Behind the mask

Michael Jackson, King of pop, resides in state, in my house.

The Ktchen Clock

The clock in my kitchen has been running fast.

It was the clock that hung in the kitchen at home in Northallerton when I was a kid. It is ceramic with a yellow front and brassy hands running around a face covered by a curved glass dome. Underneath is an egg timer, whose tick and alarm bell is so well ingrained on my memory it conjours up startlingly detailed memories of that kitchen 40 years ago.

My mum said they needed a clock when they moved in to the house in 1958, so my dad went into the town and bought one, probably from Barkers, the closest thing to a department store and probably a lot like Grace brothers. I remember having a screaming fit when I saw the trouser mannequins in the men's department. They had nothing above the waist, but they did have SHOES, therefore they had FEET! But I digress...

Anyway, back to the clock. It has a proper mechanism not a battery, and I love anything that can run on it's own like this. My mum couldn't understand why I wanted to rescue it from the box in that garage at the house she is in now. She has slowly replaced all the items from that original kitchen, and I have collected them from her. The flour bin, the stacking cake tins with CAKE written on the side, even the old utensils. I had to search through another box in the garage to find the key to wind it, but I even remembered which box it used to be in. Dark blue, and on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard my dad made, with the fuse wire, matches, emergency candles, broken bits waiting to be mended and the Araldite to mend them. The box was as it had been, with all the same items, just no longer on the shelf, the kitchen cupboard probably swept away for a shiny new kitchen long ago.

I was ecstatic it was still there, and wound the clock immediately I got it to my house. The tick, tick, tick the same as I remembered, even the feel of the hands as I moved them to the correct time, but since, it has been running a little fast. I decided today to see if I could make it run more accurately, and turned it over. There is a little horizontal slot with a + and - sign at either end, and underneath was printed in the metal a=3 Sec/24h. I stick a small knife in and I could feel a lever, but I just couldn't quite get it so I moved closer to the light. Underneath, scratched on the slot was a tiny vertical notch, and beneath in tiny letters in my dad's hand were the numbers *15862.

My dad died in 1997, and I miss him terribly. I have no idea what the numbers and the notch mean, but knowing him, he worked out the most accurate position for the lever so it would give the best time. I can't ask him if that's what it was, and it made me cry a little for my loss as I do whenever something catches me like this, but it is in a way a great way to remind myself what a clever man he was, and I love the fact that this is with me now.