Like most other households in the English countryside, Jack and Janie felt obliged to open the doors at The Kilns to some of the displaced children. Although she was now sixty-seven years old, Janie loved children and was eager to help in any way she could. Jack, on the other hand, was a confirmed bachelor who was happy to admit that he was fairly clueless about how children thought and behaved. Nonetheless, in early September 1939, three teenage girls who were evacuated from a convent school in London came to stay with the family at The Kilns.
Thankfully, the advent of war provided one positive aspect for Jack. Charles Williams, whom Jack had met several times, moved to Oxford at the beginning of the war when Oxford University Press, where Charles was an editor, relocated there from London to escape the threat of German bombardment. As well as being an editor, Charles was an accomplished novelist, and he was soon a regular member of the Inklings. He and Jack quickly became close friends, spending hours together talking about writing. Jack’s friendship with Charles also filled the void Jack felt at Warren’s departure to the war.
Once Warren arrived in France, Jack constantly worried about his brother’s safety. The Nazis were proving to be a very brutal and merciless foe, and Jack was scared that Warren would be killed at their hands. He noted his fears in the lines to a poem he scribbled in a notebook:
How can I ask thee Father to defend
In peril of war my brother’s hand to-day?
Although Jack did not like war, he firmly believed that Adolf Hitler and his troops had to be stopped in their tracks before they wreaked even more havoc on Europe and the rest of the world. Thinking of ways in which he could help the war effort, he tried to enlist as an instructor of cadets, but he was turned down for this position. However, it was suggested that he might be useful in the Ministry of Information. But when Jack investigated this opportunity, he discovered that it would involve writing propaganda and lies, and he decided that this was not the job for him. Instead, Jack signed up as a member of the Oxford City Home Guard Battalion, a group of part-time soldiers who were to be on the alert for German aircraft and confirm if they dropped bombs or invaded the land by parachute.
Jack’s first job as part of the home guard was to help the local people prepare against possible German bombing by aircraft. The task involved completely blacking out the entire city at night so that German navigators would not be able to see the city from the air. To do this, every house had to have thick blackout curtains draped across its windows so that not a glimmer of light showed through them. Also, cars could no longer travel at night, since they were not allowed to use their headlights. This rule became even easier to enforce when gas began to be severely rationed. With no gas, most people either sold their cars or locked them up in their garages and instead walked or used what limited public transportation was available during the day.
Jack enjoyed his responsibility with the home guard, and in a letter to Warren in France he wrote about being on duty the night before. He had rendezvoused at Luke Street,
eating my sandwiches on the way…. I was with two men much younger than myself…both very nice and intelligent and neither too talkative nor too silent. One is allowed to smoke and I was pleased to find out that our tour of duty included a quite prolonged soak on the verandah of a college pavilion—a pleasant spot, looking out over broad playing fields on a mild but windy night of sufficient starlight and some light clouds—with the occasional interest of a train trundling past…. Three hours passed surprisingly quickly, and if it hadn’t been for the bother of lugging a rifle about all the time I should have said that pleasure distinctly predominated…. We broke off at 4:30 and after a really beautiful walk back through an empty and twilight Oxford I was in bed by 5.
As part of the preparations for a possible German invasion or bombing from the air, dugouts and bomb shelters had to be built. Jack and the gardener busied themselves creating a large bomb shelter in the garden at The Kilns.
With these preparations taken care of, Jack waited anxiously to see what the Germans would do next and what course the war would take.
Chapter 11
A Radio Star
For the first few months after Britain declared war on Germany, apart from a few small skirmishes, very little action took place on the western front in France. These months of the war were thus referred to as the “Phony War.” Instead, Adolf Hitler concentrated his efforts on subduing Poland and tightening his control over the other areas he had invaded and annexed. But all that began to change in April 1940, when the Germans invaded Denmark and then Norway. British soldiers were sent to Norway to help beat back the invasion, but there was no stopping the German advance. The troops were withdrawn in May, and Norway fell into Nazi hands. At the same time, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. These countries tried to resist the invasion, but the powerful German military quickly swept such opposition aside and conquered the countries.
By mid-May 1940 the Germans began their push into France, surging through the Ardennes region and advancing rapidly north to capture Calais. In the process the combined Allied forces of British, French, and Belgian soldiers were trapped against the coastline on the French-Belgian border and were slowly forced back toward the French town of Dunkirk.
The news that the Germans had trapped so many of their soldiers in northern France was a bitter blow to the British people. Jack was particularly concerned when he learned that among those trapped was the British Expeditionary Force, in which Warren was serving.
As Jack fretted about Warren’s safety, on May 22 Winston Churchill, who twelve days earlier had succeeded Neville Chamberlain as the new British prime minister, set in motion Operation Dynamo under the command of Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay. The purpose of the operation was to muster as many ships and small boats, both civilian and military, as possible and use them to cross the English Channel to France and rescue the trapped Allied soldiers.
From May 29 to June 3, 1940, a ceaseless flotilla of ships and boats began crossing to France and plucking soldiers to safety from the beaches of Dunkirk. The boats endured punishing bombing from the German Luftwaffe (air force), but by the time the operation ended, 338,226 troops had been ferried to safety in England aboard approximately seven hundred different vessels that took part in the operation.
Early in June, Jack received word that Warren had been safely evacuated from Dunkirk to Wenvoe Camp, in Cardiff, Wales, and was in the hospital recovering from an illness. Jack heaved a sigh of relief, happy to have his brother back in Great Britain, even if the country was still under threat.
In July 1940, while listening to a rather boring sermon at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Jack was struck with an interesting idea for a book. He began to wonder what would happen if readers could eavesdrop on a series of conversations between an elderly, experienced devil and a young devil just entrusted with his first “patient” to derail from the Christian faith. As Jack pondered the idea, two characters marched into his head, a senior devil named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, a very inexperienced Tempter.
Jack’s mind quickly darted down lines of reasoning, examining the various ways in which Christians lose their faith. Jack thought, for example, about prayer and how a Christian asks God to answer a particular prayer—for patience, for instance. If God does not seem to answer the prayer, it is easy for a person to believe that God does not exist, and if God does answer the prayer, it is easy for the person to twist that fact into thinking that he or she can solve his or her own problems through a kind of self-hypnosis. This was the kind of issue that Jack envisaged the senior devil discussing with the junior devil.
The book, which Jack initially called As One Devil to Another, took shape quickly. Jack decided to write it in the form of letters from Screwtape to Wormwood, giving advice on the difficult situations Wormwood faced as he tried to tempt his “patient” to sin. Jack’s idea was to entertain Christians and at the same time plant seeds in their minds as to how Satan works in small, subtle ways to counteract God’s goodness.
Meanwhile Warren, who was still weak from his illness, was transferred to the Officer Reserve on August 16 and sent home to Oxford to join the 6th Oxford City Home Guard Battalion. His assignments included cruising the upper Thames River in his motorboat Bosphorus and boating along little-used canals, checking that all of the buildings along the banks were completely blacked out. Warren’s new duty became more important than ever when, in August 1940, Hitler unleashed a massive bombing campaign against Great Britain, in what would become known as the Battle of Britain. Day and night, wave after wave of German bombers flew over the country, dropping their deadly cargo on the English countryside. As well as bombing London and other British cities, the bombers targeted Royal Air Force (RAF) bases in an attempt to destroy the RAF in advance of a German invasion of Great Britain.
The British, however, were not so easily defeated. Fighter planes from the Royal Air Force put up a gallant fight, shooting down and destroying hundreds of German bombers, so many, in fact, that the Germans soon stopped their daytime bombing runs over England and resorted to bombing London by night. The decisive British victory in the sky meant that Hitler was eventually forced to abandon his plans to invade England.
Back at The Kilns, Jack was overjoyed to have his brother home again, especially since Maureen Moore was getting married the week after he arrived. Both Jack and Warren knew Maureen’s husband-to-be, who was director of music at Worksop College.
By February 1941 the Battle of Britain was well over, and a stack of thirty-one letters from Screwtape sat on Jack’s desktop—each one addressing a different tactic of the devil. With the letters complete, Jack decided to first publish them individually. He sent them off to his favorite newspaper, the Guardian, a weekly paper owned by the Church of England. The editor of the Guardian liked the letters and offered Jack sixty-two pounds to publish them all. Jack accepted the offer, and instead of keeping the money, he asked that the editor send it to a charity fund for widows of Church of England clergymen.
As the letters were published one by one, they became an instant success—so popular, in fact, that the Guardian soon had to double the number of newspapers it printed each week. By the time the fourth letter reached the public, a publisher named Geoffrey Bles was interested in buying the rights to the letters and publishing them in book form. After a little negotiation, Jack signed a contract and waited for the book, to be titled The Screwtape Letters, to be published by Centenary Press.
Meanwhile, Jack received a letter from Dr. James Welch, the director of religious broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Dr. Welch had read some of Jack’s work and wanted to know if Jack had anything that he would like to prepare to read on the radio. At first Jack laughed off the idea. He hated nothing more than the radio, much preferring to read a book or listen to a record on the gramophone. However, he soon realized that as a result of the merciless German bombing of England, morale in the country was low and many people who would not ordinarily do so were thinking about matters of life and death. He wrote back to Dr. Welch and offered to give a fifteen-minute talk each Wednesday night during the month of August 1941.
The talks, titled “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” and broadcast live from the BBC studios in London, were a huge success. Jack soon found himself overwhelmed by letters from listeners. Some of those who wrote wanted advice regarding specific situations, while others wanted to share their theological views with Jack. Everyone, it seemed, was stunned that an Oxford don could attract so much attention. Dr. Welch suggested that Jack take another fifteen minutes on the air to read and then answer some of the listeners’ questions. The hope was that this would stem the tide of letters that continued to arrive at the BBC and were forwarded on to Jack. Predictably, the opposite occurred. The more personally interested Jack appeared to be in the opinions and questions of his listeners, the more people wrote to him. Jack was glad to have Warren back at The Kilns, where he took on the task of answering the bulk of the letters in his methodical way.
