Stepson of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Gresham, interviewed by Derick Bingham

my guest for this program is a member of a very famous literary family the name Douglas Gresham is known throughout the world as the little boy in the film Shadowlands with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger the film powerfully depicts the love story of the grit CS Lewis and the American writer joy Gresham Douglas is in real life as in the film the stepson of CS Lewis I asked him what his very first impressions were of the nine legendary writer to tell you the truth it was a little disappointing when you're eight years old and you you've read the Narnia stories and you've had them read to you and you're going to meet the man who was on speaking terms with the great lion Aslan and hiking Peter of Narnia and all the rest you sort of expect some stalwart figure almost wearing a suit of armor and carrying a sword and instead I met this stooped balding professorial gentleman in very shabby clothes and nicotine stained fingers and so on so my initial reaction was one of mild disappointment but it was very very few minutes before his vibrant personality overcame any appearance deficiencies that might have been what were you aware of your mother falling in love with him well I don't think she really had at that stage this happened later and I wasn't aware of her falling in love and I don't really like the term falling in love because I think it's erroneous this is the the romance thing you know that sort of floating on clouds of perfume and lace business and of course that isn't love at all and romance doesn't last anyway love is what you do but the growing love between them after they were married was very visible that this amazing story off they hope you don't mind me using the word technically it was actually a technical marriage he married your mother in order that you might be able particularly and your brother and your mother to stay in the United Kingdom yes technically marrying your mother I mean were you aware of this not at all no I was totally unaware of that until years afterwards the first I knew of them being married was after my mother had gone into hospital with cancer and that's a year perhaps yeah you weren't aware that your mother was married to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century believe it even later I wasn't aware that she was married to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century Jack didn't come across in that way at all I was aware that she was married to Jack and I was very glad about it but I certainly had no knowledge of him or apprehension of them as being one of the greatest writers of the 20th century he didn't he didn't ever appear to be a great man he was just Jack Jack just for our of course of course was the name that his friends called him well Jack decided on his own nickname he was very small boy I think was about four living in Belfast at the time and there was a little dog in the neighborhood of which he was quite fond it was run over and the dog's name was Jack see so he came home that day pointed to himself and said he is Jack see and he wouldn't answer do anything else at the age of four and a half I think so it stuck who can play my brother and a very store an Irish dog it started off as Jack see that it became Jack's and eventually just Jack and he was known as Jack to hurt anyone who really knew him at all when your mother eventually took ill and obviously this love comes between them in a very deep way that wasn't there with the technical marriage I mean was that a very traumatic time for you yes it was less when you're married to go well I was 10 years older mother contracted cancer was diagnosed with cancer and the way it came about was a well my knowledge of the camp that was a bit odd in a sense I was at school at boarding school in England and I received a letter to say that when we went home instead of going to our own home at 10 old High Street in headington we were to go to the kilns because our mother had fallen and broken her leg and was in hospital and actually to me this is very good news because 10 old high street is a small semi-detached house in a row of houses in the town of headington and the kilns was a lovely sprawling old house with a huge grounds tennis court and a greenhouse and old kilns to play in and a wood and a lake and all that sort of thing heaven for a little boy in fact so I'm very pleased to be going to live at the kilns and it wasn't till I we got home from school that Jack immediately took us down to the hospital visit our mother and did what for him with his own background must been very difficult he did it very well actually looking back he took us into a small anteroom of the ward and said told us that in fact her mother's illness was a great deal more serious than we knew and she had cancer and when you were 10 years old and your mother and father divorced your father is thousands of miles to several years away the only person you really know in the world even to say good morning to is your mother and suddenly her impending death is made very evident to you to be that alone is almost indescribable difficult to understand unless you've been in that kind of situation but I was walking back from the hospital to the kilns and the pathway the roots led through the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church headington quarry in Oxford and there's a wrought iron gates there to this day leading into that churchyard and totally alone and grieving in a grey featureless world I lifted the wrought iron latch of that gate stepped out of our shadow lands out of our shadowy unreal existence into real life and there was a very powerful presence there in the church other than the compassion of grieving presence sharing my pain and I was not someone who as a child had a great deal of knowledge about God or religious things I was a bit of a rebel even at ten years old and I'd never really prayed in my life but I knew who he was I knew that Jesus wasn't there in that church other than the suffering the same pain that I was suffering and he made a plain to me and I didn't hear any audible words but he simply said that if you can't live without your mother I can fix it and I went into the church which in those days wasn't kept locked unfortunate has to be today and I knelt at the altar rail there was no one in the church except me and this presence and I prayed with every fiber of my being that my mother be allowed to live because I didn't think I could get by without her and instantly I was told that it was okay it was fixed I could go home and stop worrying and I walked out of that church at peace walked out of the churchyard and suddenly I was back in the Shadowlands as I closed the gate behind me I was back in this unreal estate in which we live and I went home at peace and my mother went into remission starting more or less that day they had a very happy time for three years almost four I think are wonderful absolutely one less the best four years of either of their lives it was again at the end of that four years more or less the same thing happened I was brought home from school to say goodbye to my mother the cancer had reemerged as everyone knew it must eventually and but this time I was 14 of course I'm walking back from the church not expecting is not far from the hospital I beg your pardon not from the church walking back from the hospital not expecting in the least again I lifted the latch on that gate and stepped back into this super real vibrant alive existence and again he was there and he said that if you can't live without your mother it can be done again but in all honesty in the searching within myself I I knew that by that time I had friends I had a stepfather who might grown to love I had an uncle him I loved Morni I had people around the end I was a 14 year old boy and much more independent than I was when I was 10 years old and in all honesty I knew that I could live without my mother so although it sounds very unoriginal the only thing I could think of to say was thy will be done and I walked out of that churchyard back into the shadowy lands of this world if you died about a week after that so yes it was just a strange experience it didn't make me a Christian yes didn't make me a Christian but you were aware of her presence in a way oh I knew I knew another world I knew that Jesus was there I knew who Jesus was and you've got he always believed in Jesus and in God from there those moments on but that doesn't make it a Christian because Satan himself believes in she isn't in God what would you say to CLIs was the main thing that CS Lewis taught you during those years when he was raising you there are two things that two main things that Jack taught me and he taught me them not by preaching or teaching but by example one was that everything when comes across in life should be examined not simply accepted and that includes anything to do with religion anything to do with personal problems of other people or oneself he taught me to look deeper into the Millstone than simply the surface taught me to look into things rather than at things his books reflect this attitude of his that used to look deeply into things near Christianity is the result of him looking deeply into Christianity not simply at it from outside and the second thing of course was was how to live a Christian life he taught by example in that sense also he was a man who lived his Christianity he didn't just talk about it he didn't say all the right words and go through the right ritualistic actions he simply lived a christ-like life was he hard to live with when he was writing not at all he was the opposite Jack was someone who would accept interruption every 10 minutes if necessary while he was working very hard at a book or something without the slightest degree of the rotation he was able to believe and and to behave as if he believed what he did that our own personal work is nowhere near as important as the interruptions to it the interruptions are the real substance of God's job for us when eventually he died and was there some talk about our a candle someone placed a lit candle on the coffin it was taken off as they carried the coffin out at the graveyard then it stood on trestles beside the grave the candle was placed back on the coffin as father Ron had said his his prayers and so on and the interesting thing about that is that several witnesses saw this candle I saw that it didn't move it was a dead still day there was the breath of wind moving in the cemetery and yet Ron had himself never saw it and when I wrote it in Lent and lands my autobiography Ron wrote to me and said look you know there wasn't a kid nobody ever puts a candle on the coffin and so I went to some of the other people had been there yes they remembered it but Ron hinted that it was just one of those things whether it was really there or whether the Lord simply put it there for us to look at I just don't know where did you go from there to bless this man has gone out of your life your dear mother has gone and your your noise facing life with height or running away from it one of the other where did you go from my mother's best friend who was a motoring journalist saintly lady had always promised my mother that if anything happened to Jack she would look after me and also my brother and my brother was by this I'm completely independent but she simply welcomed me into her home gave me a home in horton comes suddenly just outside Oxford and I lived there from 1963 till 1967 more or less and when I was 21 and got married and immigrated to Australia can you tell us a little about how you met Mary I hear there was quite a chance quite a chance Douglas yes there wasn't he all over the world they tell me I was a guest at the farm of Sir Edward mallet in Somerset chocolate was his name as an agricultural student and one morning lady mallet said oh you'll be happy about this Doug Mary is coming nice and who's Marian she said Mary is our niece from Tasmania and I'll never forget it Harry who's Sir Harry Malik now after as I was then he said you're like Mary Doug she's the biggest flirt in the world and I said how old is she and he told me and she was about three years older than I was so I stole it should be too old for me and Harry I said no no anything with trousers on is good enough for Mary so and I've never let him forget that either but he and I had to go into Taunton to the railway station to pick this young lass up and her friend was coming with her and I saw Mary step down off the train and I decided to marry her because it was the girl I'd been looking for all my life and as I got to know her personality it was exactly the personality I was looking for and I was 18 years old barely shaving it took me and penniless a student and it took me three years to finally convince her that she should marry me and I still don't know why she did to take the truth on me she was a gorgeous young girl absolutely stunning and the competition were all lawyers and doctors and people like that she was a nurse working in London so I really don't to this day of the faintest idea why she decided to marry me but she did and we've now been married 32 years almost and she had four children we have five children five children four of our own natural children and one adopted right you became a broadcaster well I've got into that was an accident - an accident I was farming and we managed to make it out to Australia we emigrated on the 10-pounder persistent passage scheme was going in those days and I had just enough capital that my grandmother had left me to buy a very small farm that we did and because it was such a small farm we needed extra money and Mary never reads newspapers never has but one morning she happened to pick up the local paper at our farmhouse kitchen table and notice an adverse Minh saying the local radio station needed a part-time announcer if you have a well-modulated voice why not put in for this year so Mary looked at me and said you're always talking too much why don't he put him for this job and see if he can get paid for him so just for a joke I rang the radio station and having listened to me on the phone they asked me to come up for an interview in which I did and I got the job and I started part-time within three weeks I became full-time and within about six months I was the senior announcer and studio supervisor of that small country radio station and that started a broadcasting career which when I suppose about 15 years and wound up in Perth in Western Australia first of all with the commercial networks and then moved to the ABC which is rather like the Australian version of the BBC and spent five years with them in Perth and was extremely successful in radio and television and all that sort of thing so you're a broadcaster and you're a farmer yes well when we left Tasmania I resigned from the station there and we sold our little farm put all the capital back in the bank and quite a large profit as well we had enough left over to buy a large car in a caravan but this time we had three children so we hooked up the car in caravan and took a cross in the ferry to the mainland of Australia from Tasmania and set out across Australia working from place to place and I did all kinds of jobs on that trip everything from welding up cattle yards and being a stockman riding horses around cattle and sheep and servicing windmills and what else did I do I was a powder monkey on a gel ignite gang blasting trenches through the desert all this sort of thing just all kinds of different jobs it was a fascinating experience you were also even in Tasmania on the local fire brigade I think well I've started in Western Australia I got involved in fire brigades in Western Australia and actually put in a total of 20 years service and wound up the captain of our local brigade in Tasmania but I suppose every little boy wants to be a fireman I'm just one of these people who does what he wants to be yes I to be a volunteer fire officer was there and some of my friends were members and they said well why don't you join us but there's a restlessness in your life to bless a restless theme there is always an emptiness in one's life one's always looking for something and until you grow up you don't find out what that is and by growing up I mean suddenly realize that Jesus Christ is what you've been looking for all your life but in the meantime you search for everything else you search for anything - to fill that that need within you and for some people it becomes a sport or a hobby or whatever and they are never fully satisfying I became a pilot I got a pilot's license and went flying and all that sort of thing I took advantage of my success and I lived a fairly profligate life and eventually got very bored with broadcasting it became just to pay a pest in the pain so I we marry and I both were unhappy in the climate of Perth which is extremely hot in the summer and didn't really want to raise our children in a sort of semi urban environment and decided the best way to raise our boys and our daughter by that stage as well was to bring up on a farm so we decided I'd get out of broadcasting we'd get back to Tasmania where we like the climate more and get back into dairy farming which we did so we made the trek back bought a big truck and put a lot of goods and chattels and it had a double cab and we drove all the way back to Tasmania with this big truck more adventures that goes along the way but eventually wound up back in Tasmania running dairy farms again and also I got into at that time again the fire brigade and I became a security officer ran my own security agency and private investigation agency you actually became a private investigator yes I do my goodness Douglas must be all sorts of worlds in there well it was interesting we also ran a restaurant and got into all kinds of things in any case it is in my nature always has been to like to help people and that's no credit to me it's just the way God built me I guess and eventually I've tried to help someone a young girl through what I saw as being a very difficult or rather dangerous time for life and I went about in a very inappropriate way and the whole relationship turned into a semi sexual relationship which would never have happened because I had no guidebook no guideline from which to work so I was trying to do everything in my own intelligence and my ability and the results of this were fairly catastrophic and I was forced to take a very long close look at myself and forced to realize that I have been living my entire life up to that point in arrogance and conceit and pride as if I had created my own intellect as if I was responsible for making what I was and as if I could figure out the answers to the world's problems as a result of my intellect which I had somehow created and I just suddenly was was struck with it with the conclusion and high time that I was living entirely on Pride and conceit and arrogance and I was forced to eat an enormous quantity of humble pie which although it doesn't taste very good is very nutritious to the soul and realized that what I should be doing of course was handing my life over to Jesus Christ to run because I was making a thorough botch of it myself so in more lesson desperation actually I should know with a lot of tears and I picked up the phone book our own local minister was away at the time on holiday and I just looked up a name in the Church of England was that was the church I was affiliated with in a loose sort of way and I wound up talking to a very saintly man but a good man a good Christian man who is the Archdeacon or was the Archdeacon Launceston at that time I phoned him and I said look I'm a member of the Church of England in desperate need I need the right of confession and I need someone to talk to I need to really get myself right he said when do you want to come and see me and I said how about now I think I went in the following day actually mary went with me and I sat down with with Warwick and told him the whole story and we prayed a lot and I then then they're committed my life to Jesus Christ and asked him to take over and run it because I was totally incapable of doing so at the time it was it was a very painful and very difficult procedure because I had to really admit what an absolute swine had been for most of my most of my life to everyone around me including my family my children I've apologized to everyone left right and centre and I've had to reverse the direction of my life tell us how you came to this beautiful Heights in about 1970 something like about 76 I sold my my inherited shares the copyrights to this company we should be formed specifically to develop them and because I was sort of the the the public figure if you like of the family and they and and easy to easily accesible and my brothers much more private individual they began to ask me for advice on how to do this and how to do that and what should be done and by the grace of God the advice I gave them always turned out to be right so eventually they began to rely on me fairly heavily for my advice and at the time I was trying to run several farms and a restaurant so forth on a security agency in a private investigation agency there eventually I said look you know I need to be paid for this because it's taking too much of my time and if you really want me to go full-time on us which it seems to be happening I need to put a share farmer manager on the farms so we did that and I went on salary with CS there's Peter limited and became a general consultant to them which I still AM and so we had managers on the farms and none of whom worked out to be very good as it happened and looking back on it now I can see that the Lord was reshaping our lives to indicate that he wanted us to be somewhere else he didn't modest farming in Tasmania that time was finished I mean it served its purpose it was ended so eventually we decided that was time to move and we had sort of cast our minds around of where we would like to move to if we want if we had to be on this side of the planet I mean to work for CS Lewis is all sort of in London and a New York and Los Angeles and places like that so it's very difficult to commute from Tasmania so I had a trip one of my many round-the-world trips that I used to do for the company and my associate myself found ourselves suddenly with some appointments cancelled in the week to spare in the middle of a of a trip and we were in England at the time neither of us had ever seen Ireland so we just hopped on a plane came over for a look and I fell in love with the place I must confess absolutely loved it and so I was telling Mary about this and when it became more less time for us to look for somewhere else to live I said look let's go over and have a look at Ireland and if you like it as much as I do we'll decide to settle there so we came over and Mary was looking out of the window of the aeroplane flying into Dublin she said yes this is the place almost instinctively straight away so we then started to look for a place to live and I suppose logically how we've been thinking logically and only with sort of worldly logic we should have been looking for a cottage living at home at that stage we're only my two daughters myself and my wife the sons had all moved on gone their own way and but the Lord kind of nudged us into looking for something bigger so we started look around places and we had no idea what the Lord had in mind for us we just had the niggling feeling that he had a job for us over here so Bowens realist agency we just looked through all these portfolios and picked out about 10 to look out the last one he handed us was one that had come on the market that day when was this place ruffington house so it was also the closest to Dublin so we'd hired a car and we took off down here to look at this place first and as soon as we drove in the gate both Mary and I instinctively knew that this is where the Lord wanted us to be we didn't know why and neither of us told each other at that stage but as we drove in it took on that glow a strange unearthly below that that sometimes happens and all kinds of people come here to Gliss but you don't invite them all do you well that's true friends do come by invitation but people come and need the here is the principle we work on I mean Americans often ask us what's your vision for the ministry and we have to confess that we don't have one and I'm not sure one should have one what we did is we simply gave ourselves our lives everything we have and everything we earn own and by everything we did this part of us we gave to the Lord for his use and for him to do whatever he wants with and so we rely on the Holy Spirit of God to bring the people here whom he wants to be here and to keep away from this place the people he doesn't want to be here and once having made that prayer and made their commitment you have to also realize that the Holy Spirit is doing just that and we've seen evidence of this time and time again so we are a healing and helping counseling ministry we're members of the International Institute of pregnancy loss and child abuse research and recovery which is a psychotherapy training and treatment organization based in Canada and trained psychotherapist sin therapy techniques all around the world and and we have training seminars for that organization here quite regularly we're also a seminar centre for the International Centurions which is something that Philip and I and myself Filipino being the the psychiatrist who's the head of the Institute more or less dreamed up together and that is a grouping together of people who used to be abortionists but I've realized the horror of the crime they've been committing against Garden against man and have pulled out of that industry of death so you work in this lovely heist Douglas but you also have this tremendous legacy of CS Lewis do you ever get weary of that or or do you find that his legacy is still opening up all kinds of doors and spiritual work it does all the time it is always opening doors but people often ask me what's it like living in the shadow of CS Lewis my acid that is it he didn't leave a shadow he left a glow I'm fortunate enough sometimes to be able to bask in that glow but yes it is it is something of a responsibility I suppose but I never resent it and never dislike it it's just the way my life is and it's a bit like saying do you dislike having dark hair I mean it's just it's the way it is but it is massive 40 million copies in print is that true I mean I don't know yes forty million with three dozen titles and 40 million copies of his books it's a fairly large responsibility but then you got to do something with you like I'm going to ask you a question which is asked of a lot of people I suppose it's almost a cliche atlas but you have been a fireman you have been a broadcaster like you to heart you have been a farmer your husband you are someone who is holding a literary legacy which is one of the most merciful in English literature if you had your life to live over again is there any one thing in your life that you would do I've learned to fly a helicopter I haven't done that yet I'm working on something I would love to be able to do I'm before I die I would love to be able to fly a helicopter but that's just a trivial personal ambition I mean I can fly anything with wings I can drive drive anything with wheels tracks Keys floats or a cushion of air but I can't fly on the copters I know something has money so if anybody out there has one and they have an instructor but the only change I'll make to my life would be that I would commit my life to Christ immediately but then I won't usurp his plan I don't know have you ever had cult from the writings of CS Lewis that you particularly like or a story from his life and incident in his life one of the things that stands mostly in my my fondest memories of Jack's of what Jack said on time is rather obscure rather extraordinary one when I was about 12 years old it was at the dinner table at the kilns and I suppose seeking some kind of kudos or acclaim I said to Jack in front of Herbert didn't say but you know jack I said I think my worst sin would be pride Jack looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said yes I think I'd agree with you and he was right but by God's grace you have managed to overcome well I'm still working on it thank thank you so much Douglas for talking to us align us to come to this lovely place

Channel: John Callister

Views: 115,360

Rating: 4.9139581 out of 5

Keywords: C.S.Lewis, Douglas Gresham, Merrie Greshjam, Derick Bingham, Rathvinden House, Ireland, County Carlow, Keith Getty, John Callister

Id: LlPHK2VHoUE

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2015