saved his life.
Even before he went into the nursing home I marvelled that Lewis had lived so long without setting himself ablaze. Except when he dressed for a special occasion, he wore an old tweed jacket, the right-hand pocket of which had been patched and re-patched many times. This was because Lewis, when wearied of his pipe, would drop it into his pocket, with the result that it would burn its way through. And this happened so often that there was none of the original material left.
The nurses in the Acland, having found him nodding with a cigarette in his hand, would have none of this. And so it was that, except when I was with him, they would not allow him to have any matches. What puzzled Lewis was that after I had left him with a box of matches, a nurse would, as soon as I left, rush in and take them away. “How do they know?” he asked me one morning. “Give me a box I can hide under my bedclothes.” I had then to confess that while I was the supplier, I was also the informer. “Informer!” roared Lewis. “I have what no friend ever had before. I have a private traitor, my very own personal Benedict Arnold. Repent before it is too late!”
I loved all the rough and tumble of this, and I fancy I pulled his leg about as often as he pulled mine. But there was the gentler side that was just as typical. There was one incident that took place in the Acland which the readers of his Narnian stories might find as endearing as I did. It occurred on one of those days when Lewis’s mind was disordered and when, as I noticed, he could not recognise any of those who dropped in to see him—not even Professor Tolkien. The last visitor of the day was his foster-sister, Maureen Moore Blake, who a few months previously, and by a very unexpected turn of events, had become Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs, with a castle and a vast estate in Scotland. She was the first woman in three centuries to succeed to a baronetcy. They had not met since this happened and, hoping to spare her any disappointment, I told her that he had not been able to recognise any of his old friends. He opened his eyes when she took his hand. “Jack,” she whispered, “it is Maureen.” “No,” replied Lewis smiling, “it is Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.” “Oh, Jack, how could you remember that?” she asked. “On the contrary,” he said. “How could I forget a fairy tale?”
One day when he was obviously much better, but not completely out of danger, he asked why I looked so glum.
The reason for the glumness was that, living in our neighbourhood was a fierce old atheist of about ninety-seven who went out for a brisk walk every day. Whenever we met he asked if Lewis was “still alive”, and on receiving my reply that he was indeed quite ill, he invariably said, “Nothing wrong with me! I’ve got a long time yet!”
I told Lewis that I was tempted—very strongly tempted—to tell Our Lord that I thought it monstrously unfair that He should allow the naughty old atheist to seemingly go on forever and yet let Lewis, who was only sixty-four, come so close to the point of death. “Mind you,” I said, observing Lewis’s face cloud over, “I haven’t actually said it in my prayers, but I’ve come pretty close.”
“And what do you think Our Lord would say to that?” Lewis said with a discouraging look.
“What?”
“What is that to you!”
Anyone who has read St. John 21:22—Our Lord’s rebuke to St. Peter—will recognise Lewis’s application of it in this instance. And then tenderly, tenderly, Lewis comforted me in what I had imagined was his sorrow, but which he knew was mine.
The worst over, there was a return of the high spirits and uproarious sense of fun that I found one of the most attractive things about Lewis. But it would take someone of Boswell’s talents to give the right idea to the completeness of this remarkable man, to show how naturally the humour blended into the more serious side, and indeed was one of the causes of his greatness of heart, his large intellect, and the most open charity I have ever found in anyone. He was a man, many of us have come to see, of common instincts combined with very uncommon abilities. Perhaps it is worth recording that I knew—I just knew—that no matter how long I lived, no matter who else I met, I should never be in the company of such a supremely good human being again. Of all my memories this is the most indelible and is certain to remain so.
I brought Lewis home on 6 August, along with a male nurse, a Scotsman named Alec Ross, whose responsibility it was to stay awake nights should he be needed. Lewis and I had been together almost continuously for two months, and I was even more comfortable with him now that we were in the same house. He had not once complained about conditions in the Acland—excepting, of course, my “traitorous” behaviour over the appearing and disappearing matches. Certainly he snuggled back into his familiar surroundings with much pleasure. Sensing that he liked being left alone a little while after lunch, I asked if he ever took a nap. “Oh, no!” he replied. “But, mind you, sometime a nap takes me.”
He had kept up his dictating of letters during his stay in the Acland. And although he was able to do more of this at home, he gave as well more attention to the problems which, since 1961, he knew could become worse should he die suddenly: his brother’s unfortunate problem with alcohol, and the future of his two stepsons who had, besides losing their mother in 1960, seen other sadnesses as well. But I mention these things because it was then I observed something I had never seen in anyone else (excepting, as I was to learn later, his friend Owen Barfield). Lewis had his share—some would say more than his share—of worries. But, having done all in his power to solve them, he left the matter to God and got on with his work and pleasures. Those who go on to read, for example, the additions to his sermon “Transposition” (of which more later) will perhaps understand what may sound like sweet banality but isn’t—that Lewis really wanted and liked the happiness which the Divine Son died to give all men. And this I observed at the time, some ten years before I saw in the Bodleian the whole thing put so succinctly in a letter to his brother of 28 January 1940 in which he says, “I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.” Without meaning any offence, I suspect that those who carry on about “social consciousness” or whatever the current jargon is would not understand this. Still, that is the way it was.
Our nurse hardly knew what to make of Lewis. Alec was not a learned man, but he was fortunate in being one of the few male nurses at that time. And for this reason he had been able to pick and choose his patients, nearly always with an eye as to whether they were fabulously rich, famous for something or the other, and (he hoped) possessed of a Rolls Royce. He was a good nurse but he had a foul tongue. At his first sight of the kitchen he pronounced the house to be a “pig sty” and very quickly had the servants sweeping, mopping, and disinfecting as fast as it could be done.
But there remained for him the mystifying contradiction of a far from attractive house presided over by a “somebody”. We were taking our tea alone one day when he asked whether—he couldn’t think of the name Who’s Who—the “great mon was in that big boke …” Lewis was coming through the door and, overhearing this, said, “Ay, ay, Alec. I am in what you in Scotland would call Wha’s Wha.” That did it. Alec was thereafter devoted to Lewis for his humour and self-forgetfulness, it now making no difference whether Lewis was famous for anything Alec thought important.
In August Lewis dictated a letter announcing his retirement from Cambridge. Then, at the end of the month, with Alec left to keep an eye on Lewis, his stepson Douglas Gresham and I were sent to Cambridge to sort out his affairs and bring home many of the two thousand or so books from his Magdalene College rooms. This done, we hired a lorry to transport us and the books to Oxford. All the way home I wondered where the books could go in a house already filled to the bursting point. But Lewis had laid his plans.
Alec occupied what was called the “music room”—a large room on the ground floor, empty except for a bed in one corner.
