AND so the great day dawns. For years, a parcel of steel and plastic thrust skyward over the town, but now, to change the metaphor, a living stone has shed its chrysalis to soar upwards, giddy pinnacles and all.
 It was worth the long wait. When we agreed to put a tower on the cathedral, we were not expecting this, the pale loveliness of it, the completeness, the huge flushwork “E” for Edmund catching the sun. And now for its consecration, even if the carved Clipsham, Doulting, and Barnack stone and the knapped flint declare their timeless holiness. 

 It is a hot July morning, and the marquees are festival white. Women hide under vast hats. Mayors clank their chains. The Prince and his little Duchess are met with a fanfare. A man selling tenpenny flags for a pound is sent on his way.

A band plays oompah in the Athenaeum porch to enormous crowds. Brad Pitt in a policeman’s helmet stops me at the west door of the cathedral. What is in my case? “My robes.” A likely story. He opens it and fumbles around, then thanks me.

 We process in to:

Many a blow and biting
sculpture
Fashioned well those stones
elect,
In their places now compacted
By the heavenly Architect,
Who therewith hath willed for ever
That his palace should be
decked.

 And I think of Habakkuk standing on a tower to see what God wanted him to do — it was “Write the vision.” This was very difficult, although every now and then a writer manages it.

 We sing Te Deum to Britten, and “God is gone up with a triumphant shout” to Finzi. I can see nothing from the lay canons’ stalls except other lay canons. Somewhere below us is an ocean of sound, remote, coming and going like distant tides in a conch shell. As I process out, my bands fall off on to the road. I snatch them up and tuck them back in. Only a thousand people notice.

 By now, it is blazing hot, and the hog roast will be done to a turn. I imagine Edmund, crowned, they say, on the hill above Wormingford on a cold Christmas Day, aged 15, and murdered at Hoxne, aged 30; and of the centuries of pilgrims come to see him. For many, he would have been the only doctor for their illnesses. Would a visit make them better?

His shrine would have been a milling Out-patients, as well as a delightful destination.

 It was there that the barons drew up Magna Carta; it was there that they tipped out his bones. Well, little King of the Angles, look how you have come home! How once again you tower over us!

 Mrs Goff, landlady of the Angel, comes to talk to me about old times, when her hotel was a literary venue. We stand in the Square, dodging enormous hats. The police pen us in with smooth hurdles. “Back! Back!” Only politely. Over there, on the pavement, we see free men and women, friends who can go to the Angel bar, who can do what they like; but we are prisoners for the Prince’s sake. Hands stretch out to him, as once they did for saints.

 Released without a stain on our characters, we head for the Great Churchyard where our car burns. But, alas, we are lost, lost among the St Edmundsbury dead. Gordon thinks he, too, will die. “Which way to the secret car park?” “Don’t ask me,” replies the youthful policeman, adding something like, “I am a stranger within thy gates,” meaning, we suppose, that he has been drafted in from Ipswich.