Preview

It was a stormy afternoon in the town of Eldham when the clock struck three.

Leaves, carrier bags, newspapers and discarded cardboard coffee cups had all taken flight on the relentless wind, and the seemingly horizontal rain did enough to make one feel that there were small pins attacking the face.

Malcolm Foster, a member of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, made a beeline for The Pot, an upmarket cafeteria opened by his daughter Claire in 1986. The Pot had over the years become the nerve centre of the town, as it occupied No. 1 Market Square, and afforded diners a commanding view over the town centre (if you could get a window seat, that is!). Malcolm had worked at Eldwood’s, the local clock factory for 50 years before retiring in 2003. Ever since then, he has kept up his promise of looking after “Busy Lizzie”, the Town Hall clock gifted to the town to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

When he saw the clock being installed, he thought that it was such a beautiful piece of machinery; he decided then and there that he wanted to work with clocks. As the years went by, Malcolm rose up through the ranks with hard work and enthusiasm, writing his autobiography “Time’s up!” on his retirement. There was precious little he didn’t know about traditional timepieces. “Quartz? What’s quartz?” was his familiar workplace catchphrase.

Malcolm always sat at the same table when he came for his morning coffee and toasted teacake, and as he quickly closed the door behind him to keep out the cold and wet, Claire greeted him with a peck on the cheek as she put down his tray on table 2, picked up the “reserved” sign and continued about her work.

Malcolm dropped his regulation half-a-cube of sugar into his coffee and began stirring. He had just finished his regular weekly routine of checking, cleaning and winding up the “old girl”, as he called her, and he always came to The Pot straight afterwards. That clock was his passion: he may have retired twelve years ago, but he still had an undimmed love for all things horological.

The little brass bell above the front door of the café tinkled. The weather tried to gate-crash elevenses, but was quickly sent packing by a sharply-closed door.

“Morning, everyone!”

Ted Wilkinson had been Malcolm’s colleague at the factory; they had started on the same day in 1953 and retired on the same day fifty years later.

“Morning, Ted!”

Malcolm rose to greet his friend, and then nodded to his daughter for Ted’s “prescription” tea & toast.

The two men talked and laughed over many subjects, pausing only for refills or the occasional “comfort break”. Both men were now widowers, and many had said that had it not been for their wives, they would probably have married a long-case clock apiece! Ted’s only complaint about clocks was that they “Couldn’t cook or iron!”

The storm continued unabated, and the inhabitants of the town tried their best to continue with their day despite the appalling conditions.

Nobody knows what made Malcolm and Ted look out of the window at exactly the same moment. Some will say coincidence, some will say fate; but at one o’clock precisely, both men looked outside to see a bolt of lightning hit the ornately-decorated cast iron bracket holding Busy Lizzie to the front archway of the Town Hall. The noise was indescribable as the bracket seemed to vaporise before everybody’s eyes, and then total silence as the 53-inch diameter clock fell, almost in slow-motion, to the busy street below.

The three people underneath died instantly.

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Avery Henville

Writer