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Once there was a professor who believed in enchanted wardrobes and winter curses and most importantly, he believed in The Deep Magic, the kind that was before the Dawn of Time, that could defeat all evil, once and for all. He believed this so deeply and so fiercely he wrote a story about it.
And this story did not come out of thin air, but out of his own life experiences — when he was a childless professor in a creaking house in Oxford he picked up children from the train station with luggage tags round their necks, faux-orphans who had been evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz for safety as part of the controversial Operation Pied Piper. These children were rather enchanted by their bumbling professor turned temporary stand-in parent.
The professor, of course, was C.S. Lewis, and the story would become the Narnia series.
Evacuee Patricia Heidelberger would look back on her years at The Kilns as “two of the happiest of my school life.”
“My first impression of C.S. Lewis was that of a shabbily clad, rather portly gentleman, whom I took to be the gardener and told him so. He roared — boomed! — with laughter. … Unlike most evacuees, we were comfortable, we were well fed — I grew fat! — and we seemed to be loved. I enjoyed the scholarly sessions in the den; I borrowed books; I learned about Tolkien and the Inklings. I think [we] were extremely fortunate, and more than a little spoiled.”
But there was one evacuee who seems to have held a special place in Lewis’s heart: