Patrick Comerford
During two recent visits to Headington in Oxford, I visited some of the churches in the area, including Saint Andrew’s Church, Headington, Headington Baptist Church, Corpus Christi Catholic Church, and Saint Michael and All Angels, New Marston.
In a posting on Sunday afternoon,I also described visiting Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, which is known particularly for its associations with the Belfast-born writer CS Lewis (1898-1963), who lived and worked for most of his life in Oxford, and who was a regular parishioner in Holy Trinity Church for more than 30 years.
As I walked around Headington I found more associations with CS Lewis, including The Kilns, the house where he lived on a street off Kiln Lane now known as Lewis Court, the CS Lewis Nature Reserve, and the house in Headington where his wife Joy Davidman once lived.
In the past, I have introduced a tutorial group to CS Lewis and his spirituality, written about him for American magazines to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, listened to lectures in Cambridge by Metropolitan Kallistos on the meaning of love in the writings of CS Lewis, visited churches and houses in Belfast that were part of his childhood, and visited places in Oxford associated with academic life and his work as a writer.
The Belfast-born writer, Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) is known for his literary criticism, children’s literature, fantasy literature and, essays, as well as his works in theology and as a Christian apologist. His great works include Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves and Surprised by Joy.
CS Lewis was an undergraduate at at University College, Oxford, then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for almost 30 years, from 1925 to 1954. He met JRR Tolkien for the first time 100 years ago, on 11 May 1926. They remained lifelong friends and key figures in the Inklings, the literary group that meet each week in the Eagle and Child on St Giles in Oxford, and Tolkien was influential in his decision to return to Christianity and the Anglicanism of his birth.
In 1954, he moved from Oxford to Cambridge as the first Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. But he never had the same impact on Cambridge as he had on Oxford.
Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman Gresham, then living at 10 Old High Street, Headington. She was 17 years his junior and they were married 70 years ago at the register office, 42 St Giles, Oxford, on 23 April 1956. Their friend, the Revd Peter Bide, provided a church blessing at her bed in the Churchill Hospital on 21 March 1957, despite a decree by Harry Carpenter, Bishop of Oxford, that the Church’s prohibition of remarriage for divorcees should be upheld in his diocese. Joy she moved into his home, The Kilns, in Headington in April 1957.
The couple had a brief holiday in Greece and the Aegean shortly before she died of cancer at the age of 45 on 13 July 1960. In A Grief Observed, Lewis describes his experience of bereavement in a raw and deeply personal way.
While Lewis attended the chapel in Magdalen College during the week, he never attended Choral Evensong there and went to the early Sunday morning service in his local parish church, Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, probably from some time in 1930. The Kilns, his home from 1930, is a ten-minute walk from the church. He took communion for the first since he was a boy at Holy Trinity Church on Christmas Day 1931.
He had a lifelong dislike of organ music and preferred to attend the 8 am said Communion service. Sunday after Sunday, for more than 30 years, he sat in the same pew, close to a pillar where he could observe the service but was shielded from the view of other people in the congregation.
On 15 July 1940, having been unwell, he decided to have a lie-in and attend the 11 am service instead. He did not get on particularly well with the vicar of that time and found his sermons tedious. On that Sunday his mind started to wander, but his wandering was productive: during the sermon and as he walked back to The Kilns, the concept and outline for The Screwtape Letters was almost completely formed in his mind.
Lewis died three years after Joy, on 22 November 1963, a week before his 65th birthday, and is buried in the churchyard in the churchyard in Headington.
CS Lewis was a regular parishioner in Holy Trinity for more than four decades and is commemorated in the Narnia window in the north aisle and also has a simple grave is in the churchyard. CS Lewis and his brother Warren Lewis began attending the church in 1930 and remained active in the church until their deaths, CS Lewis in 1963 and WH Lewis in 1973.
The Narnia window in the north aisle by Sally Scott in the north includes images from CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and was installed in 1991.
The window depicts the Garden of Eden as CS Lewis described it: a landscape of talking animals, speaking trees, courage and kindness, shot through with the light from outside and physically very accessible. Above, the lantern in the trefoil, the holy dove seems to shed peace on all that happens below.
The Narnia window was created as a memorial at once to the writer who sat in the pew by the window, and a bequest in remembrance of two local children who are buried in the churchyard. The Howe Bequest was made by George and Kathleen Howe, lived at Grovelands Road in Risinghurst, close to the Lewis brothers, as a memorial to their children, William George Howe (1938-1954) and Gillian Margaret Howe (1945-1947).
The artist and sculptural glass engraver Sally Scott was commissioned to create the window. After receiving the Narnia brief, she reread the books and drew inspiration too from the clear-glass engraved doors of Coventry Cathedral, and. Because the window is at eye level, she could fill her pictures with activity at a scale that is right for children.
The images include: Aslan, the great lion and creator, from whose mane streams light; two boys on a flying horse; a small girl flying on a talking owl; a and the castle Cair Paravel, which became the seat of good government on earth. Below are the heads of a unicorn, a bearded dwarf, an antlered stag, a mouse and a small bird. Along the bottom are the magic gifts made to the children by Aslan: a bottle of healing elixir, a sword and shield, bow and arrow, and the horn that summons divine help.
The top corners display the coat of arms of John Williams, Lord Williams of Thame, who founded Lord Williams’s School, where Willie was at school when he died. Three local children modelled the Narnia children and the window was dedicated on 2 July 1991.
CS Lewis died at his home, The Kilns, on 22 November 1963, the same day as the assassination of John F Kennedy. He was buried a few days later in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, the parish church he had attended for many years. Many of his friends and colleagues were unaware of his death and his funeral. JRR Tolkien was one of only 30 or so people at his funeral.
His brother Warren Hamilton Lewis, who died on 9 April 1973, is was buried in the same grave. The grave is marked by a modest headstone, their names, dates of birth and death, and a brief inscription. The epitaph, chosen by his Warren Hamilton Lewis, is from Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Men must endure their going hence.’ This quotation was the quotation on the family calendar the day their mother died, 23 August 1908.
Other graves in the churchyard include those of Mrs Janie Moore, the ‘adopted mother’, of CS Lewis, who died on 12 January 1951; William Kimber, the ‘father of English Morris’ as his gravestone describes him; and six war graves of soldiers from World War I.
The Kilns on Lewis Close is a short walk from Holy Trinity Church, and I retraced the route CS Lewis may have walked back home that Sunday morning in 1940 as he developed the concept and outline for The Screwtape Letters in his mind.
The bus from Headington back into Oxford brought me past Magdalen College where he had been a fellow for much of his life.
On St Giles, the former register office at No 42, where CS Lewis and Joy Davidman were married 70 years ago, is now a private dental practice.
The Eagle and Child at 49 St Giles, where Lewis, Tolkien and the Inklings met regularly, has long been covered in cladding and scaffolding, with promises from the developers that it will reopen some time in 2027.
For my guide to churches, chapels and religious buildings and sites in Oxford, visit here
