Local links helped shape popular author

Novelist, commentator and Christian philosopher C.S. Lewis died over 60 years ago, but his work, particularly his Chronicles of Narnia novels are still hugely popular, with numerous stage and screen adaptations. Jonathan Rowe looks at Lewis's west country connections and how his friendships here shaped his life.

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THE 2023 film Freud’s Last Case depicts a fictional meeting between the writer and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, at Freud's Hampstead home shortly before his death in 1939.

Freud was visited by an unidentified Oxford don in the last days of his life, but whether it was Lewis is not known. Featured in flashback during the First World War are scenes between a young Lewis and the woman who later shared a home with him for nearly 30 years, becoming a surrogate mother (and probably sometime lover), who lived in Bristol for 11 years.

Clive Staples Lewis (known as “Jack”) was born in Belfast in 1898 and is probably best remembered today as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s books.

His mother died when he was nine, and in 1917 he entered Oxford University but soon enlisted in the army. He was billeted at Keble College, Oxford, for officer training, where he befriended his roommate, Edward Courtney Francis Moore, known as “Paddy”.

The two made a pact that if either were killed during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families. Paddy's sister, Maureen, overheard the pair talking about their pact while at the Moores’ Bristol home.

Paddy lived with Maureen and their mother, “Janie” King Moore, at 56 Ravenswood Road, Redland, which was the family home from 1908 to 1919. Paddy was a pupil at Clifton College from 1908 to 1917, as a day boy in South Town House.

Lewis took an instant liking to Paddy’s mother and appears to have been youthfully infatuated with her. He wrote to his father:

“Moore, my roommate, comes from Clifton and is a very decent sort of man ... very booky and interesting ... his mother, an Irish lady, is staying up here and I have met her once or twice ... I like her immensely.”