Every night for 62 nights, someone has taken their turn ringing the century-old cast iron bell that sits beside the church steps in St. Jones Within.
Since there are only about 70 people in the Southwest Arm, Trinity Bay, community, with its pretty little circular harbour, it was quite the thing.
Snow, rain and the darkness of March and April gave way to less chilly evenings when deck and porch lights no longer needed to be flicked on at 7 o’clock for the nightly event.
The littlest children knew that when the ringing ended, it was bedtime.
Clyde Meadus, fixing up a house, took it as a sign of quitting time.
The bell — which once brought lost people home in the fog, whether from the sea or the woods, and let people know when there was other trouble — had ceased to beckon United faith congregants to the weekly services in 1980 when the new church was fitted with a set of chimes in the tower.
The old bell occasionally tolled for funerals or was given a clang every now and again by teenagers out for some harmless fun.
But along came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bell began to be rung every day for five minutes at 7 p.m. Pretty much everyone in the community, and some folks from surrounding places like Hatchet Cove and Hillview, had a hand in ringing it.
The ringing transcended any religious belief.
Eventually they attached a rope so it wasn’t as hard on the ears of the ringer, who could then stand several feet away.
They did it for all the essential workers of the COVID-19 crisis, those in the communities, as well as tens of thousands across the province who would never actually hear it — the truckers passing on the Trans-Canada Highway 15 minutes away, health-care workers, grocery store clerks — anyone and everyone they were grateful to.
On a late April evening at 6:30 p.m., the bell tolled 22 times for victims killed in the mass shooting in Nova Scotia.
At the end of May they decided to stop, but there’s talk of ringing it again should a second wave of COVID-19 happen, although they sure hope it doesn’t.
Oldest ringer
Lorne Tuck will be 84 soon, and the retired Metrobus driver was proud to take his turn several weeks back. He was the oldest bell ringer.
“Well, they say I am. I think someone else is older and they are afraid to say,” he said, chuckling at his home overlooking the harbour.
“No, I think he’s the oldest actually,” said his wife, Sandra.
“I am the littlest,” said Nylah Osmond, 5, among a few residents in the church parking lot.
Her sister Nevaeh, 7, in matching raincoat, and another bell ringer, Jackson King, 9, were there too.
“It was a bit heavy,” said seven-year-old Leah Brown, who wore earplugs, headphones and a hat when she took her turn.
“It was really fun and loud.”’
“She might have rung it the loudest,” said her dad, Mark.
People would go out and bang pots and pans in accompaniment.
“The first one was like, ‘What is going on when the bell is ringing?’” said Sandra.
“Then you looked forward to it. I never missed one. I was out on the deck.”
“It was very emotional,” said Heather Brown.
“People were wholeheartedly into it,” said Sylvia Brown, standing with her husband, Winston, outside the church.
“We both rang the bell.”
“It meant a lot to me … for the reasons they wanted it done,” said Mark Brown’s father, Albert, who retired back to the community after years away as an ironworker.
When he was growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, if the bell rang during the week, it meant a fire or some other danger. Electricity and a road didn’t come to St. Jones Within until the mid- to late-1960s, so the bell was the only means of communication.
“First time I didn’t know what they were doing, I never heard nothing about it,” he said.
“I was out on the step putting on the barbecue and I thought I heard the bell. I phoned my sister-in-law. … I phoned down to see what was wrong.”
Sound idea
The idea started with Brenda King, a woman known for her dedication to St. Jones Within. On, a miserable rainy and snowy Easter day, she dressed in a bunny outfit to leave treats for children in the community and in Hatchet Cove.
She was watching TV one night and saw a news clip about a motorcade in St. John’s.
King phoned Angela Kendall, a veterinarian technician, an essential worker travelling back and forth to Clarenville each day, and it was decided to contact Hector Meadus, who is involved in the church. Kendell made a post on the community’s Facebook Page.
“Every evening people couldn’t wait to listen to the bell ringing,” King said.
"The bell is a wonderful thing. You can hear that bell a long way. On a calm evening you can hear that bell around most everywhere.” — Hector Meadus
“It felt like we were all together even though we were all in our own house. … It was really nice to see the community doing something together so positive in a time that could have been not so positive,” said Kendall.
She and her husband, Kirk, who works at Mercer’s Marine, had offered to pick up essential supplies in Clarenville to save others a trip.
”Everyone was offering to do something for each other. It’s very neighbourly, trying to look out for friends and family,” Kendall said.
Marjorie Sparkes and Kevin King were the couple that took over the organizing, asking people to volunteer.
While King was taking a lunch break from his boatbuilding facility, Sparkes thumbed through the log listing off the names of those who rang the bell.
“There was no problem getting any volunteers. One family on the road, there were three adult children who were at home … all five volunteered,” she said.
“That bell hadn’t really rung like that for close to 40 years,” said Kevin, whose daughter is a general surgeon in Halifax and son is an airline pilot based in Korea.
When the bell ringing began, the residents would all drive around the community, but that stopped when Health Minister Dr. John Haggie ordered an end to all motorcades in the province during the height of the crisis.
“We had started out having a big old parade, really exciting going around the community blowing horns. We had to stop that,” said Sparkes, whose daughter is a pharmacy technician.
The community was particular about following the COVID-19 restrictions.
“I am a walker. If you met anybody, you went to the other side of the street,” she said.
“(The bell kept) everybody on their toes,” said Hector Meadus. “They remembered everybody had to stay in your bubble and keep some distance apart. … You’d talk outside and talk on the phone and wouldn’t go in anyone’s house. Keep your distance that way, but everything was much the same.”
A few people would still go to the church to support the bell ringer and kids would bike over, dinging their handlebar bells.
Proud of place
Meadus, who relocated to St. Jones Within at age 23, from Loreburn — now a cabin community five minutes’ run by boat — was the first to ring the bell, and his wife, Velma, rang it, too.
The community once had three stores, including a Co-op, as well as a post office and school, long gone now.
Meadus worries for the future of the community.
“It’s all right for me — I built my house and reared my family, just me and my wife now,” he said.
But his pride in the place sings as loud as the bell when he tells his stories.
He helped build the new church, as did all the congregation, and the day they opened it, the mortgage was burned
“Every block, every nail, every screw that was into it. … All free labour. We cut our own logs, sawed our own lumber. The only thing we bought was the doors and the seats.” he said.
Besides the bell, the pulpit came from the old church.
Mark Brown — who like his dad is an ironworker — and his wife, Niki, an Eastern Health clerk, have plans to move back from Hillview within the next year or so because his roots are there, their daughter Leah loves it and there are some children around.
“It was awesome for the community here,” he said of the bell ringing.
Rev. Gneid Lackey ministers to three churches and several communities, and when churches are allowed to reopen, she will return to holding service in St. Jones Within every second week.
In Hillview, the bells rang for a little while, but not like in St. Jones Within, she said.
“This is a United Church, but there are people of many denominations coming together,” she said.
“When it’s quiet, you were able to hear it across the arm. It was really beautiful and sacred. I am pretty impressed with the people here anyway. At times like this they really do come together. I am very humble to be a part of this whole thing — people ministering to themselves. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”
“The bell is a wonderful thing,” agreed Hector Meadus.
“You can hear that bell a long way. On a calm evening you can hear that bell around most everywhere.”
Indeed, if the bell could not reach those it tolled for by ear, then certainly it sang out loud enough to reach them by heart.
