The bells at St Brigid’s have been rung by the same band since before I was born. For forty-one of those years the captain was Arthur Pennock, who kept time by tapping his heel on a floorboard he had worn pale in one place, and who could hear a fault in the striking from the bottom of the stairs.
He stood down in September, after the harvest supper, with his coat already buttoned.
“I’m not ill,” he said, when we asked. “I’m slow. A slow captain is worse than no captain at all.”
That left eight of us in the tower and one argument, and the argument was between Nell Ferrers and me. It had been going since we were fourteen, when we were both given a rope on a Saturday morning and both told to keep quiet. In the years since it had been about who counted the changes, who called the bobs, who noticed first that the fourth bell had gone heavy on its bearing, who taught the two new learners to set their bells without dropping them. Never about anything that mattered. That is not quite true. It was about everything that mattered to us, which is why it went on so long.
Arthur would not say who should follow him. The vicar, who had a cold that autumn and no patience for vestry politics, said the band should vote.
“Eight of you,” she said. “Four each. Then the two of you can argue about who breaks the tie.”
So we had six weeks to prepare, because the vicar’s daughter was marrying a man from Colchester in the last week of October and wanted the bells rung as she came out of the church. A wedding is not a practice night. Strangers stand in the churchyard and listen, and if the striking is ragged they do not know why, but they know it is wrong.
Nell and I practised like two people trying to win something.
Which we were. On Wednesdays we both arrived at half past six for a seven o’clock practice and both pretended we had come early to grease the bearings. She cleaned the rope guides with a rag and a tin of graphite. I oiled the clappers. We did not speak. Once, in the middle of September, we reached for the same tin at the same moment and she took her hand away as if it were hot.
The trouble was that the wedding touch needed somebody calling, and both of us could call it, and neither of us would follow the other. The first Sunday we tried, the whole thing came apart at the third lead. The treble ran up when it should have run down, the tenor was half a beat behind for six rows, and Arthur sat on the bench by the window with his stick across his knees and said nothing at all until we had set the bells.
Then he said, “That was two bands ringing at once. Very impressive. Never heard it done before.”
Nell went red from the collar up. I said something to the sixth ringer about his rope being too long, which was a lie, and she heard the lie.
“It’s not the rope,” she said. “It’s you. You will not be led.”
“And you will not follow.”
“I’ll follow anybody who is right.”
“Then we’re agreed,” I said. “Neither of us is.”
She looked at me for a moment with her coat half on, and her jaw moved as though she were chewing a word. I thought she was going to say something that would settle it. What she said was, “I have to be at work at eight,” and she went down the stairs.
The vote was on the last Wednesday in October, in the vestry, with a tea urn and a plate of flapjack that Arthur’s wife sent every year and that nobody had the heart to tell her was dry. The vicar handed out slips of paper. We wrote. She counted them twice, then a third time, then put them down.
“Four each,” she said. “The band is tied.”
Nobody spoke. The tea urn ticked.
Then Arthur’s wife, who had come to drive him home and stayed for the flapjack, said, “You haven’t counted theirs.”
The vicar looked at the two remaining slips, which were in the saucer by the milk jug. She unfolded them and read them out, because she was that sort of woman.
The first said: Nell Ferrers.
The second said: Tom Ashdown.
Both in our own handwriting. I had voted for her at ten past seven and spent the rest of the meeting deciding how to lose gracefully. She had voted for me and, from the colour of her, had spent the same hour doing the same arithmetic.
Arthur laughed, one short bark, and then pretended he had coughed.
We ring on Wednesdays and Sundays and for weddings, and Nell is captain now. She calls from the fifth, because she says you cannot call properly with the tenor in your hands, and she is right, though I have never told her so. I keep the tower: the bearings, the ropes, the logbook, the letters to the insurers about the west louvre, which leaks. Arthur says this is the older job and I should not let her forget it.
On the last Saturday in October we rang for the vicar’s daughter, and it went well. Not perfectly, because the seventh was slightly late all the way through and nobody could fix it, and afterwards Nell stood at the foot of the ladder with her hands still white from the rope.
“The seventh,” she said.
“The seventh,” I said. “I’ll look at it tomorrow.”
“You’ll look at it tonight. I’ll bring the ladder.”
She did. We spent an hour in the bell chamber with a torch, and then we went to the pub, and the pub was full because of the wedding, so we stood out in the yard with our pints because there was nowhere to sit.
“We should have done this years ago,” she said.
“Argued in a yard?”
“Stopped arguing.” She drank. “You know what I thought, that first Saturday? When we were fourteen?”
“What?”
“That they’d put me on the treble and you on the tenor and we’d never have to speak.”
I laughed. “They put us on the same rope.”
“Yes,” she said. “That was the trouble.”
