To Jack’s delight, during the summer of 1907, Mrs. Lewis decided that instead of Warren coming home to visit, she and Jack would collect Warren in London and the three of them would vacation on the northern coast of France. This was eight-year-old Jack’s first time out of Ireland, and he enjoyed every minute of the trip. In London they visited the zoo, where Jack saw elephants and zebras, though he was most taken with a cage of white mice.
From London, Flora and her sons crossed the English Channel and made their way to the seaside village of Beneval, near Dieppe. Reunited, Jack and Warren enjoyed exploring the village and the seashore. And inspired by his trip to the zoo in London, Jack started writing a book he titled Living Races of Mouse Land.
Back in Belfast for another year without Warren, Jack continued reading many of the books in the Lewis house. He read Paradise Lost and decided he needed to spend time reflecting on what it was about. He was also spurred on to write more, and he produced a wide variety of books that he inventoried on a sheet of paper, titled “List of My Books”:
Building of the Promenade (a tale)
Man Against Man (a novel)
Town (an essay)
Relief of Murray (a history)
Bunny (a paper)
Home Rule (an essay)
My Life (a journal)
Jack had started keeping his journal at Christmas, just after his ninth birthday. In it he wrote a description of his servants and family. “I have a lot of enymays [enemies] however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat. Maude is far worse than Mat but she thinks she is a saint…. Papy [father],” Jack went on to explain, “is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice when not in a temper.” His mother, Mamy, he wrote, is “like most middle aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectacles, knitting is her chief industry.” Jack then turned the attention on himself. “I am like most boys of nine, and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generally wearing a jersey.” Grandfather Lewis, who had moved into Little Lea after Jack’s grandmother died, is also described. He is “a nice old man in some ways.” But he indulged in self-pity, and Jack notes, “However all old people do that.”
Jack’s simple and predictable life changed in February 1908. Suddenly the adults in the house began whispering among themselves and exchanging knowing looks. Over the years Jack had grown accustomed to his mother’s being unwell, as she suffered from asthma and headaches. But this time she was sick with something much worse. The doctor diagnosed it as stomach cancer and ordered that she have an operation immediately.
Jack looked to the adults in his life for assurance that everything would be all right with his mother, but no one thought to speak to him about what might lie ahead for his mother and the whole Lewis family.
Chapter 2
Big Changes
On February 15, 1908, Flora Lewis underwent surgery for stomach cancer right in her own bed in her bedroom. Three doctors and two nurses came to the house and transformed the upstairs into a makeshift hospital ward. Jack retreated into the attic while he waited to hear whether or not his mother would survive the operation. As the smell of ether and disinfectant wafted up through the ceiling into the attic, he wondered what would happen to him if his mother died. It was hard for him to imagine. Family pets had died before—a dog, a canary, and two mice. But what was it like when a parent died? Jack had no idea.
Much to his relief, Jack did not have to find out what it would be like. His mother survived the operation and regained her strength. However, a death did occur in the Lewis family. Two months after his mother’s operation, Jack’s grandfather Lewis, who had lived with them at the Little Lea house since the family moved into it, had a stroke and died.
Following Grandfather Lewis’s death, Jack’s father became withdrawn and moody, so much so that Jack found it difficult to have a conversation with him. And soon after Grandfather Lewis’s funeral, Flora’s health began to decline, and Jack’s mother grew weaker by the day. This situation made Jack’s father even more moody, until Jack hated being in the same room with him.
Although Flora’s father was an Episcopal minister, the Lewis family was not particularly religious. They attended service every Sunday at St. Mark’s Church, where Jack read aloud from the prayer book and recited psalms, but no one talked much about God in the home. Still, nine-year-old Jack was determined to pray until his mother was healed. Every morning he got up and said prayers for her, begging God to reverse her illness and make her well again. But it was to no avail.
On July 8 Jack realized how serious things must be, because Warren was brought home from school in England to say goodbye to their mother. Neither brother knew what to do, and they both tried to keep as quiet as possible and stay out of the way of the adults in the house. They retreated upstairs to the attic and entered their alternate worlds of Boxen and India. During this time Jack worked at linking these two worlds. He wrote a story about King Bublich II, who inhabited his imaginary world, and about how the king had discovered “India.” Jack also painted a map of his world in which India was not a country in Asia but a large island off the coast of Animal-Land. And Warren mapped the sea routes between the two kingdoms and drew pictures of the vessels that traveled those routes.
August 23, 1908, was Albert Lewis’s forty-fifth birthday, but there was no celebrating at Little Lea that day. Early in the morning while Jack was still in bed, his father came into the room. “Your mother has gone,” he said.
Jack struggled to wake up properly and take in what his father had just said. Gone where? To see a doctor? To the seaside? Then the horrible truth crept over him—not gone somewhere but gone forever!
Soon both brothers were dressed in their Sunday-best clothes and led into their parents’ bedroom.
“Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?” one of their aunts asked.
Jack wanted to vomit. His mother lay fully dressed on top of the bed. As far as he could see, there was nothing beautiful about his mother’s dead body. He was not looking at “her”; he was looking at “it.”
The funeral and burial that followed were a blur in Jack’s mind as he tried to grasp what had happened to him and, just as important, what would happen to him now. His father behaved strangely, sobbing uncontrollably sometimes and at other times telling the boys to leave the room because he did not want to see them.
Things only got worse when Jack’s uncle Joseph, his father’s older brother, died unexpectedly ten days after Flora’s death. There was another round of family visitors, with the now familiar journey to the church in the hearse for the funeral service and burial in St. Mark’s churchyard.
Jack and Warren waited for things to return to normal at Little Lea, though deep in his heart, Jack knew they never would. Jack’s father was barely able to function after the death of his father, his wife, and his brother in a four-month period.
Jack always assumed that he would eventually follow in his brother’s footsteps to school in England, but now his father seemed desperate to get rid of him. As a result Jack was enrolled at Wynyard House School in Hertfordshire with Warren, and hasty preparations were made for the boys’ departure for England.
Within three weeks of his mother’s death, Jack found himself walking along a Belfast quay in the evening. The three Lewis men, Jack, Warren, and their father, walked in awkward silence as Jack’s new boots made a hollow sound on the wooden dock. Every step he took irritated Jack. He had never worn such uncomfortable clothes before, and the thought of spending the next four years dressed in them was almost more than he could bear. He wore a bowler hat that perched on his head. The hat was slightly on the small side and fit with a vicelike grip. Jack also wore an Eton collar—a large, white starched affair that chafed at his neck—a tightly buttoned waistcoat, and knickerbockers.
The three of them found their way to the ship that would ferry the boys to England and clambered up the gangplank. It should have been an exciting moment, but it reminded Jack of the happy summer voyage he had taken with his mother to England and France in what now appeared to him to have been a different and more innocent life.
Eventually, with a great sigh of relief, Albert Lewis announced that the ship would be leaving soon and he had better disembark. Then he burst into a bout of sobbing. Both brothers looked on stoically. Jack, for one, had seen enough adult shows of emotion in the past few months to last him a lifetime, and he was glad when his father composed himself and turned and left the ship.
As bleak as the situation was, Jack and Warren managed to exchange smiles as the ship cast off from the quay. With a belch of black smoke from the ship’s funnel, the propeller began to churn the water, and the vessel started its journey down the Belfast Lough to the open sea. Jack stood on the starboard side of the ship and peered into the night, hoping to catch a last glimpse of a light from the Little Lea house. But all he saw was darkness.
The following morning the ship docked in Liverpool, where the boys disembarked and made their way to the train station. As the train rattled its way closer to London, Jack’s confusion and grief hardened itself into an instant dislike of England. Jack compared the flimsy wooden fences to the sturdy stone walls of Ireland, and the imposing redbrick farmhouses to the picturesque white cottages of home. Even the shape of the haystacks annoyed him—the stacks were taller and more pointed than Irish haystacks.
During his times at home, Warren had said little about life at Wynyard House, and Jack found himself wondering why he did not have more information about their destination. He would find out soon enough.
The brothers changed trains at Euston Station in London for the twenty-minute ride to Watford. Jack took a deep breath as he stood outside his new school—an ugly, semi-detached, yellow-brick house with a strip of gravel in place of a garden and front yard. Inside the place was even grimmer than the outside. The dormitory where the nine boarders slept was stark and unwelcoming. The windows had no curtains, and Jack passed the first night with a full moon shining in his face.
The following day, school lessons began as Jack struggled to grasp the full extent of the misfortune that had befallen him. The headmaster of Wynyard House School, the Reverend Robert Capron, ruled the place like a mad sea captain. The morning began with breakfast in the dining room. The boys, nine boarders and eight day boys, sat at one end of a long table. At the other end of the table sat the Reverend Capron with his silent wife, his son, whom the boys named Wee Wee, and his three sullen adult daughters. Wee Wee appeared to be the only person who had the courage to speak to his father, and then only when replying to a question.
The boys ate in silence, and each spoonful of porridge felt like a lump in Jack’s mouth, so much so that Jack could barely swallow. Already, just one day into his school experience, Jack dreaded what would come next.
Following breakfast the boys were all marched into a single schoolroom. The walls held no charts or other interesting reference tools, just three canes lined up on hooks and ready to be pulled down and applied to a boy’s legs or bottom at any time.
Arithmetic was the first lesson, though there was no formal instruction. The Reverend Capron, whom the boys nicknamed “Oldie,” merely told the boys to start writing sums on their slates. Oldie did not seem to care what the sums were. The exercise lasted for two hours, and Jack began to wonder whether he was ever going to be taught anything.
A short break followed arithmetic, and then it was time for the boys to study Latin. Here again Oldie barely spoke, and Jack found himself going over the Latin exercises he had learned from his mother. He could almost hear her voice, reading along with him, gently correcting him. It was all he could do to keep from crying.
