First Lecture

I have given my first lecture. I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in College. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilarating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied--I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown--and next week I may have an audience of five or none. Still it is something to be given a chance.
C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume I, Letter to his father, Jan 25, 1926
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On this day:

January 1911 Lewis (age twelve) enrolls at Cherbourg Preparatory School in Malvern.