On Saturday, we took a one hour train ride from London to Oxford. The trains in England were so convenient and turned out to be a wonderful way to travel around the country. I wish we had such a good rail system back here in the U.S.
Our day in Oxford was our favorite day of the whole trip. We met Mr. Ron Brind, of C.S. Lewis Tours, and he drove us through town showing us the places where C.S. Lewis taught and lived. I have been a fan of C.S. Lewis almost all my life. I remember when my parents gave me a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for my seventh birthday. Later, when I was sixteen, my dad gave me a copy of Mere Christianity. From that point on, I have had the greatest respect for Lewis as a Christian thinker and writer. Sometime when I was a teenager, my dad read The Great Divorce aloud to our whole family; it provided us with a lot of opportunity to think and talk about our faith. When I was a junior in college, I took an English course on C.S. Lewis. I still think it was the best course I took throughout my college career. We read most of Lewis’s works during that semester, and I also reread all of the Chronicles of Narnia as I was taking the course, so for about four months my life was saturated with C.S. Lewis. It was a great semester.
Mr. Brind is a native of Oxford and was childhood pals with Douglas Gresham, after Douglas’s mother, Joy Gresham, married C.S. Lewis. Mr. Brind is devoting his life to raising “Lewis Awareness” in Britain. He confessed to us that Lewis is much more popular in America than he is in Great Britain. Mr. Brind hopes to correct that; he is also working to see that Lewis gets the acknowledgment in Oxford that he deserves.
We started our tour of Oxford at the Randolph Hotel. Mr. Brind told us that Lewis often met with friends at the bar in this hotel, and the “Tea Scene” from the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands was filmed inside the hotel. We then drove by University College where Lewis attended as a student, Keble College where he was stationed for Army training, and Magdalen College where he taught for nearly thirty years. We also saw a house in Oxford where J.R.R. Tolkien lived and the hospital where Lewis and Joy Gresham’s marriage was blessed.
One of our favorite parts of the tour was visiting Holy Trinity Church where Lewis and his brother Warnie, and later his wife Joy, attended. Lewis and Warnie are buried in the church graveyard. We were able to sit in Lewis’s pew, where there is a plaque acknowledging him. It was truly a wonderful experience to visit the church where Lewis worshipped for so many years.
We then were taken to “The Kilns,” where Lewis lived. Most Americans refer to Lewis’s house as “The Kilns,” but our knowledgeable tour guide, Mr. Brind, informed us that it is actually the plot of land that Lewis’s house and the surrounding houses stand on that is called “The Kilns.” We got to wander around the woods and lake where Lewis walked and swam, and then we were able to tour the house. Currently the house is owned by the C.S. Lewis Foundation out of California; they allow students to live in the house during the school year and use it during the summer for conferences. While we were very thankful to be able to tour the house and to see the rooms that Lewis used, we were a little disappointed that the house is not more like a museum and less like a dormitory.
We ended our tour at The Eagle and Child Pub, where Lewis met weekly with the other Inklings, a discussion group which included J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. They met in what was then the back room of the pub, nicknamed “The Rabbit Room.” The pub has been extended since that time, but “The Rabbit Room” is still intact and there are pictures and signs commemorating its use by the Inklings. We ate a traditional English lunch in the pub, “bangers and mash,” and thoroughly enjoyed our time there. The pub was extremely crowded and there were rowdy college students surrounding us, but it felt completely appropriate that we were ending our C.S. Lewis tour in one of his favorite spots, where he was no doubt often jostled by riotous college students.
After lunch we explored Oxford a bit, before catching our train back to London. We spent the evening at St. Martin’s Theatre, where we saw the famous play by Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap. And yes, we know who did it, but we are sworn to secrecy.
