2) a peal of Bells , made in the Whitechapel Bell Foundary
3) a nursery rhyme from the Museum of Childhood
Object 1 - A headscarfe
Many years ago I lived in Cheshire Street, off Brick Lane and I used to hear the Iman calling the faithful to prayer four times a day: I remember seeing little boys in their beautiful white caps running down the street to the Mosque as snow began to fall... whenever and where ever I hear a call to prayer - the whiteness, the snowflakes on my face, the muffled footsteps and shouts of joy, seem to pour themselves out from this soaring song.
Over time the Mosque in Brick Lane has been both a synogogue and a church – graciously providing a home for refugee communities as they arrive and move through London and almost effortlessly transforming itself in the process.
Now I’m back in the neighbourhood, I decide to finally answer the call to prayer and visit the mosque myself. I ask my friend Salma, who lives nearby if she can take me, but unfortunately, her father in law has just died and she can’t come, so I decide to be brave and go alone. I get some advice from 2 girls I meet on the tube and they give me directions to the women’s entrance.
I know I need a headscarf, so before going in, I stop at a street stall in the market and buy myself a nice purple and pink one. At least two kind Muslim ladies show me how to wear it and help me pin it into place with beautifully coloured pins. One of them assures me that she never goes to the Mosque. Another lady tells me that she wears a headscarf not because she is Muslim but because it keeps her head warm.
When I get to the Mosque, a sign on the door asks me to remember, ‘....that although God values women’s prayer in the mosque, he values it even more in the home...’. Apparently the Mosque gets so busy, especially for Friday prayers that the clergy have to put up these kind of notices to stop people getting crushed.
Inside I remove my shoes and enter a small, plain room where I can hear the voice of the Iman. I follow what the other women are doing, as they kneel and prostrate themselves and find I am turning my thoughts towards God – even though I am in a Mosque, not a church, where I normally pray: the carpet inside the room is patterned with diagonal borders so that you know which way to face; other than that there is no other decoration and no distraction. Church or mosque – maybe the building doesn’t matter as much as I think.
Object 2 - A peal of bells
The call of the Iman has moved me and I decide to try and find other kinds of communal sound-making that can be used to excite, inform or warn. I think of nearby Bow Bells, rung from St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside.
According to the old saying, ‘to be born a true Londoner, you must be born within the sound of Bow Bells.’ I’m curious that a sound, like the bells of Bow can come to define a community. And now that hardly anyone lives within the sound of the bells – are there are no more true Londoners or Cockneys anymore?
Strangely, as fewer and fewer people actually live or hear the bells, they have become an ever more potent symbol of London and Englishness - every harvest London’s Pearly King and Queens, along with Morris dancers, Marching bands and topped off with the Lord Mayor of London, march to hear the bells in a rather peculiar demonstration of Englishness: it’s as if all the remnants of a peculiar kind of nationalism have been randomly assembled...
But the bells have always exerted this kind of strange power: during the Second World War the BBC played a recording of the bells at the beginning of every broadcast to occupied Europe, as if the bells were saying ‘Don’t give up hope, you’ll soon be free.’
Ironically, the bells had already been destroyed by enemy action in 1941 and what people were hearing was a recording. The bells were recast at the Whitechapl bellfoundry in 1956.
The Big Bell of Bow (mentioned in the nursery rhyme, my third object) is inscribed with the words:
Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.'
The Bell of the Parish of St Mary Le Bow
Hung for curfew 1334
Destroyed by fire 1666
Recast 1669. Recast 1738
Destroyed by enemy action 1941. Recast 1956'
The bells are no longer run that often, but I finally make it to the church one cold December evening and hear the bells. You can hear what I heard at
http://www.stmarylebow.co.uk/Object 3 - A Nursery Rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'
I visit the Museum of Childhood, to find out more about the famous nursery rhyme. There are no copies in the Museum shop, but the song is painted up on the wall, along with lots of other versions in other languages, sung by local children. In this way, the rhyme is not unlike the Brick Lane mosque/synogogue/church or even like the great bell of Bow itself - appropriated and remade anew by each generation.
The rhyme, describes the bells of London churches having a conversation about a debt that is owed. The rhyme ends with a gruesome allusion to the debtors prison Newgate and the ritual candle that was given to prisoners the night before their execution. Maybe this is why my children like singing it so much.
William Blake heard the song as: 'Mony, mony, get mony still, Let Virtue follow if it will'
Mary-le-Bow now stands right opposite the trading floors of Allied Irish Bank and it's bells can be heard by the traders playing the markets....but rather than sounding grasping and argumentative I heard something else in these bells - something otherworldly, incredibly powerful, transformative perhaps.
Later, I find out that the mathematical pattern of a plain course of bells reads something like:
12244553311
21425435132
341523441523
43513214254
55331122445
and that indeed there is something magical about their configuration. Mathematicians try and capture their ordering in complex graphs and even describe their sound by building solid poyhedra (many sided shapes), including the wonderfully named icosicosidodecahedron.
I am left wondering about whether it would be possible to weave this same order of sounds...
