“Have a look inside at the Rabbit Room. It’s in the back to the left. You can’t miss it.”
An afternoon gathering of customers was tucked in the corners of the compact pub. Our driver was right about it not being difficult to find the Rabbit Room. It was directly in the back of the pub. A small, black sign hung crookedly over the entrance to the separate back room. In the cab our guide had rattled off facts about Tolkien and Lewis being only two of the regular members of the Inklings who met here to discuss their writing between the 1930s and 1950s. A picture of Lewis hung on the back wall above the dark wood paneling. I couldn’t imagine comfortably fitting more than eight people in this room. The Inklings must have been a close-knit group when they met here!
Kellie and I snapped a few pictures and slipped out the front door where our carriage awaited us. Next on the circuit was Tolkien’s home. To our surprise the street we drove down was a normal residential street with homes that looked as if they were no more than eighty years old. They were nice homes but not fancy or impressive. I made a comment about the ordinariness of the neighborhood, and our driver reminded me that Tolkien received an average college professor’s wage until he retired in 1959. He passed away in 1973.
“The room you will see above the garage was Tolkien’s study. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was published while he lived in this house with his wife and four children. He had to move, though, due to a rash of hobbit fans who kept showing up on his doorstep.”
“I wonder how he would feel about the success of The Lord of the Rings if he were still alive,” Kellie said.
Before we could enter into a discussion of the topic, we were in front of the house on Sandfield Road. Our driver didn’t park the car in front of the house, even though a wide space was available beside the curb. Instead, he double-parked two doors down. “If you would like to take a quick hop out and stand under the sign over the garage, it makes for a good photo.”
Kellie and I scooted up the road and followed his instructions while he sat in the cab with the engine idling. We took turns striking poses next to a trash can in front of the garage. Our conduct on such an unpretentious street in front of such an ordinary garage would have seemed ridiculous if it weren’t for the sign affixed to the front of the garage. The commemorative inscription stated, “J. R. R. Tolkien lived here 1953–1968.”
“On we go,” the driver called to us.
I started for the street, feeling awkward about having just taken pictures in the driveway of what was a private residence. What did the people who lived here think of our trespassing on their property?
“Lizzie, look.” Kellie paused by the small front yard. The space was more like an overgrown garden with several trees and ivy climbing up the trunk of the largest one. “Lawn gnomes. Do you see them?”
Kellie was right. Tucked in and under the spreading greenery were several antique-looking lawn gnomes. The chipped paint on their once-red hats and fixed grins made it clear these camouflaged fellows were victims of time and the elements.
Kellie snapped a picture of the garden and the concealed gnomes. Just then we heard a window opening upstairs. Our driver called out, “Come along!”
Hurrying to the cab and sliding into the backseat, I felt the same sort of stealthy rush I had as a teenager when my girlfriends and I would go out at night and string toilet paper in the trees in front of the homes of guys we liked. Then we would run off before getting caught.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Kellie’s cheeks looked as rosy as mine felt after the dash.
“I know. None of the tour books promote this sort of snap-and-dash tour.”
“There’s a reason for that.” The cabby caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “None of them is under a court order to keep a twenty-meter radius away from the place of interest.”
Kellie and I laughed uproariously at his joke. Off we drove past Magdalen College.
All the way the cab driver kept glancing at us in the mirror.
Where to next” Kellie asked.
“We’re off to the Kilns now.” The taxi driver ran down a list of dates and facts about Lewis and his brother, Warnie, and how the two of them had bought the house in 1930 and lived there more than thirty years. He went on to explain how the acreage around the Kilns had been undeveloped when Lewis lived there. “If you can be nimble about it, a nature trail at the end of the road will lead you out to a small lake.”
My blood still was pumping from all the dashing around at Tolkien’s former residence. This was a fun way to see a lot in a short space of time. I was up for sprinting down a nature trail to see a lake. How much more Narnian could this adventure become?
Turning the cab down a private road and into a residential area with several newer homes, our driver slowed down. He spoke rapidly. “You can just about see the Kilns there now, can’t you? Brick house on the right side.”
Instead of continuing down the lane to Lewis’s home, our driver abruptly turned the cab around. In the spin of a moment, I noticed another car parked across the street from the brick house. Someone in the front seat was taking a picture. Not a picture of Lewis’s home but of us, of the taxi.
Checking his rearview mirror, our driver said, “I’ve decided it will be faster if I take you to the church first.” He picked up speed and made a sharp turn.
I looked out the back window. The other car was following us.
“Are you sure it will be faster to come back to Lewis’s home?” Kellie asked. “We were right there.”
“The church is not far. Just across the way from a pub that Jack and Warnie patronized. They walked to church each Sunday and always sat in the same pew. Try the church door. If it’s open, you’ll find the Lewis brothers’ bench on the left side halfway back. It’s marked with a plaque. The grave site might be a bit more challenging to find. It’s toward the rear area of the cemetery. Do you think five minutes will be enough time, or would you like ten?”
We weren’t sure, so he went on to give us specific directions on how we were to turn to the right slightly when we exited the church and how many paces we were to take toward one of the largest old trees in the churchyard. If we kept our eyes open, we should have no trouble finding the flat grave marker with the Lewis inscription. Both Jack and his brother were buried there.
“Why don’t you park the cab and come show us?” Kellie asked. “It seems that would be the most efficient way to find everything.”
“We’ll pay more if we need to,” I offered.
“No, I think this will work just fine for the two of you.” He checked his rearview mirror again. “Come out of the churchyard the same way you go in, and I’ll be waiting. What do you think? Five minutes going to be enough for you?”
“Sure, I guess,” I answered for both of us.
We scooted out and trotted down a dirt path under tall, sheltering trees that lined the walkway to the quaint and simple country chapel. The sandstone block construction gave the steep-roofed building that soft golden tone of so many other buildings we had seen in Oxford.
I tried the latch on the church’s wooden plank door, and it opened. Right before entering the dimly lit, musty-smelling chapel, I noticed an elderly gentleman strolling through the graveyard. No one else seemed to be around. The events were beginning to take on the feel of a BBC cozy mystery.
Kellie found the pew on the left side about three-fourths of the way back and next to a pillar. The bronze plate on the back of the pew stated, “Here sat and worshipped Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963).”
Kellie and I stood in the empty chapel and gazed around us. The pulpit was fronted with a large bronzed eagle. The floor was a pattern of dark and light tiles in a checkerboard pattern. The tiles were worn.
“Look at the hair,” Kellie whispered.
“Hair? What hair are you talking about?”
“The hair on the Christ in the stained-glass window at the front. He has yellow hair, blond hair. He’s an Anglo-looking Christ.”
I smiled. At the front of the church was a single stained-glass window with an image of Christ, the conquering King, seated on a throne. “You know what? That image makes me think of the character Prince Caspian in Lewis’s book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I’m wondering if Lewis—”
“Jack,” Kellie corrected me. “Aren’t we supposed to call him Jack?”
“I wonder if …” I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t use such a familiar term. “Lewis. I wonder if Lewis sat here and looked at that stained-glass image of a blond king on a throne and imagined the character of Prince Caspian.”
Kellie took a seat in the pew that the bronze plate indicated as the place where Lewis sat. “It’s possible.”
We took turns sitting in the honored pew, shot pictures, and slipped outside, trying to quietly close the heavy door behind us. Together we counted our paces, marking the distance to the grave under the large tree.
The grave site proved much easier to find than our driver had led us to believe. Again we took some pictures, looked around, and then hurried back to where we had been left off, as if we were on a scavenger hunt.
“Why didn’t the driver come with us?” Kellie asked.
“I don’t know, but did you see the way he kept looking at us after he said other tour guides aren’t under court mandates not to trespass?”
“I thought he was joking,” Kellie said.
“I did too. But then right before he took that sharp turn back there by the house, someone in a car parked across the street took pictures of us. Then the same car followed us.”
“All the way here?”
“No, I think he lost the car at his second turn.”
Kellie’s eyes grew wide. She looked over her shoulder. “What’s going on? You don’t think he’s going to leave us here, do you?”
“I hope not. He has our luggage!”
“Okay, keep calm.” Kellie spread out both her hands and pressed her palms downward, as if trying to quiet a noisy crowd. “We have no reason to panic. At least not yet.”
We came to the end of the walkway where we had been left off. Our cab driver was there waiting.
“Everything okay?” I asked after I was in the backseat and buckled up.
“Right as rain. Did you find the grave?”
“Yes, and the church was open, so we were able to go inside. Are we heading back to the Kilns now?”
“We’ll give it a go,” he said.
This time no other cars were parked along the side of the street. Even so, our driver parked two houses away and checked his rearview mirror as he gave us directions. We were to walk past the hibernating garden, then through the opening in the hedge, and we would be on the side of the brick house where Lewis’s study was located. If we stood on the walkway around the side of the house, we were told we could take photos standing in front of two windows; the farther one was the dining-area window, and the closer window was the one Lewis looked out as he wrote.
“Mind you, none of your photos can be used for any sort of publication.”
“Okay.”
Springing from the cab as if we had received our clues for the next part of this scavenger hunt, Kellie and I tiptoed through the daffodils that had only begun to wake from their winter’s nap and to stretch their leafy greens toward the incubator-like sun. Through the opening in the hedge and down the path, we found the two windows, just as the driver had said.
“Here,” Kellie said in a low voice as she handed me her camera. We hadn’t seen anyone around, but it still felt as if we were on the sly. “Take two shots. One close up and one far away with as much of the house as you can get in the viewfinder.”
I snapped quickly and efficiently. Kellie then traded places with me and snapped the same two angles with my camera. Practically jogging, we hustled back to the cab. Our driver had his window rolled down with the engine running.
“The lake,” he called to us. “Did you want to see the lake?”
“Oh! Right! The wildlife preserve trail. Where is it?” I asked.
“Behind you.” He pointed to a trailhead at the end of the cul-de-sac.
Kellie and I took off at a fast clip. “This is insane!” Kellie tried to tuck her passport pouch back under her clothes. “Why are we hurrying?”
“It’s a race! It’s a race!”
“Are we on some new reality TV show, and we don’t know it?” Kellie laughed.
“Maybe. That would explain the man in the chase car with the camera. We need frying pans and hot pink tennis shoes if we’re going to run down the streets.”
At the trailhead was a large sign declaring this as the “C. S. Lewis Reserve.” Pictures of several birds appeared on the sign, which neither of us stopped to study. If we did encounter any birds on our escapade, it would only be because they weren’t fast enough to flap out of our way.
“Careful, Kellie,” I called over my shoulder. “This looks pretty muddy.”
The trail wasn’t long. We came up short at the tranquil lake and quickly took pictures from what appeared to be a newly built observation deck. The trees that surrounded the lake were tall and spacious, shading the area and making it feel like an enchanted corner of the world.
“What do you think?” I asked Kellie. “If we jumped into the lake, would we find a new, untried portal into Narnia?”
“We’ll never know, because we’re not going to try. Now, smile so I can take your picture.”
I smiled. Switching spots, I took Kellie’s photo and looked around once more. “This spot reminds me of a scene from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. One of the boys, Eustace, has turned into a dragon, and he hides out in a lair by a small lake like this.”
“Tell me about the dragons later.” Kellie picked up the pace. She started to slip in the mud, but I caught her by the arm, and she righted herself.
“That was close.”
With another grand effort, the two of us hustled our warm bodies back down the vacant trail and out toward the street. The taxi was still there, which was a fairly significant concern I had every time we left our tour guide. But a car that looked like the one that had followed us was pulling into the cul-de-sac. With a sharp turn, the driver of that car blocked the cab’s exit.
I grabbed Kellie by the arm and pulled her back to the side of the trail. “Whoa, what’s happening? We better stay back.”
From our position behind the dense trees and trailing vines, Kellie and I watched what I took to be a peaceable discussion between the two men. The man who stood by the open window of the taxi appeared to be doing all the talking and pointing. His thumb kept jerking back in the direction of the Kilns.
“Maybe he’s a tourist asking directions.”
“I don’t think so.” Kellie leaned farther out of our hiding spot with an ear turned toward the street. “They’re having an argument. It’s a controlled, civil, British-style confrontation, but it’s definitely an argument.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Look how the guy is standing beside the cab. That’s an authoritative stance.”
“Oh, Kellie, this is silly. Why are we the ones hiding? Come on. We need to get to our hotel.”
“Okay, but act natural. I think I see a neighbor over there peering out her window.”
I laughed. “Nothing about this day, this place, or this whole trip has been within the sphere of natural! Why should we start acting like it now?”
Kellie and I strolled down the road toward the cab acting normal. As we approached, the authoritative-looking man was getting into his car and pulling away.
We climbed into the backseat and said we were ready to go to the hotel now.
Our driver muttered something under his breath and kept on muttering as he zoomed out of the private residential area. “Do you want to know what I think of it all?”
Neither of us particularly wanted to know, but he told us anyway with a nasty string of words. Immediately he looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Pardon my French.”
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“I speak a little French,” I said, “and I’m not sure I recognized a single French word in what you just said.”
Our questionable cab driver cracked half a grin. “I’ll tell you what. The two of you have vinegar, that’s what. You’ll both go a long way in this world.”
He pulled up in front of a small courtyard that led to a well-lit entrance of an old stone building. It didn’t look like a hotel to me. It looked as if we were stepping onto a movie set. All the years of having ready access to Disney World and Universal Studios made it hard to believe we were seeing a true medieval courtyard.
We fumbled with our ten- and twenty-pound notes to come up with the agreed-upon charge for the tour.
Still feeling a little rosy, Kellie and I thanked him and expressed how much we’d enjoyed the whirlwind tour, daring as it had been.
“It felt like we were on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” I said with sincerity.
When he drove off, I told Kellie, “I don’t think he took my reference to The Wind in the Willows book as a compliment.”
“Think about it,” Kellie said. “He was the one driving, so that made him Mr. Toad.”
“Oh, I see your point. Maybe I have a little too much ‘vinegar’ sometimes.”
“You’re not alone,” Kellie said.
As we bumped our suitcases over the cobblestone courtyard, she added, “I hope I’m wrong for thinking this, but, Liz, do you think this could be a trap?”
“What kind of trap?”
“Well, look at this place. Does this seem like a hotel to you?”
I told her my theory on Disney-Universal overload ruining my ability to process the real deal.
We were at the door then. Through the glass both of us could see a front desk, a small lobby, and a rack of sightseeing brochures. The place did, in fact, appear to be a legitimate hotel. The attendant at the desk checked us in efficiently and made a recommendation for dinner at Collin’s, a local pub down the street. She said they served the best fish and chips in Oxford.
When she saw our hesitant expressions, she said, “I always forget that visitors from the U.S. view the local pub as being the same as an American bar. Think of it as a café or bistro.”