Lady Jill Freud

From my biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian:

There was a bright spot in the Lewis home during at least part of the war: her name was June Flewett, and she was one of the many thousands of children who were evacuated from London and housed elsewhere as soon as the war began. The Kilns had taken in four schoolgirls the day after the Germans invaded Poland; they and others would come and go throughout the war. But June, who came to live with the Lewises in the summer of 1943, was different. She was certainly a saint, perhaps an angel of mercy. Sixteen when she arrived, she was a devout Catholic and an aspiring actress, and her favorite writer was C. S. Lewis, but she had no idea that the “Jack” whose house she was living in was the same man. It is not even clear that she knew his last name was Lewis, since it was Mrs. Moore to whom she was first introduced, and Jack and Warnie, as far as June knew, were just Mrs. Moore’s sons. Only after she had been around long enough to develop what she later called “a tremendous crush” on Lewis — “Of course I fell madly in love with him” — did she discover his identity. It was quite a shock. (Significantly, the first thing that attracted June to Lewis was his unfailing kindness to Minto, and she also saw very clearly that Minto nearly worshiped Lewis. The relationship had become very difficult, but much love was still in it — though obviously of a very different kind than that with which their relationship began.)

The two years that June lived at the Kilns were the best of the decade in that household. Everyone adored her, and she managed to keep Minto happier than anyone else could. There were … two maids working in the house at this time, but both of them were in their different ways mentally unstable, and in any case they could not achieve the standards of housekeeping that Minto thought necessary. Only June could mediate these conflicts, and when it became clear in late 1944 that at the turn of the new year she would be leaving — to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London — the whole household was devastated. Warnie’s tribute to her, in his diary, is really astonishing:

I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life. From seven in the morning till nine at night, shut off from people of her own age, almost grudged the time for her religious duties, she has slaved at the Kilns, for a fractional wage; I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self-accusing in the frequent crises of that dreary house. Her reaction to the meanest ingratitude was to seek its cause in her own faults. She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word “saintly.”

Lewis too — habitually more precise in his language than Warnie, who tended to exaggerate — called her “a perfectly saintly girl” in a letter to Sister Penelope, and to her parents said that “she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known.”

A difficult moment for Lewis had arisen when June’s parents wrote to ask him whether she should leave the Kilns to enroll in the Royal Academy, where she had already been accepted. Though acting was her passion and lifelong dream, the difficulty had arisen because, as Lewis told her parents, “June’s own view is simply and definitively that she won’t leave here of her own free will.” Lewis — and clearly this took an extraordinary effort of will — replied that “June ought, in her own best interests, to go to the Academy this coming term.” The conventions of such a situation required that he go on to say how much they would all miss her, but he did not, and he told the Flewetts why: “I don’t like thinking of it.” However, he had already spilled the beans: earlier in the letter he had written that “when June goes the only bright spot in our prospect goes with her.”

June Flewett acted under the name Jill Raymond. In 1950 she married Clement Freud — grandson of Sigmund Freud, a radio and TV personality and later a Liberal member of Parliament — and when Freud was knighted she became Lady Jill Freud. It is often said that she was the model for Lucy Pevensie in the Narnia books, though I do not recall any real evidence for that claim. There may be something that I have forgotten.

She has now died at the age of 98. Rest in peace.