The Bell Ringers

Part One · The Sally

Hana first heard the bells properly on a drizzly Tuesday evening in March, standing under the bus shelter opposite the old hall in Wellmere. All six of them came tumbling out of the belfry one after another like apples rolling off a table. She had heard them her whole life, of course, every Sunday morning and at every wedding and civic ceremony, but she had never actually listened, and now that she listened she noticed that the sequence kept shifting. The same six notes went round and round. Yet no two rounds sounded quite the same, as though the bells were quietly rearranging themselves in a queue while nobody was looking. Her bus arrived and departed without her. She stayed until the sound stopped, and then she crossed the road and read the laminated notice pinned beside the tower door, which said that learners were welcome on Thursday evenings and that no musical experience whatsoever was required.

The tower captain was Mrs. Penrose, who was seventy-one, wore a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, and climbed the forty-two stone steps to the ringing room considerably faster than Hana did. The ringing room was a square chamber halfway up the tower, with whitewashed walls, an aroma of dust and ancient hemp, and painted boards recording celebrated performances from a century ago. Six ropes hung down through holes in the ceiling, and each one had a thick woolly grip woven into it a little above head height, striped red, white and blue, which Mrs. Penrose called the sally. Above the ceiling, she explained, were the bells themselves, and the heaviest of them, the tenor, weighed approximately as much as a small car. Hana asked how anybody could possibly swing a car with a rope. Mrs. Penrose smiled like a person who had been waiting a long time for precisely that question.

You did not swing it, she said; you persuaded it. Before ringing began, each bell was raised until it rested mouth upward, balanced on its wheel, and every pull of the rope sent it swinging a complete circle in one direction and then a complete circle back again, with the clapper striking once on each revolution. One stroke was the handstroke, when the ringer caught the sally, and the other was the backstroke, when she held the tail end of the rope. A heavy bell could never be hurried, only timed, and a ringer who hauled with all her strength would simply arrive at the wrong moment and spoil the entire row. The band was ringing in September for the hall's one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Mrs. Penrose added, and at present they had five ringers for six bells. Hana wanted, quite suddenly and very badly, to be the sixth, and then she took hold of the sally for the first time, and it leapt upward out of her hands like something alive.

For six weeks she learned to handle the second bell with its clapper tied, so that it swung in perfect silence and nobody in Wellmere had to suffer while she practiced. Mrs. Penrose stood behind her with her own hands hovering over Hana's, ready to catch the rope whenever it misbehaved, which at first was constantly. The sally came down too early, or too late, or at an awkward angle, and twice it brushed the top of her head on its way past like an enormous striped caterpillar. Gradually, though, the movements settled into her arms. By the end of April she could ring the bell up and down by herself, catching the sally cleanly and letting the tail end slide through her fingers, and it felt rather like steering a pony that had finally consented to cooperate. Then the clapper was untied, and Hana discovered that handling a bell and ringing one were not remotely the same thing.

The difficulty was hearing. When the six bells rang rounds, traveling down the scale from the treble to the tenor in the same order every time, Hana could not distinguish her own note from the others, so she pulled whenever the rope in front of her moved. Roughly half the time her bell struck at precisely the same instant as the treble. The result was a clash like two saucepans colliding in midair. The other ringers were Mr. Lund, a postman who rang the tenor, a university student called Priya, and two retired brothers who completed each other's sentences. Every one of them was patient and kind about it, which somehow made everything worse. Mrs. Penrose said that ringers called this clipping and that every beginner in history had done it. Hana went home, lay on her bed, and stared at the ceiling, listening to two saucepans collide, over and over, for most of the evening.

Part Two · Six Glasses

Rounds were only the beginning, because the band intended to ring a method called Plain Hunt for the anniversary, and in Plain Hunt the sequence altered with every single row. Hana decided that if she could not hear the pattern, she would memorize it the way she memorized vocabulary lists, by heart. She transcribed the rows from a library book onto squared paper, six numbers to a line, and quizzed herself on the bus, at breakfast and in the bath, until she could recite the whole sequence with her eyes closed. On Thursday she climbed the forty-two steps feeling almost optimistic. The band started in rounds, Mrs. Penrose called the change, and Hana began reciting the numbers silently, one row at a time, watching the ropes and attempting to match each number to a moving sally.

By the third row she had lost her place entirely. The numbers in her head were marching steadily forward while the bells overhead seemed to be pursuing some entirely separate arrangement, and when she tried to catch up she pulled too early and clipped the bell in front. Then, attempting to correct it, she pulled too late and left a hole in the row like a missing tooth. The other ringers faltered around her. Within a minute the whole pattern had disintegrated into a jangle, so Mrs. Penrose called for the bells to stand, and one after another they settled at the balance and went quiet. In the silence Hana could hear pigeons shuffling on the wooden louvers above them. Nobody said anything unkind, and Mr. Lund offered her a mint, which she accepted, because refusing it would have required speech, and she did not trust her voice not to wobble.

On the way down the spiral staircase Mrs. Penrose asked what she had been doing up there, and Hana confessed about the squared paper, the bus and the bath. Mrs. Penrose said that the paper was perfectly accurate and that it was not the problem; the problem was that Hana had been ringing with her eyes and her memory, and the bells did not reside in either of those places. Experienced ringers, she explained, did not calculate six numbers at once, but listened for the particular bell they were following, and pulled after it, and in every row they knew exactly which bell that would be. Hana asked how anybody could possibly hear one bell inside six. Mrs. Penrose admitted that she could not really explain it, only that it happened eventually, and that some people needed an entire year. The anniversary was eleven weeks away.

That night Hana arranged six mismatched drinking glasses in a row on the kitchen table, filled them with varying quantities of water, and tapped each one with a teaspoon. Her father, who had played the trumpet dreadfully in school and remained unaccountably proud of it, helped her tune them by ear, pouring and sipping and pouring again. In the end they produced a passable scale from a crystalline ping down to a mournful hum. Then she took her squared paper and played Plain Hunt on the glasses, slowly, one row at a time, while her father kept the tempo by drumming his fingers on the table. Something remarkable happened around the fourth row. She could hear the second glass, her glass, traveling through the pattern, and it never jumped, not once, but stepped one place at a time, like somebody walking politely along a queue.

That was the principle concealed inside all the numbers, and nobody had needed to explain it, because she had detected it with her own ears. In change ringing a bell could move only one place between rows, never more, because a massive bell revolving full circle could not be accelerated or delayed any further than that. So Hana's bell would only ever exchange places with a neighbor, and the bell she followed would invariably be one of two or three candidates. She did not need to memorize six numbers; she needed to hear a single note, and then its successor. She rehearsed Plain Hunt on the glasses every evening for a week, then blindfolded, then while her father introduced deliberate mistakes, and she detected every one of them and brandished the teaspoon at him triumphantly.

Part Three · The Anniversary

On Thursday she did not recite anything at all. She stood at the second rope with her hands on the sally, and instead of scrutinizing the ropes ahead of her she listened for the treble, which she would follow at the beginning, and then for whichever bell came next, exactly as the glasses had taught her. At first it was like trying to identify a single voice across a crowded playground. Then, somewhere in the second lead, she heard her own bell strike, crisp and distinct, precisely in its place, and the next one too, and the row closed up behind it without a gap. She stopped thinking about her arms entirely, because they seemed to know their business now that her ears were in command. When Mrs. Penrose called for them to stand, the bells settled one by one, and Priya, at the next rope, gave her a discreet thumbs up without turning round.

The anniversary fell on the last Saturday in September, a golden, blustery afternoon with bunting strung across the square and a brass band tuning up beside the hall steps. Hana climbed the forty-two stone steps behind Mrs. Penrose, with the sally striped red, white and blue waiting for her above the second rope, and the walls of the ringing room seemed to vibrate faintly with collective nerves. Through the narrow arched window she could see the bus shelter, and her mother and father standing in it, and her father holding something wrapped in a tea towel that she suspected was a glass. The band raised the bells, which took several minutes and made the entire tower groan and murmur. Then Mrs. Penrose looked round the circle of ringers, one face at a time, and called out that the treble was going, and the treble went.

They rang rounds first, steady as a metronome, and then Plain Hunt, over and over, the order shifting every row like water finding its level. Hana's bell traveled down through the pattern to the back, and turned, and traveled up to the front again, one place at a time, and she heard every step it took without once losing it among its companions. She did not clip a single time. Halfway through she realized that she was smiling, that her forearms were aching, and that she did not care in the slightest about either. When they finally returned to rounds and stood the bells, the square below erupted into applause, which was not at all customary, Mrs. Penrose remarked, but was nevertheless very pleasant to hear. Mr. Lund produced an entire bag of mints for the band, and Hana took two, and discovered that this time she could speak perfectly well.

Afterwards, in the square, her mother said that she had stood in the bus shelter the whole time with her eyes closed, and that she had been able to follow Hana's bell, traveling through all the others, from the beginning to the end. Hana did not believe her, and then decided that she would. Her father unwrapped the tea towel and revealed the second glass from the kitchen, which he had carried down the hill for luck. He tapped it with his car key, and it produced a small, pure, lingering note right in the middle of the celebrations. Mrs. Penrose asked whether Hana would return on Thursday, since the band was considering learning something considerably more intricate before Christmas. Hana said yes before she had entirely finished asking, and on the walk home she was already calculating how many glasses the kitchen table could possibly hold.