The Bell by Irena Szirtes

credit Irena Szirtes

credit Irena Szirtes

 It was mostly wiry old men on the platform, in flat caps, blowing smoke into billowing steam. My Dad, then a young man, was definitely a minority, and I, a small girl, a minority of one. Baskets creaked, pigeons cooed and steam belched out as birds were loaded, destination Wigan when the season began, France and Belgium by its end. We waited, inhaling smoke and steam, until the whistle blew and the train racketed forward. Then, conversations paused and cigarette butts squashed, flat-caps scurried to the Golden Lion. Dad and I drove to Aunty Irene's. I was excited to be up late, eating grown-up suppers of filled rolls, tomatoes and mini pork pies. My cousins and I invented things to giggle about, feeding cheese and pie to the dog, while the adults talked of things we rarely understood.  

     The night drive home across Kendal fell was uneventful, so I said my prayers to save doing so in bed. As a child, I thought prayer was something I was supposed to do, rather than a heart cry, or two-way conversation, or times of powerful silence, from which words might spring, though they are rarely necessary. But I did understand deeply loving quiet, when it came to my earthly father. I didn't care what we were doing, as long as I was round him.

When he fed the bantams or collected eggs, I was there. If he took pigeons for training, I went too. We attended pigeon shows all winter, dog-walked all year. We bought pheasant eggs to incubate in Spring, drove to Kendal for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. If a pigeon was injured, it was I who held it, while Dad sewed up its wound. My contribution to gardening was less useful; I listened to blackbirds, sniffed roses, watched our terrier parade stolen eggs round the lawn, and helped myself to fruit or peas in the pod. Dad and I fed ‘Nasser’-not the Egyptian president, but a solitary, politically named swan on the Rawthey-dug up snowdrop bulbs from the wood, quite legal then, and Dad made bows and arrows from thin branches.

    Because I was Dad's shadow, the ringing of a small hand-bell with its cross-shaped handle, became background music of childhood. I can see Dad now, sitting in the recess between pigeon lofts, ringing the bell, calling birds down, while our terrier strutted rat patrol. The birds were free to fly when they pleased, and always settled on the house roof afterwards. The bell meant, “Grubs up!” but they took their time, so the bell kept ringing.  Saturday afternoons were most exciting, when birds returning from races, landed to rest before entering the lofts.  They couldn't be registered winners unless clocked in, and clocking them in from the roof was impossible. So, the bell kept ringing, and Dad kept calling. He didn't mind if they took their time, losing us short races. He preferred long distance birds, and eventually bred cross-channel champions. Winning long distance was a huge achievement, all the more satisfying because it proved his point: no one need resort to methods Dad considered cruel, in order to win a race.           

    I was too young to grasp the symbolic significance the pigeons held for Dad. They could have flown anywhere, but consistently chose to navigate home, even when shipped across Europe. When they finally arrived, all hazards overcome, it was their privilege to delay responding to the bell. But Dad could not go home, following World War 2. The Polish cultural identity he was raised with underground, because of Germany’s occupation of Silesia, was now chained by Russian Communism. Each surviving member of the free Polish Army was a marked and wanted man. A different bell tolled for Dad’s uncles, condemned to Auschwitz for resistance. The victory bells of 1945 evoked mixed emotions from those whose country, liberated from Hitler, was handed to the tyrant whose atrocities were veiled from Western eyes. No bell called Dad home. Instead, a letter from his grandfather, smuggled past censors via the resistance, urged him to stay in England. Those who returned had disappeared, lost among the millions of Stalin's dead.

    Dad loved the birds’ simplicity, their inability to wreak mindless brutality. Their miracles of navigation, their elegance in the air, their cooing and company helped bring healing from post-traumatic stress. We would stand together and watch them circle the house, watch as they flew wider and wider, until they circled the Howgill fells.

 “I never get tired of seeing them fly,” Dad would say, “it looks like freedom to me.”  He would smile with equal delight when they swooshed down in response to the bell. When we won races, it was a bonus. He loved them anyway.

   The bell was just another everyday thing. I was too young to realise I might long to hear it again, hold it in my hand, keep it forever. I have no idea what happened to the bell. But if I close my eyes on a summer evening, and picture my dad in the recess between pigeon lofts, our terrier strutting rat patrol, I hear it still.

credit Irena Szirtes