He was twice invalided out – once with trench fever and once after being wounded by a British shell. His war service was as chaotic as his childhood. But Lewis chose to defer his admission to Oxford in order to take up an officer’s commission in the British army and be involved in what proved to be the end of World War I. From Kirkpatrick he learned the commitment to logic and evidence that characterised his thought, and as a result of the tutoring was able to successfully prepare for the entrance examination to Oxford University. Lewis called his tutor ‘the great Knock’, but clearly revered him. Fortunately, his father transferred him into the charge of a private tutor in Surrey, William T. Soon he was sent to a boarding school, Malvern College, where he was thoroughly miserable. He then, for the first time, stopped having private tuition and went to school.

Lewis’s childhood can best be described as chaotic.

Lewis’s comment on this friendship in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) is characteristic: “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist.

It is no surprise that later one of his closest friends was another outsider – the South African Catholic J.R.R. In a majority Catholic country, his family were Ulster Protestants – but not the mainstream, nonconformist Protestants he was born into the Church of Ireland, a minority faith even within the Irish Protestant tradition. Later he reinvented himself as a quintessential Englishman who loved long walks in the country followed by a pint in the local pub but he was born doubly an outsider. Lewis by Darren McAndrew From Protestantism to Atheism and Back AgainĬlive Staples Lewis was born on November 29th 1898 in Belfast.

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