I had an interesting and humiliating experience to-day

Beautiful little account by C S Lewis about not judging people by appearances . It is from a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves written in 1930.

I had an interesting and humiliating experience to-day (Saturday).

I had to go out to tea on Boars’ Hill and a man I had beenlunching with, Lawson, offered to drive me. I used to know him at [University College] and I lunch with him and Keir once a week for old sake’s sake, though Lawson is a most terrible bore.

As soon as he got me in the car he decided that we had a good deal of spare time and said he would drive me first to see his old father, recently widowed, whom he has just set up in a little house at the neighbouring village of Holton. On the way I bitterly regretted having been let in for this. Lawson is a tiny little man with puffed out cheeks, a pursed in mouth, and a bristly moustache: very bright staring eyes: and rolls the eyes, jerking his head this way and that, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while he talks, talks, talks, all about himself: or else talks big of university politics, retailing opinions which I know not to be his own and which in any case I despise. I thought ‘Now he is going to show me over this house and tell me how he arranged this and why he did that—reams of it.’

When we arrived we found a lovely wild garden with a little red cottage in it. We met an old man speaking with a broad Yorkshire accent and plainly in the technical sense ‘not a gentleman’.

Point No. I in favour of Lawson—he is not ashamed of his origins: he rose enormously in my eyes. Then Lawson shut up completely and let the old man talk, which he did, describing all he was doing in the garden. He was just like Lawson, only in an old man it was different: and the courage of him setting to work to build up a new life here in his old age was impressive. When we had been round the whole place and into the house, and when I saw so many things out of Lawson’s rooms in Merton [College]brought out here, and saw the affection between them, and realised how Lawson had busied himself about the whole—and then remembered how abominably I had treated my father—and worst of all how I had dared to despise Lawson, I was, as I said, humiliated.

Yet I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It does one good to see the fine side of people we’ve always seen the worst of. It reminded me very much of the clerk in Bleak House (or is it Great Expectations) who takes the hero out to see his father and has a cannon on the roof. Do you remember?

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