County Down

County Down is the formative landscape of Lewis’s childhood and a lasting measure of home. In his memoir, its closeness to the sea, its rising ground, and its varied fields stand against the flat English countryside he first encountered as a schoolboy; remembered from later life, the landscape also holds together domestic intimacy, separation, and the imaginative longing that gives the memoir much of its force.

Home and Early Belonging

Lewis’s early County Down life was shaped by both family and place. His nurse, Lizzie Endicott, connected the children to the peasantry of County Down, and Lewis credits that connection with giving him access to social worlds beyond the drawing room. His memory of shared jokes with Lizzie and of her goodness complicates any assumption that refinement and virtue naturally belong together: his sense of character was formed across the social boundary that the household might otherwise have imposed.

County Down also supplied the setting for the brothers’ early imaginative play. They drew constantly, but their subjects diverged: Lewis’s brother favored ships, trains, and battles, while Lewis preferred anthropomorphized “dressed animals” and claimed Animal-Land as his country. These differences arose within the same childhood landscape and household, but already show the distinct imaginative territories the brothers made for themselves.

Departure and Estrangement

The journey from County Down to England made home legible through loss. On the quay, Lewis’s father was deeply moved at saying goodbye, while the boy felt mainly embarrassed and self-conscious. Once aboard the old Fleetwood boat, however, Lewis began to attend to the harbor lights reflected on oily water, the machinery, and the salt air. As the ship moved down Belfast Lough, the lights receding behind him became the whole world he had known. His brother, the more experienced traveler, showed him the other shipping; the voyage thus carried both the shock of leaving and the first stirrings of interest in what lay beyond home.

The contrast sharpened after the crossing. At about six in the morning, England seemed to Lewis strange and hostile: the flat Lancashire landscape appeared like the banks of the Styx, and its accents sounded alien. Traveling from Fleetwood toward Euston, he felt shut away from the sea and from the high ridges that had framed his life in County Down. Fences, red-brick farmhouses, oversized fields, and unfamiliar haystacks all seemed wrong. He later says that he made up his quarrel with England, but the childhood hatred took many years to heal; County Down remained the implicit standard against which the new country was judged.

Landscape as Memory

In recalling the landscape, Lewis makes physical contrasts carry emotional and imaginative meaning. From the hills above Belfast, the view joins the Lough and distant coast to the city below: industrial chimneys, cranes, mist, tram noise, horse traffic, and the persistent sound of the shipyards. The noise does not simply cancel the peace of the hilltop. Because it has been heard throughout life, it intensifies the contrast between the city’s labor and the elevated country around it. Lewis describes standing there with Arthur on one of his rare weekday holidays, while the city below contains the office to which Arthur must return.

Beyond the city, the plain of Down and the Mourne Mountains open a different imaginative register. Lewis presents the modest, irregular fields and streams not as a featureless plain but as a particular terrain of longing, whose shape was first explained to him by Cousin Mary. This remembered country is not merely scenery: its forms organize the memoir’s recurrent movement between ordinary life and an imagined elsewhere. The landscape’s power lies in the contrast itself, between the inhabited world below and the distant horizon that seems to promise an opening beyond it.

Sensory and Historical Continuities

County Down’s importance also appears through the sensory memories Lewis associates with childhood and later reflection. In recalling the double character of his school years, he names cut grass, wet moss, sweet pea, autumn woods, burning wood, peat, and salt water among the sensations that could make existence feel abundant even alongside exhaustion. The inward life of imaginative ecstasy and the outward life of school drudgery coexist in his account; the remembered natural world helps explain how both can be true without one erasing the other.

The landscape’s importance persists in Lewis’s later reflections on war. In the trenches, water, cold, and exhaustion became recurring realities, and the landscape could be reduced to bare earth without grass. Against that wartime experience, County Down belongs to a much earlier geography of home and childhood; it is not presented as a direct refuge from war, but as part of the personal history through which Lewis made sense of separation, hardship, and memory. Across these episodes, place is more than a backdrop: County Down gives his recollections a durable measure of belonging, while departures from it reveal how strongly that belonging was felt.