Garden of dreams

Twenty years later, Lewis had woven some of its dream-like quality into a tale that quickly became a publishing phenomenon.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of the famous Narnia chronicles, was largely inspired by the imposing beauty and serenity of the eight-acre garden, most of which now forms the Henry Stephen/ C S Lewis Nature Reserve, owned since 1969 by BBOWT.

Strolling through the reserve today, it is easy to imagine the author perched on his favourite circular brick seat, gazing at the large, tranquil pond known as Shelley’s Pool, perhaps meditating in exactly the same spot as the famous poet.

Climbing the steep, curving path into the woodlands above, you can also imagine fawns darting between the trees, and the wicked queen appearing in her chariot, gliding across a blanket of snow. Narnia’s snowy landscape may have been inspired by the memory of a walk in the woods shortly after moving to The Kilns, which Lewis described in a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, as “a lovely ten minutes . . . in a wood of fir trees in the snow”.

But Narnia was a long way off when Lewis first arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate in April, 1917.

Born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, he developed an early passion for reading, and it was little surprise that he chose to study English language and literature.

He quickly fell in love with Oxford, writing enthusiastically to Greeves about “the quad on these moonlit nights, with the long shadows lying half across the level perfect grass and the tangle of towers and spires beyond in the dark”.

His studies were interrupted by the war, and he followed Warnie into the Army. To his delight, he was stationed for three months at Keble College, where he formed a close friendship with a young man named Paddy Moore.

The pair agreed that if either was killed in action, the other would look after the surviving parent. As it turned out, Paddy was reported missing the following year, and Lewis was left to look after Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen, a commitment he took very seriously.

Lewis’s own war service was short-lived. Arriving in the trenches in November 1917, he was in hospital with trench fever by the following February, and in April was invalided out of the war after being hit by shrapnel.

He eventually returned to his studies in January 1919, graduating three years later. During this period he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled Spirits in Bondage.

In 1925 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, where he taught Literature and Philosophy. One of his earliest students was John Betjeman, who described Lewis as “breezy, tweedy, beer-drinking and jolly”.

His rooms at Magdalen overlooked Addison’s Walk, named after the poet and essayist Joseph Addison, a former student and Fellow of the college. The tree-lined walk across the meadows to the Fellows’ Garden became one of Lewis’s favourite haunts.

Magdalen also became one of the meeting places for the Inklings, the literary group formed by Lewis and J R R Tolkien. The pair met at an English faculty meeting at Merton College in 1926, and it was Tolkien’s religious beliefs that inspired the atheist Lewis to convert to Christianity in 1929.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), he recalled how he “admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most defeated and reluctant convert in all England”.

Lewis’s new-found faith had a profound influence on his writing. He became a prolific writer of religious fiction, poetry, essays and other scholarly works, including The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), That Hideous Strength (1945) and his great satirical masterpiece, The Screwtape Letters (1942).

By this time he was comfortably ensconced at The Kilns, along with Warnie and the Moores, and gaining in popularity both as an author and as a religious broadcaster for the BBC. But it was the arrival of four evacuees at The Kilns, at the start of the Second World War, that prompted Lewis to consider writing for children. The result was the Narnia chronicles, with their successful fusion of heroic adventure and Christian symbolism.

The first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950, followed swiftly by Prince Caspian (1951), Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician’s Nephew (1955) and The Last Battle (1956). Although one of the last two to be written, The Magician’s Nephew became the first chronicle, as Lewis felt a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was needed to explain how the Land of Narnia had been created. In 1951, Lewis began corresponding with an American writer, Joy Gresham, and when she moved to Oxford, along with her two sons, romance blossomed. Initially, Lewis was reluctant to commit himself to her, but when she was diagnosed with cancer he realised how much she meant to him, and the pair married on 21st March 1957. Tragically, Joy died three years later, and Lewis never fully recovered from the shock of her death, vividly describing his acute sense of loss in his final book, A Grief Observed (1961). Their romance was recreated in the film Shadowlands (1993), starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy.

Lewis survived Joy by only three years. He died on 22nd November 1963, a week short of his 65th birthday, after a short illness. He was buried at the Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, and when Warnie died in 1973 he was buried with him. Their grave is signposted from the churchyard entrance, so is easy to find.

The Kilns is now a study centre run by the C.S. Lewis Foundation. It is private property, but the blue plaque is visible from the gate, and commemorates one of Oxford's most celebrated authors – who, according to his beliefs, has left this world for something better. In his own words from The Last Battle, he has started “Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which ever chapter is better than the one before”.