Pogo

Pogo is a young master at Chartres whose brief influence gives Lewis an early education in worldly sophistication. A witty, fashion-conscious adolescent who delights in appearing grown up, he becomes an admired guide to clothes, theatrical gossip, and social knowledge. Lewis later limits the charge against him: Pogo helped foster vanity and snobbery, but was not responsible for Lewis’s sexual temptation or apostasy. The figure also offers a contrast to Wyvern’s more formal system of school status, where social ambition is embedded in the institution itself.

Identity and Arrival

Pogo succeeds Sirrah, a boisterous and unpretentious under master whom Lewis remembers as a hearty influence. Sirrah could preserve his authority while mixing with the boys, and had taught Lewis to meet bad weather with the spirit of a joke. Pogo presents a marked contrast: he is a young man just down from university, described by Lewis as a minor version of a fashionable comic hero. His polish and wit initially make the boys hesitate, but after about a week they admire him and hope he will pass his sophistication on to them.

That admiration belongs to Chartres, where Lewis was a pupil from the spring term of 1911 to the end of the summer term of 1913. The wider period brought changes in adults and a gradual loss of faith, but Lewis says he cannot reconstruct a precise chronology for that apostasy. Pogo’s arrival is therefore one strand in a larger, unsettled phase of development, not a single cause that explains it.

The Education in Sophistication

Under Pogo’s influence, Lewis begins to cultivate the look of a fashionable young man. The style he recalls includes spread ties held with pins, low-cut coats, high-worn trousers intended to show bright socks, and brogue shoes with very wide laces. Some of this taste had already reached him through his brother, who was becoming old enough to pursue the same fashion; Pogo completes the process. Lewis remembers his own efforts to press his trousers and slick his hair with oil with embarrassment, particularly because he felt ill-suited to the clothes he chose. He describes the new impulse as a turn toward flashiness and vulgarity.

Pogo’s influence extends beyond appearance. He supplies the boys with current songs, stories about well-known actresses, jokes, and information about their private lives, explaining material they do not understand. Lewis recalls the effect as a startling acceleration of experience: after one term in Pogo’s company, a boy might feel twelve years older rather than twelve weeks. What Pogo offers is not simply information, but access to a performance of adulthood—knowing the fashionable references, adopting the right look, and seeming initiated into a wider social world.

Lewis draws a careful distinction between this social education and his own sexual temptation. He says that he experienced an intense temptation at this age, but attributes it to reaching adolescence and to his recent, in some sense deliberate, withdrawal from divine protection. He does not believe Pogo caused it. In Lewis’s account, Pogo’s particular influence concerns the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, and insider knowledge—the lure of the World—rather than the physical appetite he says was already his own. Pogo’s effect, Lewis argues, was instead to damage qualities of humility, childlikeness, and self-forgetfulness, as he worked to make himself a fop, cad, and snob.

Limits of His Influence

Lewis refuses to turn Pogo into a convenient villain. Although he associates Pogo’s company with an increase in vulgarity and social vanity, he expressly resists blaming him for every lapse from virtue. He also distinguishes Pogo from other influences that had a stronger effect on his senses, including the dancing mistress and a classical text awarded as a prize. The account thus separates the development of worldly ambition from other experiences rather than treating Pogo as the source of every change in Lewis’s adolescence.

In retrospect, Lewis judges Pogo not too old to supervise boys, but too young: he was still an adolescent, delighted by his own appearance of adulthood and naïve enough to enjoy the greater naïveté of his pupils. Lewis also credits him with real friendliness. That friendliness partly explains why Pogo shared all he knew—or thought he knew—with the boys. Lewis’s farewell is affectionate as well as final, leaving Pogo as a limited but memorable presence rather than a figure of uncomplicated blame.

Contrast with Wyvern

Lewis’s later account of Wyvern helps distinguish Pogo’s personal influence from an institutional system of status. At Chartres, Wyvern had loomed over the younger boys through visits to matches, sports, and the finish of the Goldbury Run. The older boys’ apparent sophistication impressed them, but the Bloods—athletes and prefects—embodied worldly power and prestige on a scale beside which Pogo seemed insignificant. Pogo introduced the language and style of social distinction; Wyvern presented a hierarchy organized around it.

That hierarchy was based chiefly on seniority and athletic ability, with appearance, personality, clothes, slang, and shared tastes helping those near the threshold of privilege. At Wyvern, prefects were almost all Bloods, combining official authority with popularity and prestige. Younger boys looked up to them, while boys in the middle ranks often preferred to seek admission to their class rather than challenge it. The prospect of becoming a Blood could turn ambition into compliance, helping make the school’s social order difficult to overturn.

The school’s fagging system and games culture show how that order operated in daily life. Junior boys formed a common labor pool for the Bloods, carrying out tasks such as cleaning equipment and shoes, while school enthusiasm for games was reinforced by those who held authority. Boys who hoped to rise through athletic distinction could treat games as a route to status rather than recreation. Lewis later identifies the wider social struggle—getting ahead or holding one’s place—as the deepest harm of public-school life, producing sycophancy, calculated friendships, and conformity. Pogo’s influence at Chartres anticipates the appeal of polish and distinction, but Wyvern makes social advancement an organizing principle. Pogo remains, in Lewis’s recollection, the friendly, immature guide who introduced that appeal, not the author of the system that gave it institutional force.