A Surprising Discovery at C.S. Lewis’s House
My unexpected encounter with someone who spent an afternoon with C.S. Lewis in September 1959
This week, I visited The Kilns, the home of C.S. Lewis, his brother Warnie, and from 1957 to 1960 his wife Joy. I’ve brought dozens of students to this place over the years. I always enjoy the experience, but I expected no surprises. I have, after all, been here before.
But I was, indeed, surprised.
What I thought I would enjoy was one more tour of The Kilns, interwoven with a series of delightful discussions with my students.
What I experienced instead was an oral history about C.S. Lewis, told to me by someone who met him.
So, if you have any interest at all in C.S. Lewis, gather around and listen to the story of spending an afternoon with the man himself.
How Living History Found Me
Anyone who knows me well knows how much I enjoy eyewitness accounts of historical events. Whenever I go to a museum, I look for persons who lived during some portion of the era that the exhibits depict. Amid all of the artifacts from history, I want to hear living history.
This week, however, I didn’t need to go looking for living history.
Living history found me.
One of the individuals on the tour with us was an older man who had visited C.S. Lewis at The Kilns in Oxford, England, as a boy. The stories he told us provided a series of fascinating glimpses of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Lewis as they truly were.
Because I wanted to capture every detail of this oral history, I wrote down everything I remembered on the bus ride back to London. The next morning, I compared my notes with the recollections of my family and students, correcting and expanding what I’d recorded on the bus.
Now, I’m at my favorite—or, as perhaps I should say since I’m in England, “favourite”—coffee shop in London with my youngest daughter, writing these tidbits about Lewis so that they aren’t forgotten.
The Magician’s Nephew in Finnish, Turkish Delight, and Tea
When the older man announced he had met C.S. Lewis, I was skeptical.
The narratives he recalled and the artifacts he possessed quickly rinsed every hint of doubt from my mind.
The man’s story began in the late 1950s, when he was about twelve years old. His father was a Presbyterian theologian in the United States. Their family was mapping out a year that they would spend in England. Their plan was to take a passenger ship to Liverpool where the family would purchase a car, which they would take back to the United States when the father’s study leave ended.
The boy had enjoyed The Chronicles of Narnia, so he wrote a letter to the author, telling Lewis that his family would be in Oxford in 1959. Lewis sent a handwritten letter to the boy and invited him and his family to visit him at The Kilns—a letter which is still in the man’s possession today.
The man wasn’t sure what conference his father was attending in Oxford; he simply described it as something that entailed many scholarly lectures. It seems likely that it was the Third International Conference on Patristics Studies, which took place September 21–26, 1959. In any case, the man’s mother drove him and his two brothers through the countryside from Oxford to The Kilns. Having hiked and ridden buses through this area several times, I suspect that everything east of Headington Hill was still rural in 1959.
The twelve-year-old boy, his mother, and his two brothers were ushered into the Common Room of The Kilns by C.S. Lewis himself. The man telling the story recalled a set of crossed scimitars mounted above a doorway visible from the small entry hall—an interesting detail that isn’t visible in any of the surviving pictures that I’ve seen. He also recollected that the common room was far darker and more yellowed than it is today. (As part of the restorations over the past several years, the walls and ceiling of the Common Room have been painted shades of yellow in an attempt to show visitors the house as it actually was, stained by a constant flow of smoke from pipes and cigarettes. Apparently, the shades they selected still aren’t quite dark enough to approximate the real impact of the smoke that pervaded the house!)
In the Common Room, the boy, his mother, and his brothers met Joy. He noted that Joy limped and used a cane. The man recalled C.S. Lewis as jovial and Joy as frail. When telling the story, the man I met this week said he had always assumed Joy had polio. He was unaware that Joy was, in fact, in remission from carcinoma at the time. What he seems not to have known, even as an adult, is that, only a few weeks after he visited the Lewis family, Joy would discover at a routine checkup that her cancer had returned. Six months later, her cancer was no longer responding to radiation therapy; on July 13, 1960, she died.
But all of that was still in the future when Joy joined with C.S. Lewis to entertain this unknown family from America in September 1959.
Once they were seated in the Common Room, C.S. Lewis offered tea to the mother and Turkish Delight to the children. The man said he and his brothers did not care for the Turkish Delight at all. Lewis laughed and said that was most people’s reaction to the candy but that it remained one of Lewis’s favorite treats.
After they conversed for a while in the Common Room, Lewis took the boys out to the pond behind the house. There, he showed them a zip line that he—with Fred Paxford’s assistance, I suspect—had set up for Joy’s sons. Lewis thought Douglas and David might enjoy dropping from the line into the middle of the pond. Douglas would have been thirteen at the time while David was fifteen, and both were away at boarding school.
When Lewis and his American guests returned to the house, he signed a Finnish translation of The Magician’s Nephew and gave the book to them. The Finnish translation had been released that year, and the publisher had sent Lewis eight copies of the translation. Lewis was apologetic that the only volume of The Chronicles of Narnia which he had on hand to give them was not in English. Lewis joked that a Finnish translation of the book was likely to be “as useful to you as it is to me.”
The boys’ mother took pictures of C.S. Lewis and Joy in front of The Kilns, and the family headed back to Oxford. Sixty-five years later, this man still has the Finnish rendering of The Magician’s Nephew which he received from C.S. Lewis himself in September 1959.
The Poignancy of September 1959
This story is interwoven with so many rich and wonderful details about C.S. Lewis. His hospitality in inviting a family to visit him at The Kilns in response to a child’s letter, his enjoyment of Turkish Delight, the zip line for Douglas and David, not having any English versions of his own books to give away.
And yet, what is most poignant for me is the timing of the day that this man met Lewis. Shortly after this joyous and whimsical afternoon at The Kilns, C.S. Lewis‘s life would be turned up side down as cancer wrecked his wife’s body. Joy was dying that afternoon, but no one knew it yet.
And that story is the surprise that found me this week in the home of C.S. Lewis.
There is more to this story than I have written here; however, I am in the process of contacting the man who told the story to ask his permission to share further details.
What an awesome surprise! Looking forward to hearing more.
That is amazing. So glad you had this encounter.