Ships of Heaven by Christopher Somerville

Author:Christopher Somerville
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473527140
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Harry Potter is a modern-day saint. He may not actually exist, but then neither does Fiddler’s Green. Young pilgrims flock to his various shrines. Many believe fervently in him. He can do magic, if not miracles, and he is a money-spinner for anywhere with a claim on his persona.

Gloucester Cathedral has been the setting for many of Potter’s most dramatic appearances on earth. In the year 2000, at the behest of film-makers, the fourteenth-century cloisters were magically morphed into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They are a location scout’s dream with their long, dimly lit perspectives where hundreds of pillars rise like witchy tree trunks to sprout into a maze of fan vaulting, the first of its kind in the world, forming an intricate, interlocking forest canopy of mellow gold stone. When Warner Bros came to Gloucester Cathedral to shoot three of the films, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and later Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, they hid the electric light switches, the inscribed tombstones in the floor, and whole flights of stone steps. In the stained-glass windows the saints lost their haloes, and Adam and Eve gained a few more clothes. Potter and his chums dodged angry trolls, hid in the loo and sought the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets. And a generation of youngsters pestered their parents to take them to church – à la Hogwarts.

I enter the cloisters, and it’s the liveliest part of the great stone building, full of colour and chatter and movement. Dozens of children on their half-term break are down on their knees on either side of a long strip of paper, so long that it runs the full length of the west cloister. Designed by architectural artist Amy Jane Adams, this ‘colouring-in carpet’ is printed with a pattern of fan vaulting, and the kids are embellishing it, some with wax crayons and broad expressionist scribbles, others absorbed in filling every tiny nook and cranny of the delicate lacework with felt-tip pens. Some have added wizards in pointy hats, flights of bats, round-faced boys with round spectacles. Potter is definitely on these young minds. Every so often, says a woman kneeling with a fistful of crayons, her daughter has been glancing up to check the fan vaulting on high for magical owls bearing letters, or looking about a little nervously for bloody messages appearing on the walls. ‘Harry Potter’s real to them,’ she says, indicating the long double line of children. And is this a sort of pilgrimage to him? ‘Well, don’t know if I’d go that far …’ she ponders, ‘but yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it?’

Down among the bones I go, into the crypt beneath the cathedral. When the Norman monks began their abbey church under Abbot Serlo shortly after the Conquest, they grounded it on a long-vanished Anglo-Saxon monastery that had been founded by King Osric in about AD 670 and run by his sister (or maybe great-aunt), Abbess Kyneburga.

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