School life / Kent, 2023 to 2024: one raised hand, then a great deal of noise
One Raised Hand, and Now the Whole Parish Knows
In Kent, a shy primary pupil volunteered for bell ringing and ended up talking to adults. I wanted that for our daughter, and I wanted it by Easter.
A teacher in Kent asked a class to raise their hands if they wanted to start bell ringing, and one girl put hers up and was chosen. That was the whole recruitment process. I have three children and have spent a decade asking for raised hands, mainly over the dishwasher, and the response rate is nil. Our daughter, the middle one, would not raise her hand for a free pony.
The girl’s mother, interviewed with her on a bell-ringing podcast, admits she was surprised. Before ringing, she says, her daughter would never have spoken to older people. Then she rang a quarter peal with adults, and “she must have been the youngest by sort of 20 years, if not more.” Our daughter’s record for speaking to an adult she is not related to is one word, to a dentist, and the word was “No.”
So I rang the church. Neil Jones, one of the Kent organisers, says some towers run taster sessions for Year 6 through the school next door. Our village has a tower, a school next door and a Year 6. I mentioned this to the ringers with the energy of a woman pitching a franchise. On the first Tuesday our daughter stood in the ringing chamber in her coat and said nothing for fifty minutes. I sat in a pew with a flask and called it progress.
This is normal, apparently. Jen Thomas, another of the organisers, remembers an early group who stood about between turns and “didn’t talk to each other at all”. She had to tell them they were allowed to. A year later, she says, “it was quite difficult to shut them up.” Young ringers she knows once rang a quarter peal in honour of a “deceased strawberry plant” and have made a tradition of carrots. On why, she offers only “it’s better not to know why.” I bought carrots.
It worked. It worked faster than anything I have paid for, including the tutor. By March our daughter was ringing on Sunday mornings and explaining rope sight to a retired man in a fleece. By April she was talking to every adult in the parish, and since she had nothing to say about bells yet, she talked about home.
The flower rota now knows about my husband’s dining room, which he painted in a shade called Burnt Paprika and which she described, accurately, as “like being inside a soup”. The woman who does the coffee knows what I spent on the 11+ practice papers. The churchwarden knows I cried at the nativity, and which year, and why.
The Kent girl says the best part is that “loads of people can hear you”. Ours agrees. I have stopped going to the shop on Sundays.
Sources
- Kent Young Ringers – The Members, 2024-09-11
- Kent Young Ringers – The Organisers, 2024-11-14
- Sunday School Chime the Bells, 2024-12-15
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column