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Marking
Time
The mantle clock sits on my study windowsill because I have no mantelpiece. The regularity of its satisfying tick, smooth and precise, beats out the passing moments as I work. Each second is unrecoverable, spent, passed, and part of the long tunnel that is my history. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. I find it pleasant to pause from my work and note its march or drowse in the night to the chime of the hours. The chimes are executed exactly the same as at Westminster. First, four quarters are sounded and then the single tones of the time, one, two, three. Whilst everyone else is in bed, the clock carries on marking the passing moments. I appreciate its single mindedness.
In its own past, the clock once kept time in the living room of my grandfather's house in Fitzwilliam Street. It was a terraced house with two downstairs living rooms and a kitchen offset at the rear. Like many owners of such homes, my grandfather always spent most of his time in the middle room. He reserved the front room for special, usually formal, occasions. When I visited him with my mother, we were always ushered into the middle room, where he lived, and we sat on chairs by a coal fire that burned in a black metal range. Summer or winter it was the same, stuffy and hot.
The air in the house smelled stale and oppressive, with the odour of meals long since eaten, as though the windows were never opened. My grandfather often complained of draughts and strove to avoid them. Perhaps he suffered from "thin blood", a mysterious ailment I had heard my mother mention occasionally. The problem required the old and sick to be kept at higher than average temperatures. Cold blasts of fresh air were injurious to their wellbeing. The doors into the hall and the back kitchen were firmly closed and long woolly draught excluders ensured granddad was in no danger from too much under heated oxygen!
We took our places on the lumpy cushions of our chairs. My grandfather seated himself opposite, at a desk beneath the window, where the extra light allowed him to read the paper during his days alone. He was a tall thin man and walked with a cane when out of doors. Inside, he would guide himself around the furniture, like a stick insect, moving his grip from one solid object to another, in order to feel secure.
My mother's father was taller than anyone else in our family. His face was long and lined with deep grooves on either side of his mouth. His ear lobes fascinated me; they too were extended and spare, just as he was. His skin was the colour of parchment. Like many men of his generation, he always wore a scarf around his neck, knotted in front. Further security against draughts, I speculated.
My mother used to talk with him, while I peered into the coals and saw shapes and faces. Their conversation often centred on the past; the war, the price of things and the angst of rejection by a wife referred to in lowered voice as "you know who…"
Occasionally they would include me in the conversation. How was I doing at school? But, in the main they talked over times gone by while, in the background, the clock ticked regularly. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Just as it does now, in its quiet measured way. Its place was on the sideboard, bounded on either side by discarded newspapers, which had entertained my grandfather on previous days of the week but whose news was now old. The chime was not permitted to sound in the living room. Pressing down a small lever silenced the echo of Westminster. My grandfather found the noise intrusive.
Sometimes, for my amusement, he would explain how the clock worked. He rose unsteadily from his chair, walked the few steps over to the sideboard and fumbled under the newspapers for something. It was the key to wind the timepiece. The glass door swung open and my grandfather showed me how the clock required a small number of definite turns in each of three holes, in order to maintain its momentum. Not too much, however, or the workings would be overwound and broken. I watched with interest till he finished this task, closed the glass door and returned to his seat with studied paces.
Sometimes he offered my mother a cup of tea, which involved braving an entry into the cold back kitchen and putting the kettle on the gas. He had no fridge but kept his milk cool by standing it on the stone cellar steps. In winter that would be as good as any fridge. Finally, this innocent activity caused his death.
Whilst alone, he fell down the cellar steps and lay there for some time, in the cold. The closed doors and draught excluders had been in vain. He was taken to hospital with pneumonia and, a few days later, died there one afternoon while I was at school.
My grandfather slipped from this world in the same place where I had come into it, fourteen years earlier. The hospital had originally been a workhouse for the poor. It was converted when the welfare state rendered its original function superfluous. Many people of granddad's generation still feared it and I know he was not happy to end his days in its walls, for the shame of feeling he had gone to the poorhouse.
Decades ago and thousands of miles away, in the dark terraces of an industrial town, the clock marked time in my grandfather's living room, keeping him company into his old age. The house was swept away by "modernisation". The layout of the streets he walked on "Shank's Pony" is obliterated. Blocks of flats, which themselves are now thought old-fashioned stand nearby. Change is relentless.
In the bright sun of an Australian morning, the clock sits in my windowsill as I work with my papers and books. It ticks me into middle age. It chimes me into sleep. Tireless in its duty, it still marks time.
Caroselli-Teacup/Clock
Caroselli
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Reviews
(applause received) 
Norma Jean
Australia
"A nice descriptive piece. You caught the atmosphere of life in England a long ago."
Robert
Austen Australia
"This has very effective description and keeps one's interest. It brings back similar types of memories with my grandparents. I like the way the story links the different phases of the author's & grandfather's life with the presence of the clock, like bridging time itself. Keep up the good work."
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