What a fool I was to play the mouse
And squeak for mercy!
“SONNET XLIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
April 1956
My wedding day, if one could call it such, yet who would have thought there’d be another?
At my new home on 10 High Street in Oxford, I stood in front of the mirror buttoning the front of the cream dress I would wear that day to my second wedding, although it was clear it wouldn’t be a “real” wedding at all. Just in the nick of time to save me from another visit and plea to the courts for an extended visa.
Jack knocked lightly on the door.
“Come in.” I spun around to face him.
He entered with that smile I loved. “You look beautiful, Joy.” He straightened his tie and smirked a little bit. “‘The angels disapprove the way I look at you.’” And he came closer, brushed my hair from my shoulder.
He’d just quoted from “Sonnet XXXVIII.”
He’d been doing this for months now, privately inserting sonnet lines into our daily lives: whether in my backyard while I planted tulips and daffodils or tossed a net over my garden to keep the birds from destroying it, or while we hailed a taxi to attend a party. For the past eight months, since I’d handed my heart over in those sonnets, he’d become softer and more affectionate.
I straightened his tie. “You look mighty handsome for your first wedding day.”
He placed his hand on top of mine and held it there until the anguished cry of Douglas echoed from across the house.
“Mummy.”
“What is it?” I patted Jack’s tie and stepped out of my room.
Douglas tore down the hallway and stopped in front of me, his hands held out in supplication. There in his palms were the remains of what I assumed was his precious budgie bird, Chirpers.
“Sambo ate Chirpers,” he wailed. “The horrible cat ate my bird.”
“Are you sure it was Sambo? Maybe it was Snowball?” We had adopted a new kitten, a white fluff of shivering fur.
“It was Sambo!”
“On my wedding day?” I tried not to laugh, but what else was there to do? It was a mean and nasty bird anyway, although I would never say that to Douglas.
“It’s not a real wedding day. And Chirpers is dead. Dead.”
I took the bird from my son and covered it with my other hand.
Jack appeared behind me. “We will give Chirpers the proper Christian burial he is due. He is now flying among the other cat-destroyed birds in heaven,” he said.
“I hate cats.” Douglas wiped at his tears and stomped away. The front door slammed hard enough to shake the floor.
Davy was somewhere close by, probably delving into his newfound passion—Shakespeare.
I took Chirpers to my bedroom where I found an old shoe box and placed him with care while Jack headed out to console Douglas.
What an odd little family we were.
We’d been on Old High Street for seven months by then. On a blazing hot August afternoon, after Jack had left on a delayed journey to Ireland with Warnie, the boys and I departed from London. We’d settled into the three-bedroom half-brick house with a sitting room, a kitchen, and even a tiny dining room. On moving day, while boxes and tattered furniture were being dragged through the front door, we three had stood in the backyard and stared at the spacious lawn we shared with the attached identical house. Both plum and apple trees stood in our yard, echoes of the past.
“Beauty for ashes,” I said to my boys. “God redeems what’s been lost.”
Of course they only stared at me with confusion and then tossed off their shoes to feel the soft grass beneath their feet.
“Oxford is much better than London.” It was the first time in a long time I’d seen such a wide smile on Davy’s serious face.
“Yes, my beautiful boy, it is,” I agreed.
Months fly by in many ways, and those months had been the best of ways, even with my continuing and confusing declining health—oh, it’s just middle age and stress, the doctors continued to say. Walking had become difficult—rheumatism, I was told—and I only forty-one years old. When had that become middle age? Davy tried to teach me to use his bicycle to get around easier, but I couldn’t even put the weight on my hip to get on the seat.
Oxford became home quick as a flash, and I began to entertain again. Friends and neighbors visited. I cooked, made plum jam from the fruit of the backyard, gardened, and of course wrote and edited as I’d always done. The White Hart Pub was a block away, and its gardens were as lush as a tropical jungle, so I often ordered a pint and sat at a wobbly table to write.
Jack spent long hours with the boys—he’d bought them a horse to pasture in the back acreage of the Kilns, and he allowed Davy to buy books to his heart’s content in Blackwell’s. There was a football for Douglas and clothes for them both. Jack had come to love them and they him; it was obvious and endearing.
Surprised by Joy had been released the previous month to great acclaim. How many times I was asked if the title referenced me.
“Oh, that would be lovely,” was my pat reply, “but no. It’s the essence of Jack’s lifelong search for something he found as a child in a miniature garden—joy.”
I worked on The Seven Deadlies, for which I’d been paid an advance, but it seemed a dead end. Forgetting what I’d concluded when I wrote Smoke—writing theology was not my forte—I was being stretched to the limits. I took breaks from my own work to type like mad on Kay Farrer’s mystery pages, which not only brought in money but also proffered a favor for an admired friend. I niggled away on short stories and still hoped to make something of my Queen Cinderella novel. I typed for payment, but did not and would not give up on my own work.
And oh! For my own ego’s benefit—I’d been asked to speak at the Pusey House about Charles Williams, and at a London church on the problem of being a Christian Jew. In many ways it felt that my love for God, my soul, my family, and my friends had become a magnet, drawing all the broken and scattered pieces of my life together.
Bill and I continued a rigorous correspondence—sometimes I begged for money, sometimes I thanked him. I offered news and always kept him updated on our sons’ lives—Douglas playing on the under elevens football team. Davy corresponding with Tollers about The Hobbit, learning runes and the Erse alphabet. I told him of Davy’s favorite pastime—roaming through Blackwell’s Bookshop for as long and often as he pleased, as Jack gave him a large book allowance. And of all surprises—Douglas had begun writing poetry!
“A golden peacock flies,” one poem began. I hoped I painted a picture of our happiness for Bill, for it was a happy life.
Jack was alongside me every day he came to Oxford from Cambridge, and many whispered that he’d moved in. What vivid imaginations they had.
There had been a night I thought we were on a “date”—when he took me to see Bacchae, the great Greek tragedy. In the dark of the theater he had taken my hand. With our fingers wound together and the great tragic ending of the play approaching, I believed in more for us. But alas, after leaving that darkened theater our natural rhythms returned—philia, banter, beer, and laughter.
Every Sunday we went to church together at Holy Trinity, where he and Warnie had gone for years, attending the service without the organ and sitting behind the pillar so the priest could not see when Jack disagreed with his sermon. Always, the three of us slipped out directly after Communion and walked to town for a beer. There were sections of the liturgy that fed my soul and others that made me bristle with argument.
One splendid evening in the beginning of the year, I dug out a fancy dark-blue ball gown from my days in New York. Surprised to find that it still fit, I wore it to attend a dinner that Jack threw in my honor at Magdalen. Here I met his friends I’d heard about but never encountered. I behaved. I smiled demurely. It was a smashing evening that ended with a cab ride full of laughter as he imitated each one of his friends. We were a team, the two of us understanding each other in a way that no one else could or ever had.
Twice I’d been to meet Jack before or after an Inklings meeting, which is where I learned that Tollers’s talking tree, Treebeard, was modeled after Jack.
Just when I believed I’d learned all I might, there was more to discover about this man. I was confident in this: it was only the beginning. I felt we were on a threshold, a precipice. We had a lifetime to grow closer and come to truly know each other.
A lifetime.
And who knows what that lifetime is made of? How many days, or hours?
“Jack.” I faced him as I plucked my purse from the hook on the wall to leave for the registry office. “Is this meant to be a secret? This marriage?”
“It isn’t so much a secret as it is between us. Because it’s not in the eyes of the church and we aren’t living together, it is ours to hold close. Of course Dr. Humphrey and Austin Farrer will be there today, so they will know.”
“I want the world to know,” I told him.
He smiled sadly and buttoned his jacket before looking directly at me. “We shall know, Joy. We shall, and that is what matters.”
I smoothed my cream suit to leave for the office on St. Giles, down the street from our beloved Bird and Baby, where we would sign the papers binding us legally as husband and wife on April 26, 1956.