The Clock People

by Mark Roland Langdale

  So here we draw breath as another frame of the story is shown upon the imaginary magic lantern all storytellers and readers possess inside their heads, whether they know it or not.

  ‘Don’t you ever think there is more to life than simply just marking time? Perhaps there was some truth to those stories your mother told you to get you off to sleep,’ the boy sighed dreamily. The boy’s father was no longer listening to the sound of his son’s voice, as he was listening to the calming metronomic sounds of the grandmother clock sitting in the corner of the room chuntering away to itself – tick tock, tock tick, tick tock, tick tock. The boy could not sleep. His mind was running fast like a timepiece that was urgently in need of some tender loving care. So instead of trying to sleep there was time for some more wondering. These wonderings of the mind took him back in time as he wondered if the Clock People were born in the clock or had found the clock and decided to set up home there.

  ‘We’re not marking time, we’re repairing time and that is a very important job. Just ask Old Father Time if you don’t believe me! So, boy, I suggest you stop dreaming, otherwise tomorrow you’ll get a black mark from the foreman for sleeping on the job!’ the boy’s father chuckled as the inner workings of the mechanism combined with the grandmother clock in their room finally lulled him off to sleep. ‘Tick tock, tick tock, lock the back door, time for sleep,’ whispered the hands of the grandmother clock. ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite or the Book Mites, but you can forget the Clock Mites as that is simply just a highly unlikely story!’

  ‘Yes and before you get too comfortable in that dream of yours, Wilbur, may I suggest you have a bath before you go to bed. You’re covered in oil from lubricating the mechanism, and trying to wash oil out of the bedsheets is a devil’s own job. And furthermore don’t fall asleep in the bath or you’ll drown, after all you’re not the ancient mariner!’ grunted his mother scolding the boy named Wilbur, something he knew the tepid bath water would not do. The boy had a quick wash in the tin bath in the next room before all three of them finally found sleep. Actually, that is not quite correct, as the boy did not find sleep. He certainly did not find the Dream Merchant. What the boy actually found was a nightmare and one he wanted to climb out of no sooner had he climbed into it!

  ‘No, get back, get back, my time is not up yet. A bed of nails? I’d rather sleep in a lifeboat in a storm in a giant tea cup,’ spat the boy, spittle running down his chin as the dream quickly turned into a nightmare. You see, he was imagining being lost in a forest of grandfather clocks all ticking so loudly he couldn’t hear himself think, then all the clocks closed in, crushing him to death. The boy woke in a cold sweat. He gazed up at the ceiling counting the tick tocks of the grandmother clock before once again drifting off to sleep and this time he had a series of dreams. The first dream story was of him marrying the prettiest timepiece in the whole of the clock kingdom.

  The second dream was one in which he owned a fob watch with little people living inside it and in turn they all owned a fob watch with little people living inside them, who in turn owned fob watches with little people inside them. This tale was a little like the Russian dolls which kept on getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared completely. Funnily enough the boy had a dream about living inside a Russian doll, which turned into a nightmare when a child threw it on the bonfire. It seemed this boy collected nightmares in his head and when they escaped from out of his ears he caught them in a net and put them in a jar on his bedroom shelf, or so he imagined.

  The next thing the boy knew he was being chased by both a grandfather and grandmother clock, then he came to a river, jumped in a boat and rowed away. However, the boat was a grandfather clock and the oar the pendulum of a clock, and arrows were being fired at his boat, arrows which were in fact the pointed hands of a clock as once again the dream turned into a nightmare.

  ‘If you improved your time-keeping, boy, this would not happen!’ tocked the grandfather clock loudly.

  ‘The boy’s a time-waster, he’ll never become a clockmaker’s apprentice no matter how much time passes through the hour glass!’ the old grandmother clock exclaimed as she ticked off the boy.

  That was the trouble with being housed within a clock, as time dominated both the waking and the sleep hours, tick tock, tick tock…

  4

  Like Clockwork

  Tick tock, tick tock, Old Father Time moves on and so do the giant hands on the Clock of Time.

  ‘Wakey wakey, time to get up,’ bellowed a man with cotton wool stuffed in his ears, a man who was ringing a bell so loudly one would have imagined he was a bell ringer in a Gothic church.

  The workers of the clock all got out of bed like clockwork soldiers. Tick tock, tick tock, they moved through the mechanism of the clock in metronomic fashion. When the workers talked to one another it was as if they were on the clock – ‘tick tock, tick tock, no time to talk or watch the clock tick tock’. And when they did converse it sounded like two automatons were talking to one another, or characters in a children’s storybook meant for the very young, in short, mechanical, monosyllabic tones – tick tock, tick tock.

  ‘Work?! But I’ve only just clocked off,’ moaned the boy named Wilbur. It seemed even time was against him, and Old Father Time… well, that was another story!

  ‘Wake up, boy, no time for sleepwalking, not inside the mechanism of a clock, it’s far too dangerous, that’s unless you want to clock off permanently!’ cried the foreman as he shook the boy from his slumbers.

  ‘Codswallop!’ the boy muttered over his breath.

  ‘Foreman Codswallop to you, apprentice, show a little respect to your elders and betters,’ grunted the foreman who, unbelievably enough, went by the name of Cornelius Carbuncle Codswallop, Chief Engineer First Class and Head Foreman Second Class in section A subsection B of the clock mechanism.

  ‘Yes, Chief Engineer Codswallop First Class, right away, Chief Engineer Codswallop First Class, Codswallop Clock God Almighty Jobsworth NO Class!’ the boy retorted under his breath before adding, ‘Jobsworth, and if a job’s not worth doing it’s not worth doing right, in which case how about I go back to bed as I’m not right and you can forget about the rain inside a clock. That really is codswallop!’

  ‘That’s right, boy, up the ladder like a rat up a drain pipe. Quick about it, tick tock, tick tock, time’s money and money’s time and the way you’re going you’ll be lucky to earn as much as a magic bean!’ bellowed the foreman tickling his own ribs while jarring his funny bone on a hairspring. ‘Ow, that wasn’t funny, hairspring. I wish some hair would magically spring out of my head then it wouldn’t be as shiny as the cover of a fob watch!’

  Wilbur was half in and half out of a dream as usual, as the last thing he saw before he opened his eyes was a giant station clock yawning, which set off a chain reaction until every other passenger in the station was yawning their head off. It was the old Newtonian theory of every action having an equal and opposite reaction or some such poppycock hogwash codswallop. ‘Clock the look on that dial, mind you, you can’t blame the clock, it’s slave labour, that’s what it is, slave labour!’ Wilbur exclaimed pointing at the face of the station clock as the clock yawned.

  ‘High ho, high ho, it’s off to work we go. Yes, time keeping is a must if you don’t want Old Father Time on your back,’ yawned one of the workers carrying a giant hand of a clock over his shoulder. ‘You know, clocks are my whole world.’

  Some workers in the mechanism climbed ladders while others stepped into a lift and either went up or down depending on what floor their work led them to. There were fifty lifts housed inside the watch all going up and down like clockwork run by a clockwork pulley system that the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have been proud to call his own.

  Time passed as it had a notion to do, as the workers worked like clockwork – that’s if you discounted one apprentice who appeared to be sleepwalking, or
working, in this curious case. Sir Isaac Newton had a theory about time which went as follows: the universe was a giant clock which God had wound up and then had gone for the longest lunch break of all time. This theory almost certainly included an apple! But then Sir Isaac had some funny ideas, even believed in alchemy and that everything was written – the past, the present and the future. He also believed there were codes written into the stories in the Bible. However, he did not believe in the Clock Bible or the Clock God, as he was not a horologist or a maker of chronometers.

  Albert Einstein, another man with too much time on his hands to think about stuff, believed the past, the present and the future coexisted together, in other words ran along one great big timeline. In theory this would enable you to travel back and forth upon this timeline like a tram, an omnibus or a train. Perhaps Stephenson’s Rocket could be brought back into service to do this job?

  Wilbur stood up on the ladder and looked down. He didn’t like heights – not ideal when you were a Clock Apprentice Second Class. For Wilbur time dragged during the working day and sped by like a train propelled by rockets on his days off. The boy was going through the motions cleaning a small part of one of the giant cogs housed within the mechanism with a simple cloth. It was back-breaking, arm-aching and mind numbingly boring work. Half the time he performed the task as if he were an automaton and the other half like a clockwork soldier which left no time for anything else. The time he did not have he spent daydreaming and the rest of that time at night he spent nightmaring!

  If you added all this time up it came to a complete waste of time, something Chief Engineer Codswallop thought Wilbur was first class at, time wasting! Wilbur was not a Drebbles, he was a Wigglesworth. His parents had died in a terrible accident in the mechanism – too terrible for anybody to tell him exactly what had in fact happened to them. His aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Drebbles, had taken Wilbur under their wing, for which he was extremely grateful – well, most of the time he was. The rest of that small time he, like most young folk, was ungrateful, but not extremely so. Just enough to make him young and not an old carbuncle curmudgeon like Chief Engineer Codswallop!

  … tick, tick, tick, tick… ‘Old Father Time, what happened to the tock?!’ exclaimed Merlin. ‘Sorry, I’ve got a tick that’s driving me mad but I’ll soon put a stop to it, don’t you worry, shouldn’t take more than two ticks.’

  ‘Stop time, stop time? Are you mad? What if you can’t restart time?!’ cried Merlin clasping his hands to his face in horror. Tick tock, tick tock… ‘There we go, said I’d sort it out. That’s the trouble with you magicians, alchemists and scientists, you’ve got too much time on your hands to think!’ Old Father Time laughed as he clocked off for the night.

  Then the boy slipped into a nightmare as easily as he normally slipped into a daydream as he lost concentration and his footing all at the same time. Wilbur was now dangling from the ladder with one hand swinging like the pendulum of a clock, one step from having the falling nightmare, the oldest nightmare in the book. The boy wonderer was one step from heaven and one step from hell as the daydream threatened to turn into a waking nightmare.

  ‘Boy, for God’s sake wake up to yourself before it’s too late!’ the foreman bellowed through his megaphone.

  But it was too late, Wilbur’s fall from grace continuing as his hand slipped off the greasy ladder and he fell into the abyss in anything but a graceful manner.

  For Wilbur time became an illusion as he fell in what to his mind appeared to be slow motion. Still, he thought, at least now I have plenty of time to think!

  ‘Wow, that was some daydream,’ wowed the boy blinking his eyes like the shutters of an old dragonfly as he awoke to find he had fallen off the ladder into a truck full of bags of wire wool two floors below. The wire wool was for cleaning the mechanism, for like a propeller on a boat in water it worked better when polished. Everything worked better when it was polished. That was as true for an apprentice as it was for a boy who had grease all over his face!

  ‘Yes, everything appears to be working like clockwork. Wire wool is better than a bed of nails any day of the week!’ Wilbur smiled wiggling his feet and toes in a playful manner.

  ‘That boy must be the luckiest boy in the world or at least the clockwork world!’ Foreman Codswallop sighed.

  The boy looked at the hourglass attached to his leg. The sand was almost at the bottom, so he stopped cleaning the cog and turned the hourglass so the sand began to run through the glass to the bottom. Seven turns of the hourglass and he could clock off for the day. Only seven more turns to go.

  Sometimes Wilbur Wigglesworth tried to imagine how many grains of sand were in an hourglass. He imagined it was a set amount but only if the hourglass was a set size. Imagine an hourglass as big as the moon. How many grains of sand would that contain? Imagine an hourglass turned upon its side with two worlds built upon those sands, mused the boy in a whimsical manner imagining his life away. Mathematics, physics and algebra had never been his strong subjects, unlike Sir Isaac Newton who he’d read about in books. Grains of sand in an hourglass – an unimaginable number and they say mathematics is hard. I could do it with one hand tied behind my back, well, theoretically speaking, that is, in actual speaking, to me mathematics does not add up!

  An hourglass was a simple device for recording time working on the principle of Sir Isaac Newton’s seminal work Gravity, a work Albert Einstein was later to expand upon. Although I’d rather say it was Sir Isaac who passed Albert the baton and ran with it ‘as they say’ in scientific circles. But as yet Albert was not even a twinkle in his father’s glass eye. The hourglass never broke down and never needed repairing and if used properly, and not sat on its side for fun – something Old Father Time occasionally did when he was bored – ran like clockwork.

  ‘Hey boy, how many times have I told you to stop daydreaming during working hours and do your job? That’s if you want to stay an apprentice and stay alive!’ balled the clock foreman Cornelius C. Codswallop No Class, steam pouring out of his one good ear as he looked up to see the boy dozing on the ladder.

  Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick… the train of the boy’s timeline moves on a little as once more his train of thought goes off the rails…

  Inside the mechanism a series of tracks had been constructed that ran around it like in a wild funfair rollercoaster ride. Trucks ran upon the tracks to deliver heavy tools and spare parts to wherever they needed to be delivered. This system had not been designed or built by the original watchmaker Henry H. Humdinger but by one of the Clock People, the great clockwork engineer Eugenius William-Wheelwright III who, it has to be said, was a genius when it came to building and designing clockwork railways. The closest thing this railway system could be compared to was a rollercoaster as nothing else came close. But this rollercoaster ran at a more sedate speed than one at a crazy funfair. Sometimes for fun, something hard to come by in the mechanism, the apprentices rode in the carts when the Elders’ backs were turned. This was much to the annoyance of the Elders and their parents as the carts were often dirty and covered in oil and grease. Life was a rollercoaster even for the Clock People, as things did not always run on time, or run like clockwork… tick tock, tick tock…

  5

  The Moonstone Planetarium

  Night time fell as it did everywhere, which for the apprentices meant it was time to go outside to polish the glass moonstone face of the fob watch. The gold back of the watch also needed to be polished and polished so you could see your face in it. This job was always done at night just in case the stories of giants as big as a house or a wild mouse were not just simply unlikely stories of a tall nature.

  ‘Apprentice Wigglesworth Second Class, please stop time-wasting, time is too valuable to waste. Polishing the glass of the watch is a serious business. If you crack it there will be hell to pay or something along those lines that occasionally have to be read in between. I would have
thought old man Codswallop would have licked you into shape by now. You are on your final warning, boy. One more and you can forget the apprenticeship, you’ll be thrown on the scrapheap like an old clock in a clock graveyard that no longer works,’ balled an old man through a cone-shaped brass loud hailer. Two of the apprentice watch repairers skidded across the face of the glass as if they were skating upon ice and did not have a care in the world as the old watchmaker shook his head in disbelief. The names of the two apprentices, just for the Clock Chronicles, were Wilbur Wigglesworth and Tippy Handle.

  Thin ice was what the apprentices were skating upon alright, the old man thought, grinding his teeth with mechanical precision like the cogs of the mechanism ground together to drive the huge wheels that in turn drove the hands of the watch. You see, the apprentices had tied dusters to their feet. This a) made the job quicker and easier, and b) was great fun – something the Clock Elders appeared to have little or no concept of.

  The night before, Apprentice Wigglesworth and Apprentice Handle had cleaned the inside of the glass dome, standing upon long extended stepladders to do so. This was another painstaking task and one that made the arms, neck and back ache something chronic. The job hadn’t been finished from the previous night so the first task before cleaning the face of the glass was to polish off the inside. Both apprentices had reimagined the glass dome of the watch as an observatory. Tippy had named it the Moonstone Observatory and Wilbur the Moonstone Planetarium. It seemed both of our young apprentices had a mind for waxing lyrical, which was certainly better than having to polish and wax the face of the watch.