Ringing The Changes
Entry by: Al's Mam
3rd January 2025
Ringing the changes
He couldn’t imagine the village of Bellaghy or new year without the bell ringing .In fact Seamus Heaney himself a year before his death God rest him had walked down to the small protestant church and stood outside,casting a solitary figure in a black belted coat tilting his head to one side as he allowed the sonorous bells to sweep deep into him.Maybe he even wrote a poem about it that he never published.God knows he did his bit for the troubles with his other poetry anyway. Yes the ringing every year was imprinted on him since he was a babby in his crib or so Granny Moran used to tell him;ringing the changes she referred to it as.His father and grandfather were bell ringers too and it all began for the Maguire family long before what the BBC news announcers referred to oddly as The conflict in Northern Ireland.
Bell ringing in this place was reserved for the over sixties brigade the Woodies discount folk as they joked in their respective families.He’d be seventy next month and his arms still had the brawn and his heart the desire for the honour.
His hands pulled on the rope now and then there was the magical sifting of the long rope through his fingers as it lifted high up into the belfry.Above him he could visualise the awkward tumbling of the old steel bells and the spinning of wheels as the clamour woke the dead in the nearby graveyard.The cold night filled with a constellation of Derry stars filled his lungs and the familiar exhilaration moved through him.He cast a glance over at his fellow bell ringers, Tom McGurk another catholic like himself and Patrick McMonagle the only protestant.They were in full flow of the easy rhythm between them, concentration etched under their eyes and in the tautness of their bodies.
Once when the bells were broken for new year the kids from the nearby estate had gone around to all the quiet front doors on main street and woken up the babies and the old early to bed with a cacophony of saucepan lids banging together, making a discordant melody full of anger.That was strange to say the new year of 1973 the year after all the troubles of Bloody Sunday in January 1972.
His mother ,crying into her pillow that night begged him not to go out and so he sat on the front doorstep and waved at Danny O Rawe from St. Marys avenue whose first cousin was killed by a British soldier on that day as he fled from the gunfire rained on his twenty year old bare head. Donal never came home the night of Bloody Sunday and it was assumed by the family that he and his girlfriend Una had gone away to Belfast for a stay in a hotel that weekend.After a number of increasingly frantic phone calls to Una’s parents, they discovered he had gone to her flat in Derry and told her he would take her out to dinner later but wanted to take part in the civil rights march that lunch time .She went to feed the ducks in the park and went scurrying into the street when she heard the gunfire.A shopkeeper who kept his souvenir store open on a Sunday ducked the bullets and ran across the road to her.Together they availed of a lull to scramble across the street to his shop where,once inside he locked the door and pulled down the blinds.All around they heard the screams and terror whistled in the wind through the locks.
They combed the hospitals for Donal ,initially finding nothing until a senior nurse in Derry General ran out into the quadrangle after them, beckoning them back.They had it seemed just received the body of an unidentified young man of about twenty one or so who fitted the description they had given of him.Una was to remember that evening in a series of nightly terrors for years to come until the head psychiatrist at Alt na Gelvin hospital ,weary of admitting her repeatedly turned her over to an amazing psychologist Fran Dempsey who, God bless him weaned her off the anti depressants and really listened for the first time in nine years.
His mother succumbed to valium and whiskey to combat the tremors in her hands .She could no longer go out or even hardly swallow.They hospitalised her too and when she came home she accompanied his father to mass and went out on the monthly fair days again to greet her neighbours with a thin lined shadowy smile.
Mammy became detached from them all after that even two year old Darren, looking at her child but not seeing him. Nightly she took a picture of Donal to bed and kissed it before placing it under her pillow.His father got laid off at the steelworks a couple of years later and stayed home on disability, playing mother and father to his brood of six ,his heart ribboned and displayed only for the neighbours or the welfare man.
Yes every year those bells rang out, they sang out “No change No change.”They pealed in the seventies singing lustily “nothing changes” and every year was a repeat symphony of more bombing ,more unborn babies killed in the womb along with their mothers as in Enniskillen where the pregnant girl who died was a distant cousin they didn’t fortunately know.Nearly everyone in Bellaghy was touched by “the troubles” as they were referred to.
By the time he was twenty one, he was ready for the boat until the sight of his mother’s ashen face over the breakfast table in their small kitchen knifed in him and he cancelled the sailing and told his cousin Murph to tell the foreman on the building site in Kilburn he wasn t coming.
It was the right decision.She was dead inside of six months and his Da put in a good word at the new aluminium factory whose supervisor on the line he had once worked with.He met Ailish there ,a quiet country girl who loved the dances and they boogeyed their way into marriage and six kids.Hard to believe the eldest was an electrical engineer in Toronto and Kate was a school teacher in the local primary school.His mother would have been so proud of them all.Baby Darren was a foreman now in the aluminium factory. He often wondered what Donal might have gone on to do.He was an apprentice fitter with a great interest in legal things.Might he have trained in law or had a son or daughter called to the bar?.It would have been a fitting ending.He thought of his youngest grandchild Elaine.She was fierce clever and looked a lot like Mammy God rest her.He could just see her in her wig and flowing black cloak on the steps of Belfast crown court.
He couldn’t imagine the village of Bellaghy or new year without the bell ringing .In fact Seamus Heaney himself a year before his death God rest him had walked down to the small protestant church and stood outside,casting a solitary figure in a black belted coat tilting his head to one side as he allowed the sonorous bells to sweep deep into him.Maybe he even wrote a poem about it that he never published.God knows he did his bit for the troubles with his other poetry anyway. Yes the ringing every year was imprinted on him since he was a babby in his crib or so Granny Moran used to tell him;ringing the changes she referred to it as.His father and grandfather were bell ringers too and it all began for the Maguire family long before what the BBC news announcers referred to oddly as The conflict in Northern Ireland.
Bell ringing in this place was reserved for the over sixties brigade the Woodies discount folk as they joked in their respective families.He’d be seventy next month and his arms still had the brawn and his heart the desire for the honour.
His hands pulled on the rope now and then there was the magical sifting of the long rope through his fingers as it lifted high up into the belfry.Above him he could visualise the awkward tumbling of the old steel bells and the spinning of wheels as the clamour woke the dead in the nearby graveyard.The cold night filled with a constellation of Derry stars filled his lungs and the familiar exhilaration moved through him.He cast a glance over at his fellow bell ringers, Tom McGurk another catholic like himself and Patrick McMonagle the only protestant.They were in full flow of the easy rhythm between them, concentration etched under their eyes and in the tautness of their bodies.
Once when the bells were broken for new year the kids from the nearby estate had gone around to all the quiet front doors on main street and woken up the babies and the old early to bed with a cacophony of saucepan lids banging together, making a discordant melody full of anger.That was strange to say the new year of 1973 the year after all the troubles of Bloody Sunday in January 1972.
His mother ,crying into her pillow that night begged him not to go out and so he sat on the front doorstep and waved at Danny O Rawe from St. Marys avenue whose first cousin was killed by a British soldier on that day as he fled from the gunfire rained on his twenty year old bare head. Donal never came home the night of Bloody Sunday and it was assumed by the family that he and his girlfriend Una had gone away to Belfast for a stay in a hotel that weekend.After a number of increasingly frantic phone calls to Una’s parents, they discovered he had gone to her flat in Derry and told her he would take her out to dinner later but wanted to take part in the civil rights march that lunch time .She went to feed the ducks in the park and went scurrying into the street when she heard the gunfire.A shopkeeper who kept his souvenir store open on a Sunday ducked the bullets and ran across the road to her.Together they availed of a lull to scramble across the street to his shop where,once inside he locked the door and pulled down the blinds.All around they heard the screams and terror whistled in the wind through the locks.
They combed the hospitals for Donal ,initially finding nothing until a senior nurse in Derry General ran out into the quadrangle after them, beckoning them back.They had it seemed just received the body of an unidentified young man of about twenty one or so who fitted the description they had given of him.Una was to remember that evening in a series of nightly terrors for years to come until the head psychiatrist at Alt na Gelvin hospital ,weary of admitting her repeatedly turned her over to an amazing psychologist Fran Dempsey who, God bless him weaned her off the anti depressants and really listened for the first time in nine years.
His mother succumbed to valium and whiskey to combat the tremors in her hands .She could no longer go out or even hardly swallow.They hospitalised her too and when she came home she accompanied his father to mass and went out on the monthly fair days again to greet her neighbours with a thin lined shadowy smile.
Mammy became detached from them all after that even two year old Darren, looking at her child but not seeing him. Nightly she took a picture of Donal to bed and kissed it before placing it under her pillow.His father got laid off at the steelworks a couple of years later and stayed home on disability, playing mother and father to his brood of six ,his heart ribboned and displayed only for the neighbours or the welfare man.
Yes every year those bells rang out, they sang out “No change No change.”They pealed in the seventies singing lustily “nothing changes” and every year was a repeat symphony of more bombing ,more unborn babies killed in the womb along with their mothers as in Enniskillen where the pregnant girl who died was a distant cousin they didn’t fortunately know.Nearly everyone in Bellaghy was touched by “the troubles” as they were referred to.
By the time he was twenty one, he was ready for the boat until the sight of his mother’s ashen face over the breakfast table in their small kitchen knifed in him and he cancelled the sailing and told his cousin Murph to tell the foreman on the building site in Kilburn he wasn t coming.
It was the right decision.She was dead inside of six months and his Da put in a good word at the new aluminium factory whose supervisor on the line he had once worked with.He met Ailish there ,a quiet country girl who loved the dances and they boogeyed their way into marriage and six kids.Hard to believe the eldest was an electrical engineer in Toronto and Kate was a school teacher in the local primary school.His mother would have been so proud of them all.Baby Darren was a foreman now in the aluminium factory. He often wondered what Donal might have gone on to do.He was an apprentice fitter with a great interest in legal things.Might he have trained in law or had a son or daughter called to the bar?.It would have been a fitting ending.He thought of his youngest grandchild Elaine.She was fierce clever and looked a lot like Mammy God rest her.He could just see her in her wig and flowing black cloak on the steps of Belfast crown court.
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