Leaving Wyvern for Great Bookham

Leaving Wyvern for Great Bookham was a decisive escape from a school Lewis had long begged to leave, and the beginning of his education under Mr. Kirkpatrick. In the summer of 1914, the departure joined private relief to a wider historical rupture: Lewis left behind the school’s hated routines just as war was declared, then went to Surrey to prepare for university. The move also sits within a more complicated spiritual chronology. Lewis had once become an effective believer at Belsen, later abandoned that faith at Chartres, and would not acknowledge God until years after arriving in Great Bookham.

Why Lewis left Wyvern

Lewis’s departure followed the worsening domestic and educational circumstances surrounding his family. His brother’s tutor in Surrey, an old friend of his father who had been headmaster at Lurgan, rebuilt and extended the brother’s education sufficiently for him to enter Sandhurst and rank among the few candidates awarded prize cadetships. Lewis’s father recognized what this achievement demonstrated about the tutor’s ability. He also shared, nearly as strongly as Lewis, an aversion to Wyvern, while Lewis continued to plead in letters and conversation to be taken away.

Those considerations led Lewis’s father to propose ending his schooling and sending him to Surrey to read for the university with Mr. Kirkpatrick. The decision was not automatic: his father carefully warned him about solitude, the abrupt loss of a large school’s bustle, and the possibility that life with an elderly couple might disappoint him. Lewis appeared grave in response, but later admitted that this seriousness was an imposture. He was delighted by the prospect of living without boys his own age, and even more by the thought that he would never again have to play games.

Lewis’s relief did not amount to a claim that his dislike of sport was a virtue. He regarded it as an involuntary misfortune: not liking games cut him off from companionship with people who might be approachable in no other way. He disputed the moral benefits schoolmasters attributed to games, arguing that they could foster ambition, jealousy, and bitter partisanship, but still recognized the social cost of being unable to share them. The move promised release from an intolerable routine while carrying a real risk of isolation.

Departure amid change

In his last weeks at Wyvern, during the summer of 1914, strange news began appearing in the papers. Lewis remembered puzzling with a friend over a column asking whether England could stay out of the conflict; the friend could not see how the country might become involved. Lewis recalled the last hours of term in apocalyptic colors, while acknowledging that memory might exaggerate them. For him, the ending of school gave the moment its own finality: even familiar objects seemed to bear the weight of a last sight.

War was declared early in the holidays, and Lewis’s brother, then on leave from Sandhurst, was recalled. Some weeks later, in September, Lewis crossed to Liverpool, continued to London, and went by way of Waterloo to Great Bookham. The departure thus unfolded in two linked steps: first the end of his Wyvern term and the declaration of war, then his journey to take up the arrangement his father had made.

Arrival and expectations of Kirkpatrick

The Surrey landscape surprised Lewis. He had been told that it was suburban, but from the train he saw steep hills, watered valleys, wooded commons, and bracken. The timbered, red-tiled houses set among trees differed sharply from the stuccoed Belfast suburbs he knew. Their crooked paths and gardens stirred in him a desire for a domestic life whose full form he felt he had not experienced.

At Great Bookham he was met by his new teacher, whom his family called Kirk, Knock, or the Great Knock. Lewis believed he already knew what to expect because he had heard about him all his life. In particular, his father’s story of the elder Knock comforting him at Lurgan—with an arm around him and whiskers pressed against his cheek—had left Lewis fearing an embarrassing display of sentimentality. He arrived prepared to endure what he imagined would be the emotional price of escaping school. The evidence of this arrival establishes his apprehension and expectations; it does not yet settle how the actual relationship would develop.

The religious chronology around the move

The relocation did not mark an immediate religious return. At Oldie’s school, where the boys attended church twice each Sunday, Lewis had become an effective believer. The Anglo-Catholic services initially struck his conscious self as alien, but he later suspected that candles, incense, vestments, and hymns sung on their knees had affected him in ways he did not recognize at the time. More important, he heard Christian doctrines taught by men who appeared to believe them. With no skepticism to resist the teaching, he found that it brought to life beliefs he would already have claimed as his own.

That belief had been accompanied by fear, especially during blazing, moonlit nights in the curtainless dormitory. Lewis began to pray seriously, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. He also remembered religious discussion among the boys as grave and healthy rather than hysterical or shamefaced. This early practice makes his later departure from faith a change, not the continuation of an uninterrupted childhood unbelief.

At Chartres, Lewis gradually became an apostate. He said that his occult fancies and his argument from the world’s apparent lack of design had no logical connection, but shared the effect of working against Christianity. He abandoned his faith without a sense of loss and with relief. By the time the move from Wyvern was arranged, that apostasy belonged to his past; it should not be confused with the religious conversion that came much later.

What the move did—and did not—begin

Great Bookham became the setting of a later decisive change, but Lewis distinguished that change from the act of leaving Wyvern. In the Trinity Term of 1929, alone in his room at Magdalen, he finally admitted that God was God, knelt, and prayed. He described the surrender as reluctant, following a long resistance to being interfered with or made to give himself wholly. This was conversion to Theism, not yet to Christianity: Lewis emphasized that he knew nothing of the Incarnation at that point.

The further step came later. Lewis described his acceptance that Jesus Christ is the Son of God as occurring on a drive to Whipsnade: he set out not believing it and arrived believing it, without recalling a journey dominated by conscious argument or strong emotion. His account therefore resists turning the Surrey move into a single, inevitable conversion episode. Leaving Wyvern freed him from a school he could not bear and brought him into Kirkpatrick’s tutelage; the subsequent passage from childhood belief through apostasy, Theism, and finally Christianity unfolded across distinct periods and experiences.