Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Quarter from the Silent Purse
One quarter in every hour in Wakeham is paid for by a collection nobody remembers taking up, and its sound is heard only when the street is quiet.
- status: folklore
In Wakeham the quarter bell rings the four quarters as towns do, every hour, every day, and if you counted what is struck against what is paid you would come out one to the four. Four quarters sound. Three of them, everyone agrees, belong to the parish and are rung for by the rates, and the receipts for those three are in the town chest and can be read by anyone with a mind to read old paper. The fourth quarter is paid for by somebody else, or by nothing, or by all of us, and the not knowing is the start of this telling.
It is always the fourth quarter, the one on the last quarter before the hour, and it is always paid for by a collection that is taken up without anyone handling a bag, plate, hat, or fistful of coppers. Nobody remembers the money going round. That is the custom of it, that nobody remembers, and the ones who say they remember are the ones you move away from at the bus stop. The old men down the yard call it the silent purse. It goes round the street once an hour, they say, whether the street is asleep or not, and it comes back full, and the quarter rings, and the purse goes out again to fill for the next.
You can hear the difference in the quarter itself, those with the ear for it, and there are more with the ear for it here than anywhere else I have lived. The three paid quarters ring bright on the hour's metal. The fourth has a beaten sound, a note that lands a half breath late, as if the coin in the purse were handed over and counted and the bell asked to hold the striking until the arithmetic was seen to. The carillon men came out from the city once to time it with their machines and left saying the mechanical truth of it: that the bell mechanism is sound, the rope is sound, and the quarter arrives funded from somewhere their instruments do not reach.
The rules of it are these and they are kept, because waking them is poor housekeeping. It is heard only when the street is quiet. If the fourth quarter finds the street loud, motor lorries, a wedding, dogs, argument, it puts itself off and the hour arrives three quarters rung, and the whole of Wakeham gives it a moment to pass before going on with what it was doing. Second, you do not contribute. If you are ever aware of the purse going by you, hand-shaped or otherwise, you keep your hands where they are. The quarter is paid already. It was paid before you were born to worry about it, and your coppers will not better it and will not be returned.
There is a story of the ruined old betting book at the Hanover Row social club, whose members used to wager on whether the fourth quarter would ring of a Friday. The book ran forty years. Every Friday for the last six of them it recorded the same entry in the same blue pencil, and the entry was this: not taken up tonight, no house on the street open, purse passed full anyway. The book was closed after that and put in the cupboard behind the trophies, and the club will not produce it, and the cupboard stays locked, and the quarter has rung every Friday since, both ways of knowing it.
Who tells it today: I do. Nan Osgood, crossing-keeper, retired off the school crossing and still keeping the hours by ear out of forty years of habit. I tell it to the children at the crossing when they ask why we wait for the bell a moment before moving, and I tell it in the front room at the quiet part of the evening to anyone who will sit still for it. And I close with the question my mother closed with, and she had it from the collector before her: if the purse goes round an hour at a time, every hour, day and night, and nobody is ever awake to see it fill — when it comes round to the hour with the street dead quiet and no one waking, who is it that is left in Wakeham to be asked.