Kirkpatrick (known by 'Jack' and his brother Warren as “The Great Knock”). Latterly he was privately tutored by his father’s former headmaster, the remarkable W.T. Sent off to boarding school, his teenage years were generally miserable. Were it not for a military service waiver from the Oxford University mathematics entrance examination hislife might have been very different.įlora died of abdominal cancer in 1908. She was probably the sharper of the parents, although “Jack” did not inherit her mathematical gifts. The StudentĬlive Staples Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second son of Albert Lewis, a promising attorney and his wife, Florence (“Flora”), daughter of an Anglican clergyman and one of the earliest female graduates (in Mathematics and Logic) from what is now Queen’s University, Belfast. But they also open a window into who C.S. The words (from The Last Battle) bring down the curtain-or perhaps better, close the wardrobe door-on Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. It comes from the world of students and pupils, but only a teacher would employ it as a metaphor for death.

The dream is ended: this is the morning.” The metaphor inherent in these words is striking.

Seven years earlier he had thus described death: “The term is over: the holidays have begun. November 22, 1963, the date of President Kennedy’s assassination, was also the day C.S.

Surprised by joy