Three strokes for a man, two for a woman, then one for every year they lived. I have counted it my whole life. On the ninth of April it rang three, and then it rang forty one, and I am forty one.
Nobody under fifty knows what the passing bell is any more and I only know because of my grandmother.
She would stop. That is my first memory of it. We would be doing something in the garden and the tenor would go, one slow stroke, the deep one, and she would put down whatever was in her hand and stand still and her mouth would move.
She was counting.
The passing bell, or the death knell, or the tellers depending on how old the person telling you is, works like this. When somebody in the parish dies, the sexton rings the tenor bell. Three strokes for a man. Two for a woman. Then a pause long enough that you know the pause is deliberate, and then one slow stroke for every year of their life.
So you are in a field a mile off, and you hear three, and then you hear seventy nine, and you know. You know before the phone goes, before anybody walks up the lane to tell you. You stop, and you take your hat off if you are wearing one, and you go back to work knowing who is dead.
Nine tailors make a man is the old joke, and it is not a joke about tailors, it is about tellers. Nine strokes for a man in some parishes, six for a woman, three for a child.
Ours is three, two, and one for a child, and then the years.
We still do it. That is the part people find hard to believe.
There are about four hundred of us in this parish and the church is thirteenth century and it is in a benefice with three others, so we get a service twice a month. But the bell is not the vicar's business, it is the sexton's, and our sexton is a man called Robert who is in his seventies and who took it on from his father.
He does it within a day of a death, once the family have said it is all right.
You are supposed to be told beforehand out of courtesy so that people are not frightened by it, and mostly people are told, but there is not really a mechanism, it is a village, somebody tells somebody in the shop.
I have counted it maybe thirty times in my life.
Ninety one for old Mrs Vane. Sixty six for a man I did not know who had moved into the barn conversion. Fourteen, once, in 2003, and the whole village heard those fourteen and the whole village stopped, and I will not say any more about that one.
On the ninth of April I was in my garden putting in beans.
It was about six in the evening and it was that clear cold light you get in April. My wife was inside. There is a straight line between our garden and the tower, about half a mile of pasture, and on a still evening you can hear it as if it were at the end of the road.
Three strokes.
I stood up. You do, it is automatic, my grandmother put that in me and it has not come out.
The pause.
And then it started, and I counted, and my hands were dirty and I remember thinking I should have brought a phone out, and I counted forty one.
Forty one slow strokes, evenly spaced, about four seconds apart, which takes nearly three minutes, and you do not lose count of something like that because it is the only thing in the world while it is happening.
Then it stopped.
I went in and I said to my wife, somebody has died, a man of forty one.
She said who, and I said I do not know, and she got her phone out.
There is a village group. There are two, actually, an official one for the hall bookings and an unofficial one that is the actual one. If somebody dies in this parish it is on the unofficial one within about ninety minutes and there are eleven messages about what a lovely person they were.
There was nothing.
There was a photograph of a lamb and a row about parking.
I rang Robert the next morning.
I know him well enough to ring him. He does the churchyard as well and he cut the yew back for us two years ago when it got into our light.
He said he had not rung it.
He said it plainly at first, as though correcting a wrong question, and then when I said I heard it, three and then forty one, at about six, he went quiet.
I said Robert.
He said, I was in Taunton yesterday, with my daughter. I did not get back till gone nine.
I said somebody else could have rung it.
He said the tower is locked and there are two keys and he has one and the churchwarden has one, and the churchwarden is eighty three and does not go up there, and even if somebody had got in, you cannot ring the tenor by accident and you cannot ring a decent count on it unless you have been taught, because it is a heavy bell and it takes a particular sort of pull to get an even stroke.
Forty one even strokes, four seconds apart.
He said: who was it for.
I said I do not know, nobody has died.
And he said, no, and then he said, that is not what I asked.
I did not understand him for about a fortnight. Then I did, at three in the morning, all at once.
He was not asking who had died. He was asking who it was rung for.
I am forty one.
I have gone at this from every direction I can think of and I want to set out the ones that failed, because otherwise you will only be thinking of them.
The church has no automatic ringing. There is no clock chime on our tenor, the clock has its own small bell and it has been stopped since 2016.
There were no ringers practising. Practice is Wednesday and it is the full ring, all six, and it sounds nothing like a single tolling bell, and this was a Tuesday.
It was not a bell in another parish carried on the wind. The nearest tower is Cothelstone and their tenor is a different note and I have known both notes since I was six years old, and there is no wind on this earth that carries a bell four miles and leaves it perfectly even.
My wife did not hear it. She was inside with the extractor fan on and the radio, and I have not held that against her, but I have thought about it.
Nobody else in the village heard it. I asked, carefully, in the shop, in the way you ask something in a village when you do not want it to become a thing about you.
I am fine, by the way. I want to say that.
I had a full set of bloods in the June and everything came back normal, and I have not had a scan because there is nothing to scan for, and I know that is the first place your mind goes because it went there for me too, at three in the morning, for about six weeks.
I am fine and I am well and I have had a good year, which is the part that makes it worse rather than better.
Robert died in August.
He was seventy four and it was his heart and it was quick, in his kitchen, and his daughter found him.
I heard it rung. The churchwarden's grandson does it now and he had been taught by Robert in the spring, which I did not know until afterwards, and he made a decent job of it.
Three strokes. Then seventy four.
I stood in the garden and counted it and it was correct and it was terrible and it was also, and I do not know how to put this, a relief, because it was right. It was the bell doing what the bell is for.
There is one thing left and I have gone back and forth on whether to say it.
I said the pause between the tellers and the years is deliberate, and long enough that you know it is deliberate. Robert used to say his father counted three breaths.
On the ninth of April, the pause was the same length as it always is.
Whoever rang that bell knew how long to wait.