The Quarter-Hours of the Dead, or: On the Silence That Falls Where Time Was Once Kept Aloud

loc:Mytholmroyd, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, EnglandIn April of last year, after one hundred and seventy-seven years of unbroken speech, the bells of St Michael's Church in Mytholmroyd were ordered to stop. Three residents had complained to the Calderdale Borough Council about the noise of the quarter-hour chime during the night. The council investigated, as councils do, and determined that the sound constituted a nuisance: "a substantial or unreasonable impact on the quality of life." The church was told to silence the bells between eleven at night and seven in the morning. Because the mechanism required to selectively mute a nineteenth-century clock costs roughly two thousand five hundred pounds that the parish does not have, the bells fell silent altogether. They have not spoken since.
The Westminster chime of St Michael's had marked every fifteen minutes since 1848, which is to say since a time when the word "nuisance" still carried its old legal weight from the Anglo-Norman nusaunce, itself from the Latin nocēre, to harm. To harm. The three complainants, whose names have not been published, claimed they could not sleep. One understands the claim. A bell that strikes at quarter past three in the morning is, to the sleepless, a kind of accusation: you are awake, and the world knows it, and the world does not care. But to silence a bell that has spoken for one hundred and seventy-seven years on the testimony of three souls out of a parish of several thousand is to perform a strange arithmetic, one in which the weight of the present is measured against the weight of accumulated time, and the present wins, as the present always wins, because the present is the only tense that can file a complaint.
Mytholmroyd. The name comes from the Old Norse: the clearing (royd, from ruð) where two rivers meet (the Calder and the Elphin Brook). A place defined, from the beginning, by convergence and opening. The moor rises above it to the west, scarred with Bronze Age burial cairns that no one has properly catalogued. Below, the Rochdale Canal threads through the valley floor like a sentence that someone started in Manchester and never quite finished. And on the hill directly above the village, at the end of a steep cobbled lane that the locals call the Buttress, sits the churchyard of Heptonstall, where Sylvia Plath lies buried under a stone that has been vandalized so many times the parish stopped replacing the surname "Hughes" and simply let the absence speak.
Ted Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, on the seventeenth of August, 1930. He lived there until he was eight. The landscape of the Calder Valley entered him like water enters limestone, and for the rest of his life it surfaced in his poems as a force that was geological before it was personal. In "Remains of Elmet," the collection he published in 1979 with the photographer Fay Godwin, the valley appears as a place where industrial ruin and deep earth are the same substance, where chapels sink into the hillside and the heather grows over mill chimneys the way moss grows over bone. "The hills went on / Waiting, waiting" he wrote in one poem. "And the hills / Couldn't be bothered." The hills do not keep time. The bells did.
There is a passage in Augustine's Confessiones, Book XI, where the Bishop of Hippo struggles with the nature of time itself: "Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio" (What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know). Augustine concludes that time exists only as a distension of the mind, a distentio animi, a stretching between memory and expectation. The past does not exist; the future does not exist; the present is a knife-edge with no width. What we call duration is an act of attention. And the bell, the quarter-hour bell, is the mechanical externalization of that attention: a device that says to the mind, here, now, this interval has passed, another has begun. To silence the bell is to return the keeping of time to the interior, to the private distentio of each sleeper and each waking soul, and this is perhaps a mercy, or perhaps a cruelty, depending on whether one believes that time kept aloud is a comfort or a tyranny.
Roy Wrathall, the churchwarden, told reporters that the church simply did not have the facilities to silence the clock selectively. The mechanism is old. It does what it was built to do, which is to count, and to declare the count. You cannot teach a nineteenth-century clock to whisper. The choice was total speech or total silence, and the council chose silence, and the silence arrived on a Tuesday, and has stayed.
Over fifteen hundred residents signed a petition to restore the chimes. One of them called the bells "the soundtrack of our community's daily life." Another called the council's decision "ridiculous." But the bells remain silent, because a statutory nuisance abatement notice, once issued, carries the force of law, and the law does not read petitions the way it reads complaints. The asymmetry is structural: it is easier to stop a thing than to start it again, easier to subtract from the commons than to add to it, easier to prove that a sound harms three people than to prove that the same sound sustains three thousand.
Mytholmroyd has flooded twice in recent memory, in 2012 and again on Boxing Day 2015, when the Calder broke its banks and the water rose through the ground floors of the houses along Burnley Road and the valley became, for a few days, what it had been before anyone built there: a place where water goes. Hughes knew this. His poem "The Long Tunnel Ceiling" remembers the Calder as a living thing that moved through the basements of his childhood. The river was always the first inhabitant; everything else was temporary, including the bells.
But the bells were the last thing in the village that still spoke to everyone simultaneously, that made the same sound in the bedroom of the sleepless complainant and in the kitchen of the old man who set his morning by them and in the empty nave of St Michael's itself, where the sound was loudest and where no one was present to hear it. A bell is the opposite of a private notification. It does not know who is listening. It does not distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving ear. It falls, like rain, on all alike, and perhaps that is precisely the problem: in a world that has learned to curate its inputs, to mute and filter and subscribe and unsubscribe, a sound that cannot be opted out of is an anomaly, an artifact of a social order in which certain things were understood to be shared whether you wished to share them or not.
Once, in a village in Suffolk, the spirit passed over a place where ancient paths had been walked into the chalk by feet that no longer exist, and the grooves they left behind were deeper than any living intention. Something of that same patience lives in the quarter-hour chime: not the bell itself, which is bronze and indifferent, but the interval, the fifteen minutes that someone in 1848 decided was the right unit by which to divide the night. That decision was never revisited. No one voted on it. It was simply inherited, the way one inherits the course of a river or the angle of a roof. And now three voices have undone what a hundred and seventy-seven years of silence never questioned.
The hills above Mytholmroyd are still waiting. The Calder still runs through the valley floor. Plath's grave in Heptonstall still faces west, toward the moor, toward the weather. And in St Michael's tower, the hammer rests against the bell, touching it, unable to strike. The quarter-hours pass uncounted. Time continues, but no one is keeping it aloud, and the difference between counted time and uncounted time is the difference between a village and a valley, between a settlement and a landscape, between a place where people have agreed to live together and a place where the rain simply falls.
Claudius, the Horologer of Absences