THE CLOCK MAN

There's always progress in the world of man

His shop was old, dusty, looked as if it never opened, but he sat on a stool behind his counter waiting for customers. People walked past it, some maybe glanced at it, but nobody saw him as he propped himself up on his stool and read a manual for this or that clock, nodding his head when something caught his eye and made him think. Even in the world of clocks there are exciting things to be discovered. He needed to be prepared.

He was Sterling Fauntelroy and he’d had his shop for longer than he could remember, and he could remember an awfully long time. But then, what with all the ticking and chiming of an army of clocks he was almost oblivious to the passing of seconds, of minutes, of hours. Time was just a mush of sounds, lovely sounds but they meant very little to him.

The shop has been there way back when the woman who was a really old queen in the here and now, sitting in her palace in London today had been a young thing with a daughter and a son in short pants, crowned, what was it, seventy years ago. And he’d been there behind his counter back then, watching the door, wondering it would open, even back then. And if anyone had asked him in those far off days how long the shop had been there he’d have shaken ahis head and muttered an awful long time, too long for me to remember…

He’d wound his favourite mahogany wall clock up when the Beatles were singing their songs. He might even have given a spasmodic jerk to the rhythms in their music. Sterling quite liked the Beatles though it did annoy him when all the girls in the neighbourhood screamed themselves hoarse ar the very suggestion they might be in one of the cars driving through the town. It was only ever a suggestion, but the screams were loud none-the-less.

The sixties had been a splendid decade for his shop because it was then that he’d had his customer. One morning, it had been winter, December or thereabouts, he’d unlocked the door (not opening it, he never opened that door, it was or customers to push it and fall into his shop, carrying a clock they might want to be repaired, because that’s what he did.

He repaired clocks. Or that was the theory. And the sign outside the shop made it quite plain. ALL KINDS OF CLOCKS REPAIRED, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED it said, bold as brass.

But not so many people either wanted their clocks repaired or needed a guarantee of satisfaction, it seemed, because not so many people pushed open the door of his shop and came in. Except that one man back in the sixties who had pushed his way in, making the door’s bell jangle in the exciting way that it did, and proudly carrying a wooden cuckoo clock.

It was a Swiss, or maybe German, cuckoo clock but the cuckoo had lost its song.

Sterling was overjoyed to take it, to reverently say the man could call back for it tomorrow or maybe the day after because he’d start work on it straight away and no clock took more than a day for him to fix. He, he said, knew clocks inside out and back to front.

That boasting turned out to be a mistake because he might have known grand old wall clocks or mantel clocks or even grandfather clocks like the back of his hand, but cuckoo clocks were supposed to cuckoo like a wild and free bird might, and his education there was lacking.

He’d failed to fix that particular clock. He’d had it to bits and couldn’t make the cuckoo but out and the man carted it off three weeks later, a very grumpy individual indeed, and that as far as customers was concerned, just had to be that.

“Call yourself an expert,” he had moaned as he went, “yet you can’t bring the simple voice back to an old cuckoo!”

The shop had been there when the millennium had chimed with the threat of its bug ready to spoil everything. He opened up on that first of January 2000. It had, he remembered or thought he remembered, been a Saturday, but the shop door had remained steadfastly shut all day. The fact that one millennium had, overnight, become a new millennium didn’t mean much to Sterling. It might have helped had he been faced with a customer to discuss it with and neutralise the silence of his domain, though there were quite an orchestra of ticking sounds to entertain him, and an symphony of chimes every hour.

Now it was 2022 and he started wondering if he should retire. After all, he wasn’t as young as he’d been and there’s more to life than sitting on a stool behind a counter and waiting for people who, it seemed, didn’t want a clock repair shop.

And out of the blue a customer walked in. The bell jangled dustily, the door squealed on its hinges, and a young man walked in. A customer! He was carrying a box and in that box would be a clock that needed his expert attention.

He gave his wall clock a playful poke as he walked past it, in order to greet the customer personally.

Maybe he should offer the young fellow a prize? For being the first customer this millennium? But no: that might be a poor advertisement for his skills.

So, “Can I help you, sir?” he asked with a broad smile on a face that had seen everything and nothing.

“It’s my laptop,” the man said, “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong but I can set its clock…”

“Pardon?”

What was the man talking about? Was that actually English he was speaking? And what in the name of goodness is a laptop?

“Does it need winding?” he asked, “or have you lost the key?”

Sterling did retire after that He decided that after a lifetime of diligent service to a couple of dissatisfied customers he ought to go on a refresher course.

These days, there might be more to clocks than meets the eye.

© Peter Rogerson 02.09.22

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