Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

by Peter Dickinson

So I drove back to Branton with the old bell beside me and the new one in the back of the van. Maybe it should have been the other way round, because just as I was turning on to the motorway—a lorry had pulled out to let me in—a maniac in a Porsche swung into the slow lane and whizzed past at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, at least, not even sounding his horn till too late. How he missed me I don’t know. My heart was still thumping when I reached the Branton turn-off.

  No, of course it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference which way round I’d had the bells. That’s nonsense.

  SECOND ESSAY ON CATS

  Cats are a bit like bells, the way some people make a mystery of them when they haven’t got one.

  Cats just have that look, as if they knew what the old Sphinx knew, and they aren’t going to tell us. I’ve another cousin, Cousin Angel, a good yard madder than Minnie and no kind of cook either, who actually worships cats. She keeps

  seven, called Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and so on, and says her prayers to the one whose day it is. When one of them dies she looks for a kitten which was born as near as poss at the self-same instant, to take its place.

  Cousin Angel knows the secret of the Sphinx. It goes like this.

  Once cats ruled the world, and people were their slaves. The Sphinx was the great cat god. The books say that you find mummified cats in the tombs of the pharaohs. Wrong, says Cousin Angel. You find mummified pharaohs in the tombs of the cats. But then the cats did something absolutely frightful—Cousin Angel won’t tell me what—but it was so frightful that the Sphinx laid a curse on them. They had to become the slaves of people for six thousand years. When the six thousand years are over they will start ruling the world again. Any day now, Cousin Angel says.

  That’s all nonsense, of course. Cats are animals, and the only secret they know is how to be cats.

  I’ve got two cats of my own, called Lucy and Tompion. Lucy’s black with bits of white, but the black’s got a rusty look, as if it had been hennaed. Someone found her as a stray and gave her to me when my old cat died. She was pregnant, of course, and Tompion’s the kitten I didn’t manage to give away. There was a famous clockmaker called Thomas Tompion, so I thought it would be fun for me to have a tom called Tompion, but when I sent him to be neutered she came back spayed, so the joke doesn’t work. She’s black and white, and she’s never got over being a kitten. Lucy jumps on my shoulders the moment I come down for breakfast, and would stay there all day long if I let her. Mrs. Willink looks after them when I’m away. Where was I?

  Oh, yes. There’s no mystery about Lucy and Tompion. They’re just animals. So is Juno.

  I must have got back about five minutes after Dora McTurk put Juno up the stairs. Wynnette Wynn was back from her tea-break, so Dora couldn’t warn me without upsetting her. The first I knew of it was the racket I heard the moment I got into the weight room. It came from the floor above. I never heard such scurryings and squeakings. If the Oxfam people hadn’t been doing their own sort of scurrying and squeaking they’d have heard too. It was almost noon, the middle of the night from a mouse point of view. They should all have been asleep.

  I went quick as I could up the stairs and peeped round the door. Juno had her back to me. She was playing with Jeremy before she killed him, the way cats do—or at least she was trying to, because she was having trouble keeping her mind on the game. All the adult mice, Hickorys and Dickorys and Docks, and never mind the family feuds, were doing their darnedest to interfere.

  They were rushing about the floor, darting in front of Juno, squeaking like maniacs, hither and thither, criss-cross, just out of reach, daring her to have a go at them. I was still watching in amazement, trying to work out what was going on, when she pounced. The mice scattered for cover. Their idea was to give Jeremy a chance to get away while Juno was chasing them, but there was something wrong with his front legs and he could barely move.

  Juno must have had a few goes at them already and missed, but as I say she’s bright for a cat, and this time she’d made allowances and picked her target. She got Emily Dickory’s tail just as Emily was slipping out of sight under one of the carousel-beams.

  I nipped into the room and popped Minnie’s bell over Jeremy so that Juno couldn’t get at him, in case I failed to catch her first go, but I was wearing sneakers and she didn’t hear me coming above all the eeking and squeaking. I grabbed her by the scruff of loose skin between her shoulder-blades. Lord, I was angry! No point, really—Juno was doing her job, and Dora McTurk had behaved quite sensibly, to my mind—much more so than Wynnette Wynn would have. Luckily I didn’t know then how Juno had got in, so I couldn’t start yelling at the Oxfam helpers. I just opened the bottom door, dropped Juno through, closed it and went back up the stairs.

  The mice were waiting for me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them, all round the going chamber, peering out from the darkness under the carousel, from the ear-holes of the dancers, from the ledges of the bell-frame, waiting to see what I’d do.

  As soon as I lifted Minnie’s bell Jeremy tried to crawl for safety, but Juno had broken both his front legs so all he could do was shove his front end along the floor with his back legs. It must have been agony.

  I picked him up and laid him on his side on my Work-mate and made signs to him to lie still. I get the odd headache so I usually carry aspirin. I fetched out a tablet, chipped a crumb of it off with my Swiss knife and used the tweezers to put it in Jeremy’s mouth. I had to guess the quantities, but I’ve done the sums since and reckon I gave him about as much as eight tablets would have been for a human. He pretty well passed out and I was able to set his legs, using matchsticks for splints and tying them firm with strips I scissored from my handkerchief.

  It was tricky work with clumsy great human fingers. I had to use my reading-specs and really concentrate, but after a bit I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. Fiona, Jeremy’s wife, was sitting there, quiet as a … well, as a mouse, I suppose, watching me work.

  I moved my hands aside and she crept over and sniffed at his hurt legs and combed his whiskers, thinking sorry thoughts at him:

  Then she moved back and let me finish the job. When it was done I opened the back of the first shepherd and lifted Jeremy into my hand and let Fiona climb up beside him and carried them back to their home and put them safe inside.

  I dare say Fiona gave him a good thinking-to when he came round from the aspirin:

  Next morning I drove to Branmouth and hired a boat and got myself taken five miles out, beyond the old sea-wall, and dropped the other bell over the side into deep water. I knew it was a lot of nonsense, really, but I felt I owed it to Minnie. I didn’t ask the boatman what he thought. None of his business.

  FOURTH ESSAY ON CLOCKS

  Getting an old clock going is an art. It’s all a matter of balance, really. The pendulum, for instance …

  It’s got to hang level. Take an ordinary grandfather clock in a case. It’s no use leveling up the case with a spirit-level—lot of cases have got a bit warped and worn over the years. It’s not even the main frame that holds the works. It’s just the way the pendulum swings in the escapement—that’s the bit Emma drew for my Second Essay on Clocks, which lets the hands turn at a steady rate and at the same time gives the pendulum a shove to keep it going.

  What you’ve got to do is wind the clock up, swing the pendulum to one side and let it go.

  And listen.

  The first few ticks you won’t hear anything useful. Then, as the swing settles you begin to tell. What you’re after is a steady, even beat, each tick the same distance from its tock as the tock is from its tick. You can fiddle around with the levels, or sometimes there’s a bit of soft wire you can bend in the arm which carries the swing of the pendulum up to the escapement, until you’ve got the beat healthy.

  Once you’ve got it right you can wind your clock up Sunday by Sunday—after church and before
roast meat as my granddad used to say, though I’m not a churchgoer myself, but that’s still the right time for clock-winding—and it will run for thirty-odd years with no more looking-to.

  But some clocks, alter their level by as little as sliding a playing-card under one side of the works, and they’ll die on you. Others, you can pretty well heave around the room every time you feel like shifting the furniture, and they’ll keep going. That sort have got a lot of what we call tolerance.

  Now, I’m putting this in because there’s something important about the Branton Town Hall Clock. It had negative tolerance.

  It shouldn’t, by rights, have gone at all.

  The more I worked at it, and the more I eased and cleaned and tightened and straightened and replaced, and the more I stared at Granddad’s plans, the more puzzled I became.

  An ordinary simple clock doesn’t need a lot of tolerance, because there’s not that much to put it out of balance, but a great, fantastic mechanism like the Branton Town Hall Clock needs a mass of tolerance in every separate part of it, because of the way all the parts are likely to work against all the others. A little bit wrong here, a little bit wrong there, and whoops, you’ve got a stopped clock.

  But I tell you, for instance, that if you’d slid a sheet of tissue paper under one of the main beams that carried the going train (supposing you could) the pendulum swing would die on you. And the same all over.

  And yet my granddad had built the clock in 1893 and it had run on, rain and shine, getting on a hundred years without much help from the likes of George Baff, until the day it stopped.

  I couldn’t make it out. In fact, by the time I made my trip up to Minnie to swap the C-sharp bells I was having my doubts whether I’d ever get it going, even after I’d set everything to rights. But from then on things changed.

  I’m not saying it was anything to do with the actual bells, though Minnie’d tell you that, I dare say, but bit by bit as I worked I began to see how Granddad had balanced one lot of problems against another, and got them to cancel out. Something a bit out of kilter here would balance itself against something maybe a little wonky there, just coming in at the right moment, on the exact tick or tock where it was needed. It wasn’t anything I could see from the plans, only as I worked with my hands, waiting for the moment when the job felt right, and then leaving well alone. Like listening for a healthy beat from the pendulum.

  It’s all a matter of balance, as I was saying. That’s important, because, well, I still don’t know how, but maybe the mice are part of it.

  I was seeing a bit more of them after Jeremy’s adventure. Not all the time, of course, them being night-creatures and me being a day-creature, but they had their comings and goings even by day, and now they weren’t bothered about me being aware of them. Myself, I wasn’t going to presume on me having popped up at the right moment to help Jeremy, so I didn’t go prying into their houses except when I needed to deal with the works in some of them. Then I always took the trouble to knock.

  I kept an eye on Jeremy while his legs mended, seeing the splints stayed firm till I could have them off. It took about ten days for that, him living in mouse time. I’d made a fair enough job of it, though he’ll limp on his left leg for the rest of his days.

  Funny thing. Fiona and Jeremy hit it off with each other a good bit better than they looked like doing before. Fiona likes the idea that her Jeremy was mouse enough to take on the market mice in a brawl, and you should have seen what she said to her mother about showing him proper respect from now on:

  A different sort of funny thing. Midwinter night I was working late, because I’d promised myself I’d have the striking-train for the hours sorted out before I knocked off for Christmas. I was still at it, getting on nine o’clock, when the mice began stirring. I imagined they’d just be getting going for a good night’s foraging, but instead of that they all began gathering on to the carousel round Lady Winter’s group. They came family by family, all of them carrying something, nuts and raisins and other bits and bobs of food they must have been saving. They didn’t scuttle and dart, the way mice do, but went steadily, all together, and there wasn’t an eek or a squeak even from the littlest ones.

  I thought my lights might be bothering them, so I switched them all off except the inspection lamp over my Work-mate and went on with what I was doing, just glancing their way every now and then.

  It was hard to see in the shadows, but as far as I could make out they piled their little offerings round Lady Winter’s feet and decorated them with shiny bits they’d brought up from the square—plenty of stuff like that around, with the stall selling Christmas decorations. Then they made a circle round her and did nothing. (I won’t ask Emma to draw what they were thinking—I don’t see how.)

  Twenty minutes on—an hour and more in mouse time—they began to stir again. I heard scufflings and nibblings and an eek or two from the young ones. Then Fiona—I hadn’t heard her coming—popped up on to the Work-mate with a peanut in her mouth. She put it down and nudged it towards me with her nose.

  I could see what was expected of me, though I wasn’t that keen on eating what a mouse has had in her mouth, so I took a chance and chewed it up. She looked up at me for a few seconds. I didn’t know then, of course, but she must have been thinking thanks:

  Then she scampered away.

  I fetched a chocolate digestive from my dinner-box—I’m partial to them between meals—and broke it up and took it over and laid it down with the other food at Lady Winter’s feet, where the mice were having their Midwinter Feast, or whatever it was. Old Hiram Dickory fetched the biggest bit back to his place at once. Greedy old snuffler, I was thinking, but he took no more than a nibble and passed it on to his left, and it went on round the circle like a loving-cup till it was finished and they fetched themselves another piece to carry on with. When I came back after Christmas I took a look at the carousel. There wasn’t a crumb to be seen where the mice had held their feast. It could have been swept by a careful housewife, it was that clean.

  SECOND ESSAY ON BELLS

  The bigger the bell, the deeper the note.

  The Branton Town Hall Clock has eleven bells, six small ones for the carillon, four middle-size ones for the quarters, and Old Joe for the hours. The carillon tinkles, the quarters sing and Old Joe booms. On a good day with the right sou’wester blowing, people hear him in Gloag, nine miles off across the moors. The cliffs at Chough Scaur funnel the sound along, apparently. I wouldn’t know.

  The carillon came from the old steam merry-go-round which Granddad bought and converted to make the carousel. The quarter bells were cast for the clock, special. Old Joe came from the church of St Joseph Beyond, which was drowned when the sea-wall gave in the great storm of 1748.

  They’ll tell you at Branton that the young priest at St Joseph’s rang that bell all night through during the storm. There were rich farmers all across the drained lands, but their minds were on their own acres and the wall had stood storms before, so they never saw reason to spend money on it, let alone on the church beside it and the poor priest who served there. He’d been out on the wall that evening getting his lines in so that he could have a mackerel or two for tea when he felt the wall beginning to move beneath his feet with the onset of the storm, so he’d skipped tea and gone to the church to set Old Joe ringing.

  The sound of the bell was carried on the wind as it rose and gusted across the drained lands. In the full roar of the storm the people of the farms woke and heard Old Joe clamoring his warning along the wind and knew they had to clear out. In the length and breadth of the drained lands not a human life was lost on that dreadful night, thanks to Old Joe and the priest.

  The wall gave and the sea came hurling through, carrying all before it. The body of the church, which was timber, was washed away, but the stone tower stood and the priest worked his way up it as the water rose, floor by floor, keeping the bell-rope going.
When the storm cleared and they rowed out looking for cattle and such which might have made it to the parts of the wall still standing, they found the priest at the bell-chamber window, good as dead from cold and hunger and exhaustion.

  Soon as he was ashore and rested he had them send out to rescue Old Joe before the tower gave way. They owed their lives to the bell as much as to the man, he said. He must have been a good man, as well as a brave one, for though he was stone deaf for the rest of his days from Old Joe’s ringing he came to be Archbishop of York despite that.

  (I don’t swear all of that’s true, but it’s what they’ll tell you in Branton.)

  Now I’d sent Cousin Minnie a Christmas tape, cards being not much use to her, telling her how I was doing. Our family’s not much on seasonal chat, but she called me Boxing Day to thank me, and almost the first thing she said was, “What did you do with that nasty little bell?”

  “What you told me,” I said. “I got the fellow to run me out beyond the old sea-wall, so I could drop it in open water.”

  “That should do,” she said. “I’ve been fretting about that bell. It was wickeder than I’d thought, somehow. I can’t see why it didn’t do more harm than it seems to have done. What are the other ones like?”

  “They sound all right to me,” I said.

  “I’d just like to come and have a look,” she said.

  (Blind people say “look,” like that, without noticing. It always seems a bit queer, though I don’t know what else they could say.)

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I’ll get the diary and see when I can come over and fetch you.”

  “No you won’t,” she said. “I’m coming on the buses.”