More Bell Follies
I think I was too blasted on Friday to tell you that Vicky had come in to tower practice breathing a certain amount of ladylike British fire and smoke, and that she nailed Niall and me more or less on sight because the three of us are probably the three biggest saps . . . I mean, the three New Arcadia ringers most likely to be willing to ring an extra service to help out a local tower. Niall and Vicky are certainly the top two, and I think I may be finding myself in the third position by virtue* of not getting out of the way fast enough often enough. This is undoubtedly how I have found myself the point and reconnaissance person for the monthly Old Eden bell action.
There’s now another tower we appear to have been awarded semi-responsibility for. Arrrgh. I think we should organise a press gang and chain a few locals in their own towers, and keep them there on bread and water till they can ring plain bob doubles. We will supply method books. Even then they will only be let out wearing welded ankle bracelets that become very, very painful every practise night for an hour and a half, unless they’re within the neutralising field surrounding the ringing chamber of their home tower.
Meanwhile we’re now also helping keep Madhatterington’s bells rung. But the situation at Madhatterington is more bizarre than at Old Eden. Old Eden is just the sad but common tale of local ringer attrition. Madhatterington until recently only had three bells. You can ring changes on three bells, but you can’t ring very many of them. Hot eager change ringers are going to want more than three bells. So the valiant folk of Madhatterington got together and raised enough money to install two more bells. You can ring doubles on five bells; doubles counts as real method ringing.**
This is a lot of money, a lot of organising, a lot of fuss, getting two additional bells wedged into your bell tower. A lot.
Two more salient points about Madhatterington. First: they have no ringers.
No. Ringers.
They what? They’ve gone to all this mega-trouble to have enough bells to ring AND THEY HAVE NO RINGERS? I have this little fantasy that getting those extra bells put into their tower was some kind of extreme dare situation. It should have included training a band. Given how long stuff like installation of bells takes, if they’d started learning on other people’s bells the minute they put up their first stall at the village fete to raise money for two new bells, they’d’ve been ringing Stedman Doubles*** by the time they had their own bells to ring it on. If they’d only started learning when they had the money and had begun negotiating for a place in the queue with the only remaining bell foundry in England, they’d still have been ringing plain bob doubles† by the time the new bells were hanging in their tower. But these extreme-dare people just don’t see the big picture.
The second salient point is: the half of the village not involved in raising money for more bells . . . hates bells. Which certainly opens up the possibilities of context about how the extreme-dare situation may have arisen.
However we got there, nonetheless we have got there. We have a newly-five-bell tower with nobody to ring it. Us ringers really dislike ringable bells not being rung. Aside from the sheer thundering waste, unrung bells degenerate toward entropy a good deal faster than other bits of this universe. If you have ringable bells, you have to keep ringing them. Furthermore, in this particular case, there’s all that common-law we’ve-been-here-longer-than-you-have-if-not-quite-time-immemorial†† thing which is any bell tower’s first defense when some spoilt urban pillocks buy a quaint country cottage and discover that there are bells in that quaint church tower and they ring (quaintly) every Sunday morning. If Madhatterington’s bells are going to keep ringing, we really need to keep them ringing, or the antis will close them down for good.
So Vicky came billowing in Friday evening to say that one of our less foresightful local tower captains had rung up about half an hour ago to say oh-by-the-way Madhatterington needed a band to ring Sunday evening, she was on her way out of town, and could Vicky deal with it? So Vicky was looking for victims and I didn’t get out of the way fast enough.
Niall and Vicky and I went together.††† And after all the flapdoodle there were seven of us for five bells. But what five bells. We were all vying for the opportunity to sit out. These bells make Old Eden’s bells—which I have told you are possessed by demons in cold weather—look positively benign. I have no idea which are the two new ones, but they have already been fully and exhaustively corrupted by their evil fellows. But before you even get to the question of bell affability. . . . In the first place the ringing chamber is one of these ‘hey, it’s a cupboard, we can get some bells in here’ cases. The trap door in the floor is not that unusual—we climb through a trap door at New Arcadia—but this one is so badly situated there are two of them and they still try to take your head off. There’s an interesting hole in the floor near the fourth bell which keeps trying to grab your foot if you’re ringing the four, and to get to the belfry you have to go through the door into the organ loft—oh yes, we’re right off the organ loft—turn 180° and back through a door whose frame shares an upright with the door you just went through—and up the ladder-stairs. About that organ loft: yes, we’re right off it. But remember the trap door(s)? You have to close them again and stand on them to ring the one and the two, which means that latecomers can’t get in. The usual system for a service ring is that you ring up to the point that the organ starts playing. This means that the organist has to be able to get into the organ loft. And this means, since the only access to the organ loft is through the ringing chamber that you have to keep stopping and listening for frantic banging on the floor under the one and two’s feet, which is the organist trying to get in.
And then we come to the bells themselves. The three, which I attempted unsuccessfully to cling to, is not actually too bad, as evil bells go, and Niall says the five isn’t too murderous either, so I may make a dive for that one next time, since there will certainly be a next time, between Vicky’s management abilities, my own weak, sentimental feeling that bells should be rung, and the fact that robust rumour of the temperament of Madhatterington’s bells is spreading fast which means there are going to be more people out of town the next time they want ringing. Bells one and two demonstrably have little slitty red eyes and long pointy tails. I had for a moment thought that I was going to manage to sit out a touch when the woman on the one stopped suddenly and said in a high, trembling voice that the bell was bouncing around and someone else was going to have to ring it, whereupon a series of large dazzling car-headlamp eyes—Vicky, Niall and Wild Robert’s—turned on me, the bunny rabbit crouching in the long grass. Even Vicky had had trouble with the one, and Vicky does not trouble easily.
There are all kinds of technical weirdnesses that may come up with bells: one of them is the business of the weight of the rope against the weight of the bell. A light bell with a long ‘draught’ may have a heavy-enough-in-proportion rope that it will not only ring a complete stroke by itself but hit the stay when it rolls back up on its frame. This is not good, and it’s tricky to handle—it’s particularly tricky to handle accurately, like if perhaps you’re trying to keep your place in a method. Madhatterington’s treble is quite light and all the ropes are heavy, dank and stiff with the weather, which means that the old joke about ‘pushing’ your bell up is almost true . . . which is not actually something you want thank you very much.
No one died. And Vicky complimented me afterward. And hey, it’s given me a blog entry.
* * *
* Or vice
** You still want more bells. You can’t start getting really interesting with your method possibilities till you have seven or eight. I think I’m right in saying however that six bell towers are the commonest in the UK, which is the global Change Ringing Central.
*** Hard
† Less hard. Plain bob doubles only looks easy when you can ring Stedman. Approached from the other end it is the flaming pit, and it is going to destroy you.
†† I am failing to look this up effectively on google
††† The Three Musketeers. Not. I fancy being Milady, only getting away with it. Hey, you guys who are my age, remember reading books like this and thinking despairingly that the only powerful women are always bad? There are lots of these books, of course, but the three mucks hit me particularly hard. It bookends in my mind with The Count of Monte Cristo, where poor old Mercedes is damned for having married someone so she could go on living, and the only good woman is a teenage slave.
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