A bell person story, continued
Part Two
When whoever was responsible for finding six ringers had done so, either the finder or the four locally found ringers had failed to figure out who was going to lead the occasion. With the result that there was no one to lead–to organise, to decide what we were going to ring, to make the calls, to keep order. Conducting is a big ugly hairy deal and one of the few things I am not looking forward to as I involuntarily become more skilled and experienced a ringer, is being pressganged into learning to do a little conducting, because they will pressgang you: everybody should be able to conduct a few call changes and a basic method or two and have you ever noticed how many people don’t rush in to take control when the ship’s sinking and the captain’s just been shot? Yes. Exactly.
So everybody just stood around and stared at everybody else, and the locals made vague flapping gestures with their hands.*
So it fell on Boadicea, who had a cough that sounded like the Last Trump. In a voice that was as near to despairing as I’ve ever heard from her she said, What can you ring?
The locals said brightly, call changes.
Call changes are what they sound like. Methods are preordained: you learn a method because a method has an exact, specific, individual blow by individual blow for each bell, pattern. Call changes are dependent on the conductor’s calls: you only move to a new place in the pattern if he or she tells you to. There are common patterns to call, but they still have to be called. This means shouting. This means shouting every few seconds over the shout of several tons of metal.
I can’t call call changes, said Boadicea, coughing.
We ended up ringing a lot of plain courses of the two most basic methods, which in itself doesn’t matter; we’re just a nice lead-in background noise at something like a carol service and nobody’s going to notice that’s the sixth plain course of bob doubles in a row while they’re waiting for the singing to start. But we didn’t ring our plain courses very well. So poor Boadicea was still having to shout, to keep us together and all pointed in the same direction. And she was also beginning to spit fire and smoke and small fanged imps: I recognised the signs, but then I ring a lot, and I know Boadicea. I don’t think these little-village ringers, who probably ring the way they might volunteer to run a stall at the village fete, really think about ringing as ringing. I think it’s something they do for the community. And they don’t know Boadicea.
When she got round to ripping strips off, she ripped one off me too: she’s an equal opportunity savage warrior queen. But I’ve been here before. The other ringers obviously didn’t know what hit them: you could see them bemusedly staring at the blood flowing freely from the sword slashes that had mysteriously appeared on their bodies. I wanted to tell them that if Boadicea really wanted you dead, you’d be dead, but I didn’t.
The ringing was only for half an hour. How much real mayhem can be accomplished in half an hour? . . . Well.
The funny thing is–and this is Boadicea too–on the way home in the car again, she obviously had no clue that she’d left general carnage behind her. She was just exhausted. I haven’t seen her since; she went off to Lancashire or Yorkshire for the holidays, one of those up-north places where people pride themselves on speaking their minds, which is where she’s from, I believe. There are lots of bell towers up north: I wonder if the word goes out, Boadicea’s coming. Lock up the old, the weak, and the easily offended. I hope she’s spent a lot of time wrapped up in a blanket drinking hot toddies.
Three days ago I got back to the cottage to a phone message from the woman who had organised the carol service, and to some degree would have felt responsible for the above debacle. She was inviting me to the usual informal New Year’s Day party that is more or less for everyone who has ever done anything nice for their church in the previous year, which would be me two or three times most years, as a fill-in ringer. She also sounded like she was looking for an excuse not to invite Boadicea. She’s very county, our organizer–let’s call her Felicity**–and it was a very polished performance: some of you will know the posh-Brit manner when they’re apparently being all humble and self-abasing and apologetic when what they really mean is that it’s all your fault. Or in this case, Boadicea’s.
Here was my opportunity to sit back and go ‘mm hmm’ and let someone else say all the things I have often thought about Boadicea. I might have replied, Well, let me tell you about the time. . . . We might have commiserated, but that’s probably a bridge too far: I don’t think I can do recognisable posh commiseration.
And I found in myself a great red tide of righteous fury rising up . . .
. . . in Boadicea’s defense.
I rang Felicity back and said thank you for the kind invitation but that I wouldn’t be coming this year [pause for Last Trump noises to rival Boadicea's] . . . and what had gone wrong at the carol service was merely that Boadicea had been really ill, that there had been no one to conduct, it had therefore fallen to her, and she had been in no condition to perform it.
Did I hear any attitude rearranging occurring on the other end of the phone? Even, conceivably, the faintest brush of embarrassment? Maybe. Maybe not. I am a vulgar, brash American, and I can’t do English county; I can only bellow against injustice, as and when I see it. How dare they run crying to their organiser, complaining about how mean Boadicea had been to them? Didn’t anyone notice she was ill–when she could hardly speak from coughing, and her face was the colour of an old gym sock? Because that part of it certainly hadn’t come through to Felicity. Yes, Boadicea can be a bitch on wheels: sword, whirling wheel blades, gnashing orcs, the lot. And she was, with shiny metal bosses on, that day: a man-eating tiger on wheels, a rogue mastodon riding a tank. I wouldn’t want her at my party either. But she’d also managed to create something somewhat resembling a band of ringers for their carol service, when no one else was going to.
Something like two years ago Boadicea had defended me against some other good ringer having a bad moment. It was at one of the district ‘education days’; I can’t remember what I was supposed to be trying to learn, but I can tell you that being snarled at was not helping. I nearly died of astonishment, however, at Boadicea sticking up for me, when I’d been making exactly the kind of stupid repeated error that winds her up. I told Niall about this later, because I’d told him I was going–because Boadicea had put the fear of rotating hub knives into several of us area beginners and was hauling us all off to the central altar to be tenderised for sacrifice. Er. I mean to learn to ring better. Niall grinned and said, you were one of her chickens. Of course she would protect you.
It amuses me silly to have had Boadicea as one of my chickens, for the space of a phone call.
* * *
* And I went home swearing to learn a few basic call-change series. Well, I’ve learnt one. Now I have to stop coughing myself long enough to start going to bell practises again and ask a ringing master to let me try it out.
** I have the horrible feeling I’ve already named someone Felicity, but if I have, I didn’t write it down on my dramatis personae list
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