Once upon a wardrobe, p.14
Once Upon a Wardrobe, page 14
I smile. “You’re going to freeze without your coat. What are you doing?”
“When a girl walks across the green, a gentleman doesn’t take the time to button his coat or put on a scarf.”
“Padraig.” I say his name as he’d said mine and hope it has the same effect.
“Are you in a rush?” he asks.
“I am.” I nod toward the second floor. “I must meet Mr. Lewis. It would be rude to be late.”
“Yes, it would.” He leans closer, and the cold begins to bite his nose red. Folding his arms around himself, he rubs his hands up and down. “Did he tell you anything else? Have you heard more stories?”
“I have,” I say. “About the war.”
“You must tell me about it.”
My glee vanishes. I feel like I’m stealing the thunder and the lightning, all the goodness of the stories that are just for George and me. As if by sharing with Padraig I’m robbing my brother. My smile fails. I feel it.
“Are you okay, Megs?”
“I must go.”
“Then off with you,” he says but with a smile.
I try to grin back at him, but it feels shaky and false as I walk off, hurrying into the New Building and climbing the stone stairs and then reaching a door on the left. A sign hangs on it: Mr. C. S. Lewis—Tutor of English Literature.
The door is slightly ajar, and I peek inside and see him sitting at his desk with a pipe in his mouth and a nib pen in hand. He dips it into an inkwell and begins to write quickly. I hear him mumble the words he is writing out loud. He is whispering them into existence on the paper and through his pen. Something otherworldly is happening while he dips and writes and mumbles. I almost expect a faun to jump from beneath his desk or a witch to perch on the windowsill.
I don’t want to interrupt, but then he looks up, as if my gaze has distracted him. His smile is wide, and he sets his pen down. The room smells of tobacco smoke and sunshine, if sunshine has an aroma.
“Welcome, Miss Devonshire.”
I take a few steps and pause. “I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You were invited here. By me. Do come in.” He stands there in his carpet slippers wearing a welcoming grin. I think, for the first time, how he looks much like a jolly countryman instead of the learned man of letters and books he is.
“Thank you for having me,” I say. “I know you usually don’t have girl students in here.”
“Oh! On the contrary. I do tutor some young women.”
I lift my eyebrows at the lovely news, then gaze at the room. There are so many books they seem to have taken over, making it hard to focus on anything else. Heavy curtains cast shadows. Papers are scattered across his desk like fallen leaves. “Are you working on another Narnia book?”
“Oh yes.” He stands. “But just then I was answering a letter.”
“Oh?”
“I have a pen friend in America, a most fascinating woman named Joy Davidman.” He pauses with a smile that could warm the White Witch. “Her deep questions and curiosity remind me of yours.”
“Oh, I hope that is a compliment?”
“Indeed it is.”
I feel happy to have been compared to his pen friend in America. I want to keep chatting with him before he tells me another story. “How is the newest Narnia coming?”
“It is much harder than the others. I’m trying to write the prequel. You see”—he grins—“I am telling the story of the professor before he appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and you’ll learn his real name.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Digory Kirk.”
I nod and think about Professor Kirkpatrick but don’t say a word about it, like a treasure I save for George. “So you’re writing the first book second?”
“Oh, I am writing the first book fourth. I am going backward. It’s not as easy as all that.”
“When I read your story, you made it all look so easy. I couldn’t just sit down with a pen and make a whole new world.”
He laughs that beautiful laugh and says, “Well, I couldn’t sit down and solve a physics equation.” His balding pate glows with the sunlight falling into the room through the two windows facing west. “And meanwhile I’m working on an autobiography the publisher seems jolly keen to have from me.”
“An autobiography!” I say. “I will read that straight away.” I think for a moment whether to say the next thing on my tongue and then I do. “Seems like I’m getting an early performance.”
“Indeed.” He gives me what seems a secret smile. “They think I have salacious secrets I will finally tell. They are going to be truly disappointed.”
He motions for me to sit in a large green armchair and I do. In my mind I have a list of direct questions prepared, ones I think will let me return to George with all the answers. But in Mr. Lewis’s presence, these questions fall away.
We settle in, and I consider his huge wooden desk sitting in the middle of the room, piled high with papers and what appear to be an inordinate number of letters. There is no typewriter. A standing grandfather clock looms over the study, its numbered face elegant and large. The rug is threaded with red and green. On the wooden coat rack, a robe of red and black hangs with a fisherman’s cap on the top rung.
Mr. Lewis sits back in his chair and lights his pipe slowly, tapping down the tobacco as if he has all the time in the world. It’s obvious his pipe has been fashioned by hand from the deep brown brierroot and soon glows under the smoke that rises toward his eyes. He blinks. I break the silence.
“I read Phantastes,” I tell him.
“Oh, did you now? And what did you think, Miss Devonshire?”
“It was very enchanting, with all the fairies and the adventure. Honestly, I had a hard time stopping.” I pause and realize in that small space of time that he also knows I’ve read his book too. “Just as I did reading yours,” I add.
He bellows with laughter and leans forward, his cheeks ruddy and cheery, his rimless glasses falling lower on his nose. “You can love more than one book. It’s not like a husband. You also don’t have to feign loving both books.”
“I’m not pretending, sir.” I try to fix my hair, which is falling into my eyes, but then give up. It is unruly and will stay so. “I loved them both. I don’t know why I believed . . .” I pause, because I don’t know quite where I’m headed with the sentence, but he does.
“That fairy tales were only for children?”
“Yes.”
He settles back into his chair. “Now where were we in our stories for your brother?” He pauses. “For George?”
“The last story I told him was about the war. It made us both so very sad.” I think about telling Mr. Lewis that I wish we were, at long last, at the part of his story where he tells me exactly—word and literal word, like a math problem spread across the blackboard—where Narnia came from. This plus this equals that. This plus this equals the faun and the beavers and . . . the lion!
Instead, he nods and says, “Have I told you about the next war?”
“You went back?” I hope this isn’t true.
“No, Miss Devonshire. Warnie did, but no, I did not. What happened during the next war is that children, many of them, came to live with me during the Blitz.”
“Children?”
“From London,” he says.
“Like in your book!” I feel the thrill of solving a problem. This is a direct line, an answer, an equation solved. The children in Mr. Lewis’s book came from London to live with a professor. The children in World War II came from London to the Kilns. I settle back in my chair with a self-satisfied smile.
He sees it and laughs, as if he knew all along this next story might satisfy my logic.
* * *
Later that afternoon, I wait for the train at Oxford station, the floor slick with melted snow from the hustling feet of those rushing to the platform to catch their trains. I glance at the flicking tiles on the board announcing the time and platform of each train, at the cart of sandwiches and beers, at the stand with the bitter tea I love sipping on the way home. I think of Mr. Lewis stepping off the train at this station and walking out the opposite side of the building and into the wrong town. How disappointed he must have been! There is a slide of disappointment when a self-told story doesn’t match what you encounter. But then there can also be a wonderful surprise when despair changes to rejoicing merely by turning around.
I hand my ticket to the conductor in the blue uniform. I walk onto the platform just as the black hulk of train approaches, sliding to a full stop and breathing out like a smoker with a deep cough.
I slide into my seat, and a woman with a large red hat and a wide smile sits across from me. She unwraps her sandwich, and just as she opens her mouth to speak to me, I lift the book I brought with me to block all conversation. Thinking of George, I have no desire to engage with her right now. I’m always within two breaths of crying. I hold myself together by being alone. Her long exhale tells me of her disappointment, but I want to read Spirits in Bondage, Mr. Lewis’s book of poetry from the war, the book he published under the name Clive Hamilton when he was twenty years old.
He’d done so much at twenty: fought in a war and written a poetry book. It makes me wonder what I will have accomplished when I am twenty. What will become of me?
On this day, Mr. Lewis told me stories about the wartime London bombing, Operation Pied Piper, the friendships that changed his life, and a peculiar literary group called the Inklings, which was the anchor for so many of those friendships.
After I left him, I ran by the library and quickly wrote in my notebook what I could recall from his stories. Then I checked out two books to carry home: his book of poetry and a history book that includes information on Dunluce Castle. If I can’t take George to Ireland, which of course I can’t, I’ll take Ireland to him.
Eager to read, I turn a page in Mr. Lewis’s poetry book. I want to compare his younger self to the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I begin to read the lines:
Woe unto you, ye sons of pain that are this Day in earth
Now cry for all your torment; now curse your hour of birth.
I am stunned at the poem’s misery. Jolly Mr. Lewis hardly seems the kind of man to write of such despair. I have heard that war changes people, but I can’t quite put together these pieces of his biography.
My mind wanders as the landscape passes by: villages glistening in snow and cows roaming wire-fenced fields, lifting wet noses at the sound of the train. When I finally arrive home, after taking the long way along the River Severn to watch it never give up its incessant journey, the sun is sinking. Mum waits in the kitchen with warm bread and a bowl of lamb stew. I shed my clothes and drop my satchel onto the table before hugging her so tightly that she lets go first.
I sink onto the chair and begin to gobble the dinner, realizing I haven’t eaten since the porridge early that morning before I caught the train at dawn. After I finish, Mum and I sit in amiable silence as sleet ticks against the windows. Day slinks toward night.
“Why did you return to Oxford today, dear? Are you concerned about your marks?”
I look up and shake my head. “Not at all. Have you been worried about that all day, Mum? I thought I told you; I took Mr. Lewis up on his offer to come to his rooms and tell me a few last stories.”
“You didn’t let this silly storytelling ruin your status at Somerville, then, aye?”
“Mum.” I pause because I want my words to be real and true. I want her to understand that although I had been the first to call Mr. Lewis’s stories silly, I no longer can. Indeed, I am well aware they have changed me. I don’t yet know how, but I want to convey this without worrying her.
She waits patiently, a wide-open space of love between us.
Finally I say, “It’s not silly.”
She nods, stands, then absently wipes the counter.
“I might have thought so too,” I say. “But there is something in his stories, Mum. Answers without answers.”
“You know that makes no sense, right, my dear Margaret Louise?”
“I know it sounds like it makes no sense.” I put down my teacup and dig into my satchel to bring out my notebook. “Look. It’s full of stories. Why would such an important man spend so much time with me if it weren’t meaningful? He wouldn’t do this if it meant nothing, if it were silly.”
Mum takes the notebook from me and opens it smack in the middle, reads a few lines quietly and looks as if she wants to say something, but George’s voice interrupts. He’s calling for us, and after a few steps down the hallway we are both at his side. I sit next to him in the chair and Mum perches at the end of his bed. She still holds my notebook open and continues our discussion.
“You’ve written all of this.” It is not a question.
“Only as much as I can remember. Mr. Lewis and I walk and we have tea and I can’t take notes, so some of it might not be exact, but it’s all true.”
“Why would he waste his time telling you about things like”—she runs her finger down the page—“a horrible boy who teases him in public school?”
George pipes in now with a sincere laugh that is his alone. “Maybe because that’s what Edmund is like when he teases Lucy about finding Narnia. Maybe the cruel boy who tortured Mr. Lewis for not being good at football shows up in Narnia as Edmund.”
Mother and I lift our brows, and Mother walks to the head of the bed, leans down, and kisses his forehead. “My brilliant son.”
I look at George and say, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
He sits up straight, then swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “Did he tell you more stories when you went to Oxford today?”
“He did, and I’m afraid these are the last. I can save one until Christmas.”
“We don’t know such things! He might tell you more.” He suddenly sounds to my ears like Mr. Lewis himself. “Now tell me everything,” he orders.
Eighteen
The First Start
Megs settles back in her chair and opens that black notebook that George has come to love so much. Its pages chronicle a man who turned all he was and all he is into a magical story about Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.
Mum leaves the room to clean up the dinner dishes and Megs begins to read. “Now we skip all the way to World War II. There were, astonishingly, only a little more than twenty years between the two wars. This means that men who fought in the First World War could fight again in the next, or their sons or their brothers or their nephews would be fighting in it.”
She pauses; they give each other a knowing look. Yes, they are in the middle of their own kind of war.
She continues. “Mr. Lewis told me that Warnie said it was like he went to sleep after the first war and had a pleasant dream and then was called back up to return.”
“Warnie had to go back?” George asks.
Megs nods. “But as you know, he returned unharmed. Now let me tell you what happened.”
George listens, moving over on the bed so his sister can climb in beside him. She scoots closer to him, and they are shoulder to shoulder, his head nestled against her. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”
“And not very far away,” he says.
“During the war, there was a government program called Operation Pied Piper. In 1939, the Nazis were taking over countries across Europe, and even France had fallen. But Britain held out, keeping Germany from totally dominating Europe. After Jack graduated from university, after a stint as a subbing philosophy tutor, he was eventually hired at Magdalen, where he still teaches today. He and Warnie had been living in the Kilns for nearly ten years already at this part of their story.”
She looks away from her notebook toward the memory of the story, as if finally getting the hang of telling a tale. She speaks in a soft voice.
George stood on a busy London street, where the threat of bombs was whispered day and night. Notices that read “Evacuation of Women and Children” fluttered from lamp posts and were slipped inside children’s school knapsacks.
The war was coming, and any sense of safety in London was obliterated. Trenches were dug around the city, sandbags scattered around doors and windows, tape placed across glass to keep it from shattering. What was a mother to do? A father? How were they to keep their children safe?
In September of 1939, the signs about Operation Pied Piper were posted and sent home. Train schedules were established, and mothers and fathers began to pack up their children, who then gathered at their schools with their valises overflowing. To keep them safe from bombs, the children would be sent to live with relatives or even strangers in other cities.
Every parent was given a list of what their children must take with them on their journey: a gas mask, a change of underclothes, plimsolls, spare stockings and socks, combs, and more. They must label their luggage and take a warm coat, for who knew how long they would be gone?
Some children were sent off with nothing. Their families didn’t have the money or the time to gather it all.
It wasn’t just their luggage that was labeled. Every child wore a tag as if they, too, were baggage that could become lost in the shuffle of travel. These tags stated their names, schools, and other important evacuation information to help officials keep track of them. After taking their seats on departing trains, children waved out the windows to their parents and older siblings, clinging to teddy bears or their suitcases or their siblings’ hands.
Some of these children were sent to the Kilns.
That autumn of 1939, at the Kilns, Jack Lewis sat in his upstairs study writing a letter to his friend Arthur in Ireland, his ink nib hoisted in the air and a drop of ink falling to his desk. He looked away from his letter and stared out the window to see the clutter of gold and red leaves. He stood and walked over to gaze down at two young girls chasing Jack’s big lopey dog, Bruce, through the hedges. He smiled.
