Little Lea

One of the greatest joys of my life has been touring C. S. Lewis's Ireland and England, so I thought I would share a bit of that tour with you here in this blog, starting with Lewis's childhood home, Little Lea, on the outskirts of Belfast. Lewis writes of that home in Surprised by Joy:

"In 1905, my seventh year, the first great change in my life took place. We moved house. My father, growing, I suppose in prosperity, decided to leave the semi-detachd villa in which I had been born and build himself a much larger house, further out in what was then the country. The 'New House', as we continued for years to call it, was a large one even by my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than a city."

The key phrase in that last paragraph is: "to a child". What Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy is told from a child's perspective. The house is large, but not so large as Lewis makes it sound. But to a child it would have been huge. I'm sure every person who has revisited their childhood home after not seeing it for many years has had the same experience--it seems much smaller in reality than in memory. Thus Lewis continues:

"I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noises of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books."

"Out of doors was 'the view' for which, no doubt, the site had principally been chosen. From our front door we looked down over wide fields to Belfast Lough and across it to the long mountain line of the Antrim shore--Divis, Colin, Cave Hill."

"And every day there were what we called 'the Green Hills'; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing . . ."

Below is a photo looking down the "long" upstairs corridor to the "Little End Room" from which Jack and Warnie had a view of the Holywood Hills.

Of that "Little End Room" Lewis wrote: "I soon staked out a claim to one of the attics and made it 'my study'. . . . Here my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction."

(C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955, pp. 14-19.)

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