The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter
p 203-4. Harper Collins. Pbk. 2006
"The railway line from Oxford to Fairford is closed now, but in 1945 it was still operating.
At nine thirty-five each weekday morning a tank engine would haul two or three coaches northwards
from Oxford station, along the edge of Port Meadow, and then sharp west at Wolvercote and over the
fields to Witney. In the summer months the train would often be quite full, carrying (besides its
usual complement of local people) families setting off for a holiday by the Upper Thames or in
the Cotswolds, or maybe a group of men from the University armed with knapsacks and sticks and about to
begin a walking tour. But in winter only a few people used the train.
One Wednesday morning in December 1945 Jack Lewis (C S Lewis) was on board, looking out of the
carriage window at the fields and streams and villages as they passed. The countryside through
which the branch line meandered was not, as he observed, dramatically beautiful: just a fine
English winter beauty of haystacks and stubble, ploughed land, bare trees and rooks. From Witney
the train carried him on until it passed not far from William Morris's old home at Kelmscott, and
came at last to the end of the line and the station that served the small quite town of Fairford.
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Warnie Lewis was on the platform to meet him, with Tolkien. They had already spend a day and a
night staying at the Bull Hotel in Fairford. It was the long-planned Inklings' celebration of
victory ('To take a whole inn in the countryside for at least a week, and spend it entirely in
beer and talk'). But none of them could spare even as much as a week, let alone more; and they
were only a small party. Dyson could not come, Owen Barfield was ill, Havard was only able to
get to Fairford for lunch one day, Jack Lewis himself had not been able to arrive until after
the others; and Charles Williams was dead. ....
The Fairford party made the best of it. They walked. They argued. They found a pub called the
Pig and Whistle. They admired the flat countryside. 'I don't remember ever seeing more exquisite
winter colouring, both of sky and landscape, of the subdued types,' Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary.
'Down on the river was a perfect mill house where we amused ourselves by dreaming of it as a home
for the Inklings.' Then, on Friday afternoon, they took the train back to Oxford."
Note: The Inklings were CS Lewis, JRR Tolkin, Charles Williams and their friends who met
regularly to talk and discuss one another's writings over beer, usually in the "Bird and Baby"
(the Eagle and Child in St Giles, Oxford). Warnie Lewis was CS Lewis' brother. They stayed at
The Bull to celebrate the end of World War II.
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