C. S. Lewis: His Life, Thought, & Theology Issue 7 | 1985 Click here to order the downloadable audio version

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A Letter to Sarah written to his goddaughter in 1945. Lewis refers to a 6 week old baby living at his home. During the war, children were often evacuated from London to the country to protect them from German air raids. The Lewis household took in many of these evacuees. Recall that Lewis later began The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with evacuation of the Pevensie children from London to Professor Kirke's country home.

Magdalen College
Oxford
February 11th, 1945

My dear Sarah—Please excuse me for not writing to you before to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and to thank you for your nice card which I liked very much; I think you have improved in drawing cats and these were very good, much better than I can do. I can only draw a cat from the back view like this. I think it is rather cheating, don't you? because it does not show the face which is the difficult part to do. It is a funny thing that faces of people are easier to do than most animals' faces except perhaps elephants and owls. I wonder why that should be! The reason I have not written before is that we have had a dreadfully busy time with people being ill in the house and visitors and pipes getting frozen in the frost. All the same I liked the frost (did you?): the woods looked really lovely with all the white on the trees, just like a picture to a story. But perhaps you were in London. I suppose it was not so nice there. We now have a Baby, about 6 weeks old, living in the house. It is a very quiet one and does not keep any of us awake at night. It is a boy. We still have our old big dog, he is eight years old. I think this is as much for a dog as 56 is for a man—you find this out by finding what is seven times the dog's age. So ...