Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Hun

"Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

Coventry was a convenient point at which to break the journey home from Yorkshire. A pagan-inclined person might see in its name the tree at which the coven met. Scholars prefer to make up a man named Cofa, genitive Cofan. What is not in dispute is that at the city’s heart is a hill, one so sacred that the Christians built a church there in the name of St Michael the Archangel and all his heavenly host. They were taking no chances. Appropriately enough, St Michael is now an unofficial patron saint of the Royal Air Force.

The latest St Michael’s is the post-war cathedral designed by Sir Basil Spence, its portico reaching out to the ruins of its gutted Gothic predecessor. Coventry was mediæval England’s fourth largest city, after London, Bristol and York. The devastation of war has diminished but by no means extinguished its appeal. Alas, it is not the devastation of war alone that has created the modern city.

Every time I visit Coventry I discover another piece of the bigger picture. Last time, I visited its museum, into which many gorgeous relics of its past are gathered, relics that tell of a very different city from that which now exists. Here I learnt that when the Labour Party first took control of Coventry Corporation in the 1930’s it began to draw up plans for comprehensive redevelopment. Adolf Hitler was philosophical about RAF raids on Berlin, noting that they would ease the job of rebuilding, bigger and better, once the war was won. For Coventry councillors too there was no cloud without a silver lining.

So much of central Coventry is new that the easiest assumption is always to blame the bombs. It ain’t necessarily so. The guidebook to Coventry Cathedral includes two shots of the area to its east, as they were before the old streets were flattened in the 1960’s to build what is now Coventry University. It would be most instructive to take a map of pre-war Coventry, to mark on it (a) the buildings and streets that survive; (b) those destroyed by the Luftwaffe; and (c) those destroyed by Coventrians themselves; then to total the numbers and areas for each. Similarly instructive maps can be drawn up for Exeter, Plymouth and Swansea, to mention only those cities with which I am most familiar and which are most haunted by the memory of the Blitz.

The loss of life in all these places – tiny as it was compared to the torrential fire rained down on German cities – is what remains worthy of memory. Coventry does it subtly, with the tomb of the Unknown Civilian nestling, barely noticed, in the shadow of the old cathedral. As to the destruction of property, it is time for a more honest account of who did what to whom, and when and why, and what was lost and gained in the process. Coventrians and their politicians may elicit less sympathy when the full story has been told.