Destroyed by war

There are two cathedrals at Coventry, one grown at the foot of the ruins of the other. A man with an 800mm camera lens is leaning on a pillar taking pictures of the recently fledged Peregrine falcons on the tower of the old one. The tower is all that’s left intact of the first cathedral, standing sentinel over a courtyard and a shell.

On 14 November 1940 Coventry was relentlessly bombed. Hundreds of people were killed. The city, once one of England’s finest, was flattened.

On the same date in 1990, Queen Elizabeth unveiled plaques, and accepted on the cathedral’s behalf the gift of a German bell inscribed with the word Peace. Everywhere around the new, postwar, cathedral there are memorials, art works, and promises: Never Again.

I am to play in front of the Baptistry window. The window is fabulous, and famous. Look how Gillian’s paintings are transformed into stained glass! The font itself is lightly carved from a boulder brought from a hillside in Bethlehem.

The performance isn’t until 3pm, so I walk leisurely around the whole building, taking it in, settling myself in it. It makes me cry. I need sunshine; I need sustenance; I need tea.

I pause to admire Lady Godiva. Here’s a tradition I think might happily be taken up again – riding naked through the town to protest about taxes. My protest would be about funding Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.

I learn about the origin of “peeping Tom” – he was the one who didn’t obey the injunction to keep his doors and windows shut when Lady Godiva passed by. And what about being “sent to Coventry”? In the Civil War, Parliamentary Coventry had a big jail for Royalists, where they could be locked up and forgotten about.

The performance exhausts me; it always does. Gillian is here, unexpectedly. The gentleman who marches up to me during the applause, looking like someone important on his day off, introduces himself to me as the Dean. He offers very generous thanks, and immediately segues into an interrogation.

What are you doing, he wants to know? I’m on a pilgrimage. Yes, but what does that mean – for a non-theist like you? You say “no-one has returned”; so why are you here?

These are very direct questions (he apologises for the lack of polite introduction, but time, he says, is short, and this is important). Yes, these are very important questions. I relish tackling them with someone so erudite as Dean John. I talk about believing in God, while not believing in the existence of God. Is he satisfied? I don’t know. Does he think I’m trespassing? If so, he’s too generous to say it.

The paintings and the music packed away, Daniele takes me back to the tea van. Mohammed, we discover, is from Palestine. When I am immediately intemperate on the subject of war and genocide, there are tears in his young eyes, and he won’t let me pay for tea and sweets. When we leave I am wearing his Save Gaza wristband. I won’t take it off until this pilgrimage is over.

After a strenuous journey to Birmingham, during which I was helped over a fallen tree by a young Bangladeshi family picking green plums from the wreckage, I’m sitting in Rob’s kitchen, gently restored.

We’re having almost the same conversation I had with the Dean – though I promise I didn’t start it. Rob is a mathematician, and physicist, so far beyond the cutting edge of it all you couldn’t possibly keep up. He introduces the idea of atheism. He declares himself an atheist, who believes in God. But he’s talking maths and physics, so it’s impossible to know what he means, or whether to take him seriously. Which is probably what the Dean thought, too.