Sign up for our free newsletter:

One hundred years ago, Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland; thirty-five years ago (in 1963), he died at The Kilns in Headington Quarry, England, a home that the future Oxbridge professor in 1930 described upon moving in, "is such stuff as dreams are made on." It was private and secluded, with woods and a quarry pond. Much of the landscape has changed since Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress, and more than fifty other books, but for twenty-odd years the house hadn't changed much from the days of its most famous occupant. A young couple—an American and his British wife—found that out for themselves.

Do you know anyone who'd like to live in C.S. Lewis's house in England?" a woman asked the attendant at the C.S. Lewis collection at Wheaton College Library. "Why no," came the reply. "Anyway, who wants to know?"

"It's my son. He's just bought the house, and now he's looking for a caretaker."

My wife, Judi, who was within earshot, peeped over the top of the book she was reading, and said, "Excuse me, but I think I might be able to help."

Ruth Cording turned, "Oh?"

	I opened the door of a cubby-hole in C.S. Lewis's bedroom. Crawling on hands and knees, the cubbyhole was really a long passageway running under the eaves behind the walls of the adjacent rooms.

Putting down the copy of The Letters of C.S. Lewis she had been reading, Judi meekly offered, "My husband and I would love to live there."

Delighted, Ruth replied, "Well then, you really must meet my son, Bob."

Bob Cording had a vision: "I was in Oxford when I heard Lewis's house was on the market. I looked at it, and after praying, I felt somebody ought to preserve it in his memory, maybe to encourage Christian scholarship." With down-payment help from a handful of other Christians, Bob secured a mortgage on the property. "Now all we need is someone to develop it."

Through Bob we met Douglas Gresham, Lewis's adopted son. Douglas warned us, "The right people for this job will have to be practical with a hammer."

We'd been seeking God's guidance since I had finished grad school. Judi, homesick for her native England and expecting our first baby, was ready to pack up the next day. I was the cautious one.

"If God wants us to go to England," I said, "then he'll have to make an offer we can't refuse." This seemed to be it.

With a generous monetary gift from Bethel Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois, we moved to England—house unseen—with our four suitcases.

We were dumb-struck when we first saw The Kilns—it was nothing like we imagined. We thought Lewis lived in a comfortable, rambling Victorian mansion. On the contrary, as in Lewis's day, The Kilns is a hodgepodge of do-it-yourself extensions, blocked-up chimneys, crumbling brickwork, and rising damp. J.R.R. Tolkien once called it a midden—the Old English word for pig sty. Doug Gresham wasn't kidding when he said the occupants would have to be practical!

Where do we begin?
When Lewis moved to The Kilns in 1930, it was a clay-quarry bungalow with two living rooms, four bedrooms, and a large kitchen. Two additions transformed the house into a vast, twelve-room rabbit warren. On the property were twin brick kilns (hence the name), crumbling but still standing.

When we arrived on a snowy day in January 1985, the house was empty but peaceful. Outside, the windows were framed by overgrown vines. Inside, dim corridors twisted, leading us into room after quiet room. We slept on the floor that first night. With the full moon casting blue shadows across the white lawns, it felt like camping in Narnia. Lewis said of the place, "If (The Kilns) is haunted, then good life must have been here before us."

We wanted to restore The Kilns to the way it was in 1940 when Lewis and his brother, Major Warren (Warnie) Lewis, and their irascible friend, Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen, lived there along with a collection of dogs, cats, geese, servants, and child evacuees from World War II's blitz-weary London.

Word spread fast that the Yanks had taken over Lewis's home. While some resented this fact, most Britishers embraced us. The Rev. Val Rogers and his wife, Mary, read about the restoration project in the paper and offered their help. Val and Mary were Lewis's students in the 1930s. "You can't appreciate how popular Lewis was as a tutor (professor)," Val told me.

Mary chimed in, "We looked for bicycles parked four deep on the pavement outside of a lecture hall. Four deep could only mean Lewis was speaking. We were never disappointed." Val and Mary still treasure their yellowed notes from Lewis's "Prolegomena" lectures from 1935-36.

Long-time neighbors Pat and Mary Thompson recalled C.S. Lewis fondly. According to Pat, "Lewis was a very large, energetic man with a florid face rather like a farmer's. He had what we call a 'full habit of body.' His speech was always very formal—an almost 18th-century style of diction. But behind that large body and red face, friendliness oozed out."

Mary described the Lewis household as "shipwrecked."

"He had animals—so there were dogs' and cats' hair. Books were everywhere. Deep sofas and chairs and tumbled-down furniture. And cobwebs were certainly accepted," she said with a grin.

A close friend of C.S. Lewis, Jean Wakeman, gave us his powder-blue bedroom suite. "It's kind of garish," I said.

"Typical of Jack," Jean replied. "He bought it from a junk dealer about 1920."

Jean also donated a wardrobe, a sofa, and a chair Lewis had owned. She'd also kept the walking sticks owned by Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, during their last days together, suspecting that one day they would be valuable.

"These items are a gift to The Kilns," Jean said. "I want them to remain here as long as the house is used to preserve the memory of Jack and Joy and their work."

Relying on Jean's memory, we arranged everything so that it appeared Lewis still lived there. If you squinted, you could almost imagine "Jack" bursting in, face flushed and pipe blazing after a bracing trudge on Shotover Hill with his dog, Mr. Papworth.

Discovering the secrets
When co-owner, Chris Quinn, learned of the shabby state of The Kilns, he arrived from Santa Rosa, California, to help. "I'll do anything," he said. We put him to work sanding floors and clearing blocked drains.

The first room to come under the plaster trowel and paint brush was Lewis's 1940s bedroom. Situated on the top floor, this chamber may have inspired a room described in The Magician's Nephew. Digory and Polly had crawled through a door and along the rafters of their attic, finding secret entries into other rooms, including that of evil Uncle Andrew.

One day I opened the door of a cubby-hole in Lewis's bedroom. Crouching, I crawled inside. On hands and knees, I saw that the cubby-hole was really a long passageway running under the eaves behind the walls of the adjacent rooms. From this passageway, you could slip in and out of other rooms through other small doors. If someone really wanted to, he or she could go into one room and appear "magically" a few minutes later in another. Ultimately, the passage ended at a brick wall; on the other side was part of the attic. From that side, I picked up the trail again, circumnavigating the hidden labyrinth of the additions to the house.

Although it's romantic to think there was special significance to these hidden passages, it actually was wasted space—most likely due to second-rate architectural plans. Still, many a visitor to The Kilns enjoyed scrambling around on all fours behind the old walls.

In the same bedroom, there was a large door that opened to a fifteen-foot drop to the pavement below. I asked Jean about it. "That door? It used to have a spiral staircase. Jack had it built so he could leave for a morning swim in the pond without disturbing the rest of the household."

Much of the restoration required greater skills than I possessed. Pipes leaked and the curtains billowed as mysterious drafts moaned in the eaves. "What we need is a carpenter with lots of time on his hands," my wife said to me one day after breakfast.

"I'll say," I sighed. "But until Mr. Right comes along, I'll have to make do."

Soon after the local media carried news of our plans to preserve The Kilns, the president of the Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society invited me to speak at their meeting at Oxford's Pusey House. Membership consists of students, scholars, and anyone else interested in discussing the work of Lewis or his group of literary friends (like J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams among others) known collectively as the Inklings. Through the C.S. Lewis Society, Judi and I met John Thomas and invited him to The Kilns. Over tea and biscuits he asked, "Could you use a hand putting the house right? I'm a carpenter." Judi and I grinned.

Two surprise visits
For months, John donated his labor. One day he came in and said excitedly, "A few minutes ago, I was sawing a two-by-four and thinking about the old boy (Lewis), and something made me look up at his bedroom window. And blow me down, there was old Jack standing there looking down at me. He looked pleased. I glanced away, and he was gone." John had no reason to fabricate this story. We simply accepted that he had seen something that could not be explained.

Even before John Thomas reported his ghostly encounter, I had had my own close brush with an inauspicious visitor in the house's bathroom.

One bleak February morning, I heard someone at the door. "Judi?" I called. There was no reply.

I knew the door was bolted, so I waited to see what would happen. Suddenly, anxious fingers scratched at the door. The hair at the nape of my neck rose when I saw a hairy hand dart under the crack of the door.

The "hand" had two bright black eyes, a pink nose, and gray whiskers. A mouse. The furry fellow stared at me for a long second, twitched his nose, then retreated. Did Lewis get his inspiration for Reepicheep, the bold mouse of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, from a cheeky Kilns mouse? I wondered, laughing.

Outside the house, we delighted in the apple, plum, and pear trees, as well as the shrubs and flowers planted by Jack and Warnie. The Lewis brothers' crowning glory, however, was clearing foot paths from the house, through a wood, and around the quarry pond on the edge of the property. When Joy came to The Kilns, she wasn't well enough for serious gardening, but she did enjoy the roses. For my wife, Judi, one of the great delights of gardening at The Kilns was knowing that the rose bushes she tended in front of the house were the same ones we had seen in black-and-white photos of the site in the 1950s.

Pilgrims at the door
Our next door neighbor Zena Gibbs warned us that over the years C.S. Lewis pilgrims regularly turned up at The Kilns, hoping to get a glimpse of their literary hero's home. Her warning proved apt: As winter turned to spring, more and more people knocked on our door asking if they could see the house. No doubt word spread that the current occupants of The Kilns were a friendly if not naive couple who rarely turned anyone away—not even the men wearing the fluorescent orange jump suits who were cutting across our front lawn single file. Opening an upstairs window, I called down, "Who are you?"

"We're the Daniel Amos Band from Santa Ana, California. We play Christian rock 'n' roll. Is this really where C.S. Lewis lived?" Minutes later they sat around our table telling stories of how Lewis's books had helped them find faith in Christ.

Our baby's dedication party was interrupted by a group of Japanese fans who took a quick tour, snapped some pictures, shared our buffet, and left overjoyed.

In the two years we lived there (from 1985 to 1987), over 500 uninvited guests came to visit The Kilns. Money was tight for our family, yet there was always tea in the pot, scones in the oven, or soup on the stove for our guests—whether they were Lewis scholars or simply fans.

Gone but popular as ever
After Lewis's wife, Joy, died from cancer in July 1960, his neighbors, the Thompsons, tried to stop by more often.

"When Lewis became ill after Joy's death, he couldn't eat the food he was accustomed to. But I knew he loved bread. So I used to bring him freshly baked bread quite often. He was always reading a book which he quickly put aside. No matter how badly he was feeling, he always had a big smile and asked me to sit and chat for a while."

Pat told me how they heard of Lewis's death on November 22, 1963, news many friends missed because it was eclipsed by the news of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on the same day.

"It was a very fair autumn day and we were outside in the late afternoon. Paxford, The Kilns handyman, came down to our garden looking very sad. He said simply, 'The master has died.' I later learned that Kennedy had been assassinated, so that was a day of double disaster."

Walter Hooper, Lewis's close friend and one of the trustees of his estate, says Lewis still gets mail from children who are reading The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time. There's disbelief and sadness when they learn that Mr. Lewis isn't writing any more books.

The final restoration phase of The Kilns is scheduled to be finished in time for the centenary celebration of Lewis's life this summer, thanks to Stanley Mattson and the C.S. Lewis Foundation of Redlands, California (see story on p. 45).

Far from being a shrine or museum, the house is being preserved to help people find a saving faith in Jesus Christ through Lewis's testimony and his books.

On a recent trip to the house, Judi and I learned The Kilns is being rented by students until full restoration is completed. I was sorry to see that the rose bushes and the strawberry patch are gone. Gone, too, are the ivy, the tall hedges, and the honeysuckle that covered much of the property. Still, the building looks loved. That's how Jack would have wanted it.

A Christian Reader original article.

	What did you think of this story?
	Please to give us your feedback.

Home  |  People of Faith  |  Stories of Hope  |  Today's Culture
Build Your Faith  |  Laughing Matters  |  Archives  |  Contact Us

				Try Today's Christian Woman Free! Name Street Address City/State/Zip E-mail Address No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. If you decide you want to keep Today's Christian Woman coming, honor your invoice for just $17.95 and receive five more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is yours to keep, regardless. Give Today's Christian Woman as a gift Order a gift subscription!

FREE Newsletter Subscribe to the Today's Christian Newsletter    RSS Feed   RSS Help