How the wind
Whips all our talk and laughter out of mind,
And time, far more than Thames, has power to drown
“SONNET VII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke slowly in that cold room in Jack’s house and pulled the covers to my chin. A pounding came from inside the walls, like someone trying to escape from a stone-walled dungeon. The plumbing, ancient and groaning like one of Jack’s fictional frozen statues come to life.
The house bustled around me, doors opening and closing, Warnie’s voice calling out to Mrs. Miller. A man’s low voice, must have been Paxford, and then Jack’s reply, that rumble of familiarity.
I stretched and rolled over to glance at the clock. Already nine. They must think me lazy, but I didn’t mind. At home, this one thought—lazy—would have made me nervous, the jittery feelings overcoming me as I thought about Bill being angry that I’d slept in.
After I dressed and finished my morning routine, I entered the common room to find Jack reading the Bible, a Latin version that morning.
“Good morning,” I said quietly.
His pipe bent down from the corner of his mouth and he startled, sending it to drop onto his lap. He brushed the ashes onto the carpet as if they were crumbs from breakfast and smiled at me. “Good morning, Joy.”
He didn’t move to stand but held his finger fast to the spot in the Psalms. “Mrs. Miller has some breakfast in the kitchen if you’d like some. We were gifted a few extra eggs from the neighbor.” The war was over but egg rationing wasn’t, and Jack always managed to finagle a few extra.
“Thank you,” I said, suddenly a bit shy. We were no longer at a pub or on a hike or in his Oxford rooms. This was his home, and he had his routine.
I spent some time in the sunny warm kitchen with Mrs. Miller, satisfied with tea and a biscuit when Jack joined us.
“My correspondence is done for the day, and Warnie is off to work on his Sun King. How’s for a walk, just enough to get the blood flowing for the day’s work?”
A smile was my answer.
Once we bundled and left the house, the wind came in great gusts as if the sky were holding its breath and then exhaling. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and moved as close to Jack as possible. We were headed to the Headington Quarry’s Holy Trinity Church, a half-mile walk on sidewalks and then down a frozen-mud lane. A high stone wall with bits of broken bottle capping the top like a crown bordered the narrow walkway to the church. Jack walked ahead of me, only room for one at a time, and I followed quietly. As we neared the churchyard he opened a wrought iron gate to enter a graveyard with a stunted forest of headstones.
I turned away from the irrefutable proof of death and instead focused on the church. It appeared as old as the land on which it sat, a limestone building with a bell cote and two bells on the west end. A slate roof sloped toward the ground and then seemed to take an abrupt halt at the building’s edge. White and stolid, the church spread east and west, its doorway hidden under a portico of stone where a cross was mounted, another engraved in a circle above the doorway.
“Anglican,” I said.
“Yes.” Jack surveyed the church with a proud stance. “Are you?”
“If I defined myself as anything, it would be Anglican, but I’m hard-pressed to be put into a category.”
“I don’t believe you need a category,” he said, and it sounded very much like a compliment.
“It’s very medieval looking,” I added with a shiver, closing my coat tighter, “like something out of one of MacDonald’s stories.”
“I’m quite sure that’s what the designer was after; he’d be flattered to know you think so.” He put out his cigarette in a puddle. “Let’s see if it’s any warmer inside.” He opened the doorway of the church and then stepped aside to allow me entry.
The pews, dark wood and shining in the dim light, were lined to face an altar and stained glass window of Christ with his hands spread wide. The simplicity of this church compared to the grand cathedrals in London brought my heart to humbleness. White plaster walls surrounded us. To the left a white curtain hung, separating the sanctuary from the back hall. Candlesticks sprouted from pews’ ends, and wan sunlight washed through the stained glass windows in multicolored hues, a nimbus on the angels and saints, the pews and floors.
“That’s beautiful,” I said and pointed to the window above the altar. “So beautiful that I wish I possessed a better word.”
“Words,” Jack said quietly. “The joy and art of them. Saying exactly what you mean.”
I pondered for a moment, staring and then closing my eyes. “Sublime,” I whispered.
“Yes! That’s it.” He paused. “That window was installed just last year as a memorial to those who died in World War II.”
“I wonder sometimes what those days were like for you. For all of you.”
Jack ran his hand across the back of a pew, and his sight seemed far off, as if those wartime days danced on the altar. “There was a time I believed that they’d invade and we would belong to them,” he said. “I threw my pistol into the river off Magdalen Bridge because it was rumored that the SS would find me for all the Royal Air Force lectures I’d given, and that a gun would be my demise.” He shook his head at the memory.
“We felt the fear in America,” I said, “but nothing like that. I’m not sure that the fear of invasion would have been something I could have tolerated.”
“You tolerate what you must when it becomes your reality.” Jack pointed to a pew on the left-hand side about halfway back and walked that way; I followed him.
“This is our pew, Warnie’s and mine.” He sat and I joined him. “Not exactly ours, but where we prefer to sit. We started coming here all the way back in . . . I don’t know, 1930 or thereabout? I like the eight a.m. service. The organ music in the other services grates on my nerves.” He lowered his voice as if the organ might hear his insult.
I leaned close to him. “I don’t much mind organ music; it’s the eternal sermons I can’t stand.”
Jack laughed and pointed to the Communion table. “It was here during the Eucharist, during World War II, that I thought of Wormwood and his story.”
“Oh, Jack,” I said. “Tell me. I love hearing where stories began.”
He turned slightly in the pew to face me. “I’d heard a speech Hitler gave over the radio waves, and I was easily convinced by him, if only for a moment. I started thinking what it would take to convince one of evil, just as the sermon that morning was trying to convince one of good.” His voice was quieter than usual. I didn’t want him to stop talking; I wanted him to unload his heart into mine.
“While the preacher spoke of temptation, my mind wandered. How would a head devil instruct his underlings on such things? Would he do it in the same but opposite manner as this preacher?” He paused and smiled at me. “I had almost the entire book in my head before I returned home. And then I believe I wrote the whole thing during the Battle of Britain with airplanes overhead. Young children were sent to live here. Hitler was on the radio with his fierce voice. And during all of that, my mind was churning with the idea.”
“I’m envious,” I said. “You just decide to write a book and then you do it.” The church was growing warm, or I was. I removed my coat and laid it gently in my lap. “You have tapped into something others have not.”
“Don’t admire me in that way, Joy. I write stories just as you do, one after the other. People believe I spent years studying for Screwtape and Wormwood, but the idea and words came from the wickedness of my own heart.” He rose from the pew and motioned for us to leave.
I sat for a moment longer. “Maybe they are the type of stories we think of during war—the devil and his works. Paradise Lost was written during the English uprising.” I stood and followed him.
He opened the door to the outside and wrapped his coat tighter. “I read that when I was nine years old and fancied myself a critic.” He paused. “And how do you come to know these things, Joy?”
I donned my coat and squinted into the sunlight. “Because I’m writing about King Charles II. It was his father who was executed during that time. I retain the oddest information, Jack. I can’t quite remember to pay the bills or buy a new button for my jacket or answer a letter, but I can remember a piano score after seeing it once and little facts like Milton writing Paradise Lost during that terrible war. Those obscure things burrow themselves into my brain. But ask me to catch a train on time?”
He laughed. “No one really knows you, do they, Joy?”
“I wouldn’t say no one.”
With a few tentative steps back into the courtyard, Jack spoke. “That’s what Tollers says about me also. But I don’t believe he says this with great affection, merely annoyance.”
I laughed. “Tell me more about Tollers. How did you become such grand friends?”
“We met in 1926 at a Merton College English faculty meeting.” He sat on a bench in the courtyard, and I joined him. “I thought him a pale little chap, but soon found that we had the same mind about many things. From poetry to English literature. We’ve been each other’s first readers, and we haven’t always liked what we’ve read.” He paused before telling me, “He’s not a big fan of the Narnian stories.”
“What does he know?” I said, obstinately horrified.
“Oh, he knows very much indeed. As with any good friend, we have many of those moments when one turns to the other and says, ‘You too?’”
“Like?”
“We don’t like politics. Neither of us has bothered to learn to drive a car. Dante. Theology.”
I nodded, but felt envious also.
“But there are our differences also. He’s the don of linguistics and language. Not a literature fan as I am. Yet what draws any two people together toward friendship is what drew you and me—that we see the same truth and share it. For example, there was this moment in an Inklings meeting when we both agreed to this—if someone won’t write what we want to read, then we shall write it for ourselves.” Jack paused. “For now he’s working on a sequel to The Hobbit. I’m quite astounded at his ability to create another world.”
“You’ve done the same.”
“I try, at least.”
“Let’s always do so.”
“Indeed.” He nodded with that smile, and we stood to head down the path.
Once home, Jack retreated to his room to “enter the fourth dimension,” and I took his O.H.E.L. papers into the common room and began to read with a pencil in my hand. For many pages I had to pretend this was not his work on which I wrote, to feign that I wrote marks on any old paper, and not become muddle-headed with admiration, forgetting to be honest.
A new twist but plenty good, I wrote in the margin and continued.
The fire puttered out, and Mrs. Miller came in to stoke it. She turned to smile at me, and I thanked her.
“’Tis wonderful to have a nice woman in the house,” she said as she hung the poker on the hook.
“Was there a not-so-nice one here before me?” I asked cheerily, not expecting an answer.
“Oh, not-so-nice is a kind way to describe her.” And with that, Mrs. Miller was off to the kitchen, not allowing for any more questions.
I closed my eyes as the fire reignited and a flood of gratitude and grace filled me. How very blessed I was to be there reading Jack’s work, warming by the fire after spending a morning in his church. But, oh, how many women had Mrs. Miller seen come and go in this house?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.