Sixteen
The Dreaming Spires

Everyone seems more frightened than George of the hospital. He doesn’t mind it much. They put tiny tubes in his nose, and he can breathe so easily it’s like swimming in oxygen. But the visitors to George’s hospital room are distressed. As Megs sits next to him, her hands are shaking. Her cheeks too. George wants to tell her that it’s going to be okay because it is—even if everything turns out differently than she wants.

She opens her black notebook and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. “This story,” she says with a false smile, “is about the Great War.” She looks up nervously. “Maybe we should wait on this one. I could reread my story on Norse mythology or the one about the Knock.”

“No, go on please,” he tells her. “It’s okay to tell me about the war. It’s probably what gave Mr. Lewis the idea for the battle in Narnia. Or perhaps it wasn’t the idea, but the”—he searches for the word—“the experience.”

Megs nods. “Mr. Lewis was about to turn nineteen.”

“So right after he left Surrey,” George says.

Megs smiles, her hands now steadier on the notebook. “Yes, but first he attends university.”

“Start right, Megs!” George orders. He wants to slide into the story with their shared words.

“Oh, yes!” She sits up straighter. “You ready?”

“Yes.”

“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”

George pauses so she’ll smile, then says, “And not very far away . . .”

“Jack Lewis sat at a desk in Surrey, preparing for exams.”

Megs continues with her story, and George finds himself inside Professor Kirkpatrick’s Surrey home while Jack Lewis suffers over algebra equations.

*  *  *

Jack was determined to gain admission into Oxford. He’d studied under Professor Kirkpatrick’s scrutinizing discipline, and his eyelids burned as he’d studied day and night for admittance exams. As algebra was sure to be in the tests, he buckled down, practicing equations, pushing himself harder than he’d ever done before. Memories of Wynard School and cruel Oldie flooded Jack’s mind each time he’d sit down to do an equation. Yet he preserved in his studies. His education would not be dashed on the shores of his loathing for mathematics.

The day Jack headed from Surrey to Oxford to take the admittance exams, he thought of what Mr. Kirkpatrick had once told his father. “You might make a writer or a scholar out of him, but that’s about it.” This was all fine and well by Jack, but to be a scholar or a writer, he still had to pass the mathematics portion of the exam.

On the train ride to Oxford, Jack again read Phantastes, because by now he understood that all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over. Finally he arrived at Oxford station, the train exhaling black coal smoke as Jack stepped off. Of course he’d imagined Oxford in his mind. The fabled city a thousand years old; the medieval city of thirty-two colleges under one Oxford name.

Jack exited the station and ambled a few blocks, confused by the dullness of the city he entered. He’d heard so much about this regal place, about its beauty and ancient feel, and he was flooded with disappointment. Oxford was merely a row of shops, one after the other, stretching along a ribbon of asphalt, without much to write home about.

Jack had expected and desired to be awed. With confusion and an itching annoyance, he turned around to find his way to the college and there—behind him, not in front of him—was the city of Oxford.

He’d stepped out of the wrong side of the train station and walked into the town of Botley.

There is only one first view of Oxford, and it paused Jack’s heart. The city was a glorious cluster of dreaming spires and jagged towers, a skyline of medieval romance.

It felt like an echo of a song he’d heard but forgotten. This first impression of its beauty was forever engraved on his mind and in his heart.

He hoisted his pack with a lighter spirit and set his feet quickly to Oxford. He found the cobblestone streets and domed library, the brick and stone colleges, the fair greens of the parks, the book-stuffed bookshops and warm pubs. Jack found the twin rivers meeting the Thames, and where he imagined his new life was to begin. He ambled along Holywell Street to the corner of Mansfield Road to locate the Tudor single house where he would spend the night.

The next morning he muddled through the tests, his head bowed over the desk in the dusty exam rooms, his attention on the questions, not on dreams of a new life.

He finished the exams and boarded another train, then a ferry back to Ireland. Jack arrived home to Little Lea and walked through the door of his family home. He stood before his father and the truth burst out of him in an anxious confession. He was sure he’d failed the math portion of the exams. There was no doubt in his mind, and he didn’t want to waste any time on false hope of admittance.

With Warnie in Sandhurst with the British army, he didn’t even have his brother to complain to, or for companionship. He would run to his friend Arthur, tell him of the injustice of mathematics and his ruined life.

He would make new plans. His inability to figure and do equations had cost him the chance to attend the prestigious university. But there were other universities, to be sure.

Jack sulked through the holiday, his father’s disappointment like smoke clouding the house. He berated himself, even as he read Spenser and MacDonald. He walked the garden paths of his childhood, stared over the lough, despair following him. Why hadn’t he spent more time on equations? Why couldn’t his mind understand numbers when it could easily learn languages and higher concepts?

It was said that math was another language, and Jack had mastered many: Greek, Latin, German, and French. But how was Jack to be a writer or a scholar if he couldn’t gain admittance to university?

Christmas Eve arrived and with it a knock on the front door of Little Lea. In the post was an envelope with the name Clive Staples Lewis typed on its front. On the back was Oxford University’s logo, stamped deep into a yellow wax seal.

Right there in the entry foyer, with ancestors’ portraits watching over them, Jack’s father ripped open the letter that would seal Jack’s doomed fate. Jack would be brave; he would stand and accept the verdict.

Albert Lewis read aloud the words.

Dear Mr. Clive Staples Lewis,

Congratulations on your admittance to Oxford’s University College  . . .

Jack’s tight fists of dread unfolded. He was stunned, but he also knew these were odd times. The war raged, and there were fewer men to attend university. Most British boys of his age were already in France. Oxford must need students; the result was that Jack Lewis was admitted.

In the summer—Trinity Term—of 1916, Jack moved to the spired city of Oxford. After he ambled from the train and through the gates of University College with the azure arms of a cross between five martlets, he was escorted by a tall and thin porter to his rooms. It was a gabled college with an emerald green quad surrounded by a tawny stone cloister, iron lanterns, and gargoyles. Jack reveled in the deep medieval feel of it all.

Jack followed the skinny porter, who looked as if he might break if he touched his toes. They walked along stone hallways, up a narrow winding staircase to a dimly lit residence hallway. The porter opened a door and stepped in. Jack followed and was about to drop his pack when he stopped mid-step to stare. This was a plush two-room residence with warm wood paneling. Covering the walls were oil paintings of old men in professors’ cloaks. Bookshelves heavy with books crowded every corner, leaving no room for more. There was a study and a separate bedroom Jack could see behind an open door. He dropped his duffel bag, unsure if he should tell the porter that this fancy room could not possibly be his.

To boot, in the center of the room, proud and large, stood a piano.

This young man had quite obviously taken Jack to the wrong room.

Jack looked to the porter already halfway out the door. “This can’t be right. It’s brilliant, but it can’t be mine. This must be for a . . . wealthier student. I think you might have me confused with someone else.”

The porter stopped and looked at Jack, his eyes narrowing like a crow eyeing a shiny object he may or may not dive to retrieve. “Yes. It was another student’s room, but he’s been sent to the front lines. It’s yours for now.”

The porter shut the door. Jack sat on the large wooden desk chair with the plush cushioned seat and stared out the iron mullioned window to the green quad where students hurried this way and that, carrying books and smoking cigarettes on a summer afternoon. The war raged far away while he sat in the two-room suite with a piano and shelves extravagant with books.

Until then, Jack had considered the war a nuisance, something that kept everyone from getting on with their lives, a bother that kept Warnie from him. But this room—it had belonged to a boy who now most likely sat in a trench somewhere in France. A boy who might not return to university or to his family.

Jack’s mind coiled around the opposing worlds of horrifying war and this warm, book-rich room. He decided right then he would not shelter in luxury, evading what his brother and other students were enduring, and he’d enlist in the British army.

An Irishman, Jack could have avoided serving in the military, but he joined the Officer’s Training Corps. During the rigors of marching and artillery training, he had to move his rooms to Keble College. There he was assigned a roommate named Paddy Moore, and they became good mates. Together they promised each other that if anything happened to either one of them, they would take care of the other’s family.

Meanwhile, Jack’s studies at Oxford took precedence. The military training was an added duty. It never felt truly likely that he would be sent.

War was merely an idea, an event far off. That is until Jack’s nineteenth birthday, when he found himself in France’s Somme Valley on the front lines, a member of the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry.

When the shelling began, war was no longer an idea or a scene in a book or something Jack acted out with his chivalrous mice in a Belfast attic.

*  *  *

Fear trembled through the earth as well as his heart as Jack hunkered down in a muddy trench near his mate Laurence. Jack’s wool uniform was tight, his hat tilted to cover his forehead and keep him warm along with his lit cigarette. The dissonant explosions, screams, buzzing, and pounding echoes resonated through the air. Jack bent lower, awaiting orders from his lieutenant, when something whizzed so near his ear, he froze up. More accurately, it whistled past him. It was a sound like nothing he’d ever heard.

A bullet. It had missed his head by an inch at most, and after it had passed, a thought flew through Jack’s mind. This is war, just as Homer wrote about.

The cold, the wet mud, the marching; it was what Jack had prepared for during his training, yet he was completely unprepared for the reality.

Now that he was on the front lines, his body could do nothing more than go along for the ride. He had never been out of Ireland or England, yet there he was, crouched in a trench with Laurence, the mud thick and dense beneath their feet, the frost biting and frigid. They were hunkered down so low that all he could see were the muddy wood slats of the trench walls, while above them the war raged with sounds like nothing he’d heard before.

The trench was as real as cold, thick mud, as real as hand-grenade blasts nearby, as real as marching to another miserable battlefield until he was marching while asleep, waking to his feet and worn boots still moving, as real as the sleepless fear that crawled through the trenches like smoke. The green grass of England was replaced by a scorched and barren landscape. He wriggled along the ground to inspect barbed wire, slept sitting straight up against a cold muddy wall. This landscape was far away from his university rooms of dark paneled walls, innumerable books, and a piano waiting to let loose its music. But just as he did at university, Jack carried a notebook inside his pocket. He scribbled in it whenever he could, often lines of poetry.

A few months after his birthday, Jack woke in his barracks with a fever and hallucinations: vivid images of a frozen wasteland inhabited by wolves and dryads; the stars trembling in the firmaments and the earth opening in jagged chasms. Faces, distorted and half animal, emerged and faded. His body trembled as if someone was lifting him like a child and shaking him. Jack didn’t know what was real or what was imagined. Eventually they sent him to a hospital and called it trench fever, a disgusting disease caused by lice. Kind nurses tended to his every need, wiping his fevered forehead, bathing him, feeding and caring for him. How he missed his mother those months of illness and all his life.

Lying in the hospital bed one afternoon, a nurse with whom he had interesting discussions about literature brought Jack a different book by George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin.

Jack consumed the story as if it were his last meal. One George MacDonald book after another followed: Lilith, At the Back of the North Wind, The Golden Key. He returned to what had sustained him in past times of fear and sorrow—reading and writing, poetry and myth—until finally he took pen to paper and wrote more poetry.

It took five months for nineteen-year-old Jack to get better in that hospital. When the fever weakened and his strength returned, Jack was back at the front lines for the battle that would change his life. On April 15, 1918, Jack Lewis and his regiment were part of the British offensive attacking German defenses near Arras. Bullets whizzed past. Bravery mixed with cowardice as idealistic and frightened young men fought for freedom, defining courage not by being free of fear but by fighting in spite of the fear.

Seven days of that battle were shaped by blood and shattered bones, collapsed buildings, and smoking piles of rubble. It was a nightmarish world. By the end of the battle, the Somerset Infantry had taken the village of Riez du Vinage and captured sixty German soldiers. On that cold April morning, a British shell was shot toward the Germans, but it fell short, scattering its lethal power at Clive Staples Lewis, his mate Laurence Johnson, and Sergeant Harry Ayres, a man who had become very much like a father to Jack. Sergeant Ayres took the brunt of the explosion and Laurence also fell. Pieces of shrapnel bit into Jack’s body.

Jack crawled through mud and dirt, through debris and bodies, to find his way to a stretcher bearer for his sergeant and mate. He wasn’t a hero; he was another soldier trying not to die by bullet or bomb. Jack was whisked away to a hospital in Étaples. Those jagged scraps of a British shell made to wound the enemy were lodged in Jack’s body: his left arm, his leg, and most dangerously, his chest.

Laurence and the sergeant were dead. Jack survived, but even as he was taken to Liverpool to heal, he could not reckon with the fact that had any of them switched places, if he had been two steps to the left or right, or if Harry or Laurence had walked away, the grim and miserable outcome would have been different.

In that moment, life made no sense. There was no plan or rhyme or reason, no goodness or mercy or great love.

Jack took his anguish to the page and to poetry.

*  *  *

When Megs looks up from the pages, there are tears in her eyes.

“Why are you crying?” George takes his hand from below the hospital sheet and touches her fingers. “He lived and went home and attended Oxford just as you do, and then he wrote all these books and—”

“But all the terrible things he had to go through. The misery in our world.” Megs looks around the hospital room as if her eyes are cataloging all the terrible things she is thinking.

“Yes, I know.” George watches her face as she tries to stop the tears. “Tell me what else.”

She glances at the pages and a tear drops, spreading the ink of a word into a blue blob. George knows she’s crying about him, and about loss.

She clears her throat before she tells him. “That mate of his that I told you about at the beginning? The one he met in training?”

“Paddy,” he tells her.

“They promised that they would take care of each other’s family if one or the other died. And Paddy . . .”

“Died,” George finished for her.

“Yes, and Mr. Lewis has been taking care of Paddy’s mother and sister all this time. Her name is Mrs. Moore, but he calls her Minto. Paddy’s sister is Maureen, and now she’s married and the mother is in a nursing home. He visits Minto every. Single. Day.”

“Loyalty,” George says. “That’s in the book.”

“Yes.” She nods. “Loyalty.”

A nurse enters the hospital room, bustling about George and Megs, tucking and checking and fixing. George ignores her, speaking to his sister. “Did Jack go right back to university?”

“Yes. And he eventually graduated with firsts in Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and English. Not too shabby for a boy who almost wasn’t admitted. And”—she smiles as if the war was finally fading in her mind—“that book of poetry he wrote during the war? He published it.”

George sits up straighter. “That was his first book?”

“Yes, it was. He published it under the name of Clive Hamilton.”

“Who is Hamilton?”

“It was his mother’s maiden name.”

“Oh, something wonderful out of something awful.” George lies back and feels as full of story as if he’d been given a huge meal of something so satisfying that he could drift off to sleep without worry.