Sari District

Surrey is the landscape of Lewis’s Bookham period, where its wooded intricacy and daily variety gave shape to a new kind of happiness. Arriving after a childhood journey through a landscape he experienced as flat, imprisoning, and alien, he found in Surrey not simply a more attractive setting but an invitation to domesticity, exploration, and attentive acceptance. Its narrow valleys and hidden paths resisted easy comparison or mastery; learning to receive them became, in retrospect, a form of training for the Christian life.

Arrival and first impressions

In September, after crossing to Liverpool and reaching London, Lewis travelled from Waterloo to Great Bookham. He had been told that Surrey was suburban, but the country passing the train windows startled him: steep little hills, watered valleys, wooded commons, bracken, and a range of red, russet, and yellowish greens. Even the occasional suburban villa pleased him. Timbered and red-tiled houses stood among trees, approached by crooked paths running between fruit trees and birches; they seemed wholly unlike the stuccoed suburbs of Belfast that he had expected to find echoed there.

The houses affected him beyond their appearance. They awakened a desire for domesticity that he felt he had never known in its full development, and made him think of tea trays. Surrey’s welcome therefore joined landscape to the prospect of home: a country of modest houses and sheltered paths could suggest a form of settled life, not merely offer relief from school.

A landscape of intricacy

Surrey’s character emerged most fully in contrast with County Down. Lewis had been accustomed to Irish walks where broad horizons made the general arrangement of land and sea visible at a glance. Surrey offered the opposite kind of pleasure. Its contours were tortuous, its valleys narrow, and its woods concealed villages, field paths, sunken lanes, dingles, and copses. Cottages, farmhouses, villas, and country seats appeared in unpredictable variety. The country could not be taken in all at once; daily walking meant moving through a world whose shape remained partly hidden.

That complexity reminded Lewis of the labyrinthine movement of Malory and the Faerie Queene. Even an open prospect remained incomplete: from Polesden Lacey, looking down toward the Leatherhead and Dorking valley, a train could thunder through an unseen wooded cutting while the opposite ridge concealed its own bays and promontories. Surrey’s beauty lay partly in what the view withheld. Where the Wyvern landscape had possessed what Lewis called classical comprehensibility, Surrey offered turns, concealments, and discoveries that continued beyond the visible scene.

Particular walks fixed this character in memory. On one occasion near Friday Street, Lewis and his companions recognized a strangely shaped stump and realized that they had spent the previous half-hour travelling in a circle. He remembered autumn afternoons in intensely silent hollows beneath old trees, and a frosty sunset over the Hog’s Back at Guildford. On winter Saturdays, the cold in nose and fingers sharpened the anticipation of tea and a fireside, while the reading of the weekend lay ahead. A newly acquired, long-coveted book could intensify that happiness further.

Learning to receive what is there

Surrey and County Down made an excellent contrast during term and holidays. Lewis came to see that their beauties were so unlike that neither needed to be measured against the other. This difference helped cure him, he believed, of the impulse to compare and prefer—an impulse he regarded as harmful in encounters with nature as well as with works of art. The first step toward enjoyment, he argues, is surrender to what is actually present: attending with eyes and ears rather than dwelling on what might have been there or what exists somewhere else.

This lesson gives Surrey a significance beyond its remembered scenery. Lewis connects the discipline of receiving a landscape without bargaining for another one with the training required for Christian life. The natural world, in this account, can prepare a person for a later spiritual discipline without being identical to it: learning to attend and accept in one context may make the same posture possible in another.

Place within the wider journey

Surrey also marks a reversal in Lewis’s early sense of England. His arrival in the country had first brought immediate hostility: the flat Lancashire landscape seemed to shut him away from the sea and the high ridges of home. At Bookham, by contrast, the wooded hills, varied colours, and domestic architecture opened a landscape that he could grow to love. The contrast does not erase his earlier alienation; it shows that his response to England changed through encounter with a particular place.

That change belongs to the larger movement of his recollection from school life toward new forms of attention and belief. Surrey provided the setting for his studies with Kirkpatrick and for a daily landscape that rewarded patient exploration rather than a single commanding view. In Lewis’s account, it remains both a deeply particular countryside—marked by Friday Street, Polesden Lacey, the Leatherhead and Dorking valley, and Guildford—and a formative experience of accepting beauty without forcing it into competition with some other landscape.