RTE Radio 1, Sunday Miscellany
On Sunday 21st October 2021, Maura was invited to read ‘Angelus Bells and Autumn’ on Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio 1.
Listen back here: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22024362/
Angelus Bells and Autumn
by Maura Gilligan
The light has changed. The sun hangs lower in the sky, hints at a change in season. In the garden, deadheading roses, marigolds, geraniums and poppies, I’m hoping to coax a last splash of colour from their roots and branches. Voices float up to the garden on the breeze from the shore. Childrens’ screeches of delight in the blue haze of these late summer days. Slightly out of synch, Angelus bells ring - one from the nearby church, the other on the radio.
Marker of time, call to prayer, the bells of the Angelus are woven into the soundscape of my life.
Having always been fascinated by sound, by the distances and directions in which it can travel, I like the Oxford Dictionary’s definition,
Sound : “vibrations which travel through the air and are sensed by the ear”……
At my home in Calcutta when I was a child, the sound of the 6a.m. Angelus bells from St. Thomas’ Church floated by the walls of the adjoining school, past Kalimpong Homes ice cream shop and the little dark aperture where the Chinese shoe-maker sat making bespoke leather footwear. The last tremble of each carillon seemed to settle in our big open verandah where we played and looked out onto old buildings.
As the noon bells rang, other calls to prayer were answered. On the low cement roof of a big water tank across the way, Muslims knelt in prayer in the peaceful yard of the building they worked in. Their coloured mats faced Mecca.
Back in Ireland to begin secondary school, I heard the baritone bells of Sligo Cathedral ring out across the rooftops that separated Summerhill and Gallows Hill, settling over deep ridges in my uncle’s potato field at Rusheen, the farm where my mother was born. On foggy harvesting days, the muffled sound of the bells still filtered through the blanket.
The days of my uncle’s life were punctuated by the dawn bells at milking time, the mid-day reminder to put on the pot of potatoes, and the teatime bells that accompanied the straining of warm buckets of raw frothy milk.
In later times, the stillness of cloudless autumn evenings on the Coolera Peninsula would catch the Cathedral bells on an excursion across the townlands of Merville, Maugheraboy and Woodfield, moving over the megaliths at Carrowmore and skimming Redgate to lay their last reverberation below the single hawthorn tree at Seafield where our shorthorn cattle grazed. In that kind of stillness the evening train could also be heard beating out the final stages of the line from Dublin - in the days of our forties and our childrens’ teens.
In those times, too, on Coney Island in Sligo Bay, the Angelus bells from Rosses Point became part of my sonic library. Clanking masts in the harbour briefly swallowed their sound, before the swaying yachts below them released it to the breeze, to skim the surface of Shrúnamile and impel it towards the Island’s shore.
Bouncing against the dark stone of the pier it dispersed south and west, towards the old blue pump where icy water splashed on flagstones, to the Wire Field where mushrooms flourished, to the yellow woodbine clambering along Katie’s lane and across the stubbly length of the Barley Field.
From open kitchen doors and all the northern shores of the Island, an answering blessing would echo.
These days as my own autumn beckons, there’s something deeply comforting about the noon and tea-time bells that ring out from the radio. Transcending religion, the bells encourage a pause that links us with something ancient and eternal.