as derogatory slang; but the original meaning of the word “fag” is “weary,” and refers to a tiring or unwelcome task. In English, to be “fagged out” still means to be exhausted.

  With all the rest of his contemporaries, Jack had his share of fagging. With it came the responsibility of making a Blood’s tea, cleaning out his study, or, most onerous of all, cleaning his boots. Jack had to obey
a Blood’s orders immediately, although Jack had been placed in a high form, had a lot of work to do, and could ill afford the time. When called upon, Jack had to fag as a shoeblack. That job involved waiting in the queue behind other fags in a smelly, cold, dark cellar to take his turn at the appropriate brushes and shoe polish. The job would interrupt the precious time between breakfast and morning school, when he wanted to go over set passages of translation with the boys in his form. To escape fagging, the Grundy was bliss. To avoid Bloods on the way to the library was not easy. Meeting one could cost him his afternoon.

  It was in the Grundy that Jack discovered the mythical poetry of his fellow Irishman W. B. Yeats; and a book on Celtic mythology became almost as great a feeder of his imagination as Norse mythology had become earlier. He also came to love Greek mythology with its sun-kissed stories, so very different from the Northern skies he treasured. He attempted to write an epic poem on the Irish legends Cuchulain and Finn; his Northerness still triumphed over the other two cultures. He wrote a play—an opera libretto—called Loki Bound that was Norse in subject and in Greek form. In the play, Loki was a projection of himself, and Thor was the villain, a symbol of the Bloods in his school. Loki was against the deity called Odin, because Odin had created a world; and Loki thought it was cruel that creatures should have the burden of existence forced upon them without their consent. Through his play Jack was showing that he was angry with God for creating a world in which he carried the burden of existence without having asked for it. So far it had often been a very miserable existence indeed for Jack, and it would get worse. As he sat in the silence of the Grundy, soaking up the books, listening to the bees buzzing by the open windows and the sound of leather on willow from a distant cricket match, a treacherous tide was lapping to the shores of his seclusion.