JAM connection to Narnia stories

This is a nice piece on Clement's wife - apparently the inspiration for the Narnia stories from The Daily Telegraph




The question of who inspired CS Lewis to create the fantasy world of Narnia has remained a mystery for decades. Now, 55 years on, Nigel Farndale talks to Jill Freud who, as a wartime evacuee, provided the spark for his best-selling classic. As Hollywood's £75m version comes out, she tells her extraordinary story for the first time

In a yawning, book-lined drawing room in Marylebone, central London, I am left to browse a file of letters written during the war years by CS Lewis to "My dear June". The "June" referred to is Jill Freud, the now 78-year-old wife of Sir Clement, who has disappeared into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

In 1944, she was June Flewett, a London convent girl who had been evacuated to Lewis's house in Oxford to escape the Blitz. She was also the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie, the girl who walks through the wardrobe full of fur coats and into the snowflakes of Narnia. The premiere of Hollywood's £75million The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was held in London on Wednesday, and Lady Freud had been asked to attend. She had also been asked to fly to America for the premiere there but, as she says in a crisp voice: "I was sure children wouldn't want to be told that this old lady is Lucy." Besides, she has, until now, declined all newspaper requests to discuss her extraordinary childhood.

My eye is drawn to a letter written in 1944, two years after the 14-year-old "June" was first billeted with CS Lewis, and when she had just won a place to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Lewis, who signed himself and was known by friends as Jack, writes that when June goes "the only bright spot in our prospect" goes with her. She is, moreover, "the most selfless person" he has ever known. Among the papers in my lap there is also a first edition of Lewis's Screwtape Letters, in which he has written a dedication to June in a small neat hand: "In token payment for innumerable kindnesses." She certainly was kind: she deferred her place to Rada so that she could stay on with Lewis as a "mother's help" until she was 18.

Lady Freud, 5ft 3in tall, with short hair and clear blue, wide-apart eyes, returns bearing a tray. She has a warm and engaging manner. She is energetic, too: she still goes to tap-dancing class once a week, swims 30 lengths a day and runs her own theatre company in Suffolk - called, sensibly enough, Jill Freud and Company. It is hard to believe that she has five children (one adopted) and 15 grandchildren. There are photographs of them all around us, including her daughter Emma and her husband, the writer Richard Curtis, and her son Matthew, the public relations Svengali, on a beach with his wife Elizabeth Murdoch, the daughter of Rupert.

Did she read the Narnia stories to them when they were children? "No, I wasn't a reader-to-the-children mother at all, I'm ashamed to say. I was always too busy cooking supper. I realised when I had been a mother for some time that I had a knowledge and understanding of how to bring up a child up to the age of 11, the age I was when I was evacuated, and then, after that, nothing. I realised I never took them to museums and galleries, because no one had ever done that for me. You are brainwashed by your own childhood experiences. I was a loving mother and all that, but I was completely removed from family life as a child."

She does not exaggerate. Her family lived in Barnes, south-west London, where her father was the senior classics master at St Paul's school. She and her two sisters - she was the middle one - were evacuated on September 1, 1939. "London was in a state of high alert," she recalls. "Gas masks were being issued, trenches dug and windows crossed with tape. My sister, then 14, was nearly expelled for waving to a soldier out of the convent window. She just thought it was the patriotic thing to do."

Lady Freud remembers standing on the station platform in her overcoat, with her haversack containing two school books and a change of clothes, and saying goodbye to her mother and five-year-old sister Diana, who was being evacuated with her kindergarten class to Wales, where she was to stay for the duration of the war, seeing her mother only twice. "Diana grew up thinking she had been rejected by my mother, that was the tragedy," she says. "But what could my mother do? It was the worst day of her life. She was only given 24 hours to decide."

At first, June was billeted with a retired Oxford tutor but he died after a few months and she moved in with three ageing spinsters. "They had been Lewis Carroll's 'girls'. As children they had gone up and down the Cherwell in his punt while he told them stories. In their drawing room, they had a lot of games and toys which he had made for them. We would be allowed to play with them on Sundays. They would be worth a fortune now."

In 1942, June was interviewed by Janie Moore, "Mrs Moore", CS Lewis's "adoptive mother" - his real mother having died of cancer when he was nine. Lewis was 43, Mrs Moore 26 years his senior. They were probably lovers at first, then partners who played the role of mother and son for the sake of propriety.


Jill [bottom left] aged 14

"They lived together as mother and son," Lady Freud recalls, "but I don't think that was the relationship". She raises her eyebrows significantly. "I knew nothing about any of that at the time. She was Irish and had been very beautiful, very dynamic. Jack had fought alongside her son, Paddy, in the First World War and had promised he would look after his mother if Paddy was killed. Well, Paddy was killed."

Jack and Minto, as he called Mrs Moore, had lived together in Oxford since 1920. There were no children in the house until they started taking in evacuees at the start of the war. Lewis once wrote: "I never appreciated children till the war brought them to me."

What, I ask, were her first impressions of him? "Oh, I loved him. Loved him, of course I did. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs Moore with the hen food when I first met him. I turned round and knew this was something momentous. Jack was naturally very gregarious, he liked exchanging ideas. He enjoyed the pub, and walking.

"I had read the Screwtape Letters and, being a good little Catholic at that time, his famous book Christian Behaviour, but I didn't know then that Jack Lewis was CS Lewis. I had no idea. Two weeks later I saw his books on the shelf, then I made the connection. I realised that this man I was staying with was my literary hero.

"I didn't know where to put myself. I couldn't look at him or speak to him for about a week because I knew from reading his books that he understood human nature horribly well and I just thought, 'He will know all my faults, all my nasty little foibles'. I felt completely exposed. I got over it, of course."

Mrs Moore, Lewis and his alcoholic brother, Warnie, lived in The Kilns, a redbrick house in Headington, south Oxford. "It had large grounds and a lake where we swam," Lady Freud recalls. "The house itself wasn't that large or old. It wasn't pretty or grand but liveable-in - comfortable. - with an Aga in the kitchen and an old-fashioned scullery."

And a wardrobe? "We did have a big brown cupboard in the landing. But I don't know whether that was the one. There is one in a museum in Chicago which is supposed to be the original wardrobe."

It is said that the idea for Narnia came to Lewis when a little girl, an evacuee who was staying with him, asked him what lay behind his old wardrobe. Was that her? "I don't know. I don't think so. It might have been."

Lewis wrote the first of the Chronicles in 1948. When it was published two years later he sent a copy to June. "I read them then but haven't read them since," she says. "I had no idea I had any involvement with it at all until three years ago when his stepson wrote to me and said: 'I suppose you know you are the prototype for Lucy?' I didn't. I suppose I should read the book again, to see what I am really like." In the Chronicles, the central character of Queen Lucy the Valiant is the youngest and most innocent of the four evacuees and, at first, she is a little afraid of the shaggy-haired professor they are sent to stay with. She was also the most inquisitive, and the kindest, developing a close relationship with Aslan, the lion, who is son of the Emperor over the sea.

The stepson was Douglas Gresham, who is the 60-year-old co-producer of the new movie. He was the son of Joy, the American who Lewis married in 1956 and who died of cancer. The story of her relationship with Lewis was made into the film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

I ask what Lewis was like to live with? "When he was working we had to be very careful not to disturb him. The whole household evolved around him. Everything was for Jack, every minute of the day was geared to looking after him. It must have been bit of a straitjacket for him. He was a don at Magdalen college and he missed out on a lot by not being there more. He didn't have the career he would have had if he had been staying in his college, socialising with the big wigs. Instead he was always dashing back to Headington to be with Mrs Moore.

"She resented it when he stayed out every Tuesday to meet his friends in the pub," Lady Freud says in a reference to "The Inklings", the informal group of writers and dons, including JRR Tolkien, who would meet in the Eagle and Child. Lady Freud recalls being taken to tea at Tolkien's house. "I also remember going to tea with Professor Fleming about the time he was developing penicillin. We had bread but were allowed either margarine or butter on it but not both."

Lewis was like an adoptive parent to her, Lady Freud says. "He influenced me hugely. He said he had developed my childish religion into an adult one. He gave me any book I wanted and said I could go to Blackwell's bookshop any time and put books on his account - but I was much too shy to do it.

"I had the benefit of two very erudite men talking at supper every night - Jack and Warnie. Jack could be very acerbic but he never was with me. If I made a stupid remark he didn't correct me, and I would only realise later. He did think I was bright."

In the autumn of 1944, June returned to London and sat her school certificate. "Mrs Moore invited me to stay for a holiday for a couple of weeks after I had taken my exams and so I went back to Oxford and ended up staying off and on for two years, looking after Jack because Mrs Moore had varicose ulcers on her legs and had to lie up. You couldn't get any help because it was wartime. They paid me 50p a week mostly to look after their 20 hens."

Two years later Lewis paid for June to go to Rada and, soon after she graduated, she embarked upon a successful career in the West End under the stage name Jill Raymond, co-starring with, among others, Michael Redgrave. When she married Clement Freud in 1950, the headlines read: "West End star marries cook."

When they met she had been wearing a dress with a plunging neckline, and he had teased her about it. "Clement is a very dry character," she says, "so quick. And he will never say the conventional thing. He's a constant surprise, full of mischief."

Was it true, I ask, that he proposed to her just four days after they met? "We met in April and married in September, but he never proposed. Instead he announced it in The Times and I said: 'Don't you think it's time you actually asked me?' He never does anything the right way round. He's very contrary."

Marriage to Sir Clement is never dull. "A worse-for-wear Dylan Thomas slept on our floor one night," Lady Freud recalls. "And Lucian [Sir Clement's brother, the artist] brought Francis Bacon to Christmas lunch once. I was always far too busy worrying about nappies to notice what was going on a lot of the time. I had three successful years in acting and then, once I was married, I never looked for work again."

She did do the occasional radio play and in the 1970s when her husband became a Liberal MP, she helped him canvass. In 1980, Lady Freud returned to work, forming her own theatre company which now employs 70 people every summer. She and Sir Clement celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 2000.

I notice a small collection of books by Sigmund Freud, Clement's grandfather, on an upper shelf, alongside a jokey bust of a man with a beard. I note that not only did she have an extraordinary childhood, but she married into an extraordinary family and produced extraordinary children. Does she, I ask, ever feel overshadowed by her progeny? "It used to irk me a bit, but I think it funny now that you quite often see a dynasty of the Freuds printed and you wouldn't know any of them have a mother. I never get a mention," she says, laughing.

Quite Freudian in a way, I suggest. "Yes, quite. They were all born without a mother. I think our children have been lucky though because they haven't just got the highly sensitive, neurotic, hugely intelligent Freud genes, they've also got mine."

Which are? "Well, my mother was generous and funny and silly, and I think I inherited some of that from her. I am pretty stable emotionally, you could say boring. But that, I think, is an important counter-balance to the other, highly strung side. Emma is a good mix of both. She loves people. Clement suspects the worst and then will warm to you eventually."

At this point Sir Clement arrives home and maunders in. He is avuncular and not too hangdogish of expression and, when he sits down next to his wife on the sofa, he joins in with her reminiscences of all the intriguing people they have encountered over the years. "I remember cooking for George Bernard Shaw," he says. "That was the year before we married, Darling." Then he sees that my tape recorder is still running, looks mildly perturbed, apologises for interrupting, and departs the room.

Lady Freud's thoughts return to her literary hero and, as the years that separate them collapse and shrink, long-buried memories rise to the surface. "He looked like a ruddy-cheeked farmer: heavy jowls, stick, tweeds, big shoes, Labrador, tall - well, tall to me. I thought he was wonderful. I suppose I must have had a schoolgirl crush on him," she says, covering her mouth and laughing.

She is a young girl once more, re-entering Narnia to find, unlike Lucy, that no time has passed since her last visit.