I suppose every author has a unique style with regard to the creation of a manuscript. Lewis says that his stories began with a picture. He imagined a fawn carrying packages and an umbrella in the snow, and from there The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe took form.

The Magician’s Nephew, unfortunately did not take as much imagination. When Polly first encounters Digory in the back garden, he had obviously been crying:

She had been going to say "After you’ve been blubbing," but she thought that wouldn’t be polite"

All right, I have then," said Digory in a much louder voice, like a boy who was so miserable that he didn’t care who knew he had been crying. ‘And so would you,’ he went on, "if you’d lived all your life in the country and had a pony, and a river at the bottom of the garden, and then been brought to live in a beastly Hole like this."

"London isn’t a Hole," said Polly indignantly. But the boy was too wound up to take any notice of her, and he went on-

"And if your father was away in India…"

Jacksie Lewis’ father was not off in India, but his brother, Warren, was. Well it wasn’t exactly India. It was Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire. The two had a rich life of shared imagination. Clive wrote stories of clothed animals who lived in the land of Boxen. On the maps he drew, Animal-land was always near India (for Warren’s sake). Within a month of moving into the country from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Warren, then age 10 was sent off for schooling in England. In their new house at Little Lea, the two brothers had discovered their hole, an unfinished storage area under the eaves in the attic. Here the younger Lewis wrote the stories and history of an imaginary past in an imaginary world. Letters to Warren at school told of the exploits of King Bunny and of the uprisings between the Boxonians and the Prussians.

Estranged from his father, he lost himself in books. By age nine, Jack had read Paradise Lost, and acquired the habit of writing. Early in 1908, his mother was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Before his tenth birthday she had died.

Now you know about India, the attic, and the boy whose face was streaked with earth after a good cry.