Becoming Mrs. Lewis(45)
Jack shook his head, his jowls caught in the tight constriction of his pressed white shirt and knotted tie. “I don’t care if they love me, as long as they don’t rebel and mock.” He smiled, though: all that Irish charisma even among nerves.
“Today is Douglas’s tenth birthday. How I wish he were here with us to hear you, to be with me.”
Jack drew closer to me and took my hand. “I shall pretend he’s in the audience.”
I nodded just as the librarian organizing the event, Edith was her name, came to my side with hushed voice. “Do you have children here?”
This was her insufficient attempt to figure out who exactly I was in relation to C. S. Lewis.
“No, my children are in America,” I said. And then wished I hadn’t. A flow of excuses burst forth from me. “I’m writing with and helping Mr. Lewis. I’m researching—”
Jack came a step closer and addressed Edith. “Mrs. Gresham here is a renowned American author and she’s here for research. Now, are we ready to talk to the children?”
“Ready.” She tottered off in her pencil skirt and high-heeled shoes, tight-waisted jacket, and hair stiff with spray that smelled like wet paint.
Jack and I walked into the main room, and I eased into a chair at the side of the lectern as he approached it. The room quieted. Many of the children held copies of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in their lap, opening and shutting the pages as if Aslan might leap out and join us.
The boys wore caps and little suits, their jackets buttoned and their pants pressed. The little girls wore dresses and polished Mary Janes with little white socks tight about their ankles, their hair in pigtails and ribbons. They all appeared to me as mini-adults, ready for tutoring.
“Good afternoon,” Jack said with a great bellowing voice, the one that made him the most popular lecturer at Oxford.
A few children startled, but most just stared at him in awe. He glanced at me and I smiled, waved my hand at him to go on.
“I’m here today to talk about stories, and most particularly the one most of you seem to hold in your laps, the one full of talking animals and imaginative children and a great Lion.”
The children were frozen like statues at the White Witch’s castle, and Jack showed not one sign of being nervous save the clasp of his hands behind his back, his thumbs worrying back and forth against each other—a “tell” no one else would know.
“I had the idea for Narnia long before I wrote the first book,” he continued. “From the time I was a very young boy, I imagined a faun walking through a snowy wood with an umbrella. I kept that picture in my mind, not knowing what to do with it. Then during the horrible bombings of World War II, three children came to stay with me in the countryside of Oxford where I live. They were escaping London, this very place you live now, which was once very dangerous. I don’t have children of my own, so I did the only thing I knew how to do to keep them occupied—I told them stories.”
He paused, and not one child made a peep; he cleared his throat and continued. “One of those stories was about children who were sent to live with a professor in an old musty home in the country. I wanted to make them into kings and queens, far different from the frightened children they were. And that is how Narnia began. But”—he let out a long sigh, as if remembering the wasted time—“it wasn’t until years later that I sat down to write it.”
He stared at the silent, wide-eyed children and kept on talking, enthralling them with stories. Eventually he reached the subject most of them had been waiting for.
“Aslan,” he told them, “just bounded onto the page. I hadn’t planned on him at all. But for many nights I dreamt of lions, and then I knew I had to put him in the story.”
A young girl let out a mewling sound and blurted out, “Not planned on Aslan?” Her sweet English accent made Aslan’s name a symphony of sound.
Jack laughed with such joy that the children joined in. He then chattered on about Edmund and Lucy, about Mr. Beaver and all the rest of his Narnian books, which were set to be published year after year. “I’m just finishing the last one now.”
A small boy in a tweed cap raised his hand.
“Yes, son?” Jack asked.
“How do you make a book? I want to make a book.”
“First I try to write the very books that I want to read. I see my books in pictures. I watch them unfold, and then I write about it. I tell what I see, and then I fill in the gaps.”
“Who shows it to you? Who shows you the pictures?” the boy asked quietly. “I want to know him.”
Jack leaned forward on the lectern, that twinkle in his eye. “The Great Storyteller, I believe.”
The boy stared at Jack for some time and then seemed to dismiss him as a silly old balding man.
Jack continued. “When I was just your age I started making stories with my brother, Warren. We imagined a small country full of walking, talking animals. We called the place Boxen. Many of those creatures, the very ones I imagined when I was just the age of all of you, found their way into Narnia. There is no limit or age for making stories. Begin whenever you want, and stop whenever you please.” Jack’s charm—an indescribable quality that emanated from him like light—brought the children under his spell. It was the cadence of his voice, the manner in which he leaned forward as if he were telling them a secret, the twinkle of his eyes, and the hint that he might just burst into laughter at any moment.