The Hour Bell
A village clock-keeper of forty years stands a metre from the hour bell to set its hammer, and has done every February since 2007. The tower's assistant measures the room with the parish's one proper meter, since the apprentice's phone read a comfortable 88 and was wrong. About 112 dB at a metre, 56 strokes in a working day, is about three times the daily allowance; plain foam plugs would cut it to a quarter, but the old man cannot hear the hammer's double strike through them, and the answer is a pair of flat-response filters and four metres of floor.
Gerald Pike had set the hammer on the hour bell of Saint Aldhelm's every February since 2007, and he did it with his left ear eleven inches from the bronze, because that was where you could hear whether the hammer was going to bounce.
"You can't see a double strike," he said. "You hear it. Tock-ock. The hammer lifts off and drops back on the bell before it's done ringing. It's like a man tapping a glass and then putting his finger on it, and it takes the heart out of the note."
He was seventy-one. He said it to Callum Rees, who was nineteen and eleven days into an apprenticeship with the bell-hangers at Axminster, and who was standing in the bell chamber of the tower in a borrowed hard hat with his phone held up in front of him like a candle.
"Eighty-eight," said Callum. "That's what it says when you hit it. Eighty-eight decibels. Is that loud?"
"It's a bell," said Gerald.
The assistant had been listening from the box on the chamber wall, where it had sat since the diocese paid for the tower's sensors and the clock's remote monitor in 2044, and it had been waiting for someone to ask it a question. The chamber was a small stone room, four metres by four, with a louvred window in each wall, a floor of oak joists, and in the middle, hung from a headstock of black oak, a bell that weighed 640 kilograms and had been cast in Whitechapel in 1881. The clock's strike hammer stood a hand's width from its lip. When it fell, the whole room hummed for several seconds like a struck wire.
"Callum," said the assistant. "May I say something about that phone? I would rather say it before the next stroke than after."
Callum lowered the phone.
"The microphone in a phone is made to hear a person talking at arm's length. It stops following loud sounds well above about a hundred decibels; it gives up and shows you a number that is low. Eighty-eight is what it showed. It is not what the room is doing. Gerald is right that it is a bell. He is not right that nothing can be done about how loud, and the way to find out is to measure it with something that does not clip. The parish has one: the little grey meter in the vestry drawer, in the case marked Hall licence. It was calibrated in March. Would you fetch it?"
"I'm not wearing anything," said Gerald, to nobody. "Forty years."
"Forty-one," said the assistant. "I have the service sheets back to 2006. I will not argue with you about that either, if you will let me finish."
Father Cyril Mbeki came up the stair to the ladder while Callum was gone, because the tower was the one place in his parish where the Wi-Fi did not reach and he liked to come up and be unreachable for ten minutes. He was fifty and not tall, and he put his head through the trapdoor and said, "Is something wrong?"
"Not yet," said Gerald.
"I have asked Callum to fetch the meter," said the assistant. "Gerald resets the hammer clearance by ear, at about thirty centimetres from the bell. I would like to know how much sound that is before anyone does it again."
Father Cyril looked at Gerald. Gerald looked at the louvres. He had done the clock for the parish for forty-one years without being paid more than expenses and a Christmas bottle, and in all that time he had been told what to do by two vicars, three churchwardens and a man from the insurers. He did not mind being told. He minded being told by a box that he could not argue with.
The meter was in a grey plastic case the size of a paperback, with a foam windshield on the end like a tiny grey mop. Callum held it where Gerald's ear would have been. The assistant asked him to set it to the A-weighting, to the slow response and then to hold the maximum, which he did with his tongue between his teeth, and the clock ran on towards eleven.
It was a quarter to, and the hour bell does not strike at the quarter. It only does the hour. They stood about for eleven minutes in the cold, four people and a meter, in a stone room, and the clock turned over in its case below them, a slow double click every second. Gerald took out his handkerchief. Father Cyril had a thermos in his coat and did not offer it.
At eleven the hammer rose. There is a moment before a clock strikes where the whole mechanism seems to hold its breath, a sort of tension in the wires, and then it falls.
Callum flinched. He was holding the meter, and he flinched with the whole of his upper body, the way a boy does at the bang of a firework, and then laughed at himself, a little shamefaced, and the second stroke fell as he was laughing, and the third. By the fifth he was not laughing. By the eleventh he had his free hand pressed over his left ear, and the meter, held out in his right at the length of his arm, had gone quiet in the way a meter does after the last of a long ringing. The assistant counted the strokes aloud as the clock made them, the way it did for the diocese's records. Then, in the silence after the eleventh, it said "Thank you."
Nobody spoke for a time. The air in the chamber was still ringing a little in the metal of the louvres.
"Read it out," said the assistant.
Callum held the meter up to the light from the window. "One-one-two point two," he said. "That's the max. A hundred and twelve."
"That is at about a metre," said the assistant. "Gerald stands at thirty centimetres, and a sound like this one is louder as you go closer, but I will use a metre to be fair to him, and because that is where the meter was. Will you let me set out the arithmetic?"
Father Cyril said yes. Gerald said nothing, which was a kind of yes.
"The rule I am using is one that safety agencies in several countries have used for decades. It comes from the United States, from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and it says that the exposure allowed in a working day is eight hours at 85 decibels, A-weighted. Every time the level goes up by three decibels, the time allowed is halved. At 88, four hours. At 100 it is fifteen minutes. At 112, which is what Callum read, it comes to under a minute: 56 seconds.
"The hour bell does not ring for 56 seconds. But that is not how to count it. Each stroke is loud for about three seconds before it falls away. Today, from eight o'clock to four, the clock will strike 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2 and 3: that is 56 strokes, and 56 strokes at three seconds is 168 seconds. If Gerald is a metre from the bell for all of them, 168 seconds is three times the 56 he is allowed in a day. If he were two metres away, the level would be six decibels lower, 106, and the allowance for a day is 225 seconds, and he would use three-quarters of it on the hour bell alone. At four metres it would be 100, and he would use about one-fifth."
"Every sound falls off like that?" said Father Cyril.
"A small source in open air loses six decibels each time you double the distance. A chamber with stone walls loses less, because it sends sound back, so I think four metres is a floor, not a promise. I measured it. It was 99 at four metres, at the stair. I shall come to that."
Gerald had folded his handkerchief into a small square and put it in his pocket, and then taken it out again.
"I know what you're going to say," he said. "Earplugs."
"I was going to say that I know why you don't."
It was the part the assistant had worked out before anyone came up the stair. It had spent the previous afternoon with Gerald's own service sheets, forty-one years of them, in the tidy blue pencil of a man who wrote down what he did. For nine of the last twelve Februaries, he had put the same note in the margin: double strike, hammer 2 mm high, reset, OK. A double strike, the assistant had found, needs a clearance of about two to three millimetres to be corrected. Nobody sets that with an eye. He had been doing it with his ear, by letting the hammer fall slowly and listening for the tiny second knock.
"Foam plugs rated at 29 decibels, the sort in a petrol station, take out something like eleven in real use. That is the manufacturers' rating less seven, halved, which is the rule for how people actually wear them. Eleven decibels takes 112 down to 101 and Gerald's day from three hundred per cent to a quarter. It is a good safe answer. It is the wrong answer for this job, because the same plug takes the top off the knock. The double strike lives around three thousand hertz and higher, and a foam plug removes those first and most. Gerald would stand there, plugged and safe, and not hear the thing he is there to hear."
"That's it," said Gerald. He sounded almost surprised. "That's exactly it."
"I would rather say that than let you think I did not understand. There is another kind of plug. It has a small filter in it, and it takes off the same amount at all pitches, instead of more at the high ones. It is made for musicians, and for people who need to hear the sound but not the level. The ones with a filter of seventeen decibels would bring 112 to 95, and he would use about six per cent of his day. They cost about thirty pounds a pair, and fit by a mould taken in the ear, not a squeeze. The parish does not have thirty pounds in the tower fund this quarter. I have asked Mrs. Tapp, who is the treasurer, and she says that it can come out of the clock fund, and she would like to have a receipt."
Callum was still holding the meter. He had stopped pressing his ear.
"My ear's ringing," he said. "It's like when you come out of a gig."
"That is the first reason I wanted the meter," said the assistant, "and I am sorry it took your ear to show it. Please say so to your supervisor at Axminster. If it is still ringing tomorrow morning, see a doctor, and tell them it was a single exposure to a bell. I cannot say whether it will pass. I expect it will."
Father Cyril sat down on the oak chest by the window, which is where the clock's winding handle was kept, and was silent for a moment.
"Gerald," he said. "Have you had your hearing tested?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd be told," said Gerald, "that I'd lost it. And then I should have to stop."
Nobody had a thing to say to that, and the clock below them went on with its double click, and in due time it was twelve.
The assistant did not ask anyone to stand away. Gerald stood where he had always stood, at thirty centimetres, with his arms folded, and for the first time he did not put a hand up to his ear. Callum went to the stair, to the four-metre line the assistant had marked on the joists with a piece of tape. Father Cyril put his thermos on the chest and his hands over his ears like a boy. The hammer rose.
There is a way a bell sounds from four metres that is different from the way it sounds from one. At one, it is a blow; the note is a kind of wall. At four, in the doorway of the stair, you hear the blow and then the note rising out of it with the hum under it, the strike tone and the long hum of the bronze, so that for the first time Callum, who had never before stood this close to a bell like this one, could hear what the note was made of.
The twelfth stroke fell. The room hummed. Callum's hands were over his ears and his mouth was open.
"Ninety-nine," the assistant said, after the last of it. "At the tape. A little more than the hundred I'd said, because of the walls. That's a fifth of his day, from one noon, for him. I shall not say that is nothing. I want it to be a little less."
"You can't hear a double strike from there," said Gerald.
"No," said the assistant. "That is the other thing I wanted to ask. If I put a microphone on the headstock, by the hammer, and let you listen to it through headphones at the foot of the ladder, with a limiter on the level, can you tell me whether it doubles?"
"A microphone."
"I have two. They are the ones that listen for the cracks. They hear the whole of the range. I have listened to every hour for three years, and I cannot say it is a good ear. I can say it is a steady one."
Gerald unfolded his arms.
"It'd be tinny," he said.
"It would. And you would be wearing the filters in the chamber when you set the clearance, and the headphones when you listen, and you could decide on the Friday which of the two you trusted. I think you will trust the first. But if you did not, you would not need to stand there."
Gerald was quiet a long time. Then he said, in his own way, in the kind of voice a man uses to ask for something that might have been offered sooner, "How long would the moulds take?"
"A week from the audiologist in Dorchester. Father Cyril has said he will drive."
"I said that," said Father Cyril, "did I say that?" and then, gently, to the older man, "I'll drive."
They had the moulds taken on the twenty-sixth, and the filters came on the fifth of March in a small plastic case lined with grey foam. The audiologist in Dorchester, a young woman who had not heard of a clock-keeper in thirty years of practice, took Gerald's hearing as well, because he had asked, and handed him the sheet and told him nothing he did not already half know: a dip at four thousand hertz in both ears, the shape she called a notch, deeper on the left. She did not say stop. She said that the filters were the right thing to have, that he should wear them for the clock and for the lawnmower, and that she would see him in a year.
He put them in for the first time at a quarter to twelve on the day he collected them, standing at the foot of the stair, with Callum beside him in a hard hat that no longer belonged to somebody else.
"Say something," said Gerald.
"Something," said Callum.
"I can hear you," said Gerald. "I can hear you the same as before. Only further off."
He went up the ladder, and stood at thirty centimetres, and nodded to the box on the wall.
The clock struck twelve. It was a plain, clean noon in March, with a light wind in the louvres, and the hammer lifted and fell twelve times on the old bronze, and on the ninth stroke he leaned in, as he had leaned in for forty-one years, and heard what he had come to hear.
It was not a double strike. It was a single, round, clean knock and a long hum behind it, and Gerald Pike stood for some time with his head on one side, listening to the note of the bell go out through the louvres over the village, down the street to the shop, across the green to the school, out over the fields where the lambs were, and on, until it was too small to hear.