This small book of four linked short stories was published in 1924. Knowing that De la Mare wrote extensively for children, you would be forgiven from the title for thinking that this is a children’s book, but it is not. Before the first story, there is a selection of quotes from authors such as Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. These are reflections on mortality and the passing of time, that set the tone and the theme for the stories to follow. I think the bell of the title is the passing bell.
Each story is set in a rural churchyard and features characters contemplating the inscriptions on the gravestones. These epitaphs and inscriptions are quoted in full, in italics within the stories. I assume that these were written in the traditional style by De la Mare himself, but there is no author’s note, so no way of telling if any of them were found in actual churchyards. Probably not, as they fit the stories so well. De la Mare showed his love of rhymes and verses of all sorts with his anthology Come Hither.
If this all sounds rather gloomy, it really isn’t. As so often with De la Mare, there is that nagging doubt about what has taken place that leaves the reader thinking about the story long after finishing it. Not that too much really does take place in these stories, they are as much meditations as descriptions of events.
In the first story, Lichen, a young woman waiting for a train at a country station passes the time by investigating the churchyard opposite in the company of a fellow passenger, a local old man. He is not an enthusiast of modern developments such as steam trains. “I see no virtue in mere size, or in mere rapidity of motion. Nor can I detect any particular preciousness in time ‘saved’, as you call it, merely to be wasted.” The story has something in common with De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction. By the end the old man has become a “kind of King Canute by the sad sea waves of progress”.
In Benighted, a couple find themselves stranded in remote countryside and pass the warm summer night in a churchyard. Their reading of the inscriptions appears to have an implication for their future together and the story is presented as an episode in their past.
In Strangers and Pilgrims, the verger of an old church, who is accustomed to showing visitors around it, finds something unusual about his guest, dressed all in black, who is searching for a particular inscription. This is the longest and most complex of the four. Much of it is a conversation between the initially taciturn stranger and the talkative verger, on subjects such as the nature of the past and whether or not the dead can return. At the end there is still a mystery about the visitor’s identity.
For me, the last story, Winter, is the most effective. The narrator recounts his fleeting vision of an uncanny figure in a bleak and silent snowbound churchyard, an encounter that has stayed with him for years. “But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.” It is striking that the apparition is as put out to see the narrator as the narrator is to see him. Then there is the ambiguity of the figure’s final question: “Which is yours?”
By the time the reader reaches this last story it has become apparent that the book is structured around the four seasons.
De la Mare’s way of writing about the countryside is quite unusual. It’s highly visual and evocative yet somehow slightly unreal at the same time, almost more intense than reality. You find yourself wondering where exactly such a place might actually be. It’s quite different to E F Benson, say, where you can identify the real place even when he doesn’t name it. It’s more akin to the kind of painting that offers a vision of the landscape rather than a directly realistic transcription of it.
It was the description of the story Winter in the 2013 essay Ghosts in the Material World by the critic John Gray that set me on the path to explore De la Mare’s stories. I am so glad I did because I find something in his writing that I don’t find anywhere else.
I have already written about some of his other stories, such as The House and The Almond Tree in greater detail.
My 1936 edition of Ding Dong Bell comes with a quote from The Daily News that sums this book up rather well: “An odd, loveable little book, stamped with its author’s original imagination and filled with his haunting sense of wonder and beauty.”
The book also has what looks like a woodcut on the title page, that depicts the sort of scene found in the stories, but the artist is not credited.
The Good Reader 