"Chico Kidd - The printer's devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kidd Chico)

sensible people undergo a metamorphosis which puts Dr Jekyll’s to shame if there is the slightest chance of
not being first at the next tower. Spouses snarl at each other. The day becomes a mad dash from church to
church as tempers shorten. All this is done for pleasure.
‘Look, there’s a footpath sign. I’m going to get out and walk. Can you park here?’
Alan Bellman, a lanky, gangly man who bore a passing resemblance to Leslie Howard, and who had taken
up ringing despite rather than because of his name, sighed, wondering how he had let himself be talked into
coming on this outing. He pulled off the narrow road onto the yellowed grass at its verge, which was baked
sere in that un-English summer.
As soon as the car came to a halt, the family he was chauffeuring - normally as pleasant as one could hope
to meet - scrambled out of the car and headed for the footpath like a panting band of dogs. Young Debbie’s
flip-flops slapped the soles of her feet, and the piebald flies with red eyes which doze upon the fronds of brack-
en in the sun buzzed upwards as the ringers passed them.
Following more slowly, Alan heard a bell sound suddenly, high and unexpectedly musical. Then another,
and the rest of the six followed in close pursuit, swift and sweet as a scale on a glockenspiel. Ahead of him,
Debbie quickened her pace so that her brown legs matched the speed of the bells.
His attention on the pleasing sight of Debbie’s back view in her T-shirt and brief shorts, Alan barely man-
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aged to catch a bramble she had brushed aside before it raked his face; then he looked up in pleased surprise
at the church facing him.
Unlike the walls of crumbly sandstone, red as rust, which flanked many of the roads they’d travelled that
day, this tiny church was faced with knapped flint, cold in the sunlight. It was perfectly proportioned: its
dimensions pleased the eye. Out from its tower tumbled the sound of the bells, bright and melodious. A group
of ringers stood outside the open tower door, bright in summery shirts and dresses, almost too exotic for the
quintessence of England in which they stood, surrounded by the silent trees.
Following his passengers, Alan joined the desultory queue, thinking as he watched the rush for bell-ropes
that ‘tower-grabbing’ was a very descriptive term for this activity. He was content to wait: the urgency which
seized most of his fellow ringers was alien to his nature. Maybe, he sometimes thought, this was one of the
reasons why he himself was such an indifferent ringer. Such skill as he possessed, he had learned years ago
to please his then girlfriend - a plan which had misfired when he had turned out ham-fisted. By that time, how-
ever, he himself had met Kim, and married her soon afterwards. Alan smiled a little at the memory of his first
sight of her. For an instant he’d thought her a boy, with her cropped hair and jeans.
Eyes a little out of focus, he watched the ringers and the pattern the ropes made as they bounced up and
down - the way the colours of the thin matted sallies blurred as they moved, red-white-and-blue turning to red
in motion. Then he shook himself and, still listening with half an ear to the quick succession of the bells, wan-
dered into the empty nave of the church.
It had that slightly sad and musty smell of all redundant churches. The worn stone floor was bare, and the
pews had all been removed - no doubt to some pseudo-aged pub or yuppie kitchen. Dust drifted, in its state-
ly way, in the coloured light falling through the stained glass: all that remained to the building of its past. That,
and the bells, and the tarnished wall plaques. Little enough, when you remembered it was the centre of a com-
munity once, and people were christened there, and wedded, and buried in the churchyard outside.
‘Have you rung yet?’ said a voice in Alan’s ear, making him jump.
He shook his head.
‘Go and have a ding, then.’
‘Okay,’ Alan said, and went for his grab.
Only the tenor rope was free, but he was content to take the easy option of keeping the rhythm: it was one
thing he could do competently.
“Do you want to play, Alan? Or shall we do some Stedman?”
“No, I’ll bang the drum.”
Having found the rhythm, Alan did not need to concentrate too hard - people who knew told him he should
watch the other ropes, but he usually rang behind by counting the beat - and found his eyes drawn past his fel-