Angels in the Architecture (45 page)

Tim is very focused – as only he can be – and his quirky ways have sat co
mfortably in this setting – it’s New York after all.

A postcard
from Jillie – she’s arrived in the Sudan with
Medicin sans Frontieres.
She misses us already.

Email
from Rose and Loraine – thinking of hanging up their cassocks and moving to warmer climes. Not sure they could be too far from their adored Cathedral though. Apparently
Little St Hugh
has been cordoned off – too many children sitting on his tomb thinking it’s a seat. How Tim loved that spot. I must ask him if he remembers it
.

Maitland passed on last week. So sad. He’d become a stalwart of the interfaith movement
in Lincoln, and much loved. The girls would have given him a superb send-off I’m sure. Would have packed the
Magna Carta,
no doubt.

Sadat has won a
second Nobel – unprecedented. The Middle East continues to avoid disaster – precarious nonetheless but a great care is given continuously from all the West’s leaders. There are oddball crazies everywhere but some sanity prevails among a united world leadership. Perhaps this new millennium may bring a new peace after all. 

A small note:
a National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran was elected in Teheran, after a twenty-year ban. Maitland would have liked that. Who knows – maybe he had something to do with it!

It’s been a stunning
autumn day – leaves turning in the Park.

New York
is very chilled out.  Well, it is New York.

Fact or Fiction

• All characters are fictitious accepting obvious and real historical characters, and others, perhaps less well known, as noted below.
  
• Torksey
  and Nocton Fen are towns in Lincolnshire with roughly the geographic relationship to Lincoln as the story describes.
  
• The Foss Dyke
  is the oldest canal in England constructed by the Romans around
  ad
  120 and still in use. It connects the Trent at Torksey to the Witham at Lincoln, and is about 18 km (11 mi) long.
  
• Brayford Pool
  in Lincoln is where the Foss Dyke meets the river Witham.
  
• The 1185 earthquake destroyed most
  of Lincoln Cathedral; it is not known what effect it had on the Foss Dyke. Most of the West Front of the cathedral was left standing, and rather than being pulled down and rebuilt, it was incorporated into the new building. Probably this was for financial reasons. At any rate there is a mismatch in parts of the Nave where the ‘old’ and ‘new’ were joined up, creating very noticeable, but interesting, irregularities and asymmetries, in the vaulting in particular. The Great Transept and the Nave were completed in 1240, although the central tower collapsed just prior to this, and its rebuilding was not completed until 1256.
  
• The Brayford Pool
  is known for its large population of Mute Swans (
  Cygnus olor
  ). The swans made the news headlines in 2004 over concerns about the animals’ diet and overall health.
  
• There is
  no Physics Department at Lincoln University..
  
• The
  Bell Test experiments
  were conducted by Alain Aspect in Paris in 1981. These showed that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s
  reductio ad absurdum
  of quantum mechanics appeared to be realised when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were once part of the same wave function that was not disturbed before one of the child particles was measured. Aspect’s experiments were considered to provide support to the thesis that Bell’s inequalities were violated. Bell’s theorem states:
  No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
  In quantum mechanics, a
  local hidden variable theory
  is one in which distant events are assumed to have no
  instantaneous
  effect on local ones.
  
• A personal family friend, bearing little resemblance to
  the Loraine of this story, did in fact see a ‘falling star’, and did make the prediction about a world leader’s attempted assassination, precisely the evening before the attempt made on Ronald Reagan’s life by John Hinckley.
  
• All references to the inside
  of Lincoln Cathedral stem from fact.
  
• The
  Shrine of Little Hugh
  is real, but it in fact dates from 1255. It is indeed the shrine of a small boy supposedly killed and mutilated by the Jews in Lincoln. In the few years prior to this, anti-Semitic feeling in England had led to many murder charges being brought against Jews. The story goes that the young boy was ritually murdered and his body discovered at the bottom of a well. A local Jew was found who ‘confessed’ that the Jews did this annually as a ritual act; he was tried and executed. The boy’s body was placed in the Cathedral, and he was venerated as a saint and martyr, although he was never canonised. Six months earlier, Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. Having lost this source of income, he decided that he was eligible for the Jews’ money if they were convicted of crimes. Ninety-two Jews were arrested and held in the Tower of London and were charged with involvement in the ritual murder. Eighteen of them were hanged, and Henry was able to take over their property. The remainder were pardoned and set free, most likely because Richard, who saw a potential threat to his own source of income, intervened on their behalf with his brother. Anti-Semitic feeling was also high during Bishop Hugh’s time, and the Bishop was one of their noted defenders. When the tomb was opened in 1791, the child’s body was found intact, bearing no evidence of the mutilation alleged to have taken place. In 2009, an interfaith project between the Lincolnshire Jewish Community and Lincoln Cathedral developed the wording for a sign that now rests on the wall above and to the right of the Shrine of Little Hugh. It tells the story of Little Hugh and concludes:
  This libel against the Jews is a shameful example of religious and racial hatred which continuing down through the ages violently divides many people in the present day. Let us unite here in a prayer for an end to bigotry, prejudice and persecution. Peace be with you. Shalom.
  
• Towards the
  south-east of the cathedral, more or less opposite the Shrine of
  Little Hugh
  , there is a fairly innocuous carved wall known as the Stonemason’s practice wall. The blocks are those of apprentice stonemasons who carved these practice shapes to perfect their skills before embarking on more important carvings elsewhere in the Cathedral.
  
• The
  Harvard
  experiment in prayer, described by the character Maitland, was conducted in 2006 by Dr Herbert Benson of the
  Harvard Medical School
  and measured the therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer in cardiac bypass patients.
  
• The Wig
  & Mitre
  and
  Magna Carta
  are real pubs, the former on Steep Street at the top of Lincoln Hill, a short (steep) stroll from the Cathedral, the latter at the top of Steep Street, in the square.
  
• The Stowe
  parish church is commonly known as Stowe Minster and sometimes referred to as the Mother Church of Lincolnshire. Its full name is the Minster Church of St Mary, Stowe in Lindsey. It was built in 1040 on the ruins of a church predating the arrival of the Danes in 870. Bishop Remigius refounded it as an abbey in 1091 and brought monks there from Eynsham in Oxfordshire. However, these monks were well gone by the time of Bishop Hugh, having been returned to Eynsham about five years after they arrived, by Bishop Remigius’ successor.
  
• Hugh
  of Avalon was Bishop of Lincoln. A Frenchman, and procurator of the monastery at Saint-Maximin, Hugh was appointed prior at Witham in Somerset at the request of Henry II in 1179. Hugh was not elected Bishop of Lincoln until 25 May 1186, being consecrated on 21 September that same year; That is to say, a year following the earthquake in 1185 that destroyed much of the cathedral. For the purpose of this fiction, Hugh is placed in the Diocese as Bishop prior to the earthquake. He died in November 1200 and was canonised by Pope Honorius III in 1220. He is the Patron Saint of sick children, sick people, and swans.
  
• Hugh’s primary emblem is a white swan, in reference to the story of the swan
  of Stowe which had a deep and lasting friendship for the Saint, even guarding him while he slept. The swan would follow him about and was his constant companion.
  
• Hugh did stand up
  to King Henry over taxes, among other things.
  
• Henry II had either commissioned the assassination
  of Thomas Becket himself or else a handful of his loyal knights had taken it upon themselves; either way Henry suffered considerable penance, including having to establish the Witham monastery, and even, in 1172, being flogged in public, naked, before the door of the cathedral at Avranches, which was his capital city in Normandy. He did also promise to go on Crusade. There is no evidence to suggest that Hugh of Avalon witnessed Henry’s public flogging at Avranches in 1172.
  
• Pope Lucius
  III was pope from 1181 until his death in November 1185. He spent most of his short pontificate in exile, at monasteries around Rome, and in Verona in northern Italy. History occasionally records that it was Lucius who began the Inquisition, but this in fact began in the reign of Gregory IX in 1234. Lucius began preparations for the Third Crusade to the Holy Land in 1185.
  
• Hugh is the namesake
  of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where a 1920s statue of the saint stands on the stairs of the Howard Piper Library. In his right hand, he holds an effigy of Lincoln Cathedral, and his left hand rests on the head of a swan. Notable former students of St Hugh’s College have included Kate Adie, one of the BBC’s most renowned news reporters, having covered on the ground from the London Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the first Gulf War, the war in Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide. It is not known whether Kate Adie reported from the Brixton Riots. The Burmese Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, is another notable graduate of St Hugh’s College.
  
• News facts recorded
  in Pete’s diary were all real occurrences, with the notable exception that Anwar Sadat did not survive the assassination on 6 October 1981, as is described in this novel; instead, he was definitively shot and killed. As such, of course, he did not receive a second Nobel Peace Prize in September 2001. In addition, persecution of the Baha’is in Iran remains, as does the ban on election of their Spiritual Assemblies; as such there was no election of a new national assembly in Teheran in 1981.
  
• Khalid Ahmed Showky Al-Islambouli arranged and carried out the assassination of the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, during the annual
  6 October 1973 victory parade
  on 6 October 1981. Lieutenant Islambouli was not supposed to participate in the October parade but was chosen by chance to replace another officer. When his section of the parade neared the President’s platform, Islambouli and three others leapt from their truck and ran towards the President, lobbing grenades. Islambouli entered the stands and emptied his assault rifle into Sadat, shouting ‘I have killed the Pharaoh!’ Seven others were killed and twenty-eight were wounded. Islambouli was immediately captured. Over 300 Islamic radicals were indicted in the trial of Islambouli and twenty-three co-conspirators. Islambouli stated that his primary motivation for the assassination was Sadat’s signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel. He was found guilty and executed with five others on 15 April 1982.
  The Iranian government named a street in Tehran after Islambouli in 1981, renaming it to
  Intifada Street
  in 2001 in an effort to improve relations with Egypt. (
  Bobby Sands Street
  also appeared in Teheran in 1981, following his death in
  The Maze
  ; it had been
  Winston Churchill Street
  and is the location of the British embassy.)
  
• Sheikh
  Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as
  The Blind Sheikh
  , is an Egyptian Muslim leader now serving a life sentence at a US federal prison. Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of seditious conspiracy, following the
  1993
  World Trade Center bombings. Abdel-Rahman had issued a fatwa – a scholarly religious opinion (and a term understood more commonly in the West to refer to a death sentence) – against Anwar Sadat, following the signing the Camp David peace accords with Israel.
  
• The
  Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on 17 September 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David. The two framework agreements were signed at the White House and were witnessed by US President Jimmy Carter. The second of these frameworks,
  A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel
  , led directly to the 1979 Israel–Egypt Peace Treaty and resulted in Sadat and Begin sharing the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.
  
• Danny Morrison
  is an Irish author and Republican activist. He variously had roles in writing and publishing on behalf of the IRA and was famously quoted in 1981:
  Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?
  from which came the term ‘Armalite and ballot box strategy’ to describe the dual strategy of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin in the cause of republicanism. Morrison acted as spokesman for Maze hunger striker Bobby Sands, and he is quoted here from Richard English’s book
  Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA
  published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.
  
• The story that weeping can be heard
  from Hugh’s tomb is fictitious.
  
• Simon Wilton Phipps
  was Bishop of Lincoln from 1974 to 1987. He had a successful military career in the Coldstream Guards and fought in World War II, during which he was wounded twice and was subsequently awarded the Military Cross. Following the war, he studied for the priesthood, was appointed Chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was later an industrial chaplain in Coventry, before being appointed Suffragan Bishop of Horsham in 1968. Phipps was known for his close friendship with Princess Margaret, whom he counselled during her separation from Lord Snowdon. He died in 2001;
  The Times
  recorded that Phipps had combined
  gentleness, tranquility, and sweetness of character with deep psychological insight and considerable strength of purpose.
  
• The
  character Loraine refers to in Chapter 12 to Kim Peek, the inspiration for the movie
  Rain Man,
  which was not in fact released until 1988. Kim was generally considered an
  autistic savant
  until a study in 2008 concluded he had
  FG Syndrome
  , a rare genetic disorder. It was also discovered Kim had no corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.