Great Bookham

Great Bookham was the Surrey setting of a decisive change in C. S. Lewis’s education and daily life: after leaving Wyvern in the summer of 1914, he went there to study with Kirkpatrick at Gastons. The village first appeared as a landscape of unexpected hills, woods, and welcoming houses; it then became the setting for an austere but cherished intellectual routine. Remembered against the confinement of school and the disruptions of war, Bookham stood for a form of domesticity and self-directed work that Lewis continued to regard as an ideal.

Arrival and Landscape

In September, after crossing to Liverpool, reaching London, and going on to Waterloo, Lewis travelled down to Great Bookham. He had been told that Surrey was suburban, but the view from the train contradicted that expectation. Steep little hills, watered valleys, wooded commons, and bracken made the countryside seem almost forested by the standards of Wyvern and Ireland. Even the scattered villas pleased him: timbered and red-tiled houses nestled among trees, approached by crooked paths running between fruit trees and birches. He had expected gravel drives, iron gates, and long rows of laurels; instead, the houses suggested a kind of domestic life he had never fully known and prompted thoughts of tea trays.

That welcome contrasted sharply with his first encounter with England years earlier. On the journey from Fleetwood to Euston, flat Lancashire had seemed imprisoning to a child raised near the sea and high ridges. The land’s scale and sameness, its wooden fences and red-brick farmhouses, had produced a hatred of England that took years to heal. At Bookham, by contrast, small hills, wooded commons, and domestic gardens made the English landscape inviting. The later arrival did not erase the earlier estrangement; it showed how strongly Lewis’s response to place depended on its particular shapes, textures, and prospects.

Gastons and Kirkpatrick

At Bookham, Lewis was met by his new teacher, Kirkpatrick, known within the family as Kirk, Knock, or the Great Knock. Lewis arrived with an anxious picture of him drawn from family stories, especially one in which Kirkpatrick had comforted Lewis’s father with an arm around him and his whiskers against the younger man’s cheek. Expecting a display of sentimentality and fearing an embrace, Lewis instead encountered a tall, lean, muscular man, shabbily dressed like a gardener, with a mustache and side whiskers. His apprehension about the whiskers was vivid, but it belonged to the expectation of arrival rather than to the academic life that followed.

Lewis reached Gastons on a Saturday. Kirkpatrick announced that they would begin Homer on Monday. When Lewis explained that he had read only Attic Greek, he expected preparatory lessons in the language of epic; Kirkpatrick answered with his characteristic “Huh.” On Monday morning, at nine, they sat down in a small upstairs study containing a sofa, a table and chair, a bookcase, a gas stove, and a framed photograph of Mr. Gladstone. Kirkpatrick read the opening lines of the Iliad in a pronunciation Lewis had never heard, then translated about a hundred lines with very few explanations. He handed Lewis Crusius’ Lexicon and left him to work through the passage again.

The method demanded more than matching Greek words to English equivalents. At first Lewis could follow only a short stretch of the passage; with practice he travelled farther, eventually passing the point Kirkpatrick had reached and making a game of how far he could continue. Kirkpatrick appeared to prize speed over absolute accuracy, but the larger result was that Lewis began to understand Greek without mentally translating every word. The language became something to think in, not merely a puzzle to solve by consulting a lexicon. Bookham’s lessons thus joined intensity with independence: Kirkpatrick opened the trail, then expected his pupil to travel it for himself.

A Pattern of Daily Life

The routine at Bookham remained Lewis’s archetype of a normal day. Breakfast came at eight, and he would be at his desk by nine, reading or writing until one. A cup of tea or coffee around eleven offered a brief pause. Lunch was served at one, and by two he would be out walking, generally alone. He held that walking and conversation, though each a great pleasure, interfered with one another: talking drowned out the outdoor world and led toward smoking. A companion was suitable only when he shared the landscape’s changing moods so completely that a glance, a pause, or a nudge was enough to communicate shared pleasure. Lewis names Arthur as such a companion during the holidays.

The walk was meant to end in time for tea, ideally with the return and the arrival of the tea coinciding, and no later than a quarter past four. Lewis particularly valued the occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was out and he could take tea alone; Kirkpatrick himself disdained the meal. Eating and reading, however, went well together. Lewis favoured books that could be opened anywhere rather than poetry, which he considered unsuited to the table. The works he had learned to read in this way included Boswell, a translation of Herodotus, and Lang’s History of English Literature; Tristram Shandy, Elia, and the Anatomy of Melancholy also suited the practice.

Work began again at five and continued until seven. The evening meal and the time afterward were for conversation or lighter reading; without a night spent with companions, Lewis saw no reason to go to bed later than eleven. The schedule was not just a timetable of lessons. It combined sustained scholarship, solitary walking, books at meals, and comparatively unhurried evenings, while leaving little room for correspondence. Lewis described it both as the happy life he had lived with Kirkpatrick and as the ideal life he would still choose if he could. His later lament that normal days were rare makes Bookham a standard against which subsequent daily life was measured.

Memory, War, and the Meaning of Place

Bookham entered Lewis’s story at a point of departure and unsettled expectation. In the summer of 1914, during his last weeks at Wyvern, newspaper reports began to raise the question of whether England could stay out of the conflict. Lewis remembered puzzling over one such headline with a friend. The term’s final hours later took on an apocalyptic cast in memory, though he acknowledged that memory might exaggerate them. Leaving school made familiar objects seem already lost: even a Windsor chair seemed to say that it would not be seen again. Early in the holidays, war was declared; Lewis’s brother, on leave from Sandhurst, was recalled, and some weeks later Lewis went to Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham.

The pastoral and scholarly order of Bookham later stood against the military world Lewis encountered during the war. In the trenches, weariness, water, cold, shellfire, and the dead formed experiences he remembered as largely cut off from the rest of his life, sometimes seeming to have happened to someone else. He recalled the muddy water inside thigh-high boots, the shelling, and the ordinary men he came to know and pity; the war’s physical realities often appeared faintly in memory beside an imaginative moment, the first distant bullet he heard, which told him that this was what Homer had written about. Against that later experience, Bookham’s hours of Greek, walking, and tea retained the force of a coherent pattern of life.

The place’s significance lies not in a single dramatic incident but in the durable shape it gave to Lewis’s idea of a good day. The village first answered an expectation of suburban dullness with wooded hills and intimate gardens. Gastons then offered a demanding education without the school’s institutional routine, and a schedule that made room for work, solitude, reading, and nature. Lewis’s retrospective account preserves both the concrete household timetable and the ideal it became: Great Bookham was at once a real place where he studied and the remembered measure of a life he wished he could continually inhabit.