WAR BROUGHT:

I was sure that children would not want to be told that this old lady was Lucy': The question of who inspired CS Lewis to create the fantasy world of Narnia has remained a mystery for decades. Now, 55 years on, Nigel Farndale talks to Jill Freud who, as a wartime evacuee, provided the spark for his best-selling classic. As Hollywood's £75m version comes out, she tells her extraordinary story for the first time (Nigel Farndale, 11/12/2005, Daily Telegraph)

In a yawning, book-lined drawing room in Marylebone, central London, I am left to browse a file of letters written during the war years by CS Lewis to "My dear June". The "June" referred to is Jill Freud, the now 78-year-old wife of Sir Clement, who has disappeared into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

In 1944, she was June Flewett, a London convent girl who had been evacuated to Lewis's house in Oxford to escape the Blitz. She was also the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie, the girl who walks through the wardrobe full of fur coats and into the snowflakes of Narnia. The premiere of Hollywood's £75million The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was held in London on Wednesday, and Lady Freud had been asked to attend. She had also been asked to fly to America for the premiere there but, as she says in a crisp voice: "I was sure children wouldn't want to be told that this old lady is Lucy." Besides, she has, until now, declined all newspaper requests to discuss her extraordinary childhood. [...]

Her family lived in Barnes, south-west London, where her father was the senior classics master at St Paul's school. She and her two sisters - she was the middle one - were evacuated on September 1, 1939. "London was in a state of high alert," she recalls. "Gas masks were being issued, trenches dug and windows crossed with tape. My sister, then 14, was nearly expelled for waving to a soldier out of the convent window. She just thought it was the patriotic thing to do."

Lady Freud remembers standing on the station platform in her overcoat, with her haversack containing two school books and a change of clothes, and saying goodbye to her mother and five-year-old sister Diana, who was being evacuated with her kindergarten class to Wales, where she was to stay for the duration of the war, seeing her mother only twice. "Diana grew up thinking she had been rejected by my mother, that was the tragedy," she says. "But what could my mother do? It was the worst day of her life. She was only given 24 hours to decide."

At first, June was billeted with a retired Oxford tutor but he died after a few months and she moved in with three ageing spinsters. "They had been Lewis Carroll's 'girls'. As children they had gone up and down the Cherwell in his punt while he told them stories. In their drawing room, they had a lot of games and toys which he had made for them. We would be allowed to play with them on Sundays. They would be worth a fortune now."

In 1942, June was interviewed by Janie Moore, "Mrs Moore", CS Lewis's "adoptive mother" - his real mother having died of cancer when he was nine. Lewis was 43, Mrs Moore 26 years his senior. They were probably lovers at first, then partners who played the role of mother and son for the sake of propriety.

"They lived together as mother and son," Lady Freud recalls, "but I don't think that was the relationship". She raises her eyebrows significantly. "I knew nothing about any of that at the time. She was Irish and had been very beautiful, very dynamic. Jack had fought alongside her son, Paddy, in the First World War and had promised he would look after his mother if Paddy was killed. Well, Paddy was killed."

Jack and Minto, as he called Mrs Moore, had lived together in Oxford since 1920. There were no children in the house until they started taking in evacuees at the start of the war. Lewis once wrote: "I never appreciated children till the war brought them to me."

What, I ask, were her first impressions of him? "Oh, I loved him. Loved him, of course I did. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs Moore with the hen food when I first met him. I turned round and knew this was something momentous. Jack was naturally very gregarious, he liked exchanging ideas. He enjoyed the pub, and walking.

"I had read the Screwtape Letters and, being a good little Catholic at that time, his famous book Christian Behaviour, but I didn't know then that Jack Lewis was CS Lewis. I had no idea. Two weeks later I saw his books on the shelf, then I made the connection. I realised that this man I was staying with was my literary hero.

"I didn't know where to put myself. I couldn't look at him or speak to him for about a week because I knew from reading his books that he understood human nature horribly well and I just thought, 'He will know all my faults, all my nasty little foibles'. I felt completely exposed. I got over it, of course."