A bell for the bakers

In the street behind the market a baker rings a hand bell when the second batch comes out. A short history of a sound that tells the time.

By Ilse Marrow · 2 minutes · Read it on the web

At a quarter past nine on weekdays, and half past on Saturdays, a hand bell rings in the narrow street behind the covered market. It is a small brass bell with a wooden handle, the kind a teacher once used to end a break, and it is rung by whichever of the two bakers has floury hands at the time. It means that the second batch is out of the oven. It has meant that, in this street, for longer than either of them has been alive.

Nobody under fifty seems to know this. The younger residents think the bell is a nice touch, a bit of theatre for visitors. The older ones put their coats on.

The first batch and the second

A bakery’s first batch is for people who are going somewhere: workers, the early school run, anyone who eats standing up. It comes out at six and it is gone by seven. The second batch is for people who are staying. It is the bread for lunch, the rolls for the old woman on the third floor who no longer climbs stairs before ten, the loaf a neighbour carries up for her.

The bell exists because the second batch is a different kind of promise. Its customers do not pass the shop on their way anywhere; they have to be called. Before telephones, before anyone had a clock in the kitchen that could be trusted, a sound was the only way to tell a street that something warm was waiting.¹

A clock that is a sound

I like that the bell keeps time without showing it. It cannot be read, only heard, and it is heard differently from every window: sharp at the corner, muffled behind the courtyard, almost not at all on the top floors, where people have always relied on the people below them to pass the news upwards. In that way it measures not just the hour but the street, its depth and its neighbourliness.

When the bakers were asked, a few years ago, whether they would stop ringing it now that everyone has a phone, the elder of the two said that he would stop when the bread stopped being ready. It was a better answer than the question deserved.²