HILARY’S GRANDFATHER CLOCK

A man and a clock and a puzzle.

Hilary had one heck of a job on his hands. He needed a key.

But to the beginning.

He supposed that it started when he was conceived and made his way over nine months from embryo, through being foetus until he was born on May 14^th in 1941

But is wasn’t until his thirty seventh year that his heritage assumed any importance at all, because it was during that year that his grandfather passed away leaving his cottage in the country to Hilary with the proviso that he lived in it, otherwise it was to be sold and the monies donated to a home for unwanted cats.

Hilary had never visited his grandfather during his life, either in his cottage in the country (Timeswolde, it was called) during that old gentleman’s life, or anywhere else. He would actually locate him on a family tree on and b then he would be llong dead, so it was with a sense of sorrow that he discovered his inheritance and, being at a loose end decided to go and check it out.

He obtained the key from a friendly solicitor who pointed out the clause about him living in the place, he drove to the address given on the documentation for Timeswolde.

It was a lovely old place with wild roses growing around the porch and a back garden that was beginning to show signs of needing a gardener to spruce it up a bit, and Hilary was no gardener. Still, he thought I can always learn…

Inside the cottage everything was almost clean and almost tidy and probably had been both when the old man passed away several weeks earlier. It was a small cottage, two rooms downstairs and two rooms up the flight of stairs, one of which had originally been a bedroom but had been converted into a bathroom, with toilet and sink.

“Nice,” he murmured to himself when he saw it.

Down the stairs and at one end of a short corridor and like a mechanical monarch stood a magnificent grandfather clock.

It wasn’t working and the hands were pointing to quite the wrong time. It should have been preparing to chime eleven o’clock, but the hands insisted it was twenty past two.

Though it will be right twice a day, he thought, with an internal smile.

On the table in a tiny, barely adequate, kitchen was a manilla folder, and as the cottage was now his he felt he had every right to open it to see what he might learn from its contents.

Inside was a single sheet of paper.

To whom it may concern, it read, and underneath, to get more time find the key and wind the clock…

And that was all. No warm loving greeting from grandfather to grandson. Just a simple instruction to locate what was apparently a mislaid key.

Hilary went back into the hall and stared at the clock.

There were chains that ended with shiny brass weights inside the cabinet.

“That’s odd,” he mused, “you pull on those chains and lift the weights up, and that sets the clock going, and it keeps going until the weights descend as far as they can, and then it stops. That’s how it works. No spring as such to be wound up, just weights on the end of chains, and so no key needed to wind it up. I think I’ll set it going. I love hearing old clocks chiming.”

The front of the clock was a door with a glass panel set into it, and a keyhole for opening it. And no key.

“So that’s what the note means,” he thought, “find the key to the door, and then I’ll be able to unlock the front and wind the thing up.”

He returned to the front room and sat down on a rather comfortable arm chair.

“Now let me see,” he mused, “where would an elderly gentleman be likely to forget he’d put his precious key?”

There was a drawer in a small sideboard, and he looked into it.

There was a motley collection of papers, some in opened envelopes and some on their own, a few nibbled pencils, a comb complete with a beard of fine white hairs, and several small things not worth looking at. But no key. But more significant than the absence of a key was a single foolscap sheet of paper with the words NOT HERE in capitals,

“I can see that!” he said to himself, with a grin, and when he turned the paper over he saw the words MAKE IT CHIME!.

“He’s teasing me,” thought Hilary.

And so a game of hunt the key began. There seemed to be an unusual number of places he might expect a cabinet door key to be hidden, but each one had its own instruction to continue looking, sometimes with a brief clue and other times with the same NOT HERE infuriating taunt. There was even one under the bed resting on an accumulation o dust, NOT HERE.

Hilary was not very good when it comes to being patient and by noon he’d given up. It was only an hour, but an hour was long enough for Hilary to begin to growl to himself. Then yelp.

In the end he went into the small kitchen to check that the kettle left by his grandfather still worked. It did, and he gratefully made himself a cup of tea because although the old man had apparently not enjoyed coffee there was plenty of tea.

In the drawer where the spoons were kept there was a sheet of paper with yet another teasing message

CAN’T YOU WEIGHT?

“At least he could make spelling mistakes,” he thought, and that gave his deceased grandfather a sort of humanity. He could make mistakes.

Or could he?

Was this another infuriating clue?

He drank his tea, sitting on a chair at the smallest kitchen table he’d ever sat at, and began to feel a warmth towards the ancestor he’d never met. But why had a dying man played this game? Surely the best thing he could do was dispose of the darned clock and if he felt like it, buy another one rather than waste his time running around like a scalded cat.

But the game was afoot.

Unable to stop himself he mooched around when he’d finished his drink. That clock, an ancient instrument he’d never known existed until that morning, was eating at his mind

He went and stared at it.

Was that another tease? At the bottom against the floor there was what looked like a tiny door set in what was a skirting rail. Not a hole caused by time and wear but a tidy little door complete with a hook holding it shut, and it was directly next to one of the weights.

“It’d be fine if I was a mouse!” he thought, “then I’d be able to get to the weight…”

“Get to the weight!. The weight! I wouldn’t be able to get to the weight, and if I did it would be too damned heavy!”

He stared at the weight that governed the mechanism of the clock. Someone had place a penny, an old fashioned penny, on one of them, and on the other weight, the one he rather assumed operated the chimes as it slowly responded to gravity and pulled remorselessly downwards, was a key, a cabinet key, and it was balanced on the edge most precariously.

“The clever old devil!” thought Hilary, “now if I open that little door I might just be able to poke the key and then find a way of grabbing it!”

And it was so very simple. A gentle nudge and the key dislodged, and fell tantalizingly close to the mouse-sized door and it took mere seconds for him to hook his fingers on it and pull it out.

Then he opened to cabinet door and pulled the chains that lifted the weights up. The pendulum started swinging at a touch, the clock ticking and, much to his endless joy it chimed a resonant One when he set the hands right.

“Time for lunch,” he thought, and he slipped the key into his pocket after locking its door.

© Peter Rogerson 15.06.22

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