The Sound of That Bell

There are some sounds that do not need an introduction.

The sound of that bell in the middle of the sweetest sleep was one of them.

If you went to a boarding school, you know exactly what I mean.

You could be deep in the most beautiful part of your sleep, somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow, when suddenly:

GBOOOONG!

The bell.

No negotiation.
No snooze button.
No five more minutes.

The day had decided to begin, whether you agreed with it or not.

Our school had its bell ringers, and over the years, they gave us stories that became part of the folklore of boarding school life.

One of the most memorable was Ikehudu.

Ikehudu rang the bell for the devils to wake up.

That was the only reasonable explanation we could find.

One night, or perhaps I should say one morning, Ikehudu rang the waking bell at about 1am.

One o'clock.

1am.

Many of us, still operating somewhere between consciousness and confusion, got up and started making our way out for the morning chores assigned to us.

After all, the bell had spoken.

But something did not feel right.

We had barely slept.

Morning seemed to be taking an unusually long time to arrive.

Then the whispers began.

“Ikehudu rang the bell too early.”

And suddenly everything made sense.

We had not been blessed with an unusually early morning.

We had simply been summoned from our beds by a bell ringer who had apparently lost contact with the clock.

But in all fairness to Ikehudu, and to all the other bell ringers who served before and after him, there was something we could never take away from them.

They were conscientious.

They were dedicated.

Their job was not glamorous.

Nobody wrote poems about the bell ringer.

Nobody stood around discussing how inspiring it was to wake up at 4:30am and walk through the darkness to ring a bell.

But somebody had to do it.

And they did.

Then there was another bell ringer.

This one gave us a different kind of story.

He went out to ring the bell one early morning and saw what he believed was a coffin.

He ran back towards the hostel, shouting hysterically and pointing behind him.

Naturally, we were alarmed.

For a few moments, nobody was quite sure what he had seen.

Eventually, courage gathered itself, and some of us followed him back to investigate.

And there it was.

The coffin.

Except it was not a coffin.

It was a notice board that had somehow been blown out onto the road.

The way it had landed, combined with the tiny amount of light available at that hour, was enough to turn an innocent notice board into something considerably more sinister.

A barely awake brain does not always make good architectural assessments.

And then came the teasing.

There were those who were not having it.

They bared their fangs.

Then came the verdict:

“When you will not sleep, disturbing the lives of others, how will you not see coffin?”

That line probably did more damage than the imaginary coffin ever could.

Looking back, there was something wonderfully ridiculous about those mornings.

The darkness.

The sleepiness.

The confusion.

The bell.

The chores.

The occasional frightening encounter with perfectly innocent notice boards.

But somewhere beneath all that was something else.

Those bell ringers taught us, without intending to, that responsibility does not always arrive with applause.

Someone had to wake up before everyone else.

Someone had to walk into the darkness.

Someone had to ring the bell.

Sometimes at the right time.

Sometimes, apparently, at 1am.

And someone had to keep doing it whether anyone noticed or not.

We laughed at them.

We teased them.

We complained about them.

But the bell still had to be rung.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of growing up.

There are people whose contribution to our lives is measured not by how visible they are, but by what would happen if they stopped doing what they do.

The bell ringer may never be the person everyone remembers.

But when the bell does not ring, everyone notices.

And perhaps that is why, whenever I remember that sound cutting through the middle of the sweetest sleep, I do not only remember the irritation.

I remember the people behind it.

The ones who woke up when the rest of us were sleeping.

The ones who carried a responsibility that was easy to laugh about but necessary to fulfil.

And yes, I remember Ikehudu too.

Because sometimes, even the most conscientious bell ringer needs somebody to remind him that 1am is not morning.

Nugget
Some of the most irritating parts of our lives are made possible by the unglamorous, dedicated work of someone we rarely notice.