Livre d'Or

I'm so sorry about your teacher. What a shitty thing for an authority figure and trusted person to do.

I don't come from a Christian household but my first primary school teacher was quite dedicated to Christianity and perhaps that had an influence on her choice to have us read the books at school. However, the allegory went completely over my head at the time.

Aged about 18 or 19, I was living in the USA doing odd jobs in university summer vacations. I had picked up some work on a farm and was harvesting salad greens with the other workers, one of whom was a very tall and rather innocent lad, with that well-scrubbed, impeccable-manners, denim-overall-and-straw-hat lay missionary kind of vibe. I don't remember how we started talking about C.S Lewis but he recommended 'Mere Christianity' as a book to read to understand his religious outlook. I must have said something like, 'What, the Narnia guy' and then he explained about the allegory. I remember it vividly, standing in the middle of the rows of lettuce thinking, 'OHHH!'.

I remember that the other person working with us was someone whose family I lived with at the time - I was their live-in babysitter - and he was orphaned quite young in Colombia and quite possibly brought up under the 'guidance' of monks or nuns, and when we got onto the subject of Christianity he quickly became quite angry and rude, which I found surprising, as he was generally mellow to a fault. I felt a bit sorry for the lay missionary guy. Myself, I felt a bit betrayed that these books which I had really enjoyed actually had some other message in them and I had a little bit of the disappointment you describe - I was also bullied later, in another school, partly for not being a churchgoing Christian. Or at least if not outright bullied, certainly it was regarded as weird and suspicious. So there was also a sense of the thing being taken away, sort of, that they had been intended for 'good' children and not for people like me.