Once Upon a Wardrobe(41)

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.