Summoned by Bells

BBC Four Collections -

specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

BELLS PEAL

CLOCK TICKS

Safe were those evenings of the pre-war world

when firelight shone on green linoleum.

I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky -

deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars.

And turned to Archibald, my safe old bear,

whose woollen eyes looked sad or glad at me,

whose ample forehead I could wet with tears,

whose half-moon ears received my confidence,

who made me laugh, who never let me down.

I used to wait for hours to see him move,

convinced that he could breathe.

One dreadful day, they hid him from me as a punishment.

Sometimes the desolation of that loss comes back to me

and I must go upstairs to see him in the sawdust, so to speak.

Safe and returned to his idolater.

Safe, in a world of trains and buttered toast,

where things inanimate could feel and think.

Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill.

At that hill's foot, did London then begin

with yellow horse trams clopping past the plains

to grey-brick, nonconformist Chetwynd Road

and on to Kentish Town and barking dogs,

and costers' carts and crowded grocers' shops.

BARREL ORGAN PLAYS: "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)"

I knew we were a lower, lesser world

than that remote one of the carriage folk,

who left their cedars and brown garden walls

in care of servants. BELL CHIMES

I could also tell that we were slightly richer than my friends,

the family next door.

We owned a brougham and they would envy us our holidays.

WOMAN SINGS: # Goosey Goosey Gander Where shall I wander?

# Upstairs and downstairs In my lady's chamber

# There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers

# So I took him by the left leg and threw him downstairs. #

Maud was my hateful nurse who smelt of soap

and forced me to eat chewy bits of fish

and was the first to tell me about hell,

admitting she was going there herself.

Sometimes, thank God, they left me all alone

in our small patch of garden in the front,

with clinker rockery and London Pride and barren lawn

and lumps of yellow clay as mouldable as smelly Plasticine.

I used to turn the heavy stones

to watch the shiny red and waiting centipede,

which darted out of sight.

The woodlouse, slow and fat,

the other, greyish bluey kind, which rolled into a ball

till I was gone out of the gate to venture down the hill.

My dear, deaf father - how I loved him then,

before the years of our estrangement came.

The long, calm walks on twilit evenings

through Highgate New Town to the cinema.

The expeditions by North London trains...

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

..to dim, forgotten stations.

Wooden shacks on oil-lit, flimsy platforms

among fields as yet unbuilt on, deep in Middlesex.

HOOVES CLOP

Most of all, I think my father loved me

when we went in early morning pipe smoke on the tram,

down to the Angel, visiting the works.

"Fourth generation?

"Yes, this is the boy."

The smell of sawdust still brings back to me

the rambling workshops high on Pentonville,

built over gardens to White Lion Street,

clicking with patents of the family firm,

founded in 1820.

CLARINET PLAYS

Following in Father's footsteps was the theme of all my early childhood.

With what pride he introduced me to old gentlemen,

pin-striped commercial travellers of the firm,

and tall proprietors of Bond Street shops.

For myself, I knew as soon as I could read and write

that I must be a poet.

Even today, when all the way from Cambridge

comes a wind to blow the lamps out, every time they are lit,

I know that I must light mine up again.

My urge was to encase in rhythm and rhyme the things I saw and felt.

I could not think.

And so, at sunset, off to Hampstead Heath,

I went with pencil and with writing pad

and stood tiptoe upon a little hill,

awaiting inspiration from the sky.

"Look, there's a poet," people might exclaim on footpaths near.

The muse inspired my pen.

The sunset, tipped with gold St Michael's Church.

Shouts of boys bathing came from Highgate ponds.

The elms that hid the houses of the great, rustled with mystery.

And dirt-grey sheep grazed in the foreground.

BIRDSONG

But the lines of verse came out like parodies of hymns A and M.

The gap between my feelings and my skill

was so immense I wonder I went on.

Once, when my father took me to the Tate,

we stood enraptured by A Hopeless Dawn,

the picture first to move me.

Twenty times they told me had Frank Bramley watched the flame

expiring in its candlestick before he put it down on canvas.

Guttering there, it symbolised the young wife's dying hope

and the old mother's, gazing out to sea.

The meal upon the table lay prepared, but no good man to eat it.

Put it down, translate the picture into verse, my boy,

and here's your opening -

"Through the humble cottage window streams the early dawn."

The lines my father gave me sounded well,

but how continue them?

How make a rhyme?

Atlantic rollers bursting in my ears,

and pealing church bells and the puff of trains,

the sight of sailing clouds, the smell of grass,

were always calling out to me for words.

I caught at them, and missed and missed again.

"Catch hold", my father said, "Catch hold like this" -

trying to teach me how to carpenter.

"Not that way, boy, when will you ever learn?"

I dug the chisel deep into my hand.

"Shoot!" said my father,

helping with my gun and aiming at the rabbit.

"Quick, boy, fire!"

But I had not released the safety catch.

I was a poet, that was why I failed.

My faith in this chimera brought an end to all my father's hopes.

In later years, now old and ill,

he asked me once again to carry on the firm.

I still refused.

And now, when I behold fresh published, new,

a further volume of my verse,

I see his kind grey eyes look woundedly at mine.

I see his workmen seeking other jobs

and that red granite obelisk that marks the family grave

in Highgate Cemetery points an accusing finger to the sky.

Oh, Peggy Purey-Cust, how pure you were.

My first and purest love, Miss Purey-Cust.

Satchel on back, I hurried up West Hill

to catch you on your morning walk to school,

your nanny with you and your golden hair streaming like sunlight.

Strict deportment made you hold yourself erect

and every step bounced up and down as though you walked on springs.

Your ice-blue eyes, your lashes long and light,

your sweetly freckled face and turned-up nose,

so haunted me that all my loves since then

have had a look of Peggy Purey-Cust.

Wendy, you were to me, in Peter Pan.

The Little Match Girl in Hans Andersen.

But I would rescue you before you died.

And once, you asked me to your house to tea.

It seemed a palace after 31,

the lofty entrance hall, the flights of stairs,

the huge expanse of sunny drawing room.

And there, your mother from a sofa smiled.

After that tea, I called and called again,

but Peggy was not in, she was away, she wasn't well.

BOYS CHAT

Up West Hill I walked, red-capped and jacketed, to school.

A new boy much too early.

School at nine and here was I, outside at half past eight.

Walking from school is a consummate art.

Which routes to follow to avoid the gangs,

which paths to find that lead, circuitous,

to leafy squirrel haunts

and plopping ponds for dreams of Archibald and Tiger Tim?

Which hiding place is safe, and when it is?

What time to leave to dodge the enemy?

I only once was trapped.

I knew the trap.

I heard it in their tones.

"Walk back with us."

I knew they weren't my friends,

but that soft voice wheedled me from my route to cold Swain's Lane.

There, in a holly bush, they threw me down,

pulled off my shorts and laughed and ran away.

And as I struggled up,

I saw grey brick - the cemetery railings and the tombs.

"Betjeman's a German spy,

"shoot him down and let him die."

"Betjeman's a German spy, a German spy, a German spy..."

HORN PLAYS

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

Teatime shows the small fields waiting.

Every hawthorn hedge straining inland before the south-west gale.

Can it really be that this same carriage came from Waterloo?

On Wadebridge station, what a breath of sea scented the Camel Valley.

Cornish air, soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam

as out of Derry's stable came the break

to drag us up those long familiar hills,

past haunted woods and oil-lit farms

and on to far Trebetherick by the sounding sea.

Then, safe in bed, I watched the long-legged fly

with red, transparent body,

tap the walls and fizzle in the candle flame

and drag its poisonous-looking abdomen away

to somewhere out of sight and out of mind.

While, through the open window,

came the roar of full Atlantic rollers on the beach.

Then, before breakfast, down towards the sea I ran alone,

monarch of miles of sand,

its shining stretches, satin smooth and veined.

I felt beneath bare feet the lugworm casts,

and walked where only gulls and oystercatchers

had stepped before me to the water's edge.

The morning tide flowed in to welcome me.

The fan-shaped scallop shells, the backs of crabs,

the bits of driftwood worn to reptile shapes.

The heaps of bladderwrack the tide had left,

which lifted up, sent sand hoppers to leap in hundreds round me,

answered, "Welcome back!"

SEAGULLS CRY

Bright as the morning sea, those early days.

Though there were tears and sand thrown in my eyes

and punishments and smells of mackintosh,

long, barefoot climbs to fetch the morning milk,

terrors from hissing geese and angry shouts,

slammed doors and waitings and a sense of dread,

still, warm as shallow sea pools in the sun

and welcoming to me, the girls and boys.

HORN PLAYS: "Girls And Boys Come Out To Play"

Wet rocks on which our bathing dresses dried,

small coves, deserted in our later years

for more adventurous inlets down the coast.

Paralysis when climbing up the cliff,

too steep to reach the top, too far to fall.

Tumbling to death in seething surf below.

A ledge just wide enough to lodge one's foot,

a sea-pink clump the only thing to clutch.

Cold wave-worn slate, so mercilessly smooth

and no-one near, and evening coming on.

Till Ralph arrived -

"Now put your left foot here, give us your hand."

And back across the years I swing to safety, with old friends again.

Sweet were the afternoons of treasure hunts

and in the Oakleys' garden after tea of splits and cream

under old apple boughs,

with high tide offering prospects of a bathe,

the winners had their prizes.

Once, I won.

That was an unfortunate affair.

My mother set the clues

and I, the host, knew well the likely workings of her mind.

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,

before the dark of reason grows.

Ears hear again the wild sou'wester's whine.

Deep in the noise, there was a core of peace.

Deep in my heart, a warm security.

Nose, smell again the early morning smells.

Congealing bacon, and my father's pipe.

The after-breakfast freshness out of doors

where sun had dried the heavy dew

and freed acres of thyme to scent the links and lawns.

Mint around the spring and fennel in the lane,

and honeysuckle wafted from the hedge.

A neighbour's cesspool, like a body blow,

then clean, medicinal and cold, the sea.

Eyes, see again the rock face in the lane,

years before tarmac and the motorcar.

It all is there, excitement for the eyes,

imagined ghosts on unfrequented roads.

Gated, and winding up through broom and gorse,

out of the parish on to who knows where.

Safe Cornish holidays before the storm.

CHILDREN SHOUT AND CHATTER

SCHOOL BELL RINGS

Let us pray.

Give unto us all, O Lord, an understanding heart

and grant that we may learn to work thy will,

until the fullness of thy kingdom be come.

- Amen. - ALL: Amen.

In the cricket match yesterday,

the A-11 beat Eagle House First 11 by 100 runs...

BETJEMAN: Before the hymn,

the skipper would announce the latest names

of those who'd lost their lives for King and country

and the Dragon School.

Sometimes his gruff old voice was full of tears

when a particular favourite had been killed.

Then we would hear the nickname of the boy,

Pongo or Podge,

and how he'd played 3Q for Oxford,

and if only he had lived, he might have played for England.

Which he did, but in a grimmer game against the Hun.

And then we'd all look solemn,

knowing well there'd be no extra holiday today.

And we were told we each must do our bit,

and so we knitted shapeless gloves from string

for men in minesweepers.

And on the map, we stuck the Allied flags along the Somme,

visited wounded soldiers,

learned by heart those patriotic lines of Oxenham.

"What can a little chap do for his country and for you?"

"He can boil his head in the stew," we added,

for the trenches and the guns meant less to us

than bicycles and gangs

and marzipan and what there was for prep.

CHILDREN SING HYMN

One lucky afternoon in Chaundy's shop,

I bought a book with tipped-in colour plates,

City Of Dreaming Spires, or some such name.

Soft, late-Victorian watercolours

framed against brown paper pages.

All that was crumbling, picturesque and quaint

informed my taste and sent me biking off,

escaped from games, for architecture bound.

BIRDSONG

When I returned from school, I found we'd moved -

53 Church Street.

Yes, the slummy end.

A little laugh accompanied the joke.

For we were Chelsea now,

and we had friends whose friends had friends

who knew Augustus John.

We liked bold colour schemes, orange and black.

And clever, daring plays about divorce at the St Martin's.

Oh, our lives were changed.

Ladies with pearls and hyphenated names

supplanted simpler aunts from Muswell Hill.

A brand-new car, and brand-new chauffeur came

to carry off my father to the works.

Once, on a stall in Bloomsbury,

I found an atlas folio of great lithographs -

views of Ionian isles,

flyleaf inscribed by Edward Lear -

and bought it for a bob.

Forgotten poets,

parsons with a taste for picturesque descriptions of a hill

or ruin in the parish pleased me much.

But steel engravings pleased me most of all.

Volumes of London views,

or Liverpool, or Edinburgh, the Athens of the North.

I read the prose descriptions,

gazed and gazed deep in the plates

and heard again the roll of market carts on cobbles,

coach doors slammed outside the posting inn.

Beyond the bookshop, treasure in my hands,

I scarcely saw the trams or heard the bus,

or noticed modern London.

I was back with George IV, post horns, street cries and bells.

"More books!" my mother sighed, as I returned.

My father, handing to me half a crown, said,

"If you must buy books, then buy the best."

I feared my father.

Loved my mother more.

And just because of this, would criticise in my own mind

the artless things she said.

CHURCH BELLS PEAL

All silvery, on frosty Sunday nights, were city steeples

white against the stars.

I used to stand by intersecting lanes

among the silent offices, and wait,

choosing which bell to follow.

Not a peal, for that meant somewhere active.

Not St Paul's, for that was too well known.

I liked things dim.

Some lazy rector, living in Bexhill,

who most unwillingly on Sunday came to take the statutory services.

'Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God

that brought me to these dim, forgotten fanes.

Largely, it was a longing for the past,

with a slight sense of something unfulfilled.

And yet another feeling drew me there -

a sense of guilt, increasing with the years.

"When I am dead, you will be sorry, John."

Here I could pray my mother would not die.

Thus were my London Sundays incomplete

if unaccompanied by evening prayer.

BELL RINGS

Doom, shivering doom.

Inexorable bells to early school, to chapel, school again.

Compulsory constipation,

hurried meals bulked out with whipped cream walnuts from the town.

BELLS PEAL

Doom, shivering doom.

Clutching a leather grip containing things for the first night of term -

house slippers, sponge bag, pie jams, Common Prayer,

my health certificate, photographs of home.

Where were my bike, my paintbox and my trunk?

At first, there was the dread of breaking rules.

"Betjeman, you know that new boys mustn't show their hair

"below the peak of college caps.

"Stand still and have your face slapped." "Sorry, Jones."

The dread of beatings, the dread of being late.

And, greatest dread of all, the dread of games.

WHISTLE BLOWS

In with it!

WHISTLE BLOWS

Good ball! Let's go!

Get it out! Get it out!

# To all life thou givest

# To both great and small

# In all life thou livest

# The true life of all

# We blossom and flourish

# As leaves on the tree

# And wither and perish

# But nought changeth thee

# Great Father of glory

# Pure Father of light

# Thine angels adore thee

# All veiling their sight

# All laud we would render

# O help us to see

# 'Tis only the splendour

# Of light hideth thee. #

In the name of God the Father,

God the Son

and God the Holy Ghost, Amen.

And he spake a parable unto them, saying,

"The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully..."

BETJEMAN: The centre and the mainspring of your lives,

the inspiration for your work and sport,

the corporate life of this great public school

spring from its glorious chapel.

Day by day you come to worship in its noble walls,

hallowed by half a century of prayer...

BISHOP: And then I will bestow all my fruits...

BETJEMAN: The old Malburian bishop thundered on,

when all I worshipped were the athletes,

ranged in the pews opposite.

"Be pure!" he cried.

And for a moment, stilled the sea of coughs.

"Do nothing that would make your mother blush if she could see you.

"When the tempter comes, spurn him

"and God will lift you from the mire."

Oh, who is God?

Oh, tell me, who is God?

Perhaps he hides behind the reredos.

Give me a God whom I can touch and see.

The bishop was more right than he could know.

Safe in the surge of undogmatic hymns,

the chapel was the centre of my life...

..the only place where I could be alone.

CHURCH BELLS PEAL

Dear lanes of Cornwall.

With a one-inch map, a bicycle

and well-worn little guide,

these were the years I used to ride for miles

to far-off churches.

I'm free! I'm free!

The open air was warm

and heavy with the scent of flowering mint.

And beetles waved on bending leaves of grass.

And all the baking countryside was kind.

"Don't fidget, boy.

"Attention when I speak.

"As I was saying, now I look at you,

"bone lazy, like my eldest brother Jack.

"A rotten, low, deceitful little snob.

"Yes, I'm in trade and proud of it, I am.

"My boy, it's no good sulking.

"Listen here, you go to Bates and order me the car.

"You'll caddie for me on the morning round.

"This afternoon you'll help me dig for bait.

"You'll weed the lawn and when you've finished that,

"I'll find another job for you to do.

"I'll keep you at it, as I've kept myself!

"I'll have obedience. Yes, by God, I will!"

"Come back!" I seem to hear my mother cry.

"Come back, come back.

"He is your father, John."

One rector talked of poetry, Cornish saints

and asked me which church service I liked best.

I told him evensong.

"And I suppose you think religion's mostly singing hymns

"and feeling warm and comfortable inside?"

And he was right. Most certainly I did.

SEAGULLS CRY

BELL CHIMES

In quest of mystical experience,

I knelt in darkness at St Enodoc.

I visited our local holy well,

where to the native Cornish still resort

for cures for whooping cough

and drop bent pins into its peaty water.

Not a sign.

No mystical experience was vouchsafed.

The little ferns just trembled in the wind

and everything looked as it always looked.

But somewhere, somewhere underneath the dunes,

somewhere among the cairns or in the caves,

the Celtic saints would come to me.

The ledge of time we walk on like a thin cliff path,

high in the mist, would show the precipice.

An only child, deliciously apart,

misunderstood and not like other boys,

deep, dark and pitiful, I saw myself in my mind's mirror,

every step I took a fascinating study to the world.

The other parents of the holidays

seemed easier to deal with than my own.

"Well now, my boy, I want your solemn word

"to carry on the firm when I am gone.

"Fourth generation, John, they'll look to you.

"They're artist craftsmen to their fingertips.

"Go on creating beauty."

What is beauty?

Here where I stand,

the green Atlantic bursts in cannonades of white along Pentire

There's beauty here

There's beauty in the slate

And granite smoothed by centuries of sea

And washed to life as rain and spray bring out

Contrasting strata higher up the cliff

But none to me in polished wood and stone

Tortured by father's craftsmen into shapes

To shine in Asprey's showrooms under glass

A maharajah's eyeful.

MUSIC: "The Varsity Drag" by Jack Hylton And His Orchestra

# Here is the drag See how it goes

# Up on the heels Down on the toes

# Everybody do the varsity drag

# Hotter than hot Newer than new

# Meaner than mean Bluer than blue

# Gets as much applause as waving a flag

# Hmmm mmmm

# Hmmm mmmm... #

My walls were painted Bursar's apple-green

My wide-sashed windows looked across the grass

To tower and hall and lines of pinnacles.

The wind among the elms, the echoing stairs

The quarters, chimed across the quiet quad

From Magdalene Tower

and neighbouring turret-clocks

Gave eighteenth-century splendour to my state

Privacy after years of public school

Dignity after years of none at all.

First college rooms, a kingdom of my own

What words of mine can tell my gratitude?

No wonder, looking back, I never worked

I cut tutorials with wild excuse

For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way

And evenings dining with the Georgeoisie.

And as the laughs grew long and loud I heard

The more insistent inner voice of guilt,

"Stop!" cried my mother from her bed of pain.

I heard my father in his factory say,

"Fourth generation, John, they look to you."

CHURCH BELLS RING

Silk-dressing-gowned, to Sunday-morning bells,

long after breakfast had been cleared in Hall,

I wandered to my lavender-scented bath.

Cooper's Oxford marmalade and toast

But half-engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm

Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes

Past college chapels with their organ-groan

And churches stacked with bicycles outside

To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.

ECHO OF HYMN-SINGING

Some know for all their lives that Christ is God

Some start upon that arduous love affair

In clouds of doubt and argument

And some - my closest friends -

Seem not to want His love

And why this is I wish to God I knew.

As at the Dragon School, so still for me

The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone

Stained glass and vestments, holy-water stoups

Incense and crossings of myself - the things

That hearty middle-stumpers most despise

As "all the inessentials of the Faith."

ECHO OF HYMN-SINGING

Oxford May mornings When the prunus bloomed

We'd drive to Sunday lunch at Sezincote.

First steps in learning how to be a guest

First wood-smoke-scented luxury of life

In the large ambience of a country house.

Down the drive

Under the early yellow leaves of oaks

One lodge is Tudor

One in Indian style

The bridge, the waterfall, the temple pool

And there they burst on us, the onion domes

Chajjahs and chattris made of amber stone

'Home of the Oaks', exotic Sezincote!

Stately and strange it stood, the Nabob's House

Indian without and coolest Greek within

Looking from Gloucestershire to Oxfordshire.

Dear Mrs Dugdale, mother of us all

In trailing and Edwardian-looking dress

Sweet confidante in every tale of woe!

The Colonel's eyes looked out towards the hills

While at the other end our host is heard

Political and undergraduate chat

"Oh, Ethel," loudly Colonel Dugdale's voice

Boomed sudden down the table, "that manure -

"I've had it shifted to the strawberry beds."

"Yes, Arthur.

"Major Attlee, as you said

"Seventeen million of the poor Chinese

"Eat less than half a calory a week?"

So Sezincote became a second home.

Dinner with Maurice Bowra sharp at eight -

High up in Wadham's hospitable quad.

A dozen oysters and a dryish hock

Claret and tournedos, a 'bombe surprise'

The fusillade of phrases - "I'm a man

"More dined against than dining - " rattled out

In that incisive voice and chucked away

To be re-used in envious common-rooms By imitation Maurices.

I learned

If learn I could, how not to be a bore

And merciless was his remark that touched

The tender spot if one were showing off

Within those rooms I met my friends for life.

And as the evening... BELLS PEAL

..mellowed into port, he read us poems.

There I learned to love that lord of landscape, Alfred Tennyson,

There first heard Thomas Hardy's poetry.

King of a kingdom underneath the stars,

I wandered back to Magdalene.

Certain then, as now, that Maurice Bowra's company

Taught me far more than all my tutors did.

Failed in Divinity.

Oh, towers and spires

Could no-one help?

Was nothing to be done?

No, no-one, nothing.

Mercilessly calm

The Cherwell carried under Magdalen Bridge

Its leisured puntfuls of the fortunate

Who next term and the next would still come back.

I'd seen myself a don

Reading old poets in the library

Attending chapel in an MA gown

And sipping vintage port by candlelight.

I sought my tutor in his arid room

Who told me, "You'd have only got a Third."

I wandered into Blackwell's, where my bill

Was so enormous that it wasn't paid

Till ten years later, from the small estate

My father left.

Not even dusty shelves

Of folios of architectural plates

Could comfort me.

Outside, the sunny Broad.

Stone emperors circling the Sheldonian

The hard Victorian front of Exeter

The little colleges that front the Turl

The locked and double gates of Trinity

Stood strong and confident, outlasting me.

Already, I could hear my father's voice.

"My boy, henceforward, your allowance stops:

"You'll copy me, who with my strong right arm

"Alone have gotten myself the victory."

"Your father's right, John;

"You must earn your keep."

Pentonville Road!

How could I go by tram

In suit from Savile Row and Charvet tie?

How could I, after Canterbury Quad

My peers and country houses and my jokes

Talk about samples, invoices and stock?

LIFT WHIRS

DOOR OPENS

Ah, welcome door - Gabbitas Thring & Co's

Scholastic agency in Sackville Street!

"The principal will see you."

"No degree?

"There is perhaps a temporary post

"As cricket master for the coming term

"At Gerrards Cross."

BELL RINGS

Here I was, a private schoolmaster

in a preparatory school here in Gerrards Cross.

Earning a living at last, and some self-respect.

Of course there were humiliating moments.

In the morning, for instance, lavatory duty.

When I had to go through the mark book, "Have you been?"

And the boys would say, "Have you, sir?"

I couldn't keep order at all,

but I never laughed so much in my life!

You know, I think it's only when we're young

that an autobiography is interesting.

That's why I ended mine at this point.

Because it still has in it things we share in common.

Struggles at home, struggles at school,

and then, struggles to get a job.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS: "Baa Baa Black Sheep"

SCHOOL BELL RINGS