Speaker 1: There is a rhythm to a railway town, even once
Speaker 1: the trains have left. Twenty seven strides from my garden
Speaker 1: gate to the bakery, thirteen more to where the old
Speaker 1: station platform peaks behind the hedges, though these days the
Speaker 1: platform serves only pigeons and stray cats. My walks form
Speaker 1: their own timetable up Hillcrest, down Church Lane, then Main Street,
Speaker 1: running parallel to the vanished tracks. I follow this winding
Speaker 1: route most mornings, my silver pocket watch ticking in its
Speaker 1: felt lined pouch, a relic from forty years spent minding
Speaker 1: trains retired. Now my days keep the shape of old
Speaker 1: rail schedules, only softer and quieter. It was on one
Speaker 1: of these nearly thoughtless walks a Tuesday in early spring,
Speaker 1: when the daffodils knotted gold along the curb, that I
Speaker 1: glanced up at the clock tower beside the station, not
Speaker 1: out of any true expectation habit, more like it. The
Speaker 1: clock tower is the town supposed crown slate, roofed and
Speaker 1: chiseled with the date eighteen eighty seven. Its hands were
Speaker 1: always frozen at odd, useless angles. For decades. Every one
Speaker 1: said it had never worked, or at least never kept
Speaker 1: faith with the real time. The council couldn't afford repairs.
Speaker 1: Eventually no one cared, so I'd look, smile rly and
Speaker 1: reach for the pocket watch. Ritual except that Tuesday, the
Speaker 1: clock face high above me, read nine zero one. I
Speaker 1: checked my watch, Yes, nine zero one, exactly, the second hand,
Speaker 1: tidily vertical. A chime came faintly from my little radio
Speaker 1: tucked in my jacket. The local hour signal right on queue.
Speaker 1: Three ways to know the time, three independent confirmations. Still
Speaker 1: the clock had always been dead. I stood on the
Speaker 1: empty station forecourt, considering the hands, broad black, tarnished at
Speaker 1: the tips, looked as fixed as ever, but the time
Speaker 1: was no longer random. The odd shape of the moment
Speaker 1: amused me all the same. I waited. My walk became
Speaker 1: a loiter five minutes drifted by. The hands did not budge.
Speaker 1: A few crows scavenged breakfast from the gutter. The wind
Speaker 1: jostled the limp bunting left over from some winter event.
Speaker 1: The minute hand, thick and dignified, stood unmoved. Perhaps someone
Speaker 1: had wound the mechanism, timed it right, set it running
Speaker 1: for a brief spell, even then for it to match
Speaker 1: so perfectly, an impressive coincidence. An hour later, after looping
Speaker 1: through the bakery and a few other errands, I turned
Speaker 1: back onto Main Street habit again. My eyes went up.
Speaker 1: The clock face now read ten zero one, perfect again,
Speaker 1: matching my watch and the ticking from the radio. But
Speaker 1: the air carried a certain dustiness, the sense that no
Speaker 1: one had tended that tower in months. Certainly I had
Speaker 1: not seen anyone come or go. The windows remained laced
Speaker 1: with cobwebs, and the rusty, unused door below the clock
Speaker 1: was padlocked. As always. I walked home that morning, unusually distracted,
Speaker 1: my steps soft on the gravel, mined, occupied not by
Speaker 1: aches or errands, but by the absurd steadiness of that clock.
Speaker 1: The more I thought about it, the less it fit.
Speaker 1: In all my years servicing schedules, punctuality was precious. The
Speaker 1: unreliability of that clock was one of the few constants
Speaker 1: across two generations of conductors and porters. Yet there it was,
Speaker 1: as right as rain and silent as ever. By supper time,
Speaker 1: I'd resolved to pay more attention. Some one was making
Speaker 1: a lire of the town's oldest myth, or else I
Speaker 1: thought something stranger was at play, though I could not
Speaker 1: begin to say. What if you've never lived in a
Speaker 1: railway town that's outlived its own railway, you might not
Speaker 1: catch the shape of its silences. Our station sits shuttered,
Speaker 1: a shell on the edge of everything, with tracks pried
Speaker 1: up and wild fennel growing where the express once thundered through.
Speaker 1: But in layout, the station still commands the town's axis.
Speaker 1: Main street curves to kiss its front steps. The shops
Speaker 1: press close as if hoping for a last ticket, and
Speaker 1: the clock tower leans quietly but with authority over it all.
Speaker 1: The cafe stands right beneath its shadow. That's where Arthur
Speaker 1: Singh pauses famous stovetop coffee, describes each pastry with a
Speaker 1: proud wave, and listens with enviable patients to complaints about
Speaker 1: the buses that now rule the roads. He's a natural collector, tales, mementos,
Speaker 1: faded posters from long lost train holidays. Most folks call
Speaker 1: his place the Lost Property Office for conversation. On the
Speaker 1: next corner lives missus Rosslyn Vickery, my neighbor and the
Speaker 1: nearest thing we've got to a living encyclopedia. She taught
Speaker 1: history at the school for thirty years and conducts her
Speaker 1: own little expeditions into our town, stories who built which wall,
Speaker 1: which family owned, the maidenhair ferns below the park, even
Speaker 1: a recurrent theory about Roman coins occasionally found at market.
Speaker 1: She calls herself an amateur horologist, but a true gift
Speaker 1: is keeping old things remembered. Then there's Frankie Bell, who's
Speaker 1: only sixteen but already serves as the town's unofficial photographer,
Speaker 1: always dashing between the general store and wherever light looks
Speaker 1: most interesting. Frankie documents family arguments and potholes with equal care.
Speaker 1: And I've lost count of the time she's darted ahead
Speaker 1: of me, proclaiming, hold still, mister Harper, this'll look dramatic
Speaker 1: in black and white. People often say our town runs slow,
Speaker 1: even for rural England, and it's true in some sense.
Speaker 1: The markets unravel at their leisure, the pub opens and
Speaker 1: closes with no published hour, and the only school bell
Speaker 1: left is a recording piped through cracked speakers. But for decades, everything,
Speaker 1: absolutely everything, once synchronized to the clock tower. Even as
Speaker 1: its hands stalled, time itself flowed around the myth of
Speaker 1: its old precision school term announced from the steps. Once
Speaker 1: the clock counted down, the final minutes of summer. The
Speaker 1: post always sorted on the hour, with the hour dictated
Speaker 1: by whichever side of the face faced the post office window.
Speaker 1: Best my own trains departed with the station mistress consulting
Speaker 1: her little schedule book, which always began as per clock
Speaker 1: tower time allow margin. No one believed in the mechanism,
Speaker 1: but everyone abided its authority. Ask any old timer where
Speaker 1: to stand, and they'll point by the clock. Town meetings,
Speaker 1: nativity plays, even the annual pancake race we time them
Speaker 1: to that stubborn, mostly mute dial. Yet ask a dozen
Speaker 1: residents how the clock kept or failed to keep time,
Speaker 1: and you'll get stories spun from memory, longing and a
Speaker 1: bit of weary resignation. Never worked, but always told us
Speaker 1: what we needed. Arthur would joke. Good for nothing but pigeons,
Speaker 1: replied the late Missus Bardsley, peering over her pruning shears.
Speaker 1: Yet not a day passed without someone glancing up at
Speaker 1: the tower measure their progress against its stilled verdict. Lately,
Speaker 1: though I find the clock's odd presence hard to dismiss.
Speaker 1: It is not simply derelict steel and faded numerals, but
Speaker 1: some pulse embedded in the bone of things. You can't
Speaker 1: make a schedule in this town that isn't, in some
Speaker 1: small way an echo of the tower's authority. Even the
Speaker 1: new bus drivers squint at it unconsciously, confident that it
Speaker 1: stands for something certain. All these routines acquire a new
Speaker 1: edge after my Tuesday discovery. If the clock is suddenly
Speaker 1: impossibly correct, what does that make of all our settled rituals.
Speaker 1: I keep replaying that walk though stationary hands, the silent
Speaker 1: metamorphosis of the face from nine zero one to ten
Speaker 1: zero one. I'm a man who likes a system, who
Speaker 1: understands the trust and betrayal of schedules and the dignity
Speaker 1: of keeping time. A silent clock cannot be forgiven for
Speaker 1: being right out of habit and a dose of intrigue.
Speaker 1: I start asking questions. On Wednesday, as the town blinked awake,
Speaker 1: I made my way to Rosslyn's garden. She was kneeling
Speaker 1: among pale tulips, gloved hands deep in winter mulch. I
Speaker 1: didn't waste much ceremony, Rosslyn, did you happen to see
Speaker 1: the clock tower lately? It's keeping time? Apparently? She sat
Speaker 1: back on her heels and laughed a rich chestnut sound,
Speaker 1: Oh ewen, it always has, isn't that the joke? She
Speaker 1: shook a streak of earth from her glove. My father
Speaker 1: set his watch by that thing every Sunday till the
Speaker 1: day he went blind. Yes, yes, but I faltered, suddenly
Speaker 1: aware of how easily she dismissed the doubt. Every One
Speaker 1: says it's dead, but it's been spot on these last
Speaker 1: few days. Yet I've never seen any one wind it
Speaker 1: or fix it? Have you? She mulded over, gaze flicking
Speaker 1: upward in thought. My gran used to claim a repair
Speaker 1: man came in the night, wore a blue coat, or
Speaker 1: so she said. But Gran also insisted our milk's swirl
Speaker 1: clockwise because of the tower's shadow. Another laugh. No one
Speaker 1: seen anything for decades. There's not even a ladder left
Speaker 1: in the station. You know, then, how does it stay right?
Speaker 1: Rosslyn considered me the way a teacher examines a student's
Speaker 1: wild guess. Maybe people just need it to be right.
Speaker 1: What will we do otherwise? Move to bus schedules, she
Speaker 1: mock shuddered. I left no closer to sense, but oddly
Speaker 1: cheered outside. The clock face remained sedately self assured, its hands,
Speaker 1: refusing to betray their secret. Next, I stopped by Arthur's
Speaker 1: cafe before the breakfast rush. He was adjusting chairs, wearing
Speaker 1: that faded aprons stitched with sings calf better than time tables.
Speaker 1: When I posed my riddle, he leaned in. Ah, the clock,
Speaker 1: the clock, he said, voice syrupy with nostalgia. Back when
Speaker 1: my uncle ran the kitchen, he told me an engineer
Speaker 1: had set up some electromagnetic trick. Never knew winding true
Speaker 1: railway cleverness. We were the envy of the line. I
Speaker 1: raised an eyebrow. I poked around once years ago. Didn't
Speaker 1: see any wires. Arthur grinned, unbothered. You wouldn't, would you.
Speaker 1: That was the genius of it, invisible. Or maybe it's
Speaker 1: the magic of the station without trains. The magic's all
Speaker 1: that's left. Well, it's working again, if it ever stopped,
Speaker 1: I admitted. Arthur spread his hands, delighted. That's time for you.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you stop counting and let it count you. I
Speaker 1: took my coffee to the window, uncertainty sweetening the first sip.
Speaker 1: Later that day, as I pondered the strange fidelity of
Speaker 1: the clock, I remembered Frankie's camera perched on the general
Speaker 1: store counter. I stopped in found her stocking the magazine rack,
Speaker 1: her head crowned with earbuds. Frankie, I said, lowering my
Speaker 1: voice conspiratorially, I need your help with a little experiment.
Speaker 1: She brightened. If it involves the clock tower, I'm in
Speaker 1: everyone's talking about it. My mum says, the hands haven't
Speaker 1: moved since last October, but now it's showing Thursday's soup
Speaker 1: special right on time. Her grin bordered on impish. I
Speaker 1: want to check exactly what time the clock is showing
Speaker 1: at this moment, I explained, nodding toward her camera. We
Speaker 1: walked together to Main Street, stood directly beneath the dial.
Speaker 1: I clicked open my watch two thirty three p m.
Speaker 1: On the dot. Frankie raised her camera and snapped a crisp,
Speaker 1: high resolution photo. We studied the image together there, frozen
Speaker 1: in digital clarity. Were the hands unmistakably at two thirty
Speaker 1: three undeniable since the phone's metadator corroborated the very second.
Speaker 1: I was watching it all morning, I muttered, didn't see
Speaker 1: those hands move once. Frankie shrugged, checking her phone. Yes,
Speaker 1: it likes to perform when no one's gawking. May be
Speaker 1: it's camera shy, yet her eyes lingered on the face,
Speaker 1: and for a moment her humor faded. May be it
Speaker 1: always just knows what you want to see. I didn't
Speaker 1: answer That afternoon. The contradiction replayed in my mind, restless
Speaker 1: as the trains that used to pass for a clock
Speaker 1: that never worked. It could not be caught being wrong.
Speaker 1: We are a people fond of records and routines. Years
Speaker 1: of punching tickets, recording arrivals, and matching watches gave me
Speaker 1: a suspicion for coincidence. That week I began my informal log.
Speaker 1: Each day, I wrote down the time displayed by the
Speaker 1: clock tower, lining up the readings with my watch, always wound,
Speaker 1: always trusted, and on some mornings, with Frankie's phone. It
Speaker 1: became a running joke between us, care for a time check.
Speaker 1: She'd call from across the bakery, camera primed. My careful
Speaker 1: notes rang with absurdity at seven twenty five a m.
Speaker 1: One twelve p M. Four forty six p m. Each
Speaker 1: time I looked up, the clock wore the right face,
Speaker 1: not one minute ahead, not a tick behind. The hands
Speaker 1: never shifted as I watched, but whenever my attention drifted
Speaker 1: elsewhere the world forgot to keep them still. Frankie joined
Speaker 1: in wholeheartedly, conducting her own tests. She snapped photos at
Speaker 1: odd inconvenient hours, lunch break, twilight, and after the town
Speaker 1: bonfire when the square was a whirl of embers. Every
Speaker 1: time the digital display echoed my own reading. On the
Speaker 1: few occasions when we compared images from two separate phones,
Speaker 1: the clock face agreed with both. Her laughter had become
Speaker 1: less certain. We wondered if we were the subjects of
Speaker 1: some elaborate prank. But it wasn't enough to chase shadows
Speaker 1: between the two of us. On Thursday, I started canvassing
Speaker 1: those with longer memories than mine. My first stop was
Speaker 1: the home of mister Penn, whose silver beard predates the
Speaker 1: British rail logo. He presided over his porch like an
Speaker 1: ancient owl, newspaper folded in his lap. When I was
Speaker 1: a boy, he said, after a long, slow consideration, the
Speaker 1: clock was wired to the old telegraph office underground. Mind
Speaker 1: nobody'd see it synchronized to London time. Yes, that's how
Speaker 1: it kept so perfect. But the telegraph line es been
Speaker 1: down since before the war, I interjected. He shrugged. Clever
Speaker 1: folk kept wires running for generations. Maybe they run still
Speaker 1: somewhere under the roots. I left none the wiser, holding
Speaker 1: an image of ghostly circuits pulsing beneath my feet. At
Speaker 1: the pharmacy, Missus Waverley had her own impossibly confident theory
Speaker 1: that clock's painted on always has been no hands, just
Speaker 1: a clever trompello. Will we all only think it moves?
Speaker 1: She sipped her tea, unyielding. Her son, popping in to
Speaker 1: retrieve a prescription, rolled his eyes. Ma'am, you used to
Speaker 1: set my school alarm by the clock, like everyone else,
Speaker 1: He grinned at me, conspiratorially. Don't mind her. She was
Speaker 1: a painter. She seized the world in brush strokes. Each
Speaker 1: story appended the last Tuesday evenings brought the train enthusiastic Society,
Speaker 1: a hearty, graying lot who still wore lapel badges from
Speaker 1: vanished lines, and peppered their meetings with did you know Trivia?
Speaker 1: I was roped in as a guest speaker one dull
Speaker 1: February night. Talk turned, as always to the stupid clock
Speaker 1: tower and its irrepressible stubbornness. The society kept a storied
Speaker 1: archive photos of station life, each stamped with precise years
Speaker 1: and times, spread across the table. The clock's face beamed
Speaker 1: from every image, but in each the hands matched the
Speaker 1: supposed time of capture. There was no two alike, no
Speaker 1: pattern to sabotage ten thirty in nineteen seventy two, eleven
Speaker 1: fifteen in nineteen eighty one, quarter to nine last December,
Speaker 1: all perfectly aligned with the canonical hour. One member gruff
Speaker 1: and Analytical insisted, of course we photoshopped nothing. They proved
Speaker 1: the clock never kept time. Look each one's right only
Speaker 1: for its day. He seemed both offended and impressed. A
Speaker 1: thought occurred, has anyone ever seen it wrong? Silence, then laughter,
Speaker 1: then mild descent, not once, if we're honest, conceded their secretary,
Speaker 1: peering over her by focals. With the help of Arthur,
Speaker 1: always eager for an excuse to revisit forbidden places, I
Speaker 1: wrangled permission to climb the clock tower with Franky one
Speaker 1: blue wind whipped Saturday. Those iron stairs were slick with
Speaker 1: dust and the riotous sense of feral doves inside. The
Speaker 1: gears hadn't tasted oil in living memory. The huge central
Speaker 1: winding drum was unstrung, wedges of rust flaking at the touch,
Speaker 1: levers hung loose, disconnected, no wires electromagnetic or otherwise, not
Speaker 1: even a promising battle. We stood in the mechanical heart
Speaker 1: and found only stillness, no secret power, no hidden machinery.
Speaker 1: Maybe its wind up by belief, franky guest voice echoing
Speaker 1: through the beams, I made a note to revisit skepticism. Rosslyn,
Speaker 1: undeterred by the embarrassment of riches and confusion, ushered me
Speaker 1: into the public library on Tuesday evening. Fluorescent lighting hummed
Speaker 1: above as we hunched over leather bound ledgers and brittle newsprint.
Speaker 1: The station records suffered a flaky logic. Maintenance men checked
Speaker 1: the platform clock and washed the engine turntable with clockwork regularity,
Speaker 1: but the Tall Tower's own care was sporadic, contradictory. One
Speaker 1: year annual pride of punctuality, another only a sigh irreparably
Speaker 1: broken left to weather. And yet weekly listings for market
Speaker 1: openings always referenced the tower's hour. No asterisk, no apology.
Speaker 1: Town meetings were called by the charm Times, though I'd
Speaker 1: never once heard a chime. I lost track of time
Speaker 1: in that archive, which felt dangerously metter The more we dug,
Speaker 1: the more unsteady the ground became. No one's memory quite
Speaker 1: matched the official narrative, and yet photographic, digital, and living
Speaker 1: record all insisted the clock was always unwaveringly correct, wherever
Speaker 1: and whenever you checked. Even when logic splintered, the present
Speaker 1: never wavered. By the second week of my log book,
Speaker 1: my investigation had become the town's favorite subplot. Some approached
Speaker 1: me in hope, others with humorous exasperation. Over Tea Rosslyn
Speaker 1: summarized what we'd gathered. Ewen, we have a clock that
Speaker 1: can't work, but does a dozen stories for why, and
Speaker 1: evidence from every direction contradicting the rest. Yet no one
Speaker 1: here worries as long as it stays right. Have you
Speaker 1: ever wondered if the confusion is the point. My logbook's
Speaker 1: pages were thick with dates, times, and off notations, contradictory
Speaker 1: explanations braided into a knot. Even Frankie, who claimed the
Speaker 1: Internet could solve anything, was forced to concede. Her phone
Speaker 1: logs matched mine, the digital, same as the analog, the
Speaker 1: photos each capturing a perfect single moment, but no narrative
Speaker 1: made the parts cohere. One Saturday, I caught myself trying
Speaker 1: to watch the minute hand move. Eyes fixed and patient,
Speaker 1: I waited in the square as the bakery truck unloaded
Speaker 1: crated loaves. Time seemed to soften, twist, stretch. By the
Speaker 1: quarter hour, my attention flagged, and all the hand ever
Speaker 1: did was remain poised, perfectly composed. The next glance, it
Speaker 1: had leapt to the right time, with no movement in between.
Speaker 1: I smiled ruefully, suddenly reminded of the slight of hand
Speaker 1: tricks my father liked, the coin that vanished, the ball
Speaker 1: that appeared beneath a different cup. The more I pressed,
Speaker 1: the more I suspected the clock's oddness wasn't accidental or
Speaker 1: mechanical at all. Instead, it felt like something The town
Speaker 1: itself produced a kind of quiet collusion. Each person's belief
Speaker 1: shaped a slightly different story, and yet the clock's authority
Speaker 1: endured across every contradiction. No matter where or when you looked,
Speaker 1: it agreed with you, never in advance, never in delay.
Speaker 1: That night, I sat with my note book, faced with
Speaker 1: the absurdity of a town whose only broken promise was
Speaker 1: perfect timing. The patterns in my data didn't match any
Speaker 1: one else's, and the explanations clock hands painted faces. Magic
Speaker 1: engineers seemed to matter less than the sheer collective trust
Speaker 1: in the clock's face. On Tuesday, after market Day, I
Speaker 1: decided to bring together the few who shared my obsession. Rosslyn, Arthur,
Speaker 1: and Frankie gathered at my kitchen table. Spoons clinked in
Speaker 1: mugs of tea. Head Lights blinked through the window as
Speaker 1: dusk settled. I admit, Rosslyn began, the more I hear,
Speaker 1: the less I know. My gran's repair man, Arthur's magic wires,
Speaker 1: the Society's contradictory photos. None of it fits. Yet we
Speaker 1: all watched the clock year in and year out. Arthur
Speaker 1: ran a forefinger around the rim of his mug. It's
Speaker 1: like arguing about whether a weather vane knows the wind
Speaker 1: or the wind is defined by the vein. Frankie interjected,
Speaker 1: I think it's what people want from the clock. I
Speaker 1: sent photos to my cousin in Manchester. He said they
Speaker 1: looked right for the time. I texted, it's like each
Speaker 1: version lines up with whoever's looking. We lapsed into silence
Speaker 1: for a moment, letting the notion sit. It's almost I started,
Speaker 1: as if the explanations themselves change by person. Each story's
Speaker 1: half a conviction, half a need. Arthur laughed quietly. I
Speaker 1: don't care if it's a ghost in the gears, as
Speaker 1: long as it keeps the buses honest and the market running.
Speaker 1: Let it be whatever it likes. Rosslyn pur to lips, contemplative.
Speaker 1: Have you noticed the town's records? Sometimes there are schedule
Speaker 1: announcements from years before the tower was even built, referencing
Speaker 1: its hour. Time flows backward in paper, as if the
Speaker 1: clock's always been a fixture. Frankie brightened, sort of like
Speaker 1: in fantasy books, where the magic only works if nobody
Speaker 1: doubts it. The idea sunk its hooks in me. Had
Speaker 1: our collective desire for unbending, unwavering times shaped the clock itself?
Speaker 1: Was our need for structure and routine, so strong we'd
Speaker 1: woven its certainty into the bones of the town records, stories,
Speaker 1: even our own memories. Skeptical as I am by habit,
Speaker 1: I felt a blush of awe, not fear. The problem
Speaker 1: had shifted. What if the clock's reality, its indifference to wires,
Speaker 1: gears and winding keys, was less a technical feat, more
Speaker 1: a mutual pact among all who lived beneath its face.
Speaker 1: The contradiction was not in the mechanism, but in us.
Speaker 1: No one at my table could quite agree on what
Speaker 1: had changed, but we were all smiling, caught in something
Speaker 1: larger than explanation. My search for the how had delivered
Speaker 1: me to a new and humbling why. That night, lying awake,
Speaker 1: the trains I heard in memory ran with a different tempo.
Speaker 1: Schedules were nothing without faith, and faith, however quietly or
Speaker 1: unconsciously held, could turn steel and paint into something timeless.
Speaker 1: To morrow, I promised myself, I would dig further, but
Speaker 1: not in search of moving hands or hidden wires. The
Speaker 1: foundation of this mystery ran deeper, still tangled in memory, expectation,
Speaker 1: and the peculiar certainty that holds a small town together
Speaker 1: through every contradiction. Rosslyn left late that night with half
Speaker 1: a plate of biscuits and a sheaf of copied pages
Speaker 1: from the library's record book. I was left alone with
Speaker 1: the ticking of my pocket watch. Sounding suddenly less certain
Speaker 1: than before that evening, I found myself restlessly reading and
Speaker 1: rereading my notes, scrutinizing my chart of times the same
Speaker 1: way I used to scan a time table for the
Speaker 1: one elusive mistake. My own compulsion was inching beyond curiosity.
Speaker 1: It felt more like standing at the mouth of a tunnel,
Speaker 1: sure that a train should be coming, and marveling at
Speaker 1: the silence instead. The next morning, over a breakfast of
Speaker 1: burnt toast and orange marmalade I decided it was time
Speaker 1: to pull harder on the threads scattered through those contradictory stories.
Speaker 1: If the town's need and not any plausible machinery held
Speaker 1: the tower in authority, perhaps the real history was buried
Speaker 1: in its records, not its gears. Rosslyn returned, coat bristling
Speaker 1: with late frost, her eyes lit with a conspiratorial brightness.
Speaker 1: Are you up for an archive dive? She asked, waving
Speaker 1: a library card. There's a whole cupboard in the council's
Speaker 1: records that my cousin says no one's opened since the
Speaker 1: first electric stra wheat lamp went up. I can get
Speaker 1: us in. Arthur was eager to come along too, never
Speaker 1: one to miss a good rummage through forgotten papers, especially
Speaker 1: if there were old menus or train tickets to pocket
Speaker 1: for his cafe's wall. Frankie texted she'd read my scribbled
Speaker 1: update on the general store's notice board, and brought her
Speaker 1: camera plus an armload of charged batteries in case we
Speaker 1: catch any time ghosts. Her message read, we met under
Speaker 1: the clock tower itself, a quartet in sensible shoes, Rosslyn
Speaker 1: wielding a ring of keys, Arthur with his thermous Frankie
Speaker 1: clutching what looked like a detective's kit. The key stuck
Speaker 1: only briefly in the council's frigid basement door, and the
Speaker 1: smell behind it was part dust, part something metallic and
Speaker 1: sharp edged, perhaps the fossil scent of lost ambitions. In
Speaker 1: the archives, sunlight filtered through wire meshed panes, painting stacks
Speaker 1: of ledgers, and ancient town maps in blue and gold.
Speaker 1: We split up rifling through careful boxed timetables and by laws,
Speaker 1: old station correspondents, yellowed newspapers, technical diagrams with now meaningless
Speaker 1: measurements of standard Greenwich time. What struck me immediately beyond
Speaker 1: the avalanche of stamps and brittle paper was the insistent
Speaker 1: reference to the station clock standard, years before anyone recalled
Speaker 1: the clock tower being built. Rosslyn nose pressed near to
Speaker 1: the neat looping script of eighteen seventy three, found a
Speaker 1: set of railway schedules for trains due at the ten
Speaker 1: zero three mark as set by the station clock. No
Speaker 1: clock tower appears in sketches from that year, just the
Speaker 1: low line of the platform the presiding Linden trees. Yet
Speaker 1: the station clock rules every schedule. Arthur, digging among station
Speaker 1: master's reports from the turn of the century, pointed out
Speaker 1: an odd division in the accounts. Some months funds were
Speaker 1: earmarked for maintenance of the north clock. Other months the
Speaker 1: same line declared the tower waits completion. No clock face.
Speaker 1: Yet the dates occasionally overlapped, as though the clock both
Speaker 1: existed and waited for a future that had already passed.
Speaker 1: Look at this, Frankie murmured, sliding a dogged pamphlet between us.
Speaker 1: It was a hand drawn map from the jubilee year.
Speaker 1: Two maps, technically both dated within a month of each other.
Speaker 1: On one, the clock tower is rendered in full detail,
Speaker 1: complete with the clear outline of hands at twelve zero zero.
Speaker 1: On the other, a blank space, some other feature, a
Speaker 1: lamp post, a bandstand in its place, a note in
Speaker 1: the margin assembly here for train arrival as per clock.
Speaker 1: She kept snapping photos as we worked, documenting inconsistencies in
Speaker 1: the stack of town newsletters. The clock's presence was variously celebrated, forgotten,
Speaker 1: or lamented as yet to be opened. One photo stamped
Speaker 1: for a November festival showed townsfolk gathering cups of soup
Speaker 1: in the square. The clock face glowed and the hands
Speaker 1: read six forty two, matching precisely the printed schedule. But
Speaker 1: in the ledger Rosa found recording minutes of the same festival.
Speaker 1: Reference went reigned at the sixth bell, no clock to
Speaker 1: be seen. We wrestled with these contradictions, trying to splice
Speaker 1: evidence into a story that would hold, but every attempt
Speaker 1: at sequencing historical cause and effect unraveled. For each year
Speaker 1: the clock was inaugurated, there was a counter year where
Speaker 1: the town still referred to its time. Arthur Brow furrowed,
Speaker 1: cracked a joke about Schrodinger's horology, and was met only
Speaker 1: with thoughtful nods. The facts didn't just fail to stack,
Speaker 1: they seemed to refract around the act of looking. Frankie,
Speaker 1: more attuned to the restlessness of the present than the past,
Speaker 1: tested out a new approach. Let's crowdsource an answer. She proposed,
Speaker 1: and set about texting and messaging townsfolk, collecting photos of
Speaker 1: the clock face taken at every conceivable hour by dozens
Speaker 1: of different phones and cameras. Within a day, we had
Speaker 1: had a folder DNSE with images. Some were daylight, others
Speaker 1: flickered with the orange haze of street lamps, some caught
Speaker 1: in mid storm or half buried in winter snow. Each one,
Speaker 1: despite wild variation in quality, angle or clarity, showed the
Speaker 1: clock face displaying the perfect now, whatever hour, whatever minute,
Speaker 1: the photos metadata claimed. When Frankie stitched these into a
Speaker 1: time lapse video, the result was both mesmerizing and unsettling.
Speaker 1: The clock hands never moved, never even twitched, but every
Speaker 1: instant was documented as correct, as though a separate still
Speaker 1: painting were conjured for each observer. She replayed the montage
Speaker 1: for us in the cafe's back room, a silent kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: of absolute temporal assertion. Watch this one, she said, softly,
Speaker 1: scrolling to an after midnight shot. Her friend had taken
Speaker 1: it after walking home from a party. The clock face
Speaker 1: shouldn't have been visible at all. The floodlights that sometimes
Speaker 1: illuminated it had been out for week, Yet the hands
Speaker 1: glowed in digital clarity, marking the exact minute the picture
Speaker 1: was captured. There was no shadow, no light source, no
Speaker 1: plausible way for the hands to be seen, and yet
Speaker 1: they appeared unwavering, a soft white certainty against the dark.
Speaker 1: I felt the hair prickle on my neck, not from fear,
Speaker 1: but from a sense of contact with something miraculous, reckless
Speaker 1: of explanation. It doesn't have to move, Frankie summarized, half whispered.
Speaker 1: It just always knows when you are. It was Rosslyn
Speaker 1: who first articulated the larger pattern taking shape. Thumbing back
Speaker 1: through the festival records and school announcements, she said, look
Speaker 1: here and here. Every time we line up an event,
Speaker 1: it's always described in terms of the clock, even before
Speaker 1: it plausibly existed. Not just events, but routines, milking market stalls,
Speaker 1: opening the school year's start. It's like the town always
Speaker 1: functioned as though the clock was present, whether or not
Speaker 1: it technically was. Arthur cleared throat. You know, I've talked
Speaker 1: with farmers who swear they planted on Saint George's Day
Speaker 1: at half past tower, so to speak, and those days
Speaker 1: too wet for the real sundial. The clock would be enough,
Speaker 1: if anyone asked. Anyway, It's almost as if the rituals
Speaker 1: needed something certain to lean on, even if it was
Speaker 1: only in spirit. We attempted over that week a series
Speaker 1: of gentle experiments. Arthur spearheaded the idea for a public rewinding,
Speaker 1: painting it in the local newsletter as a bit of fun.
Speaker 1: To amuse the gloom, we gathered a crowd on a
Speaker 1: drizzly Friday afternoon, each of us prepared to set the
Speaker 1: clock by consensus, bringing step ladders and a set of
Speaker 1: antique clock keys borrowed from Rosslyn's collection. Of course, the
Speaker 1: mechanism inside remained inoperable, no springs, no cables, nothing to wind.
Speaker 1: But the event itself mattered. We mindd adjusting the hands
Speaker 1: to display a deliberately wrong hour, Arthur's suggestion of three
Speaker 1: seventy to match his berth minute. Frankie filmed the whole
Speaker 1: affair with glee, capturing the collective laughter, the children scrambling
Speaker 1: to see who could touch the clock face on the
Speaker 1: model made from cardboard for the occasion. Spirits were high,
Speaker 1: the town indulged the silliness with good cheer. We all
Speaker 1: cheered as Frankie turned over her phone and showed the photo.
Speaker 1: The clock smack behind us in the tower displayed three
Speaker 1: seventeen for one bright, playful moment, it had seemed possible
Speaker 1: to outwit the phenomenon through deliberate group action, but what
Speaker 1: came next was odder still. By the next morning, walking
Speaker 1: through the square, I instinctively looked up, then froze. The
Speaker 1: clock face displayed the proper present hour eight zero two,
Speaker 1: matching my watch, the church bells, even the grocer's digital
Speaker 1: till Frankie checked the footage on her phone. In every
Speaker 1: frame of the video, the clock's face supposedly showing our
Speaker 1: prankish three seventeen now perfectly matched the actual time of
Speaker 1: the clip. It was as if our own memory had
Speaker 1: been gently rewritten to remove the anomaly, folded seamlessly into
Speaker 1: the natural order. A joke had been played, and yet
Speaker 1: never had been. Only the collective recollection of the fun
Speaker 1: itself remained, not the hands rebellion. The experiment failed or succeeded,
Speaker 1: depending on your view. We proved something. The phenomenon was impervious,
Speaker 1: not just to neglect, but to deliberate subversion. Any record,
Speaker 1: image or remembrance ultimately synchronized itself to the clock's right time.
Speaker 1: It resisted all efforts to catch it out, not with hostility,
Speaker 1: but with the same smooth assurance. As ever, a nudge
Speaker 1: back to the consensus, erasing traces of doubt, Frankie, undeterred,
Speaker 1: brought out a menagerie of cameras and recording devices, a
Speaker 1: pinhole cardboard viewer her grandfather had built, a battery powered
Speaker 1: super eight, even a mean spirited little webcam borrowed from
Speaker 1: the library's stash of out of date kit. We pointed
Speaker 1: lenses up at the clock, left them running for hours
Speaker 1: from various window ledges, while we avoided gazing at the
Speaker 1: face ourselves. Yet when we played back the tapes, the
Speaker 1: results bordered on comical. Some files were inexplicably corrupted. Others
Speaker 1: showed a still shot for their entire runtime, with no
Speaker 1: motion from the hands whatsoever, though nearby shop windows reflected
Speaker 1: the passing bustle perfectly. Rather than reveal any secret mechanism,
Speaker 1: the cameras captured only the town unchanging clock, a silent witness,
Speaker 1: as if the hands required not only eyes to move,
Speaker 1: but mines to measure the movement. We compared our findings
Speaker 1: with others in the town. The children from the primary school,
Speaker 1: let in on the investigation, gleefully declared their own theories
Speaker 1: the clock. They assured us was powered by hundreds of
Speaker 1: tiny mice in waistcoats running the wheels, or an invisible
Speaker 1: grandma who didn't like to be late when pressed. Some
Speaker 1: adults said the mystery was just a pleasant face. Others
Speaker 1: reckoned the strangeness a symptom of living too long under
Speaker 1: overcast skies, or of needing a certainty beyond the drift
Speaker 1: of days. Missus Waverley, whom I'd suspected of theatrical invention,
Speaker 1: confessed she could not recall a time the clock had
Speaker 1: contradicted her expectation, but also admitted with a wary smile
Speaker 1: that she couldn't picture the hands moving, nor imagine any
Speaker 1: one else recalling such a thing. It's always right, so
Speaker 1: it's always enough, she concluded, leaving the rest unsaid. I
Speaker 1: began to feel oddly comforted by the phenomenon, even as
Speaker 1: its contradictions deepened. My own recollections of early mornings in
Speaker 1: the signal box radio press, to my ear, had always
Speaker 1: included a quick check outside at the clock, sometimes grumbling
Speaker 1: at its obvious wrongness. Sometimes it now seemed confident that
Speaker 1: it was perfectly in sync. I wondered, with an odd
Speaker 1: ache whether the most private threads of my memory had
Speaker 1: twisted over time, tying the clock's authority with the risrhythms
Speaker 1: of my own habits. The hands of the clock then
Speaker 1: seemed to be less a pair of steel arms and
Speaker 1: more the visible tip of an iceberg, something immovable beneath,
Speaker 1: quietly governing the flow of town life, with or without
Speaker 1: conscious attention. The more I tried to dislodge the enigma,
Speaker 1: the more it pressed back, not resentful but essential, reassuring.
Speaker 1: Even at Rosslyn's suggestion, we organized a final gathering in
Speaker 1: the shadow of the old station, part symposium, parts social evening.
Speaker 1: We called it a time circle, inviting anyone curious or
Speaker 1: opinionated to join us beneath the clock tower. News spread,
Speaker 1: as news does through the twin arteries of the village,
Speaker 1: the post office Q and the gossip table at Arthur's Cafe.
Speaker 1: As the sun dipped low and the last streaks of
Speaker 1: cloud reflected gold off the tower's face, a dozen or
Speaker 1: so townspeople found their way into the ark of benches
Speaker 1: and loose chairs we'd set into a circle. Among them
Speaker 1: was doctor gili Or Tees, a railway historian visiting from Durham,
Speaker 1: who had been lured in by news of our unruly horology.
Speaker 1: Gil keen eyed and genial beneath his battered felt hat,
Speaker 1: introduced himself with a dry quip, I study the moments
Speaker 1: when trains and reality disagree. Tea and skepticism flowed in
Speaker 1: equal measure. Arthur, as always, provided a wedge of seed cake.
Speaker 1: Frankie managed the ab equipment, queuing up her composite video
Speaker 1: of impossible time keeping. Rosslyn started the conversation with a
Speaker 1: brief history of the clock's uncertain provenance, reciting from memory
Speaker 1: the dueling entries in council ledgers and the contradictory festival
Speaker 1: fliers that had so perplexed us. We passed around old photographs,
Speaker 1: each dated and signed, each an immutable record of the
Speaker 1: clocks now. Frankie's montage was met with gasps, then laughter
Speaker 1: when one of the children in attendance pointed out, look,
Speaker 1: that's me last Tuesday. The hands are exactly right, mum.
Speaker 1: That was when you wouldn't let me stay out late.
Speaker 1: Gil ort t ease, neutral and attentive, scribbled notes through
Speaker 1: the presentation. When asked for his view, he leaned back,
Speaker 1: balanced his mug on one knee, and said, I've spent
Speaker 1: thirty years looking at railway towns, and I've never seen
Speaker 1: a case where the clock is less about the machinery
Speaker 1: and more about, let's say, mutual expectation. The town needs
Speaker 1: a certainty, a sort of fixed star, and its stories
Speaker 1: bend to fit. Most places, clocks fall behind, and every
Speaker 1: one corrects them. Here you seem to have corrected yourselves
Speaker 1: so completely that the artifacts, histories, and schedules all adjusted
Speaker 1: in kind. Rosslyn nodded, weighing his words. So it's not
Speaker 1: a clock at all, then, not in the usual sense,
Speaker 1: maybe not, Gil replied, It's more like an old milestone
Speaker 1: in the road. No matter how the road curves, you
Speaker 1: always find yourself passing it at just the right moment.
Speaker 1: Arthur offered his version, informed by both hospitality and folklore.
Speaker 1: People need to anchor their days to something reliable. The
Speaker 1: clock promises order, so order appears. The bus comes, the
Speaker 1: loaf bakes, the bell rings all as they should with
Speaker 1: the trains gone. It's become the guardian of routine, so
Speaker 1: we keep it, not the other way around. Frankie chimed in,
Speaker 1: almost shy, I tried posting a photo of the clock
Speaker 1: to my cousin's group chat, and his friends all swore
Speaker 1: the face showed just what it should. Even the Americans
Speaker 1: who saw it with the wrong time zone. Their versions
Speaker 1: matched their moment, not mine. It's not just local. It
Speaker 1: kind of bends for whoever cares about it. Rosslyn, gently steering,
Speaker 1: returned to the maps and ledgers. The tower appears and
Speaker 1: vanishes in the records, but never in any one's schedule
Speaker 1: or event. Time is always marked by it. Whether or
Speaker 1: not the stone or clockwork ever existed in that year,
Speaker 1: everyone fell quiet. I realized then, the our search for
Speaker 1: a gear, a wire, or even a single accountable memory
Speaker 1: had been only half the work. It was not about
Speaker 1: proving a miracle or exposing a fraud. Instead, we charted
Speaker 1: how deeply the clock had sunk into the town's logic,
Speaker 1: how its constancy had become a shared promise, one that
Speaker 1: overruled even hard evidence or honest recollection. I found myself
Speaker 1: pondering aloud, Maybe it isn't the clock demanding belief. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's the town needing a certainty, shaping the clock in
Speaker 1: its image, not as a trick or a lie, but
Speaker 1: as a kind of anchor, something so needful that all
Speaker 1: the details in the end must fall into line, the
Speaker 1: hands become the truth, because anything else would simply feel unbearable.
Speaker 1: It was strange to say such a thing, even stranger
Speaker 1: to see so many heads nodding. No one appeared alarmed.
Speaker 1: If anything, there was a gentle collective relief, as though
Speaker 1: some shared tension had been gently loosened. We had looked
Speaker 1: for a creator, a mechanism, a secret engineer, but the
Speaker 1: clock had always belonged to all of us, not as property,
Speaker 1: but as the heartbeat of expectation, Doctor Ortiz smiled rily.
Speaker 1: Agreement reality, some call it where the need for certainty
Speaker 1: is stronger than the need for history to be consistent.
Speaker 1: That's a kind of genius most engineers envy. It only
Speaker 1: works if no one doubts too loudly. Frankie, younger and
Speaker 1: less burdened by nostalgia, grinned. So the clock works because
Speaker 1: we do, or maybe we work because it does. We
Speaker 1: lingered into dusk, every one a little lighter for having
Speaker 1: spoken their minds. The questions had not all been answered,
Speaker 1: but the mystery's edges had softened, replaced by something like
Speaker 1: collective pride. Walking home with the last blush of daylight
Speaker 1: setting the stone edges of the tower, gleaming. I felt
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the town more intimately than ever before.
Speaker 1: Bells sounded, Children sped home, racing against a curfew decreed
Speaker 1: by the clock. Friends exchanged nods as they passed the
Speaker 1: base of the square. Everyone in their own way lived
Speaker 1: in time with the tower, each heartbeat, each footfall, uniting
Speaker 1: around the silent confidence of its dial. Sometimes I caught
Speaker 1: myself standing in the square watching people cross beneath the clock,
Speaker 1: heads tilted up in casual reference. I stopped writing down
Speaker 1: the minute by minute log of its face. I knew,
Speaker 1: without checking that it would display whatever each passer by
Speaker 1: most needed. My walks took on a greater ease. Ticking
Speaker 1: of my old pocket watch or the church bell's peel
Speaker 1: mattered less, the schedules and signals of my working years
Speaker 1: receding like shoreline at low tide. What remained was a
Speaker 1: gentler reassurance, the knowledge that in this place uncertainty had
Speaker 1: been woven together into a fabric of shared conviction, neither
Speaker 1: forced nor fraudulent. In the bakery, Arthur joked care for
Speaker 1: a slice of punctuality, ewan baked fresh every hour. I
Speaker 1: found myself laughing, accepting the joke. On its own terms.
Speaker 1: Passing the cafe, I'd see Frankie setting up her next
Speaker 1: time lapse, or chasing after an angle of light, wholly
Speaker 1: undeterred by paradox. Try to catch it out again, I'd tease,
Speaker 1: that's the fun, isn't it. Came her reply, no frostration,
Speaker 1: only delight. Sometimes under a sky writhing with crows or
Speaker 1: dusted with evening gold, I would pause, hand shading my eyes,
Speaker 1: looking up at the face that had so preoccupied my days.
Speaker 1: After all, we'd sought machine memory miracle. I found it
Speaker 1: quietly comforting to know the clock would not could not
Speaker 1: ever be wrong. Its perfection was not proof of its flawlessness,
Speaker 1: but of the unspoken, ongoing packed between all who lived
Speaker 1: in its orbit. The trains continue their lonely courses elsewhere,
Speaker 1: now new lines crossing distant towns, new time tables, printed
Speaker 1: and poured over by anonymous hands. But here the pulse
Speaker 1: endures a communal rhythm, gently upheld by a device that
Speaker 1: does not, in the ordinary sense even function. I sometimes
Speaker 1: muse about how many other places hold their own quietly
Speaker 1: impossible wonders, not out of stubbornness, but from a shared,
Speaker 1: simple need, A secret consensus for how the world ought
Speaker 1: to Behave This morning, as I walked along Main Street
Speaker 1: beneath the early sun, I found myself glancing up once more.
Speaker 1: The clock face looked down, impassive and unhurried, hands as
Speaker 1: always steady nine forty five, as it happened, precisely the
Speaker 1: time I expected, and for the first time, instead of questioning,
Speaker 1: I smiled and let it be in answer, if we
Speaker 1: all agree on the time, does it matter how the
Speaker 1: clock knows. The day moved on, the town quickened into
Speaker 1: its little routines, and above us all the clock tower
Speaker 1: remained serenely, wonderfully correct, never quite explained, yet forever assuring
Speaker 1: us that even in uncertainty, we are living precisely when
Speaker 1: and where we mean to be, and that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.