Peacetime Clamor

Since June 1940, every British family has kept its shotgun and poker, pitchfork and flatiron ready to use against invaders whenever the church bells rang. This week the bells broke their long silence. Over tattered city streets, shining holly hedgerows, silvering fields and the camouflaged tin huts of army encampments the rolling echoed, celebrating with propriety victory in Egypt.

The Archbishop of Canterbury had recommended that the nation listen with "fresh resolve and renewed prayer for ... our Allies and the cause we serve." Bell-ringing teams, dispersed by war, had reassembled and practiced frantically with muffled clappers.

To many British ears the peacetime Sunday pealing brought nostalgia to temper the rejoicing. No clamor came from some 1,200 parish churches, either because their old grey stones had collapsed under bombs or because partial damage had left the bells insecure in the belfries. The famed bells of St. Mary-le-Bow in London's Cheapside were silent. Ten of the twelve had crashed from the 90-ft. belfry ceiling when the church was bombed (TIME, Sept. 2, 1940).

There was no sound from most of Christopher Wren's churches in the City of London. But there were the old guttural notes from St. Paul's Cathedral, and the same mellow chimes from Westminster Abbey. At Coventry the cathedral bells, all that were saved in a night of concentrated blitzing, sang out at special length, to observe the victory and to commemorate the second anniversary of the raid which destroyed the cathedral and the town.

To an old nursery rhyme:

"Gay go up and gay go down,

"To ring the bells of London town,"

London urchins sang a new verse, added during the blitz:

"Now come the incendiaries to light you to bed,

"Bring out the sandbags and kill them all dead."

The British are handier with sandbags now than when the Germans silenced their bells.

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