A Brief Excerpt From a Long Letter: C. S. Lewis to Warren, 5 November 1939

Old Mrs. Moore died on Thursday evening. She had complained of being “uncomfortable” and feeling “only middling” for about 24 hours before, but on the whole her last days seem to have been painless and only partially conscious – in fact she was, in most senses of the word, dead for the last week or so. Miss Griggs, whose behaviour I can’t praise enough has relieved Minto of a lot of the work and slept in the bungalow for the last night or so of the old lady’s life. We are all thankful that she had before her death quite recovered from the brain storm of a few months ago, and died, as far as one can judge, in charity with all – I was going to say “mankind”, but no doubt she would have excluded the Pope right until the end. I hope she is gone where everyone, including Popes, will only regard this as a matter for laughter. We have all had the usual bother that follows a death, of course. The registrar lives at Thame of all places and is usually out: and Dr. Radford made a mistake in the death certificate which meant that Maureen has had to make a second journey to Thame – or would have had to if she had not to-day retired to bed with a cold. As you may imagine this gave her an opportunity for a few comments on Dr. Radford (referred to as “Radford” tout court. The funeral is tomorrow (Monday), any earlier day having proved for various reasons impossible. Lee the sexton excelled himself in conversation with me on this point, when, having pointed out that the burial could be till Monday, he added brightly, “But, of course, you can get the good lady screwed down right away.” The children are all fortunately away this week end for a half term visit home and Annamarie is leaving for good: but being replaced.

I heard as good a story as I know this week about old Phelps the Provost of Oriel – you probably remember him, with the beard and the black straw hat. Jenner was a fellow of Jesus, a high-minded dissenter and fanatical tee-totaller. He was dining at Oriel and the Provost asked him to take wine with him:

Jenner: Sir, I would rather commit adultery than drink a glass of that. Provost: (in a low, stern voice) So would we all, Jenner; but not at the table, if you please.

On Friday Stevens and I made our way through blacked-out North Oxford – and a very pleasant, quiet, comfortable way it was – to call on J. A. Two bits of conversation are worth mentioning. One was that J. A.’s mother died in 1914, and her brother had died 110 years earlier. I suppose this is possible if the brother had died in infancy and the sister was born when her mother was middle aged. The other is a variant, a daring one, on “It’s a funny thing the way the human mind works.” It consists in saying, not in a furtive parenthesis but with the weight of a lecturer, “I shall not trouble you with the intervening steps that lead from the subject we have been discussing to what I am now going to say.”