Lunch proved to be as dismal as breakfast, and after lunch the boys were sent outside to exercise, which consisted of playing a game of rounders on the gravel strip at the front of the school building. As Jack ran around on the sharp stones, he wished for the soft, green grass that surrounded Little Lea.
Jack soon learned to hate any form of organized sports, mainly because he and Warren had inherited defective thumbs from their father. A normal thumb has two joints that bend, but the Lewis brothers each had only one bending joint on each of their thumbs, making them clumsy at holding a bat or catching a ball.
Afternoon studies were just as boring and undirected as those in the morning, though Jack did get his first glimpse at how Oldie disciplined his students. During class, Oldie asked one of the boys, Peter, a question regarding a geometrical proof. Peter began to give his answer, but it was not correct. Jack watched in shock as Oldie pulled down one of the canes from the wall and began beating the desk yelling, “Think! Think! Think!” at Peter.
Despite the admonishment to think, a clearly frightened Peter could not come up with the right answer.
“Come here, boy,” Oldie finally demanded.
Jack watched as Peter gingerly walked forward.
“Bend over there,” Oldie said, pointing to a spot at the front of the classroom.
Peter did as he was commanded while Oldie walked to the back of the room with his cane in hand. Suddenly Oldie spun around, ran forward, and brought the full weight of the cane down as hard as he could against Peter’s backside. Peter made no sound as Oldie turned around and repeated the procedure. Six times he stroked the cane against Peter’s bottom, and when Oldie was done, Peter let out a whimpering groan of pain that made Jack feel sick to his stomach. It was one the worst acts of cruelty Jack had witnessed, and he decided, as much as he was able, to try to avoid being punished with the cane.
The living conditions at Wynyard House also shocked Jack. Back home at Little Lea he was used to having the run of the house, but here every move had to be accounted for. There was one washroom with a single tub, and each boy got to take a bath once a week. The toilet situation would have been enough to get the school closed had it ever been inspected. There was only one outhouse, located at the back of the school, and no one ever cleaned it. To make matters worse, the boys’ snacks and any extra food sent to them from home were stored in the outhouse.
The situation at Wynyard House did not improve, and each day Oldie seemed to make up new rules and new punishments to go with them. Two weeks after arriving there, Jack wrote a pleading letter home to his father.
My dear Papy,
Mr. Capron said something I am not likely to forget—“Curse the boy” (behind Warnie’s back) because Warnie did not bring his jam to tea, no one ever heard such a rule before. Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply CANNOT wait in this hole until the end of term…
Your loving son Jack.
Unfortunately Albert did not respond to his son’s plea, and the Lewis boys were left at Wynyard to fend for themselves until the end of term.
The only bright spot during this time was that Oldie often banished the boys from school and commanded them to go for long walks together. Sometimes the boys were told to go out for the entire day. Instead of walking for miles, the boys stopped at nearby villages and bought candies to sustain themselves. Then they would follow a canal as it meandered through the flat countryside. Trains and the odd motorcar raced by, adding to the general excitement. It was on one of these walks that Jack enjoyed his first philosophical discussion. He and one of the older boys got into a conversation about whether the future was a line that had already been drawn or was rather an unknown entity that was created at the time it happened. Jack loved the conversation and realized that he much preferred talking about ideas than about everyday matters, like school.
When the Lewis boys returned to Little Lea for Christmas, Jack was sure he could convince his father not to send them back to Wynyard House School. But Mr. Lewis turned a deaf ear to his pleas, convinced that a little hardship would go a long way to toughening his boys up in the English school tradition. And so the boys returned to Wynyard House School.
That year, 1909, in which he turned eleven years old, Jack had begun to find solace in Christianity. As a young boy in Ireland, religion had been all around him. His grandfather Hamilton was a preacher, who recited an endless number of psalms to himself as he turned senile, and his mother had liked to read the Church of England prayer book. Jack, however, had never thought about the personal implications of Christianity until his time at Wynyard House. The experience of school there was so bad that Jack found himself looking forward to the Sunday visit to St. John’s Church for the morning service.
At first Jack had been put off by the High Church feel of St. John’s, where the members of the congregation crossed themselves and bowed to the altar. But soon this subsided, and Jack began to listen to the sermons and prayers, and he decided to do everything he could to be a good Christian.
Jack took to praying each night and morning and reading his Bible every day. The practice helped him bear his times at school a little more easily, as did his visits home to Ireland, where Jack and Warren liked nothing better than to pack a picnic lunch and bicycle off into the countryside of County Down. By then cars were becoming more common on Irish roads, and Warren was fascinated with them. But for his part, Jack preferred to stay out of their way, often hopping over a fence when he heard a car coming toward him.
After Jack had been at Wynyard House School for one year, Warren graduated and went on to study at Malvern College in rural Worcestershire. In Jack’s mind this provided the perfect opportunity for him to leave the school as well. But Jack’s father would have none of it. Still wrapped in his own grief at the death of his wife, father, and brother, he had no idea how bad things had become at Wynyard. In fact the situation had become so bad in 1909 that another parent had complained of abuse to the police and a scandal had followed. The matter was settled out of court, but half of the remaining students were withdrawn from the school, leaving just four day boys and five boarders, one of whom, unfortunately, was Jack Lewis.
After the police investigation, Oldie became even more erratic. He prowled the hallway looking for boys to punish and took to holding the shorter boys up high by their collars and swinging the cane at their calves. The effect reminded Jack of a macabre pendulum on a grandfather clock. Fortunately Jack, who was a good and quiet student, managed to avoid being beaten himself, but he suffered terribly watching his friends being so cruelly treated. Within a year of Warren’s leaving Wynyard House School, Oldie was a broken man, unable to carry on the daily affairs of running even the smallest of schools. One day he announced that Wynyard was closing and he was going back to his vocation as a minister.
Jack was astonished that his prayers had been answered. Wynyard House School was over—it was history. But what lay ahead of him now?
Chapter 3
New Schools, New Trials
About a mile from the Little Lea house in Belfast, a redbrick school named Campbell College dominated the landscape. Even though the school was within walking distance of the Lewis home, Albert Lewis had not thought it appropriate for his sons to attend there. This was because he wanted Warren and Jack to be able to fit into English upper-class society, something that would be difficult to achieve if they mixed with Irish boys in an Irish school instead of English boys in an English school. Still, in a moment of weakness, and faced with the imminent closure of Wynyard House School, Mr. Lewis agreed that Jack could return to Belfast and enroll at Campbell College. The only thing he insisted upon was that Jack be a boarder at the school rather than a day boy. And he agreed to sign a pass so that Jack could come home to visit on Sunday afternoons. At this stage Jack was glad to accept any kind of compromise that would keep him from having to attend another English school like Wynyard.
From the first day at Campbell College, Jack found it difficult to feel at home there. This was because as a junior student he had no place of his own except a bed and a locker. When school was out, he and the other boys wandered the great halls and lingered at the dinner table. Jack later described the experience as being like living in a railway station—and just like a railway station, all sorts of things went on there.
There was little institutionalized bullying at the school, but from time to time gangs of about ten or twelve boys would form and come up with some crazy stunt they would pull for as long as they could get away with it. Then they would fade back into the general school population. About a week after entering Campbell College, Jack found himself the victim of one of these gangs. One minute he was standing in a corridor, and the next minute five boys were charging at him. They caught him and dragged him headlong through a series of corridors until he had completely lost his bearings. Then they entered a dingy, low-ceilinged room. In the dim light Jack could make out four other young students like himself. The boys nodded to each other and awaited their fate in silence.
The boy to the right of Jack was the first to be hauled to his feet by the gang of bullies. The bullies pushed the boy’s head down to his feet, and then they shoved the boy under a pipe that ran around the room about three feet above the floor. Suddenly, unexplainably, the victim was gone—disappeared into thin air—and then everything was silent. Chills went up and down Jack’s spine as he tried to work out what had happened to the boy.
Two more boys suffered the same fate—whatever it was—and then it was Jack’s turn to be dragged to his feet. Like those who had gone before him, he was bent in two and pushed under the pipe. He found his body pushing against a trapdoor that gave way, and then he found himself tumbling downward. He landed with a thud on top of the boy who had gone before him. Once Jack regained his senses, he realized that the boys had all been dispensed to the coal cellar. Moments later another boy came barreling down the chute, and then the boys heard the sound of the trapdoor being bolted.
The boys sat together in the dark for what seemed like an eternity until they heard the rattling of the padlock and the trapdoor was opened. One by one the boys crawled up the chute and back into the low-ceilinged room. Their captors had fled, and the boys all started laughing when they saw the sooty state of their faces and clothes. One of the boys led the rest back to the main hall, where they were all reprimanded for getting their clothes dirty.
Even though it was scary at the time, Jack did not find the episode troubling. He had heard of much more sinister things happening to new boys attending other schools.
Jack never got the opportunity to be anything but a new boy at Campbell College. He had barely begun to settle in when he came down with a serious case of bronchitis and was sent home to his father. At first Jack was disappointed to be leaving Campbell College, but as his health improved a little, he came to love the solitude of home. His father went off to work each day, leaving him to read, write, and draw for as long as he wanted. And Warren was not there to concoct trouble with. For the first time since his mother’s death, Jack felt at ease around his father.
During this time Jack particularly enjoyed reading fairy tales and epic poems. His English teacher at Campbell College had introduced him to the work of Matthew Arnold, and Jack fell under the spell of Arnold’s classic poem Sohrab and Rustum. With books as his friends and with his father’s company at night, Jack could have stayed at home forever, but Albert Lewis had other plans. This time they did not involve Jack’s going back to Campbell College. Instead, the plans were to send Jack to a small English boarding school located near Malvern College, which Warren was still attending.
