Charles Williams

Most people have heard of J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They were part of a larger group in Oxford called The Inklings, and they all used to meet in one of their houses and discuss literature, and read out loud from their own writings. Exciting times indeed. Tolkien, Lewis, and an unfortunately lesser known member Charles Williams, decided each to invent a strange world of their own. Tolkien of course invented Middle Earth, Lewis Narnia, and Williams our world but with strange dimensions and odd happenings. He wrote seven remarkable novels, and in them you find adventure in ordinary tranquil English towns and villages where supernatural occurrences cause disturbance, even havoc. Here is the unusual opening paragraph of The Place of the Lion (1933), which takes place in the then sleepy southern pre-Brexit English county of Hertfordshire. It made me want to read on:

"From the top of the bank, behind a sparse hedge of thorn, the lioness stared at the Hertfordshire road. She moved her head from side to side, then suddenly she became rigid as if she had scented prey or enemy; she crouched lower, her body trembling, her tail swishing, but she made no sound."

[A little further on, two young men on a country walk stop and enter a cottage garden. It later turns out to be the garden of a certain mysterious Mr Berringer, who manages to channel powers from another dimension, thereby unloosing powerful 'archetypes' on to our poor unsuspecting world - the first of which appears here as a giant lion. The town will eventually be cut off from the rest of the country, and absorbed into this higher dimension. Unless someone comes to the rescue... . And it all has a much deeper meaning, but no room to go into that here. Read the story and find out]:

   "The straight path to the gate by which they had entered divided a broad lawn; on each side of it the grass stretched away and was lost in the shade of a row of trees which shut it off from the neighbouring fields. The moon was not high, and any movement under the trees was invisible. But the moonlight lay faintly on the lawn, the gate, and the road beyond, and it was at the road that the two young men gazed. For there, halting upon her way, was the lioness. She had paused as if she heard or felt some attraction; her head was turned towards the garden, and she was lifting her front paws restlessly. Suddenly, while they watched, she swung round facing it, threw up her head, and sent out a long howl. Anthony felt feverishly at the door behind him, but he found no latch or handle--this was something more than the ordinary cottage and was consequently more hostile to strangers. The lioness threw up her head again, began to howl, and suddenly ceased, at the same instant that another figure appeared on the lawn. From their right side came a man's form, pacing as if in a slow abstraction. His hands were clasped behind him; his heavy bearded face showed no emotion; his eyes were directed in front of him, looking away towards the other side of the lawn. He moved slowly and paused between each step, but steps and pauses were co-ordinated in a rhythm of which, even at that moment of strain, the two young men were intensely aware. Indeed, as Anthony watched, his own breathing became quieter and deeper; his tightened body relaxed, and his eyes left turning excitedly towards the beast crouching in the road. In Quentin no such effect was observable, but even he remained in an attitude of attention devoted rather to the man than the beast. So the strange pattern remained until, always very slowly, the stranger came to the path down the garden, and made one of his pauses in its midst, directly between the human and the animal spectators. Anthony thought to himself, "I ought to warn him," but somehow he could not; it would have seemed bad manners to break in on the concentrated silence of that figure. Quentin dared not; looking past the man, he saw the lioness and thought in hasty excuse, "If I make no noise at all she may keep quiet.

     At that moment a shout not very far away broke the silence, and at once the garden was disturbed by violent movement. The lioness as if startled made one leap over the gate, and her flying form seemed to collide with the man just as he also began to take another rhythmical step. Forms and shadows twisted and mingled for two or three seconds in the middle of the garden, a tearing human cry began and ceased as if choked into silence, a snarl broke out and died swiftly into similar stillness, and as if in answer to both sounds there came the roar of a lion--not very loud, but as if subdued by distance rather than by mildness. With that roar the shadows settled, the garden became clear. Anthony and Quentin saw before them the form of a man lying on the ground, and standing over him the shape of a full-grown and tremendous lion, its head flung back, its mouth open, its body quivering. It ceased to roar, and gathered itself back into itself. It was a lion such as the young men had never seen in any zoo or menagerie; it was gigantic and seemed to their dazed senses to be growing larger every moment. Of their presence it appeared unconscious; awful and solitary it stood, and did not at first so much as turn its head. Then, majestically, it moved; it took up the slow forward pacing in the direction which the man had been following; it passed onward, and while they still stared it entered into the dark shadow of the trees and was hidden from sight. The man's form still lay prostrate; of the lioness there was no sign."