in W. T. Kirkpatrick, he would probably have been equipped to get a good mark in Mods in his last month at Great Bookham. The first four terms of his Oxford life were therefore a delightful opportunity to taste again, and at greater leisure, at familiar wells. For example, at Gastons, he had read through the Bacchae of Euripides in Greek and compared it with the poetic English rendering, which he much admired, of Gilbert Murray. At Oxford, he had the chance to attend lectures on the Bacchae by Murray himself – the brilliant young Australian who had become a Professor of Greek at Glasgow in his early twenties and had now returned to his old university to occupy the Regius Chair of Greek. ‘He is a real inspiration,’ Lewis wrote, ‘quite as good as his best books, if only he did not dress so horribly, worse even than most dons.’1
Other intellectual stimulation came from his membership of an undergraduate society called the Martlets, a group that met once a week in term-time to discuss a subject of common interest and hear one of their members read a paper. An essay which particularly took Lewis’s fancy was one on the poetry of Henry Newbolt, read by a man called Basil Wyllie. ‘I hadn’t thought the subject very promising but he quoted a great many good things I hadn’t known – especially a queer little song about grasshoppers.’2 When we follow Lewis’s reading over his first couple of terms, it is sometimes hard to remember that he is at this point studying Latin and Greek rather than English Literature. Gibbon, Shakespeare’s King John and Troilus and Cressida (‘a very good play’), Layamon’s Brut and Wace in the Everyman translation and an unnamed book of philosophy which took him eight weeks to read were all devoured in his first term, on top of his Latin and Greek authors. ‘Of course there is very little time for ordinary reading, which has to be confined to the week-end as it was at Kirk’s.’3
They were happy days, spent basking in the pleasures of peacetime, the beauty of the college buildings and, as spring turned into summer, the beauty of Oxford itself.
‘It is perfectly lovely now both in town and country – there are such masses of fruit trees all white,’ he wrote in June 1919.
One big cherry tree stands in the Master’s garden just below my windows and a brisk wind this morning has shaken down masses of leaves that lay like snowflakes on the bright smooth grass. Then beyond the lawn you see the gable end of the chapel. I usually go and bathe before breakfast now at a very nice place up the Cherwell called ‘Parsons Pleasure’. I always swim (on chest) down to a bend, straight towards the sun, see some hills in the distance across the water, then turn and come again to land going on my back and looking up at the willow trees above me.4
As if the pleasures of mind and sense were not enough, he was also expanding his circle of friendship. Eric Dodds, his fellow-Irishman, destined one day to succeed Gilbert Murray as Regius Professor of Greek, was Lewis’s exact contemporary at Univ. They differed radically over the Irish question – Dodds being a fanatical Home Ruler who refused to stand up for the National Anthem; but they liked each other and were stimulated by each other’s company. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, later to be known as an authority on Cornwall, was another friend made at this juncture. ‘I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment, in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most wet and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge.’ Another friend met in his first year of residence at Univ was Owen Barfield, an undergraduate at Wadham College. The First Friend, Lewis believed, is like Arthur Greeves, the man who becomes an alter ego and who shares your tastes. ‘But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything.’5 Lewis was to say that Barfield changed him a good deal more than he did Barfield, and this was probably true. The thing they disagreed about most forcefully was religion, Barfield being set on the course which was to lead him to embrace theosophy, and Lewis at this stage still being an ardent atheist.
Lewis appeared to be enjoying an archetypal undergraduate career in ancient and beautiful surroundings. But in fact his routines were completely different from those of his fellow-collegians. True, he rose at six-thirty, bathed, attended chapel (which was still compulsory for undergraduates) and had his breakfast in hall. Then he went to lectures and libraries and tutorials, and had lunch (bread, cheese and beer) brought over to his room by a college servant. But at 1 p.m. without fail, he got on his bicycle and pedalled over Magdalen Bridge, up Headington Hill and into the dingy little suburban thoroughfare near the mental hospital. There at Number 28 Warneford Road, in the house of a lady of High Church persuasion by the name of Featherstone, Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen had taken up their abode. ‘They are installed in our “own hired house” (like St. Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out and we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room.’6
It is the ‘we’ in this paragraph from a letter to Arthur Greeves which must give the reader pause. Lewis is now twenty years old, and dependent (in those days before university grants) on an allowance from his father. This allowance was meant to cover the expenses of one young man living in college. Instead, it was made to stretch (in those months when cheques were not forthcoming from the Beast) to pay the rent for Mrs Moore and her daughter. Here was a commitment indeed.
Nor was it merely a financial one. From the very beginning of his relationship with Janie Moore, Lewis involved himself in all her domestic arrangements – the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, as well as the schoolwork of the little girl. ‘He’s as good as an extra maid,’7 Mrs Moore once said of him. Moreover, because the arrangement was so makeshift, there was no permanence in any of the domestic arrangements which they made. They lived from hand to mouth. Between 1918 and 1923 they had nine different addresses, traipsing disconsolately from one set of rented rooms to the next, and always finding something wrong when they got there. Some places objected to Maureen’s noisy music practice. Some were by their nature temporary. In others doubts were cast on the relationship between Mrs Moore and her ‘adopted son’ and they moved on to avoid scandal.
For all this domestic life of Lewis’s in his undergraduate days had to remain a closely guarded secret. Nowadays, nearly all the colleges in Oxford are open to both sexes, and no disgrace attaches to the two sexes consorting together. Things were very different until at least 1960. In 1919, the older dons could just about remember the days when college fellows had to be celibate. Even though marriage was now permitted them, an atmosphere of celibacy prevailed. Scholars of colleges were under an obligation of celibacy. Nor was this entirely a formality. Failure to attend breakfast in your college could result in being ‘gated’, that is confined to the college for a period of anything from a week to a term. To have slept out of college was a very serious offence. To be shown to have associated with a member of the opposite sex was yet more serious. Six years after Lewis began his career at Univ, another poet whose first volume had been published before he arrived at Oxford was rusticated – sent away for a term – because of his association with a married woman in Maidenhead.’ “I hope, Mr. Quennell, you do not know as much about Mrs. X as we do,” remarked the Vice Chancellor with a gently dismissive sigh … The Oxford I knew was still a semi-monastic institution; some of the dons clearly detested women; and the only kind of moral offence they condoned were discreetly managed homosexual passions.’8
If Lewis’s domestic arrangements had been known to the college authorities or to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, there is no doubt at all that they would have been considered most irregular. True, there had been oddities before in the history’ of the University. John Ruskin’s mother had taken up residence in the High Street when he was an undergraduate at Christ Church. Robert Hawker, the future vicar of Morwenstowe and author of ‘And Shall Trelawney Die’, had arrived to be an undergraduate as a married man (as it happened to a woman twenty years