Hertfordshire enters the memoir as a landscape of estrangement and becomes, through a difficult school life, a place of companionship and childhood curiosity. The county’s flat fields and unfamiliar weather initially seem to imprison the boy arriving from County Down; later, shared walks and private conversations make it less hostile. Its physical landscape thus frames a formative experience in which outward hardship coexists with an inward life of striking richness.

Arrival and First Impressions

The journey to England begins with the departure from Belfast Lough aboard the old Fleetwood boat. As the quay recedes, the lights astern seem to contain everything the child has known. His first view of England reverses that sense of attachment: the Lancashire flats appear like the banks of Styx, the unfamiliar accents sound demonic, and the railway journey from Fleetwood to Euston passes through a land he experiences as flat, interminable, and cut off from the sea. Wooden fences, red-brick farmhouses, oversized fields, and oddly shaped haystacks all seem wrong beside the stone walls, white cottages, and high ridges familiar from home. The hostility he feels toward England takes years to heal. The destination is a small Hertfordshire town, called Belsen in the memoir. The label “Green Hertfordshire” does not match the boy’s experience: to someone raised in County Down, this is flat, flinty country with yellow soil. He encounters a wider range of weather than before, from bitter frost and stinging fog to oppressive heat and large thunderstorms. Through the dormitory’s curtainless windows, he also sees the full moon with a beauty he describes as ghastly. The landscape is not simply a backdrop; its unfamiliar flatness and exposure intensify the sense of dislocation.

Belsen School and Its Decline

The school is small, with roughly eight or nine boarders and about as many day boys when Lewis first knows it. Organized games have nearly died out, leaving endless rounders in the flinty playground before games are abandoned soon after his arrival. There is no bathing beyond a weekly bath. He continues doing Latin exercises, begun under his mother’s instruction, throughout his time there, yet never reaches a Roman author. In the single schoolroom, the few canes hanging from the green iron chimney piece seem to provide the teaching’s only stimulus. The staff consists of the headmaster and proprietor, Oldie, his grown-up son Wee Wee, and a succession of ushers, one of whom lasts less than a week. The school’s decline continues until there are no ushers and Oldie’s youngest daughter teaches the junior pupils. By then only five boarders remain. Oldie eventually gives up the school to seek a cure of souls, and Lewis describes himself as one of the last survivors, leaving only when the school itself goes down. Hertfordshire’s remembered school is therefore a failing institution, its shrinking numbers and abandoned games part of the same narrowing world.

Companionship and Familiarity

The school’s hardship does not amount only to isolation. Lewis has his brother’s protection during his first terms, until his brother leaves for Wyvern, but doubts that he needed it. In the school’s later years there are few boys, no newcomers after a certain point, and little scope for bullying among the boarders. Their quarrels feel serious at the time, yet shared suffering and long familiarity turn them into old acquaintances. Lewis concludes that this companionship helped ensure Belsen did him relatively little harm: oppression from one’s fellows, he observes, can be more damaging than oppression from above. The five remaining boarders spend pleasant hours together, and the abandonment of organized games, though poor preparation for public-school life, gives them room to retain the curiosity of children. On half-holidays they are sent out alone. They buy sweets in sleepy village shops, linger by the canal, or sit near a railway cutting to watch trains emerge from a tunnel. Through these modest routines, Hertfordshire begins to look less hostile. Their talk is not confined to the narrow interests Lewis associates with public-school boys; he remembers an early metaphysical argument about whether the future is like a line that cannot be seen or a line not yet drawn. He cannot recall which side he took, only the zeal with which he argued it. The slow ripening of old jokes is another part of their shared life.

Memory, Landscape, and the Two Lives

Lewis connects this school fellowship to an earlier pattern at home: bad times had drawn him and his brother closer, just as fear and hatred of Oldie united the boys against a common adversary. He suggests that encountering this pattern twice so early may have shaped his lasting expectation that a few people will stand together against something stronger and larger. The memory of Belsen thus extends beyond the county or the school; it helps explain the form his later understanding of solidarity takes. Yet the memoir resists treating hardship as the whole truth of those years. Lewis interrupts his account of Wyvern to insist that a period of outward misery could also be inwardly ecstatic, filled with imagined gods, heroes, and mythic figures. The sensory abundance he recalls includes cut grass, dew-dabbled mosses, sweet pea, autumn woods, wood smoke, peat, and salt water. He describes the relation between these inner and outer lives as oil and vinegar, or a river running beside a canal: each seems complete when remembered on its own. Against this divided recollection, Hertfordshire’s initial hostility and its later fellowship belong to the outward story, while the memoir’s larger structure allows another, inward experience to coexist with it rather than cancel it.