There was a bell before this one. She hung in a city church from 1893, and in the spring of 1941 the church burned in a single night of war. The tower held; the bell frame did not. She fell through three floors and was found in the morning cracked from lip to shoulder, her voice gone.
The parish kept the metal. Bell bronze is never scrap — it remembers nothing, and can be forgiven everything — and for eight years the broken bell waited in a crypt while the church was rebuilt around her. In 1949 the pieces came back to the foundry that had cast her grandmother, were melted with a tenth of new tin, and were poured mouth-down into a fresh mould as the ninth founder read the old inscription aloud in the casting shed.
She rose from the pit a true-harmonic bell, tuned once on the lathe as the earlier bell never was — her five partials exact, her decay clean. The parish chose her new name before the pour: Resurgam, the promise carved over more than one bombed church door. Her first full peal was rung on the tenth anniversary of the fire, by ringers who remembered the night it happened.