I’ve just finished reading the first Helen Waddell biography, Mark of the Maker by Monica Blackett, and I was again struck by the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had much to do with C.S. Lewis, who like her was from Northern Ireland (indeed, also from County Down, though from a different corner of the county), and like her made his name in England, as an expert on literature and religion.

There were of course differences between them: Helen Waddell was a decade older, her emphasis was more on literature while Lewis’s was more on religion, she never got a tenured academic job while he was at Oxford from his teens, she split her time between London and County Down as an adult while he rarely if ever went back to Belfast. In his memoirs, David Bleakley, who I remember well as a fading political figure in the 1990s, gives an insight of conversations with Lewis at Oxford in the late 1940s:

I was disappointed that he could not be drawn on Helen Waddell, whose “star” was high and with whom he had much in common. Helen was a great favorite back home, where she was held in high esteem at Queen’s University.

Helen Waddell never mentions C.S. Lewis as far as I can tell, and Lewis’ most substantial reference to her is in a letter dated 16 February 1921 (when he would have been 22 and she 31), and then nothing else afterwards, even though their paths must have run close together. In 1921 he wrote to his father of an Oxford dinner party:

I met a friend of the said Tchainie’s the other night at the Carlyles, a girl called Helen Waddell whom you may have heard of. When last I saw her she was lying face downward on the floor of Mrs McNeill’s drawing-room, saying rather good things in a quaint Belfast drawl.

‘Tchainie’ Is Jane Agnes McNeill (1890-1959), a schoolmate of Helen Waddell’s at what is now Victoria College. Jane’s father, who died in 1907, was the first headmaster of Campbell College, the Belfast school which Lewis later attended. Jane and her mother took Helen Waddell on a trip to France in 1924, during which Helen Waddell wrote this poem:

JANE or The Perfect Traveller

She likes to travel in the train.
She never smells an open drain.
On boats she talks to stewardesses,
And gives advice in their distresses.
She is not sick in any swell,
But only in each new hotel.
And even in Paris summer heat
She wears goloshes on her feet.

Jane McNeill was also close to C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren, and one gets the impression that they had spent a lot of youthful hours at her mother’s house in Belfast. Both of them dedicated books to her – in Warren’s case, his second book, published in 1955, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV, was dedicated “To My Brother”).

Ten years earlier, in 1945, C.S. Lewis dedicated That Hideous Strength to “J. McNeill”. Following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it is the third of his Space Trilogy, whose central character, Elwin Ransom, is based on J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewisian lore has it that Jane did not like That Hideous Strength, and did not really appreciate the dedication.

When Jane McNeill died in 1959, four years before C.S. Lewis and six years before Helen Waddell, Lewis wrote in The Campbellian, the magazine of his old school where her father had been headmaster:

Molliter Ossa Cubent
[‘May Her Bones Lie Softly’, a quotation from Ovid meaning ‘Rest in Peace’]

Of Miss McNeill the charitable lady, the teacher, the member of committees, I saw nothing. My knowledge is of Janie McNeill; even of Chanie, as we sometimes called her, for she had the habit, common in some Scottish dialects, of ‘unvoicing’ the consonant ‘J’. Obviously there is a great deal I never knew. Someone writes to me describing her as a mystic. I would never have guessed it. What I remember is something as boisterous, often as discomposing but always as fresh and tonic, as a high wind. Janie was the delight and terror of a little Strandtown and Belmont circle, now almost extinct. I remember wild walks on the (still unspoilt) Holywood hills, preposterous jokes shouted through the gale across half a field, extravagantly merry (yet also Lucullan) lunches and suppers at Lisnadene, devastating raillery, the salty tang of an immensely vivid personality. She was a religious woman, a true, sometimes a grim, daughter of the Kirk; no less certainly, the broadest-spoken maiden lady in the Six Counties. She was a born satirist. Every kind of sham and self-righteousness was her butt. She deflated the unco-gude with a single ironic phrase, then a moment’s silence, then the great gust of her laughter. She laughed with her whole body. When I consider how all this was maintained through years of increasing loneliness, pain, disability, and inevitable frustration I am inclined to say she had a soul as brave and uncomplaining as any I ever knew. Few have come nearer to obeying Dunbar’s magnificent recipe (she knew her Dunbar):

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

The two descriptions, thirty-five years apart, give an intriguing picture of a woman who was a close friend to two people who were not friendly with each other. I see that the New York C.S. Lewis Society published an essay on “Jane McNeill and C.S. Lewis” by Mary Rogers in 1979, but cannot access it from their website. Maybe I’ll do some further research some day.