Tale of a Clock
My father had left a message inside the old grandfather’s clock that said (in Chinese) “Open tap to speed up the clock. Close tap to slow it down.”
My sister had found the piece of paper when the clock was moved from our house to hers. For a bit, she was puzzled. Then she saw the little knob inside the clock and realised what the message meant. The actions of opening a tap and closing it refer to turning the knob counter-clockwise and clockwise when the clock is running behind (to speed it up) or ahead (to slow it down).
The clock has been in the family for longer than I’ve been alive. It was in the shop from before we moved out of there in the early 90s, altho I can’t remember if it was downstairs in the shop itself or upstairs where we lived. There were two, actually, and this is the bigger of the two. When we moved, we gave the smaller one to a relative who’d asked for it. This one moved with us, first to our rented house in Subang Jaya, then to the current house, and now, to my sister’s house.
Apart from striking every hour on the hour, the clock also has the most amazing set of chimes – once for the quarter hour, twice for the half hour, three times for the three-quarter hour, and finally four times for the full hour before striking the appropriate number of times for whatever time it was (once for one o’clock, all the way to 12 times for 12 o’clock).
We grew up with the clock as part of our daily soundtrack, never bothered by its various chimes and hourly strikes. It only bothered my brother after he’d moved to work and live in Singapore. During one weekend visit home (this was after we’d moved from the shop), the clock bothered him so much that he got up in the middle of the night to stop the pendulum so that he could have some uninterrupted sleep.
| Yes, our old grandfather’s clock has a pendulum in addition to the usual clock face. It looks like the clock in this picture here. |  |
In addition to running ahead or behind, it would sometimes stop running, and not by human hands. Apparently this happened when the clock is out of alignment hanging on the wall. My father was the only one in the family who knew how to get it just right so that it would run uninterrupted. It stopped shortly after he left us in April. When my brother came home one weekend, he wound up the clock, it ran for a few days, and then stopped again. I left it in that state until it was moved to my sister’s house recently. While it hasn’t stopped since then, it has been running ahead, often by five minutes everyday.
Our old grandfather clock had at least two other quirks that I remember well.
One time many years ago, when we were still living in the shop, the clock would strike one more than the actual hour. Nobody knew why and it couldn’t be repaired. We got used to it, so that when it struck 4 times, we knew it was only three o’clock. I can’t remember what happened but the clock eventually corrected itself and went back to striking the correct number of times each hour.
For the other quirk, the clock would strike 12 times even though it was 1 o’clock. This meant listening to it strike 12 times twice in one hour. This was one quirk I never got used to. Again, the clock eventually corrected itself and stopped striking 12 times at 1 o’clock.
When my sister told us about the “tap” message in the clock, her husband’s niece commented that the “open tap, close tap” analogy doesn’t apply these days as many taps run on the lever function where you push it either left or right or up and down to turn it on and off.
For some reason, after the clock stopped and I never bothered to wind it up, I could still “hear” it striking every so often, whether on the quarter, half, three-quarter or full hour. Guess I miss the old clock, despite its various quirks.
