Emily Clarke

1,260 changes

I can ring Plain Bob Doubles

Fifteen months of Tuesday evenings in a flint tower in the Chilterns to ring a forty-five minute sequence I could barely hear.

A ringer pulling a bell rope with a striped woollen sally in a small church ringing chamber, other ringers standing round the circle.

Change ringing is not music and you should be careful about saying it is, because you will be corrected, politely, at length, by somebody who has been waiting years for the opportunity.

It is a sequence. Five working bells give you a hundred and twenty possible orders, and a method is a rule for moving through them so that every bell changes place with a neighbour each row and no order repeats. Plain Bob Doubles is the first method most people learn. You memorise the path your bell takes, which is drawn as a line on a page, and then you ring that line while five other people ring theirs.

Fifteen months

You do not touch a method for the first six of them. You learn handling.

A church bell is not a hand bell. The one I ring weighs a little over half a ton and it is above you, turning through a full circle, and the rope is attached to a wheel. You are not pulling it round. It wants to go round. What you are doing is checking it, twice a revolution, at the handstroke and the backstroke, so that it arrives when it is meant to. The whole skill is restraint, and the way ringers get badly hurt is by holding on.

Ruth is seventy-eight and has rung in that tower since 1971 and taught me all of it, mostly by standing behind me and saying “no” in a very level voice.

A quarter peal is 1,260 changes. It takes about forty-five minutes. You do not stop, you do not speak, and if any one of the six of you loses the line the whole thing is lost and everybody is extremely gracious about it for the rest of the evening.

We got ours on a Tuesday in April at the second attempt.

The ringing chamber sits directly beneath the bells, and there is a floor and a sound-proofed ceiling between, so from where we stand it is muffled and flat and slightly late. The village hears it properly. The six people producing it are the six people least able to hear what they have made, which I did not know before I started and have thought about every week since.