Spartan.

The Critic looks at the magical monotony of C.S. Lewis' Oxford ...

Much of Lewis’s years at Oxford will be recognisable to those who know the university today, though modernity has intruded into aspects of Oxford life that were still familiar in the late twentieth century. The sheer level of spartan discomfort, for instance, that university denizens were expected to endure is now mostly a thing of the past.

When elected to his first teaching position at Magdalen in 1925 on the princely salary of £500 a year, Lewis was allocated unheated rooms without a lavatory. He held tutorials in a dressing gown with a heavy cardigan underneath, and students recall him occasionally leaving tutorials to use a chamber pot in the bedroom. 

In winter the bedroom was so cold that he slept wearing two pullovers and trousers over his pyjamas. Mice were regular nocturnal visitors; Lewis wrote with characteristic humour to a correspondent that they would poke their heads out as if to say “Time for you to go to bed. We want to come out and play.”