I couldn’t sleep last night and I didn’t have my usual tolerance for reading. I kept reading a page of one book and then putting it down, picking up another and then putting it down. I was feeling twitchy. In those circumstances the best thing to do is get up and watch some mindless television.
Usually this is what I do. Unfortunately, despite having access to hundreds of channels of dreadful television, there was nothing that I could stomach. I have very strict rules about just how dreadful a dreadful television show can be and whether I can actually face watching it. Nothing matched up to my exacting criteria and I found myself watching something I had Sky Plussed from about a fortnight ago. It was a Timewatch special about the bombing of Coventry during the Second World War.
I love a good war. I’m not interested in modern warfare. It’s too antiseptic and has far too much to do with flash technology and showing off four thousand ways to make someone’s life miserable using sand. I’m particularly interested in the First and Second World Wars, and have been known to sidestep into Vietnam on occasion.
I’m not sure why I find them so fascinating, because I would hate to fight in one and generally believe that they are ludicrous, pointless, and could all have been solved with a little less chest beating and testosterone and a lot more tea and cakes. Anyway, I do, and as Coventry is only about twenty miles away and I’ve been there countless times, I was particularly interested in this programme.
Coventry, for those of you who have not had the great misfortune to go there, is one of the ugliest cities in Britain. It didn’t used to be. It started life as a prosperous Medieval town, thanks to a thriving wool trade, and many of the original and extraordinarily beautiful buildings were still standing until the Germans smashed them into teeny, tiny bits and then set them on fire.
So much of Coventry was destroyed during the bombing, over 50% of its civilian housing and 25% of its industry, and so many people were left with nowhere to live, that something had to be done pronto once the war had ended. Hence the appalling public toilet municipal architecture which sprawls greyly over the city like a permanent fog.
It has one of the worst ring roads in the world, with the possible exception of Swindon and Milton Keynes, and not even a jolly statue of Lady Godiva with her kit off on the back of a horse can do much to cheer it up. It is just horrible, and even though it has an Ikea in the city centre, I still cannot bring myself to go there very often.
There is one exceptional thing that makes it worth going to though, and that is the cathedral.
On the night of 14th November 1940 the Luftwaffe started their blitzkrieg on Coventry. The reason they picked Coventry, by the way, is that it was a centre for automotive production and most of the factories had been given over to the war effort, producing hundreds of planes for the RAF. It was a prime military target. Unfortunately most of the factories were mixed in amongst the regular houses in the city, which was why the damage that night was so extensive.
First they dropped tons of incendiary bombs. These were dropped in order to set fires all over the city and put such a strain on the fire brigade that they would not be able to put them out quickly enough to be effective. The bombs they used exploded in a shower of bits of molten metal which were white hot and scattered out like dandelion clocks, setting fire to everything they landed on. The city started to burn, which meant that its visibility as a target was much clearer for the enemy planes overhead. The narrow Medieval streets, particularly in the middle of the city, meant that the fire could spread across the street as well as from building to building. One of the eyewitnesses spoke about a man who had two shops, one on each side of the road. As she watched, they both caught fire simultaneously and within minutes the flames were so high they arched over and met in the middle of the street.
After the initial incendiary bombs came the bomb, bombs. As well as on the industrial targets these were also dropped on places like water works, gas works, etc, so that the emergency services were hampered doing their jobs. Bombs were also deliberately dropped on the roads to make them impassable. Over five hundred tons of explosives were dropped in one night, on one city. Amazingly the figures suggest only about 560 people died.
Apparently the sky glowed red and the city could be seen burning from the South coast. Coventry is in the East Midlands. We are the farthest point from the sea in the whole country. To get to the South coast from Coventry is about 150 miles.
When I was a child I lived in a small village, about eight miles away from Leicester. One school project involved us researching the history of the place we lived. I interviewed an old lady who had lived in our village all her life. I asked her about her most vivid memories of living there and she told me about standing in the field at the back of her house on the night of 14 November and watching Coventry burn. I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.
The cathedral was five hundred years old. It was hit several times during the night and all but the outside walls were destroyed. Someone told me that the lead on the roof was so hot it liquified and ran onto the ground. One eyewitness on the programme had been absolutely fine talking about her experiences until she spoke about the cathedral burning and then she just broke down. It was immensely moving.
Afterwards, when the people of Coventry were picking up the pieces of their lives and rebuilding their city, a decision was made to build a new cathedral, right next door to the old one. It is an amazing building. If you haven’t been, you should make the time to go. I am not a great believer in organised religion, but it is one place I think God would definitely hang out, should he exist.
When they were clearing the rubble from the original cathedral, a workman found two of the iron nails that had been in the Medieval roof beams. They were lashed together to form a cross. This was used to form what is known as The Community of the Cross of Nails. Its role is to emphasise peace and reconciliation. A similar cross was given to cathedrals in Kiel, Berlin and Dresden after the war when they were rebuilding their own churches and communities.
Although what happened in Coventry was horrendous, the programme was scrupulously fair in pointing out that we took a lesson from the Germans and developed their ideas of blitzkreig with such enthusiasm that in Dresden, when we did the same thing to them, we killed 55,000 people. It puts it into perspective rather.
Anyway, back to the cathedral.
The cathedral itself, is, in my opinion, quite an ugly building from the outside:
This is the side view, which you see from the street as you come to it. To the left, out of the picture, is the ruin of the old cathedral, which has been made safe and you can now walk around.
No, the amazing things about the new cathedral are mostly on the inside, although I have always had a soft spot for the sculpture which you can see on the outside wall. It’s St Michael kicking the devil’s arse, (not Bishop Brennan after all) and is by Jacob Epstein, one of my favourite sculptors.
At the front of the building is the most spectacular window, which is called The Screen of Saints and Angels and is 70ft high and 45ft wide. It is made up of panels of glass on which the most beautifully spiky angels are etched. I cannot find a photograph to do it justice. You really have to see it. It’s breathtaking. They have no colour at all and they just look like they’ve floated there, like feathers or snow flakes.
Inside, the rest of the stained glass windows are kind of fluted into the walls so that you have to stand at certain angles to catch them in the light. Mostly abstract and just made of these impressionist panes of jewel coloured glass, the sun slants through and lays giant shafts of gleaming coloured light across the interior spaces.
The walls are full of paintings and sculptures from countries all over the world even down to tiny wooden mice that are carved into some of the chair legs. All of these people worked together to rebuild this cathedral as a symbol of community and peace. It’s quite awe inspiring.
It just shows you what happens when you drop 500 tons of explosives on people.
It makes me feel quietly hopeful.
