“What are you doing in the wardrobe?”
“Narnia business”

C.S.”Jack” Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where he and his brother immersed themselves in myths and legends. They spent wet afternoons sitting inside an old and cavernous wardrobe where they told each other tales of a magical kingdom of talking animals. The world of Narnia was rooted in his own childhood imagination and magical kingdom.

This is how he described his boyhood home:

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.

When WW2 began, Lewis was living at The Kilns just outside Oxford, a house with an assortment of adults including his brother. He was a professor at Oxford and wrote all the Narnia books while living there. Here’s how the first book of the Narnia series begins: 

The evacuees with whom Lewis shared his home were not young like the Pevensie children of the Narnia books. Those four children seem to have been based on the Bastables in E. Nesbit. The evacuees at The Kilns were, in fact, all teenage girls.  By all accounts, Lewis –  who had a reputation for being very hard on the undergraduates under his tutelage at Oxford – seems to have treated all of them well. 

Evacuee Patricia Heidelberger would look back on her years at The Kilns as “two of the happiest of my school life.” “My first impression of C.S. Lewis was that of a shabbily clad, rather portly gentleman, whom I took to be the gardener and told him so,” she later wrote in a letter to Clyde Kilby, founder of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. “He roared — boomed! — with laughter. … Unlike most evacuees, we were comfortable, we were well fed — I grew fat! — and we seemed to be loved. I enjoyed the scholarly sessions in the den; I borrowed books; I learned about Tolkien and the Inklings. I think [we] were extremely fortunate, and more than a little spoiled.”

As was often the case, the evacuees often stayed for quite short periods and the turnover was high. In the autumn of 1939 there were three or four girls at a time and in 1940 there were two other sets, one of three in the winter and one of two in the fall, the latter staying for two years.

In June of 1942, June Flewett was first a resident at the house. When her school class moved back to London, she left Oxford with a plan to return to the Kilns for a  holiday the next summer. In July of 1943, June Flewett arrived back at The Kilns and became the much-needed housekeeper. 

Lewis and his brother Warnie became very attached to June, and they remained good friends for the rest of their lives. When June left in January 1945, Lewis wrote to her mother:

 Dear Mrs. Flewett,

Oh what a sad waking up this morning when we realized that June was gone!—but I try to comfort myself by realising that there was a correspondingly happy waking in your house and thinking how long you and she had waited for it and how you deserve it. . . . I have never really met anything like her in unselfishness and patience and kindness and shall feel deeply in her debt as long as I live. . . . We are the ghost and ruin of a house. . . . Ichabod, Ichabod! God bless her.

It is believed that June was the inspiration for the character of Lucy Pevensie. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Lewis paid the fees) and took the film name of Jill Raymond. In 1950 she married the writer and politician Clement Freud. Freud died in 2009 but when allegations of paedophilia and sexual abuse were made against him in 2016, Jill Freud issued an apology to his accusers and a statement of sympathy saying: “I sincerely hope they will now have some peace.”

The Pevensie children of the Narnia novels are evacuated from the dangers of the Blitz only to find themselves in the middle of an epic battle between good and evil in the land of fantasy. 

Are you up for a Narniathon?

I am not a Narnian although I did read TLTW and TW out of a sense of obligation sometime in my twenties. But many people are. If you’re one of them then consider this Narnia reading challenge.

Chris Lovegrove of Calmgrove proposes a Narniad readalong – with luck to be announced in early August. Check it out and share your thoughts at Are you up for a Narniathon?  Have fun. And while you are at it, enjoy some Turkish Delight via the Fictiicious Dishes An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals  of Dinah Fried. 

And if you don’t fancy that, how about whipping up some gooseberry fool from the Official Narnia Cookbook?

Or from the BBC that claims this yoghurt-based fruity syllabub dessert is great for a last-minute dinner party.

First find your gooseberries.