Where exactly do the Pevensies go when they are evacuated?

A clothes shop in Rye!

“They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.”

Though many places in Narnia are mentioned in the Chronicles, only two locations in the children’s world are named. (It’s one of the techniques Lewis uses to make Narnia feel so very real.) The first of these places is London, which we hear about in the second sentence of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The other is the city where the awful Scrubb family live: Cambridge. This, of course, is a typically Oxonian joke but it may also be a joke Lewis makes against himself. In the same year that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (in which Cambridge is mentioned) was published, Lewis took up a new job: as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge!

But where exactly are the Pevensie children evacuated to? Lewis doesn’t tell us but he does leave clues, so let’s follow them and see where they lead.

There are two obvious possibilities. The first is Lewis’s own house, the Kilns on the outskirts of Oxford, and the other is Gastons, the house where he studied with W. T. Kirkpatrick in Bookham. Why these two places?

The answers can be found in Lewis’s Collected Letters where we read, for example, that on 2 September 1939 the first of many evacuees arrived at the Kilns:

Our schoolgirls have arrived and all seem to me – and, what’s more important, to Minto [Mrs Moore, the mother of a friend who was killed in World War I] – to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their new surroundings. They’re fond of animals which is a good thing (for them as well as for us).

Just like the Pevensies, these evacuees found the Kilns to be a delightful place owned by an amiable academic who let them get on with pretty much whatever they wanted.  But we cannot simply equate the Kilns with the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , not least because Lewis, unlike the Professor, did not live “in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.”

This lack of remoteness also seems to rule out Bookham, where Lewis was tutored by “Kirk” (as he sometimes called him) after several horrific school experiences. His tutor’s name is significant in more than one sense (as I’ll show in my next post). For the time being, it’s enough to mention that we eventually learn that the Professor’s name in the Chronicles of Narnia is also Kirk. What’s more, the way in which Lewis describes his arrival in Bookham sounds remarkably like the Pevensie children’s response to their new location. Here’s Lewis writing to his childhood friend, Arthur Greeves on 26 September 1914:

As for the country, I can hardly describe it. The wide expanse of rolling hill and dale, all thickly wooded with hazel and pine (so different from our bare and balder hills in Down) that is called Surrey, is to me, a great delight.

And here are the Pevensies on first arriving at the Professor’s house from London:

“You might find anything in a place like this,” Peter said. “Did you see those mountains as we came along? And the woods? There might be eagles. There might be stags. There’ll be hawks.”

“Badgers!” said Lucy.

“Foxes!” said Edmund.

“Rabbits!” said Susan.

Of course, the children are right. They soon see all those animals, though not in the countryside around the Professor’s house. They see them instead in Narnia. It’s a delightful passage that only yields its full riches once we’ve read on, but it’s also a passage that scuppers any idea that the Pevensies might have been evacuated to Bookham or Oxford. Glorious as both places are, they are singularly lacking in mountains.

So where are they? Mountains? Woods? Eagles? And then, a few pages later, heather: “The weather was fine and they were out of doors from morning to night, bathing, fishing, climbing trees, and lying in the heather.” On the face of it, it sounds very much like the Highlands of Scotland where Lewis went on a walking tour in 1933 (he also visited St Andrews in 1946). But that doesn’t work either because a few pages on in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we read these lines:

This house of the Professor’s – which even he knew so little about – was so old and famous that people from all over England used to come and ask permission to see over it.

If it was so old and famous and Scottish, surely people from Scotland would have visited too? But we don’t need to rely solely on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to help us place the house because in The Last Battle, Lucy sees the house again:

“Peter! Edmund! Come and look! Come quickly.” And they came and looked, for their eyes also had become like hers.

“Why!” exclaimed Peter. “It’s England. And that’s the house itself – Professor Kirk’s old home in the country where all our adventures began!”

“I thought that house had been destroyed,” said Edmund.

“So it was,” said the Faun. “But you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”

It’s a wonderful moment in the series. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lucy had called to the others to come and see Narnia but they doubted her. Here it is England that is the true marvel and the others come rushing at Lucy’s call “for their eyes also had become like hers.”

So the Professor’s house is definitely in England but it has mountains and heather and (possibly) eagles. One possibility for the exact location is mentioned in a 1941 letter to Arthur Greeves, where Lewis writes about a lecture tour of various RAF bases he has just completed: “I had some interesting times and saw some beautiful country. Perthshire, and all the country between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury, and Cumberland, are what chiefly stuck in my mind.”

Could the Professor’s house have been in Cumberland? It’s certainly possible. In the heart of the Lake District there are plenty of places where you can be “ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.” There are mountains and heather and plenty of wild animals and birds. But I think there’s actually a simpler explanation.

If Lewis had wanted to guide us to a specific place, he could easily have done so. Instead, he chose to keep the location of the house a mystery. All that is clear is that it is in the north. And that northernness really matters.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes about a moment when

It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.

If that passage sounds familiar, it may because you are remembering that wonderful moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the snow starts to melt and Edmund

noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree – gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of the water. Close beside the path they were following a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds’ music

There may be an echo here of Edward Thomas’s lovely poem, ‘Adlestrop’, in which “for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” But in Surprised by Joy, Lewis isn’t writing about his beloved Oxfordshire. He’s writing about the great moment when he first saw Arthur Rackham’s illustration to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.

Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic on the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity …

Shortly afterwards, he continues:

And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country.

It’s all here in the Professor’s House: the remoteness of the Professor’s house; the Joy that the children find in the house when they pass into Narnia; the North.

At the start of the Chronicles, the children leave home as evacuees. At the very end of The Last Battle they find they have come home at last, to their true home, the place they had always known but, somehow, had not truly known before. They return from exile – “and after this, our exile” – to their own true country.

So where exactly do the Pevensies go when they are evacuated to the Professor’s house? They go to the North and, in going North, they eventually find their way home.