Maybe it was the sight of a large indoor plant placed outside the wardrobe in my room — to make way for the Christmas tree in the dining room — that reminded me of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (back to front as it were); or maybe it was the release of the 20th Century Fox film of his Narnia book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

But either way I have been thinking about C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) lately.

Or perhaps this cold old winter, tight in the grip of the White Witch, so to speak, reminded me of his poem What a Bird Said Early in the Year, inscribed on a plaque in that loveliest of Oxford places, Addison’s Walk, in Magdalen College: I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear: This year the summer will come true. This year. This year. Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees. This year nor want of rain destroy the peas. This year times nature will no more defeat you. Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

Well, here is hoping. Clive Staples Lewis, always known as Jack to family and friends, was born in Belfast, the younger son of a solicitor. He won a scholarship to Malvern College and then to University College, Oxford, in 1916. He came up to Oxford to train in the Officers Training Corps before seeing active service with the Somerset Light Infantry and being wounded in 1918 by an English shell falling short.

While training for the army, Lewis made a pact with fellow cadet Edward Moore that if either were killed, the other would look after both their families. Moore was indeed killed in 1918, aged 19, and, true to his word, after the war, Lewis went to live with his friend’s mother, Jane, and her daughter, Maureen. In 1930 he, Jane, Maureen, and his brother Warren (Warnie) moved into the Kilns in Headington Quarry. The Lewis brothers and Jane shared the £3,300 cost of the property.

Whether C.S. Lewis and Jane Moore were lovers has been the subject of speculation, but suffice to say here that she was 26 years his senior and he referred to her as mother.

As for Maureen, known as Daisy, she unexpectedly became a baronetess through the family of her father, who was separated from her mother. It was an unusual baronetcy, too, which could be passed down the female line, and which she did indeed pass on to her son after her death in 1997). She also inherited a 15th-century castle in Caithness. After the death of Warnie Lewis in 1973 she also inherited the Kilns. In 1956, C.S. Lewis married the American writer Joy Gresham (1915-1960) at Oxford Register Office and again, in Anglican form, the next year in the chapel at the Churchill Hospital where she was a patient and believed by many to be dying.

Lewis was elected a fellow of Magdalen College in 1925, having won a First in Literae Humaniores in 1922 and another First in English Language in 1923. His rooms were in the college’s 18th-century New Building.

One of his students, John Betjeman, described him as “breezy, tweedy, beer-drinking and jolly”. Much of his drinking was done at the Eagle and Child pub (known as the Birdie and Brat) in St Giles where the informal group of writers known as the Inklings used to foregather. Other members included Tolkien and the poet and theological writer Charles Williams, who worked for many years at the Oxford University Press.

Lewis continued to live at the Kilns as much as he could even after he was appointed in 1954 to the newly-established chair of English Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge — and swapped Magdalen for Magdalene College. He died at the Kilns and is buried at Holy Trinity Church in Headington.

One thing I for one know about this year: I shall go and see that film — and soon — and I shall also visit the garden of the Kilns, now a nature reserve. I am ashamed to say I have never previously done so.