By November 11, 1918, Jack was almost well enough to be sent back to France to fight, but to everyone’s relief and delight, on that day Germany surrendered. The Great War in Europe was over. Jack and Warren had both survived the fighting. Now Jack could make plans for his life. His first priority was to visit his father at Little Lea in Belfast.
Jack arrived in Belfast two days after Christmas in 1918 for a bittersweet reunion with his father. Warren was already there, having arrived several days before, and the two brothers and their father toasted the end of four grueling years of war and the fact that both brothers had survived the gruesome battlefields of France.
Warren, as a career army officer, was on leave and due to return shortly to France and then go to Belgium to help bring civil order to those war-torn places. Jack was eager to return to University College in Oxford and begin his studies in earnest. And on this front there was some good news. With so many young British men dead as a result of the war, University College, along with the other colleges at Oxford, was half empty. A university could not run without students, and so the university board had decided to make it easier for students to enter the institution. They rewrote the rules so that soldiers returning from war did not have to pass the entrance exams, thus freeing Jack from the burden of having to pass the mathematics and sciences parts of the exams—something he had already failed twice.
This was a huge relief to Jack, because he doubted that he would ever have been able to pass the tests. Such failure would have led to his eventually being thrown out of University College. The war, for all its ugliness, had bestowed on Jack one great gift—the opportunity to become an Oxford scholar.
Oxford had always been a beautiful place, but in January 1919, when Jack returned to begin attending class at University College, the contrast to the muddy trenches of France was overwhelming. Jack quickly settled in to his new schedule, rising before daybreak to watch the winter sun creep over the horizon and ignite the ancient towers of the town in a golden glow.
The close relationship Jack had forged with the Moores continued to deepen, and soon Janie Moore and her daughter moved into a rented house in Oxford so that they could all be a “family.” Jack realized it was an odd arrangement, and he tried to shield his father from the details. This was difficult, however, because he had made a financial commitment to help Mrs. Moore and Maureen, a commitment he could not fulfill without a generous allowance from his father. On top of this, Janie Moore constantly changed houses and expected Jack to fix up each new house to her liking. In between his studies Jack laid carpet, painted walls, and dug gardens. Remarkably, he was able to keep up his grades.
During his first year at University College, Jack was required to live on campus. But in his second year he moved into the Moore home and became a permanent member of the household. Again he avoided explaining the situation to his father and had all of his mail directed to him through the college.
Despite all the external changes, Jack matured as a reader and writer, a fact reflected in the honors he began piling up. In April 1920 he won a first-class degree in classical studies, the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, followed by another first-class degree in literature in 1923.
One incident, though, cast a shadow over this time. In March 1921 Jack learned of the death of his old professor, William Kirkpatrick, “Old Knock.” Jack wrote down his thoughts upon hearing the news. “Poor old Kirk, I owe him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another. That he enabled me to win a scholarship is the least he did for me. It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him.”
By this time Jack was sure he wanted to follow in Old Knock’s footsteps and become an English tutor. He applied for every job that became available at the university. He was passed over for the first two positions, but he won a job on his third attempt. The position was that of a substitute for a philosophy tutor who was on leave in the United States for a year. Jack thrived in his new position and greatly appreciated finally earning his own money. He felt he no longer had to be dishonest about where his father’s money was being spent. The job also furnished Jack with his first experience at public speaking, and in a letter to his father Jack outlined how he was approaching his forthcoming lectures: “I am to lecture twice a week next term, which comes to fourteen hours talking in all…. I rather fancy I could tell the world everything I know about everything in five hours—and Lord, you hear curates grumbling because they have to preach for about twenty minutes a week…. [I] must learn that slow deliberated method dear to the true lecturer.”
Jack soon adjusted to lecturing and began to enjoy the challenge of engaging his students in the subject. He decided not to read straight from lecture notes, because doing so, more often than not, put his students to sleep. Instead, he practiced using sparse notes scribbled on slips of paper and expanding them to fit the allotted time of the lecture. He also enjoyed being part of two worlds—the heady, intellectual world of the Oxford tutor and the down-to-earth role of a family man at the Moores. His days fell into a pattern. He had breakfast served in his college rooms each weekday, followed by tutorials for the rest of the morning, before walking to the Moore house for lunch. Following lunch he did a few odd jobs that Janie Moore invariably had lined up for him to do, and then he walked the long route back to college, where he either lectured or tutored for the afternoon. His day usually ended with formal dinner in the University College Hall, after which the faculty often retired to a common room to continue with any lively conversation that had been started over dinner. On Friday nights, Jack would retire to the Moore house, where he would stay until Sunday afternoon.
Jack found that this new lifestyle suited him immensely, and so at the end of the year he applied for a fellowship in the English department at Magdalen College, Oxford. Much to his delight, he won the position and moved into his rooms there. The rooms were located in what was called “New Building,” despite the fact that it was built in 1793 as the medieval college outgrew itself. Jack’s only disappointment was learning that he had to furnish his college rooms himself. This included finding tables, chairs, curtains, rugs, fire irons, a coal box, a bed, and bookshelves. Several friends came to the rescue and loaned him bits and pieces, and his father sent him a check to cover the cost of the rest of the furnishings.
Over the summer, Jack, Janie, and Maureen celebrated Jack’s new position, and the financial relief it brought to them all, with a trip to Somerset.
Magdalen College was located just outside the old city wall of Oxford beside the Cherwell River. Although most of the college was constructed during the fifteenth century, it did not have the closed-in feel of many of the other medieval colleges of the town. The ancient buildings were clustered around lawns and gardens, and a deer park bordered the college to the north, where the deer sheltered themselves under clusters of old elm trees. Across the river was a meadow, where wildflowers bloomed in the spring. Around the meadow ran Addison’s Walk, which also passed the secluded Fellows’ Garden. Jack loved the location. His large sitting room in New Building faced north and looked out across the deer park, while the view from his small sitting room and bedroom looked south across a broad lawn to the main buildings of Magdalen College.
Jack embraced his new “home college” with great enthusiasm and soon established his routine. He arrived for breakfast at eight in the dining room with the college’s other fellows, among them Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke. Paul was the grandson of composer Felix Mendelssohn, and senior fellow at the college. He was a deeply spiritual man whom Jack loved to talk with in the mornings. Paul’s character and spirit had a deep impact on Jack.
Jack also enjoyed the company of J. A. Smith, the Wayneflete professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy. J. A., as everyone called him, was a Scotsman who always seemed to come to breakfast pondering some piece of information or concept that Jack found fascinating. J. A. was also a stickler for using the correct meaning of words, a practice that he passed on to Jack.
Adam Fox, dean of the divinity school, was another colleague Jack enjoyed having breakfast with. He had a gentle and devout manner about him that intrigued and challenged Jack.
Following breakfast Jack returned to his rooms and prepared himself for his first tutorial, which started at nine. For the tutorial, a student would come to Jack’s rooms on the hour. The student would sit in an armchair by the fire while Jack sat opposite on a couch reviewing the student’s essay and asking him to explain and expand on the meanings of things he had written.
In the evenings Jack would eat dinner with the other fellows and students of the college in the hall, after which, as the tutors and fellows at University College had done, they all retired to the senior common room to continue their conversations started over dinner.
At the same time as Jack won the fellowship at Magdalen College, his immediate obligations to the Moores began to lessen when Maureen left for college to train as a music teacher. Yet Jack still found that his emotional attachment to Janie Moore, now fifty-three years old, was as strong as ever, and he longed to set up a permanent home for the two of them to live in.
Jack’s ability to finally do this was made possible, indirectly, through Albert Lewis. Jack’s father had become seriously ill, and in August 1929 Jack returned to Little Lea to visit him. He spent close to a month at home in Belfast, running errands for his father and bathing, shaving, and cooking for him. During this time Albert underwent an operation, wherein the doctor discovered that he had cancer. The doctor supposed that Albert would live at least another year or more. Jack made arrangements for his father’s convalescence and returned to Oxford on September 22. He expected to have several more visits with his father.
Chapter 7
Leaving Ireland Behind
Two days after his return to Oxford from Belfast, a telegram arrived for Jack from his father’s doctor. Albert Lewis’s health was failing fast, and he was not expected to live long. Jack threw a few belongings into a suitcase and headed for the train station to start the journey back to Ireland. Unfortunately, Albert died before Jack reached Belfast. He was sixty-six years old.
His father’s death was a cruel blow for Jack, who was left feeling alone and remorseful that he had not been kinder and more respectful to his father during his adolescence. Since the death of his mother, Jack had never been able to feel close to his father, though he was grateful for the monthly allowance Albert had always sent him. In his grief Jack wished Warren were there with him at Little Lea instead of being stationed thousands of miles away in Shanghai, China. Jack wrote to his older brother, telling him of the funeral and trying to keep him informed as to the decisions that needed to be made regarding their inheritance. On a more personal note, Jack also wrote about the emotional impact their father’s death was having on him:
As time goes on, the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality. You remember “Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next. There is none. No man can be said to put you in the mind of Johnson.” How he filled the room. How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a big man. Our whole world is either direct or indirect testimony to the same fact…. The way we enjoyed going to Little Lea, and the way we hated it, and the way we enjoyed hating it; as you say, one can’t grasp that that is over.
Both Jack and Warren realized that it made no sense to keep Little Lea. Jack’s only reason for visiting the place in the past few years had been because his father lived there, and Warren was now posted overseas most of the time. Yet both brothers had to admit that they were attached to the house where they had spent the happiest part of their childhood. It was painful to think of selling it and of another family moving into the house and changing things around. It was so painful, in fact, that Warren came up with all kinds of ideas to reconstruct their “Little End Room” in the attic in Jack’s rooms at Oxford. Warren was constantly writing and asking Jack about the fate of their boyhood toys. After several rounds of pleading letters from his brother, Jack decided it would be unwise to move much out of Little Lea until Warren was there to add his input. He had the house boarded up for the remainder of the winter and returned to Oxford.
