One of the sharpest minds of the 20th century was honed here. Mick Duggan on the years CS Lewis spent in the county...
On the 19th September 1914, a 15-year-old boy from Belfast boarded a train at Waterloo for Great Bookham. He had come to Surrey to study under a private tutor, and the two and a half years ahead would prove pivotal to his development.
His schooling up to that point had been a disaster. At nine he had been sent to Wynyard School, near Watford, which was run by a sadist later committed to a psychiatric hospital. The boy lasted two years there.
After a short, happier interlude back in Ireland, his next ports of call were in Worcestershire: Cherbourg House prep school and nearby Malvern College. At Malvern, however, he again failed to fit in. Diffident and unsporty, he suffered miserably at the hands of the school aristocracy, the ‘Bloods’, lasting only a year before his father agreed to remove him and roll the dice once more.
Yet the acorn about to be planted in fertile Surrey soil was to grow into a mighty intellectual oak. For the unfortunate boy was none other than CS Lewis, future Christian apologist and professor of medieval and Renaissance literature – and, of course, the creator-to-be of Narnia.
Waiting for him at the station that September day was WT Kirkpatrick, his father’s old headmaster, now living in semi-retirement at Great Bookham. Lewis would remain under his tutelage until March 1917; and while Oxford is the place with which he will always be associated, both Kirkpatrick and Surrey itself were to have a profound effect.
Some of what lay in store for Lewis is illustrated in the comical account of his arrival at Great Bookham in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Walking through the village with Kirkpatrick to ‘The Gastons’, his tutor’s house (now demolished), Lewis tried to make conversation about his journey. But his efforts were instantly shredded by his new mentor, who would question the logic of even the most innocuous-sounding remarks.
Kirkpatrick’s nickname was ‘The Great Knock’. Perhaps this is what it felt like to come within range of his formidable, ruthless intellect. Yet if the teenage arrival was greatly knocked by his tutor’s onslaught, he recovered quickly. Lewis was, in fact, invigorated and enthralled by the company of such an exacting mind. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the professor who owns the house to which the children are evacuated is Digory Kirke: a nod, perhaps, towards the man who helped to shape the mind from which Narnia would spring.
Surrey the place also made a huge impression, beginning with that first train journey. Lewis had expected bland suburbia. What he got was altogether different.
“The landscape that actually flitted past the windows astonished me,” he wrote in Surprised by Joy.
He saw “steep little hills, watered valleys and wooded commons”. Even the sprinkling of suburban villas delighted him. These “timbered and red-tiled houses, embosomed in trees” were “wholly unlike the stuccoed monstrosities which formed the suburbs of Belfast”.
Lewis knew, of course, that snootier types would look down their noses at all those crooked paths and wicket gates and fruit trees. Yet this failed to dampen his enthusiasm.
“I cannot help thinking,” he reflected, “that those who designed [these houses] and their gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest Happiness.”
His own early childhood had been shattered by the death of his mother. As a consequence, the houses of Surrey filled him with desire for a domestic life he had never fully known.
“They set one thinking of tea trays,” he wrote.
That first train journey to Bookham was the prelude to even greater delights buried deep in the Surrey Hills. Surprised by Joy contains a full chapter devoted to this period, with Lewis reminiscing about frosty sunsets over the Hog’s Back, getting lost during a walk on the slopes of Leith Hill and looking down from Polesden Lacey on the valley between Leatherhead and Dorking.
In Ireland, his walks had afforded large horizons where the lie of land and sea could be taken in at an effortless glance. Surrey required prospectors to search diligently for its diamonds of delight.
“The contours were so tortuous, the little valleys so narrow, there was so much timber, so many villages concealed in woods or hollows, so many field paths, sunk lanes, dingles, copses, such an unpredictable variety of cottage, farmhouse, villa, and country seat, that the whole thing could never lie clearly in my mind, and to walk it daily gave one the same sort of pleasure that there is in the labyrinthine complexity of Malory or The Faerie Queene.”
Similar raptures about the Surrey landscape can be found in letters Lewis wrote home to his great childhood friend in Ireland, Arthur Greeves. He also recounts for Greeves a time when, at the village inn in Friday Street, a tame old jackdaw came hopping about, asking for crumbs. The bird, it transpired, was called Jack – the name by which all who knew him had called CS Lewis since childhood.
The Surrey Hills became a kind of Eden for Lewis – and, in due course, a paradise lost. By late 1917, six months after leaving Bookham for the final time, he would be fighting in the trenches in France. The last word goes to him, then, putting the cap on his memories of those country walks in Surprised by Joy, recalling the pleasures of returning at the end of them to the house of The Great Knock.
“On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose and fingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to the anticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole weekend’s reading lay ahead, I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth.”
Big Narnia surprises in the woods
Fans of Narnia should head to Banstead Woods, where they will discover a selection of characters from Lewis’s famous Chronicles hidden within the forest. The figures were created from standing deadwood by chainsaw sculptor Ella Fielding of the Tree Pirates. They include Lucy, Aslan, the White Witch and, of course, the Wardrobe (complete with garments).
