Fifty years after his death, C. My first encounter with him was extra-ordinary. I was being taken to meet the man who, as far as I was concerned, actually knew High King Peter of Narnia and the great lion Aslan.
Despite my initial dismay, Jack soon emerged from my imaginary C. Lewis to become a real friend and a much-loved stepfather.
He had grown up with the nineteenth-century belief in honesty, personal responsibility, commitment, duty, courtesy, courage, chivalry and all those great qualities society now needs so desperately to recover. Jack also had come to understand a great deal about humanity.
He was no stranger to suffering: he lost his own mother at the age of nine; he fought in the First World War, and lived through the Second, losing friends in both.
He learned to love and to lose, and suffered their respective agonies. No one could have blamed him had he closed himself off and become the cloistered scholar, as is often depicted. Instead, he plunged once more into love and pain by marrying my mother, who was already dying at the time. He faced the pain of loving one whom he knew was unlikely to be with him very long, and also took on the responsibility for my brother and myself.
