AMERICANS RESCUE
OXFORD HOME OF C.S. LEWIS

By Evelyn Tan Powers
Gannett News Service

Even in a many-splendored place like Oxford and its environs, the cottage known as The Kilns has uncommon cachet.

Legend has it that the poet Shelley once came by to sail paper boats on a nearby lake.

But what brought The Kilns its greatest fame is the fact that it was home to C.S. Lewis, the. Northern Ireland-born Oxbridge professor and writer noted for his exposition of Christian tenets in books like 'The Case for Christianity" (Simon and Schuster, $5.95) and "Mere Christianity" (Simon and Schuster, $7.95).

Lewis' children's fables, particularly his seven-volume "Chronicles of Narnia" (Harper Collins, $41-65), are read to children by parents who heard them first when they were young. Now a group of 28 American volunteers is breathing new warmth into The Kilns, which had fallen into disrepair since Lewis' death in 1963.

The renovation project is timed to finish by the summer of 1998, in time for the centenary of Lewis' birth, says the Rev. Toni Luck, an official of the Redlands, Calif.-based C.S. Lewis Foundation, which is behind the project. "It's (going to be) a place of contemplation for scholars," says Luck, who also is pastor of Jerusalem First Ministries in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. connection in this project is only natural. Lewis' wife, Joy Gresham, whom he married in 1957 when he was 58, was from New York. Their love story and her subsequent death from cancer are portrayed in the 1993 movie "Shadowlands."

The U.S. volunteers are all Lewis readers who put their lives on hold to take part in what Luck calls a "Summer vacation with a purpose."

"They are teachers, they are doctors. We have an internist from New York," Luck says.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation has a mailing list of about 15,000 people. Each year it mails information about plans for working on The Kilns. Since the project began in 1993, it has used between 25 and 30 volunteers each summer, chosen on a first-come, first-served basis. Volunteers pay their own way to England.

Gail Ward, 31, a high school teacher at Christ Presbyterian Academy in Nashville, Tenn., has volunteered for three summers. Early on, she says, the house and grounds were completely decrepit. "The hedges had grown up to about 15 feet. The neighbors told us they saw wildflowers they had not seen in a generation,' she says.

Since then, the volunteers have replaced the roof, stripped the kitchen, cut down trees, replanted the garden, restored the fireplaces and done most of the major structural work. Interior decorating will be completed next summer.

Project chairman Don Yanik, 54, who teaches design at Seattle Pacific University, used photos of the house taken when Lewis lived there as templates for his work.

"What I've tried to do is to capture the essence," he says. The goal of making the house genuinely Lewisian posed a unique challenge, says C.S. Lewis Foundation president J. Stanley Mattson.

"(The Kilns) was described as a house of books held together by cobwebs," he says. "Jack (Lewis' nickname) and (his brother) Warnie believed tobacco ash was good for keeping termites out of the house."

The U.S. volunteers wanted to make the house truly comfortable, "so we took some liberties, one of them being . . . extensive use of the Hoover (vacuum cleaner)," he adds.

Lewis' stepson, Douglas Gresham, gives the results a thumbs up. "They consulted me right through," he says. 'I think they're doing a fine job."

The project is funded by donations.

In late July, the volunteers were cheered by a donation by the British company Aga-Rayburn of an AGA Cooker to replace the one that Lewis had. The AGA Cooker, which allows several dishes to be prepared at the same time with little monitoring, is a fixture of the traditional English kitchen.

By the time the renovated house is unveiled during the "Oxbridge '98" conference at Oxford and Cambridge, The Kilns will be furnished in a way that will evoke the 1930s and '40s, Mattson says.

No detail has been forgotten, Mattson says.

Volunteers even figured out a way to produce fake nicotine stains. True to the project's mission, he says, the rooms at The Kilns "will look as though they were well smoked in."