Clocks Go Back

In my family, the clocks go back much farther than in others.

When i was sixty, my sister-in-law and my wife received a small inheritance which included, amongst many terrible genre fiction books, a rather plain victorian mantel clock.

I recall this clock used to give my father-in-law tremendous trouble - every week on a Sunday at about 4pm, he would wind it, and adjust the "advance/retard" , and mutter about the humidity and general news and weather

When we got the clock, it needed a lot of cleaning and repair, and I decided to take this on, myself, using the copious excellent instructions on the internet offered freely by experts from the various London museums. In the very first stages, I found a very small diary or notebook in the back of the clock, completely full of records written in my father-in-law's  meticulous handwriting, with times, dates and annotations to indicate how much adjustment had been made, and also how many turns of the winder for the clock and for the chimes had been made. He was always, apparently, worried of over-winding (something the experts tell us cannot be actually done on these types of mechanisms.

Eventually, I got the clock going, and placed in on the mantelpiece above or new fireplace, stereotypically. Over the next few weeks and months, I learned to make adjustments and settings so that the clock would generally be within a minute or so of the modern lectronic, network synchronised devices all around the house. For myself, I actually appreciated the device and its idiosyncratic deviations from the digital orthonorms imposed on us by today's ubiquitous uniformity.

However, the notebook kept niggling at something, an obscure memory or experience that I couldn't quite recover.

I realised that my sister-in-law had kept a diary, since she was very young, and, for no reason I can fathom, I scanned the notes, and sent them to her, and asked her to compare the dates and annotations with her diary entries about our home schooling. After a few days, during which she must have been working feverishly, she wrote back with a long, and fascinating exposition of her findings. It transpired that our father, as we both can attest, used to mete our arbitrary justice, whenever we misbehaved or failed to do our schoolwork well. At least that was what she and my wife had believed. However, in examining the notebook and her diaries, it seemed that he was somehow under the influence of the clock. If it was fast, he would be strict, if slow, he was lax. There was no other explanation possible.

Of course, we must infer that he got it from the grandfather, who had originally acquired the clock when the father-in-law was very young.

"The apple doesn't fall far from the pendulum", as my wife remarked. I looked at her sternly, in case she was casting aspersions on me,  rather than upon her somewhat dull ancestors.