Postscript . .
By CYRIL RAY COVENTRY
`WELL, you sort of get used to Coventry, if you live here,' said the manicurist at my hotel, `but when you go to other towns you can't help feeling station is slap up-to-date, mani- festly a creation not only of the twentieth century but of this half of it, and British Railways got me into it on time, too—a feat they bring within their own rather modest reach by the simple device, I am told, of giving their trains more time to do the journey from Euston than was considered necessary in the nineteenth century.
What makes other towns look a bit behind the times to a Coventry manicurist is the bold and imaginative planning of the centre of the blitzed city : what must make Coventry, in its turn, look behind the times to a Rotterdammer, say, or a Rhinelander from Cologne, is the timidity and meanness of the architecture and design that went with the lively planning until Basil Spence's cathedral took shape, a clear strong vice in a chorus of whispers. It was a good, if not a particularly original or adventur- ous, idea, for instance, to create a precinct in which people can shop or window-gaze without the danger of being mown down by motor-cars, but as the shops in every city in Britain these days are the same assortment of Mansfields, Marks and Spencers and MacFisheries, how shall we distinguish between one sizeable city and another when all the rest of them have taken, as they must, to creating precincts, too? Flower- ing cherries and park benches won't proclaim to the visitor from out of town that this isn't Cardiff but Coventry : a sculptor's hand might have done.
The English are the only people in Europe never to have got used to their own climate. In much the same way, the young people of England's great cities never have a good word to say for their native towns, as a Milanese would have, or a Lyonnais. 'Nothing to do; more dead than alive; last place God made, they moan in Manchester and Middlesbrough, pining for a bed-sitter in Maida Vale, which is Paved, as is well known, with the amplest means ill passing the time.
Just so, the taxi-drivers and shop assistants and car-park attendants of Coventry. The cathedral was a good thing, they supposed, and Would bring money to the town, but this one would as soon have more dance halls, that one a jazz club or a skating rink or another swim- /Twig pool. The manicurist wanted some good restaurants in Coventry, and she can say that again. Not that they wouldn't still grumble when they'd got what they wanted : the attendant at the 'new four-tier public car-park, with its space for 800 cars, said gloomily that 'it's been open two weeks, and I give it another two. When one of those automatic barriers jams—well, you know "hat motorists are: they put their shoulders underneath, and heave. That one's out of order, this one's been smashed, and we haven't had a really busy Saturday yet : it'll be hell an' all when we do.'
He was less interested in the cathedral than In the wheeled WC, half for men, half for women, that can be towed hygienically from fete to football match, a mobile thunderbox, Proudly on temporary duty near by. (Not that Coventry is as up-to-the-minute in this respect as it seems to think : the last one 1 saw was at a Park of Culture and Rest in Moscow, twelve years ago—my enthusiastic report on it, gladly sped on its way by the Moscow censors, Was killed by some more than usually nice-minded Sunday Times sub-editor.) I should have liked to record that a work of art like Basil Spence's, in the heart of a city like Coventry, had caused the citizenry to walk with a brisker step and a prouder mien. But it Would take a starrier-eyed reporter than I am. Though there are those here who have cause to be, if not proud, at any rate grateful. There are cardboard cut-out models of the cathedral on sale at 15s. in aid of some good cause or other; there are coloured and mounted pictures of it in the windows of the big stores; and the souvenir shops and jewellers have tiny silver models of the cathedral as bracelet charMs, at a brisk and, no doubt, profitable ten bob. 'True, a Lady Godiva of the same size is worth half as much.again, but I am out of my .depth in trying to assess relative values : for reasons which are no doubt clearer to Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Biggs-Davison than to me, Union Jacks to wave at the Queen today have been marked down for the past couple of weeks to half-price.
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