Weekend Edition, August 23-25, 1996

U.S. group fixes C.S. Lewis house

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.

Now a group of 28 American volunteers is breathing new warmth into The Kilns, which had fallen into disrepair since Lewis' death in 1963 when he was 64.

The renovation is due to be completed by July 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.

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

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."

The C.S. Lewis Foundation has a mailing list of about 15,000 people. Each year it mails out information about plans for working on The Kilns. 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.

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 which have poured in from far and wide thanks to Lewis' redoubtable literary reputation. The largest individual gift - $25,000 - was from Thomas L. Phillips, retired chairman of the Lexington, Mass.-based Raytheon Company, Mattson says.

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, no matter how small, 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."