Roads to Joy

There are two bells in the New Galloway Town Hall tower: the larger one is bonged either by a hammer engaged with the clock mechanism, or by its pendulous clapper when the stout bell-ringing rope is pulled; the smaller one, with a higher tone, which rings only when its own rope is pulled. I know this because I was up there this past weekend helping to clear out generations of birds’ nests.

The whole hall is being renovated, and no nook or cranny is being left untouched. As the professionals near the end of their work, the volunteer crews have arrived to help clear and clean the place, and that’s where we came in. Of all the places that I wanted to see, in our adopted village, the tower was probably top of the list, so my excitement began to fizz when I realised that I could be being called to help, up the ranks of ladders.

It promised to be dusty, dirty, bent-over scooping work clearing out the endless piles of twigs and straw that greeted us over two levels. However many bird-hours were spent bringing in the nest materials, we were to dispatch as much as possible within the volunteer hour. But we did manage to retrieve some twenty or more heavy-duty plastic bags (recycled from a builder’s work gear) to fill and empty their detritus contents into the skip nearby.

And the tower is clear; professional workmen will re-install proper louvres and perhaps some chicken netting to prevent any further bird encroachment into the tower. The clocksmith will attend to the mechanism so that the time is visible from each point of the compass. When it strikes the hour of its own accord, the village will know that the work in the hall is almost done.

As a treat, before we descended back down to the main hall and then ground levels, we listened to the two tones from the bells. Talk about sonority: when you’re right beside a great bell and it’s rung, the vibrations thrill through your whole body, filling the belfry space. I did feel a kind of reciprocity, a ripple of a shared experience, after the hard work up and down the ladders, and it’s true that joy has been on hold for the past fortnight, the emotional doors barricaded against unwarranted intrusion by life and the lightness of being.

But as John Donne (1572-1631) wrote, in a prose piece and not a poem:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Those words feel particularly poignant, written as they were a fortnight after our beloved cousin disappeared in the muskeg, rock-faced wilds of northern Ontario, and we are all bereft, but now truly realising that a life has been lost from our fellowship.

Yesterday, 27th November, nearly four months on from his disappearance, a memorial service helped to reinforce that sense of togetherness, as we celebrated our cousin’s life, lived to the full.