Julia Flynn Siler

My first Saturday in Oxford, I walk down the Banbury Road towards St. Giles Church. My small roller bag click clacks over the broken sidewalk.

Bells peal in a melodic succession:123456…654321. At first, the ringing seems to be coming from a dated glass and concrete building – a structure, I learned, that some locals consider the ugliest building in Oxford. But the resonant ringing of the bells is coming from nearby St. Giles and bouncing off the walls of the 1960s-era engineering building. I feel auditory whiplash.

 

Shortly before arriving here, I received an email from an American visiting scholar who’d lived in our house a year earlier. One of her favorite things had been “walking the bells” on Sunday mornings through University Park. Before leaving home, I imagined myself doing that once I arrived, with the bells from different chapels enveloping me in a kind of a three-dimensional auditory puzzle.

On this icy January morning, the park is still wearing its winter grey. Bicyclists zip past me in green, fluorescent vests. Unexpectedly, I find myself walking amidst bells in this urban setting, the bells from the medieval church rising above the sounds of the buses and cars whizzing past on the A4165. Why are bells ringing on a Saturday? And when did I last hear bells ringing in America?

St. Giles’s largest bell – a tenor in F# dating back to the year 1632 – weighs nearly as much as a grand piano or an adult horse. The church rang this largest bell, along with seven others in higher strike notes, for the funerals of the many young men from Oxford slaughtered on the Somme or Gallipoli or on November 11, 1918, to mark the end of the war.

 

 

John Betjeman, who would become one of Britain’s Poet Laureates – wrote in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, about his experience of recovering from an operation in a North Oxford nursing home and hearing the bells from his bed.

In “Before the Anesthetic, or a Real Fright,” he wrote a poem whose rhythm seemed to echo that of the bell sequence from St. Giles’s tower: The opening lines are:

 

 Intolerably sad, profound

 St Giles’s bells are ringing round

 

The sound of the bells unsettles me. At home, across the Atlantic, the new administration is issuing a head-spinning array of executive orders and have frozen federal grants and loans.  I miss the simple sound of the bell in my small parish church in Northern California, usually run after funerals – one sounding for each year of life. As much as I fear what is happening at home, I’m comforted by Oxford’s traditions.

St. Giles’s bells are rung twice a day on Sundays to summon parishioners to services, and once on Thursday evenings for practice. Bell ringers from the parish pull ropes attached to the rim of a wheel in clockwise, and then counterclockwise position. They’ve been doing this for nearly 400 years. I struggle to get my mind around that continuity amidst the smashing of norms taking place in my home country.

I walk past the church towards the train station. The church bells fade against the traffic. Soon, all I can hear is the click clack of my roller bag.

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Julia Flynn Siler is a visiting scholar with the Oxford Next Horizons Program this spring, working with the Oxford Centre for Life Writing.