Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963 - Walter Hooper

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have weighed and graded and stamped and sorted and packed them, they seem to be always stale and often bad by the time they reach the consumer.

      I have been away for a few days in the Welsh mountains, and my brother—lucky man–is just back from a fortnight in Ireland, or Eire as they prefer to be called. He tells me that over there they are still living in a fool’s paradise; whilst the English—and no doubt American–papers were full of anxious discussion of the Korean war, the leading Irish paper carried banner headlines, WHAT IS WRONG WITH IRISH LUMPING? (It was Horse Show week). What is wrong with Irish THINKING would be more to the point.

      With all best wishes,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS

      REF.50/19.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 5th September 1950.

      Dear Mrs. Allen,

      How nice to hear from you again! No wonder you feel disinclined for letter writing, with so many more attractive occupations out of doors. Your river sounds delicious, and I would much like to see it. I wonder is your King bird what we call over here a Kingfisher? Ours is a smallish bird of a very beautiful vivid blue, which flies low over the water, and at a great speed. Our bitterns are I think extinct, but I have often read of the ‘booming’ of the bittern. Do yours boom, and what sort of noise is meant?

      I envy you your visit to Madison beach. No, I did’nt get away to the sea this year, alas, but I did manage a few days down in the Welsh mountains, which are very lovely, and where I got some fine walking: came across an inn, miles from anywhere where the guests are fed in the kitchen, as was common practice a hundred and fifty years ago. This was not a show piece for tourists, but is still the way they live in the heart of Wales.

      My brother, more lucky than I, took Edward’s suit for a treat to an Irish beach for a fortnight in August; when he came back he informed me that he had had thirteen wet days, ‘and on the fourteenth we had a shower’. He was astonished at the unreality of life in Ireland today. Current events are never referred to, and Ireland is quite happy about the future: she is to be neutral, and her defence is to be a first charge on American and English resources: and that’s that, and now lets talk about horses. (On one of the most critical days in the Korean fighting, the leading Irish newspaper carried banner headlines on the front page, WHAT IS WRONG WITH IRISH JUMPING?). They are certainly an odd people.

      All that you have to say about those little churches is very interesting and charming, and I am amused at your both being the same colour as the negro congregation; it’s a great testimony to Madison Beach. Though it is possible, by devoting all your time to it, to do the same thing even in England. There has been a man at the Oxford bathing place this summer, who would have passed, if not for a negro, at least for a Malay: though how he acquired this tan in such a wet summer, I don’t know. They tell me you can now buy sunburn in a bottle, which is perhaps the answer. By the way, yes, the Thames is bathed in, and I use it regularly in good weather; but its not the same thing as the sea, though very pleasant.

      Many thanks for all the too kind things you say about my books–and the hardship of authors.

      My mother died in 1908, when I was nine and my brother thirteen; we have no sisters, and are a couple of confirmed old batchelors, sharing a rather nice house with an eight acre garden in the suburbs.

      And now I really must stop, with all good wishes to you and Edward,

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Sept 7th 50

      Dear Miss Bodle

      The question ‘Is it better to live in cramped quarters with sister and Aunt-step-mother and bad prospects or to be uprooted and begin a new life elsewhere?’ immediately provokes the other question ‘Better for whom?‘

      In other words it all turns on the actual character of, and relations between, Gertrude and Franzel. One can imagine a sort of home life wh. was worth clinging to at all costs, or one wh. was worth escaping from at all costs: and (troublesomely) the chances are that this home-life is between the two extremes. Now you hardly know enough to decide, and of course I know nothing. Mustn’t Franzel and Gertrude make the decision? Especially Franzel.

      My own immediate feeling is that the uprooting wd. on the whole be the best thing for now. After all, what with jobs and marriage and one thing and another, most boys get pretty well uprooted anyway. But I think you can only offer, pray, and wait for their decision. Of course I can’t ‘see F’s point of view’. Boys are no more like one another than anyone else! With all good wishes.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Sept. 12, 1950

      Reverende Pater

      Contristatus sum audita dilecti D. J. Calabriae valetudine. Placeat Domino nostro diutius servare nobis ‘tam carum caput’. De nugis meis, mi crede, non scripsissem si putavissem virum aegritudine teneri: quo fit ut importunior esse viderer. Attamen quodcumque est libelli mitto. Saluta pro me D. J. Calabria: quem, cum tota domo vestra, benedicat benedictus Jesus Christus. Vale

      C. S. Lewis

      

      *

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Sept. 12, 1950

      Reverend Father,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

      REF.50/81

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 20th September 1950.

      Dear Miss Mathews,

      To receive one of your kind gifts produces a perceptible lightening of the gloom which descends on an elderly tutor when he realizes that he is on the verge of beginning yet another term. Many thanks for your unwearying attentions. The parcel which has just

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