Was reading C.S. Lewis' book of collected letters the other night. In the 1950s he was asked by a young aspiring writer, a little girl, how to write. He responded with six or seven wise suggestions, one being, "Turn off the radio."

In 1994 I had the rare, unrepeatable chance to sleep in Lewis' Oxfordshire study for two weeks. That was my bedroom for the fortnight I helped renovate his house, where he lived from 1930-1963.

Over the years the house slowly turned from a neglected rental cottage into a retreat center. I was enchanted by the study, where Lewis and his brother Warnie would write and smoke their pipes. The ceiling, previous renovators told me, had been so stained with pipe smoke in that room that they decided to leave it that color, a tobacco yellow-brown, as a memento. Every morning that July, I would be awakened by a bird whose song I'd never heard before. It sang the first few notes of If I Only Had a Brain: "I would not be such a--. I would not be such a--."

While staying there, I dug up blue-glass inkwells tossed out the window of Lewis' study. Under a layer of sod I dug up a handful of Lewis' wife Joy's garden markers, on which she had painted herb names, like "Old Man" and "Old Lady." I scraped away paint to find the house trim colors used when he lived there.

I also collected information, hoping to write a book about The Kilns, which is the name given to the house. The name was taken from the huge brick kilns that stood from ancient times on the property, until the beehive-shaped kilns were deemed unsafe and torn down a few decades ago.

My interviews with Lewis' neighbors, who had lived there longer than 30 years, were entertaining enough to fill several episodes of Monty Python:

"Well, I don't recall much about old Lewis, he was always *writing* you know, too busy to stop and talk, but I do remember they had such lovely silver poplars going down the lane, I don't know why those had to come down, and it used to be a *proper* road, you see, a dirt road, as you call it, not paved, and just off the Roman road, which is still there, you can see bits of the stones under the pavement; now Paxton the gardener, oh there was a love, singing hymns at the top of his voice as he trimmed the hedges...." Everyone mentioned Paxton.

I was also told the story of Lewis and his brother during World War II building and hiding a tiny propeller plane in the one-car garage (for escape or self-defense, no one could tell me for sure). And the story of the brothers preparing a bomb shelter in the woods just behind the house, in case Oxford ever got bombed by the Germans. The shelter was (I was told) the very same bat cave used by King Charles hiding from Cromwell. And of course The Kilns was where Lucy, a little girl who was a London "bombing orphan," stayed for months during the war. One day she asked Lewis, "What's behind the wardobe?" It got him thinking about his childhood. The rest, they say, is a fantasy series.

Publishers dismissed the book proposal one by one. Not enough pertinent information, one said. Asked another: Who would want a book about a house? Indeed.