Within two weeks, Jack was sent to England to boarding school with his brother. The headmaster was often brutal, flogging the students indiscriminately. Lewis later called it a concentration camp, and "Belsen" [site of one of the Nazis' concentration camps]. Here he met corporal punishment and, during compulsory church attendance, "Christianity"--the first Christianity that was "undiluted" and not wishy-washy.
The following year Warnie was sent to a school in Malvern; a year and a half later, Jack was also sent there. By then, however, his brother had advanced to the College (roughly equivalent to American high school), so the brothers were unable to be of much help to one another.
In this school, partly from studying the classics and partly from the influence of a teacher, Jack got the impression "that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand religions, stood our own, the thousand and first, labeled True. But on what grounds could I believe this exception?" ("Surprised by Joy," pg. 52, hardback edition)
When Jack was thirteen, about 1912, he wrote a play called "Littera Scripta." He was already a brilliant parodist, and his stories show that he had re-invented the world of servants and relations in his notebooks.
This same year, he also wrote an impressive essay on "The Great Bayreuth Master," Wagner. He concluded that "once having grown to love Wagner's peculiar richness of tone and the deep meaning of his music and the philosophy of his dramatic poems, all other composers seem but caricatures and ghosts." ("The Lewis Papers," vol. 3, pg. 235)
Because he was caught smoking, Jack's brother was forced to leave Malvern College school just before Jack was to attend the same school. He was there from September 1913 through August 1914. A poor athlete, partly due to his unbendable thumbs, Jack had a difficult time adjusting to the rough and tumble life at Malvern, and he was not popular. However, he loved the Latin master, Henry Wakelyn Smith, who improved Jack's Latin and moved him further down the road of Greek, on which his mother had begun him when he was small. He also loved the well-stocked library.
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