by admin
BELL, GONG, CHIME OR JUST NOISE?
2:16 pm in discipline by admin
WHAT WAS YOUR SCHOOL BELL LIKE?
By Ann Gitari
I had a conversation the other day with six generations of once avid school goers some now too old to remember their headmaster’s name. But they all remembered their school bells, the descriptions of which kept altering in my mind in both shape and sound until finally I had doubts about the dictionary definition of bell.
From rusty milking buckets, to contorted Cowboy tins, the stories kept coming, some sad, some shocking, others just too funny. Can you believe school could just not run without those contraptions? Leave the hand watch. Who could afford them anyway, other than Mr. Kimani the headmaster whose fading silver coated Casio was then today’s Rolex. But that’s a story for another day.
I tried to piece all those bell stories together, if just to make some sense of them.
As I gathered, the first school bell was a large rusty iron sheet, which was nailed to a pole. Right next to the sheet was attached a metal rod. Upon striking the metal rod on the sheet, the device would produce a gong loud enough to prompt the next lesson or wake up a pupil who had fallen asleep. For security purposes and to ensure the bell was rung at the right time, the rusty sheet was hardly replaced. In fact the more the rust the better, for the pupils were cautioned that whoever dared to venture close to the sheet would get infected with the worst strain of tetanus and would eventually resemble its rusty, crusty appearance. That pupil would then become the new bell. As if avoiding a burning bush, no one dared to play near the bell.
Then there was the portable, bent Cowboy tin which was always in the staffroom for safe keeping. Its portability enabled the user to move around the school, banging on the tin like some crazed religious fanatic. More often than not, the tin banger (a.k.a bell ringer) also beat the school drum, the church drum and the sides of the drum that held water back at home.
Then some wise head teacher stumbled upon a good dictionary and had a look at the word bell, saw a picture of it, then went to a certain catholic church in the city to see it in real life. The head teacher, thoroughly fascinated, had one tailored for his school. A smaller one with a nice little handle and its little ball hanging from within, just like that piece of flesh that used to hung at the roof of his throat as a little boy. He liked to use it, but because he often had to be away, he gave it to the teacher on duty. The teacher on duty, sensing early symptoms of deafness, cunningly passed it on to the head boy, who from then on became a symbol of authority to the students.
Because of this new addition to his powers, the head boy was not liked very much and the students often disregarded his authority. They either hid the bell when he was delivering the noisemaker’s list to the headmaster or rung it at the wrong time, putting the head boy in a lot of trouble. One day, after a group of noisemakers received a good thrashing from the headmaster thanks to the head boy, the bell got lost, never to be seen again. One pupil Jerusha, said that it had probably been taken to the district hospital to have its hanging tongue removed.
This turn of events threw the school into a state of utter confusion and anarchy. The pupils, not conscious of time came to school late and ‘unknowingly’ left school early. The only thing they were somehow never late to do was have their lunch. In fact they knew lunch time so well, that when their teacher extended his lesson into that filling moment they coined ‘swallowship’, they tapped their spoons on their plastic lunch containers until the teacher got hungry and had to leave.
Then electricity came to the area and subsequently to school, bringing the pupils’ short lived revelry to an end. The head teacher, sensing too many ‘swallowship’ sessions and very little readership, acquired an electric bell. All it took to make it ring, say rather scream, was a push of a button tightly screwed onto one of the staffroom’s walls. The bell’s effectiveness was unmatched to any of its predecessors. Not only was it an asset to the school, but the school’s neighbors became instant beneficiaries.
In fact Jerusha who believed the word ‘clock’ came from ‘cock’ because the latter was replaced by the former as a time giver, went to school one day and happily bragged to her classmates that their cock back at home was of no use anymore and would become dinner very soon. According to her, since the arrival of the electric school bell which could be heard from the confines of her grandmother’s kitchen, she had never been awoken by the big red avian. Hence, her need to have it written off and eaten off a plate.
Tracing the evolution of the school bell is no easy feat, especially when that progression depends on the location of the school, the schools capacity to afford a sophisticated bell and research efforts as those taken up by Mr. Kimani and others like him. As products of various Alma Maters, we must hail the significance of the school bell in our lives. It prompted us into action, guided us through lessons and cultured us into responsible time conscious individuals, who are never patient to wait for a friend who’s running late by 10 minutes but always eager to walk into a meeting one hour late. Perhaps we have not outgrown our need for bells?
Perhaps we need the startling kind. Like one my high school headmistress had installed. It was more of a siren, whose wailing sound you are bound to hear in Iraq just before one of those deadly air strikes. It took some getting used to but for some, it just made the heart stop. On one of those occasions when a serious bunch of Form 4 boys chanced upon our school for a symposium, I was lucky enough to catch the attention of one. After the symposium, like other classmates of mine I offered to show the guy around, much to the chagrin of their teacher who kept telling them that it was late and they had to go back to their school. But his boys were not going anywhere that fast, especially not when they were surrounded by so many girls. All efforts to round up his boys failed miserably and just as he was just about to give up, our bell wailed to indicate the start of evening prep. Before, I could show the guy my desk he jumped out of the window and dashed off towards the direction of their school bus. So did every trouser wearing figure that was at one time walking with a girl that evening. In utter shock, we went for our preps, each girl eager to write to her 404 (Four 4) and enquire what the near stampede had been about. A week later we received similar replies explaining what had come to their minds when our bell wailed. “We thought our teacher had called the police.”