I am reduced to a slow-moving caricature of my normal fairly energetic self by a particularly filthy cold and a stiff neck. But I am also beguiled by the beautiful misty winter afternoons, which recall Priestley’s description of the ‘Smoky Gold’ of the light in pre-1914 Bradford. I feel, as I do at this season very much in touch with the past what I most want to do is to sink into the sofa cushions in a lamplit room and read, preferably one of those enormous, thick novels that I have read before , its pages softened by use (but not too recently) and which promises to keep me company for many days.
But, thanks to my own vanity, I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. After the full-scale debate at Oxford last week (of which a little more later, though not about Professor Millican, whose hypersensitivity I fear to wake again), I had agreed to talk to the Warwick University student Tory association, and debate cannabis (almost the last of these) against Tim Wilkinson.
Warwick University is closer to Coventry than to anywhere else , but being one of the Robbins plateglass universities of the 1960s (most of which were in agreeable , picturesque Cathedral cities), it preferred to take its name from ancient Warwick, whose tremendous church is almost of Cathedral standard, and whose name echoes through English History, as that of Coventry doesn’t quite.
So, it being my day off, I thought I would make a day of it and take another look at Coventry, a city I lived in for six short but rather intense and (at the end) troublesome months in 1976. One reader here takes issue with my description of it as sad. I am not sure why. I have been led to believe that Coventry before 1940 was a hauntingly lovely mediaeval city of ‘Guildhalls and carved choirs’ as Philip Larkin, who grew up there, might have put it, of half-timbered houses leaning over narrow streets, of warm red sandstone. It certainly isn’t that now, and there’s been a long debate over whose fault that is. Most people, who have heard of the terrible German bombing of the city in 1940, blame the Luftwaffe. But others, in Coventry, will tell you that much of the ancient city either survived the bombing, or was recoverable. But it wasn’t recovered. It was swept away for a shiny new plan (‘I have a Vision of the Future, Chum’, as John Betjeman put it).
Certainly there’s an interesting contrast between Coventry - now an almost entirely modern place with a few islands of the old - and Nuremberg, with which it was often compared before the war and which was even more ferociously bombed by the RAF than Coventry was by the Luftwaffe. Nuremberg is obviously not what it was. You have to go to the miraculously unspoiled city of Bamberg to get an idea of what was lost, and indeed to weep for the loss of so much beauty in Germany as a whole. But a considerable effort has been made to retain and rebuild the former character and pattern of the old town.
Coventry, by contrast, is blighted by those dogmas of English post-war planning - the scything ring-road, destroying all continuity between the heart and the limbs of the place, and the pedestrian shopping precinct, which looks as if it has been lowered from a not particularly enlightened or architecturally advanced planet on top of what was there before. This creates extraordinary, jarring stark borderlines between the new and the old. Where there is anything old, it is concentrated in a tiny museum-like zone.
When I first knew Coventry, it was, even so, a pretty cheerful place. We thought we lived in modern times. We didn’t realise than that we were at the end of an old era, and the approaching world (in which we now live) would regard our way of life as absurd. Coventry in 1976 was a proud manufacturing city, where men made things and earned good wages for that. People still lived in married families and brought up their own children. It had an almost American feel of prosperity. Its clean, efficient electric trains (then quite rare in Britain) were still a sign of optimism and modernity.
Now the shopping centre is full of pound shops and horrible establishments offering ‘pay-day loans’, that modern curse. The pleasant suburban road where I rented a bedsit, in the enjoyably mixed suburb of Earsldon, looked considerably shabbier than it did when I lived there. And of course the old-fashioned grocery, with its urn-shaped coffee grinder and bacon-slicer, had vanished to the Grocery Valhalla where all such shops have gone. And in the centre there were the all-day bars with their unlovely clientele, supervised feebly, if at all, by Community Support Officers, and promising much worse to come after nightfall.
I visited, out of a sort of duty, the Basil Spence cathedral. This has always had a melancholy effect on me because I remember so well the fuss that was made when it was being built, and after it opened. It dates from the ‘New Elizabethan’ optimism of the years just before and after I was born, and was a focus of some national excitement during my childhood, so it makes me feel my age -as does the Russian Foreign Ministry on Smolenskaya Ploshchad in Moscow, which proudly carries the date of its opening, the year of my birth, 1951. The last time I was there, it looked as if it had weathered the years a bit better than I have. But I digress.
I cannot like Sir Basil Spence’s architecture. I think that anyone building an English cathedral should so as they did in Liverpool (the Anglican one) , or at St John the Divine in New York, or at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. There is one pattern, and it will always work, and always endure. But it was part of the conceit of the 1950s that we could begin the world over again, and did not need to be bound by silly old rules. Almost the only wholly good thing is that the glorious local stone, a tawny red sandstone, is used for the exterior. Otherwise it would just look rather like the Festival Hall. The glass is, well, modern. Of course it’s preferable to a shopping centre, but it has no real relation to the long tradition of English stained glass, full of scriptural detail, still surviving at York Minster, at Fairford and at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.
The building is large but has little atmosphere, and the city seems to turn its back on it – the day I went, skateboarders were crashing around on the flagstones just outside the East Door (which in modern Coventry is of course not in the East, but the North) . I bet a lot of modern clergymen are sorry that the great Biblical passages , carved on huge blocks of stone, were done when the Authorised Version was still in use. How they must dislike this reminder of the poetry they have so furiously and zealously extirpated.
The words ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls’ would once have set off a great throbbing burst of music in the head of any Englishman or Englishwoman, because they form one of the greatest passages in Handel’s ‘Messiah’. Now, I suppose they just baffle the few puzzled tourists, who have been told this is a great building and visit it. Some years ago, I attended Choral Evensong in its chilly, modern space. Somehow, it seemed uncomfortable and out of place, transplanted from elsewhere.
I walked out across the ring road, past Philip Larkin’s old school (now of course private) through the suburbs, across a golf course and a curious remnant of countryside, until I reached the university, a City of Youth out beyond the places where semi-detached suburban folk dwell.
And it was a very pleasant experience, a full room, not too big and an interested audience with a sense of humour, not all by any means friendly. There’s an account of the occasion here, though I must stress that I would never use the word ‘toilet’ in a public speech . I might resort to it in places where asking for the ‘lavatory’ would be a class issue, but otherwise I would be too scared of my mother’s ghost to utter those hated syllables. She didn’t think Nancy Mitford’s ‘Noblesse Oblige’ was a joke at all, or John Betjeman’s sneering verse ‘Phone for the fish-knives, Norman’. These for those of you fortunate enough to have been born too late, were the essential texts of lower-upper-middle-class snobbery of the early sixties. I’m still amazed (and amused) that so many people simply don’t care about distinctions that were considered decisive in my boyhood.
There’s a brief independent account of the occasion here
http://theboar.org/news/2012/nov/15/peter-hitchens-gives-talk-warwick/
As I struggled homewards on a delayed train (they all are at this time of year) , I pondered on a novel I had recently been persuaded to read, Jane Gardam’s ‘Old Filth’, whose central characters are a distinguished lawyer and his wife, neither of them wholly what they seem to be. I hadn’t read anything of hers before, and it was certainly a memorable, well-crafted and interesting study of several lives, and in particular of the awful privations and ordeals of the children of the Empire, parted from their parents at incredibly early ages and damaged for ever afterwards. But the thing which stuck in my mind was the description of a 1940 winter train journey from the North of England to Oxford ( along some of the route I took from Coventry that evening).
I had never before read a depiction of post-Dunkirk England that was so unsparing. It really did sound like a bankrupt, militarily defeated country whose last Gold Reserves had just been shipped off to America (which they had been ). The trains unheated and hopelessly crowded, with the , er, toilets, disgusting with overflow, and besieged by desperate passengers waiting their turn in awful public discomfort, the station signs crudely painted out to confuse the Wehrmacht, but really only confusing us, and ( an amazing detail this) the drawers of the empty chocolate vending machines and cigarette vending machines (which I remember as a feature of the railways of childhood) hanging out as if they had been plundered. It actually sounded much more like an invaded, pillaged and occupied country than like Britain Standing Alone. A bit, in fact, like the Eastern Europe I first encountered more than 30 years ago.
Perhaps these thoughts are intensified by my other current reading ( which I shall return to at length when I have finished). This deals with an era we tend to regard as one of more-or-less cosy post-war recovery. Not for everyone, it wasn’t. The great new historical breakthrough of the season is the bitterly-titled ‘Orderly and Humane’ by R.M.Douglas . It is, as far as I know, the first work in English to address fully the great guilty secret of World War Two – namely that it ended with the savage, bloody and cruel expulsion of millions of German citizens, mostly innocent civilians, from their ancestral homes, an act of politically convenient ethnic cleansing and crude revenge that must number among the greatest crimes of our times or any.
The words ‘orderly and humane’ featured in the Potsdam Declaration which set the horror in motion, though Mr Douglas shows clearly that its progenitors knew perfectly well, before they launched it, that it would be neither orderly nor humane. Any reader of this cold, judicial account will be engulfed in a mixture of rage and pity.
Of course, anyone who raises this topic has in the past tended to be accused (as are critics of the Harris policy of deliberately bombing German civilians in their homes) as National Socialist apologists or Holocaust deniers. Well, the accusation is false, and enough time has passed for us to acknowledge this wrong, or we shall learn nothing. But if what is set out here is true the need for a total re-evaluation of our belief in a ‘Good War’ is stronger than ever. Especially as Mr Slippery seems to be trying to get us into another war of benevolence in Syria.
Wednesday night’s London debate (I’ve posted an independent account elsewhere, and would be happy to post others) was an unusual; experience for me in that the audience largely supported me on the drug issue. How ‘typical’ this is I have no idea. Either way it was perhaps a little unfair on my opponent, who may not have shone as much as he would have done if he’d felt he had more of a home crowd. I won the vote at the beginning and the end, and few minds can have been changed. I’d only say that this couldn’t have happened if my side didn’t at least possess a coherent moral and political case.
One other thing. One of my opponents at the Oxford Union last week, Michael Shermer (or someone claiming to be him) has said on Twitter that ‘Peter Hitchens's argument for God was to attack me as "the most obnoxious irritating person I have ever met" and accuse atheists of amorality.’
Of course that’s not quite right. The person I condemned in these terms was my own adolescent self. I said Mr Shermer and his ally reminded me of that adolescent self. This was partly the truth and partly a joke, and was recognised as such by the audience. Mr Shermer’s version leaves that out. I think the point is subtly but definitely different, and it is naughty of Mr Shermer to give what I think is a misleading impression. I understand that Twitter has character limits. Well, if you can’t give an accurate account within those limits, then don’t Tweet in the first place. There’s no need to accuse atheists of amorality. It’s axiomatic that they are amoral, since they don’t believe in morals, which as I understand it are absolute and religiously defined. They believe only in situational ethics and evolutionary advantage.
