Discovering Tolkien and Lewis

I thought I might relate how I came across the works of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien even though it's probably not very different to how most people did. But this includes a bit of personal history too which I always quite like when it relates to other people.

My great-grandfather was a man called J.L. Garvin who was the editor of the Observer newspaper from 1908 to 1942. He was the son of an Irish labourer so he did very well for himself as apparently people could do in those days if they were clever and worked hard though that is not the perception now. He had 4 daughters and one son, the latter of whom was killed in the first World War like so many other young men at the time. There is a book published by my uncle which is a collection of letters between father and son written while the son was at the front. (We Hope to Get Word Tomorrow by John Ledingham). The family was very 'arty', books, poetry and so on, except for my grandmother Una who rebelled against all that and became a doctor, specialising in diabetes in pregnant women.  She married another doctor and they were both atheists, probably in reaction to their quite strict religious upbringing, Catholic in her case, Church of Scotland in his. But I think of them as atheists with strong Christian overtones as people still could be in those days when the moral and cultural legacy of the past was still deeply rooted. When, in effect, you could afford the luxury of being an atheist because you lived in a world formed by religion.

Thus the household in which my mother grew up was not religious at all though it did have an unspecified Christian underpinning. In contrast, my father grew up in a Methodist household run by his mother and her spinster sister. His father had died when he was only 3 years old and he was raised in religion though of a rather dour type which he didn't pay much attention to as soon as he was old enough not to.  I was baptised in the Church of England but we only went to church on high days and holidays, though I attended a religious service every day at school.

The point of all this is that, due to one thing or another, there were not many books in my house.  My mother was a voracious reader but she mostly read romantic fiction and pot boilers which in later life she actually bought by weight in a second-hand market like fruit and vegetables.  “Could I have 25 pounds of paperbacks, please.” It actually was like that. She claimed to have read all the classics in her youth and now just wanted something to distract her. My father, who was a chartered accountant, had more or less the same books on his bedside table when he died as he had had ever since I can remember. He just read the newspapers. But I was a bookish child and two of my grandmother's sisters, both regarded by the family as rather dotty (which they were), came to my rescue. It was they who every birthday and Christmas from the age of 8 until about 12 gave me The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and most of the Narnia stories. I devoured these avidly and when my parents died I recuperated my early hardback copies from their house and I still have them.

In this way it was basically two slightly eccentric old ladies, one of whom, Viola, was a tipsy poet constantly in debt who sold the family portraits to finance a whiskey habit while the other, Ursula, started her adulthood by running off to Paris with the actor Claude Rains before moving to Italy and ending up after a divorce super-devout and going to mass every day at Westminster Cathedral, who injected some imagination into my prosaic childhood. The more responsible members of the family, fond as I was of them, did not. Perhaps there’s a moral there somewhere.

Now, of course, it has fallen to me to be the slightly dotty relative in my wider family and I try to fill the same function (in respect of stimulating imagination not necessarily way of life) as my two great aunts.