Out of the wardrobe

Now that we know that June Freud (née June Flewett) was the inspiration for Lucy in The Chronicles of Narnia, it’s interesting to go back and read about the impression that she made on Warnie Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s brother). It’s like walking back out of the wardrobe into the real world:

Tuesday 2^nd January, 1945

Our dear, delightful June Flewett leaves us tomorrow, after nearly two years…She is not yet eighteen, but I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life From seven in the morning till nine at night, shut off from people of her own age, almost grudged the time for her religious duties, she has slaved at The Kilns, for a fraction 2d. an hour; I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self-accusing in the frequent crises of that dreary house. Her reaction to the meanest ingratitude was to seek its cause in her own faults. She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word “saintly.”

Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (Harper & Row 1982) 180-81.