Sat Jan 06, 2018 1:24 pm
Thanks for sharing this loving recount. Mr. Lewis seems to be the real deal. I got the biggest kick out of this excerpt!
Mother was slightly more widely read than Jack, for she had read what he had read but also the more modern American writers. She also had travelled further, having been to America and returned to England with her progeny in 1953 when her marriage to my father ended. Jack and she married at her deathbed but the hand of God intervened and she rallied, going into a remission of several years, when they had the happiest years of their lives. It was during this time that the physical courage they both possessed was made evident to me. We were walking up the hill into the woods, my mother carrying her little "garden gun", which she used to scare pigeons off our vegetables and trespassers out of our woods, when the two of them, some distance ahead of me, were accosted by a young man with a bow and a quiver of arrows. "Excuse me," said Jack politely, "this is private land and you really shouldn't be here. Would you please leave?" The young man's response was to nock an arrow to the string and draw the bow, pointing it at them. Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her, and stood there for a few seconds until he heard her say, in tones of chilled steel: "God damn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire!" Whereupon Jack stepped swiftly sideways, leaving the young man staring down the barrel of a gun. He took off rapidly. They were brave, and Jack thereafter needed to be, for Mother went on before him, leaving him alone to deal with her absence.
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