The Clock Tower Truce

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Fictional narrative created for 11+ comprehension practice.

Every Saturday since Priya Anand could remember, Bellcross Market had rattled itself awake long before the sun properly cleared the rooftops. Canvas awnings snapped in the wind like impatient flags, and the smell of frying onions tangled with turmeric and cardamom drifting across the cobbles from her grandmother's spice stall. Nirmala Anand stood behind her scales exactly as she always did, sleeves rolled to the elbow, calling out prices to anyone who slowed their step.

Directly across the square stood the flower stall, a riot of colour that never seemed to fade no matter the weather. Its owner, Gwyn Pritchard, kept his back turned towards the spice stall with a stubbornness that had lasted, Priya's mother said, for at least thirty years. Nobody in the family could explain exactly why the two stallholders never spoke to one another, only that some ancient disagreement over pitch space had hardened, over the decades, into something like a wall.

'Priya!' Ffion Pritchard came skidding between two vegetable crates, cheeks pink from running, an official-looking leaflet crushed tightly in one fist. 'The clock tower. They are pulling it down on Monday. Everything inside goes in a skip unless somebody sorts it first.'

The clock tower stood at the very centre of the market, its four faces reliably ten minutes fast and its bell reliably far too loud. Nobody had been inside for years except the pigeons. 'Sorted by who?' Priya asked, though she already suspected the answer.

Mrs Okonkwo, the market manager, agreed to let them look, provided they were quick and provided somebody's grandmother signed a consent form. Half an hour later, torches in hand, Priya and Ffion climbed a narrow iron staircase that wound up through the tower's dusty innards, past groaning gears and a curtain of startled pigeons that exploded upward in a sudden clatter of wings. Cobwebs draped every ledge like grey lace, and their footsteps echoed strangely, as though the whole tower held its breath around them.

At the very top, wedged behind the great pendulum, sat a battered tin box, its lid rusted almost shut. Ffion prised it open with a coin. Inside lay a curling photograph: two teenagers, arms slung around each other's shoulders, laughing outside a market stall exactly like the ones below. Priya turned it over. Someone had written, in faded pencil, Nirmala and Gwyn, market day, 1974.

Beneath the photograph lay a folded letter, the paper gone soft as cloth. Ffion read it aloud, her voice dropping almost to a whisper.

Dear Nirmala, I never explained why I missed our meeting about the stalls. My father was taken ill that morning and I could not leave him. I hope you do not think I chose the pitch over our friendship. Write back when you can. Your friend always, Gwyn.

'She never got it,' Priya said slowly. 'It was never sent.'

They found their grandparents exactly where they always stood, some twelve careful paces apart, closer than actual enemies but further than old friends. When Priya held out the photograph, her grandmother's hands, usually so steady around the scales, trembled slightly as she took it. Across the square, Gwyn Pritchard had gone very still, staring at the letter in his own granddaughter's hands as though it were something fragile.

Neither elderly stallholder said very much. But that Saturday, for the first time in thirty years, two paper cups of tea passed across the cobbles between the flower stall and the spice stall, and somewhere above them, the clock tower's bell rang out, ten minutes fast as always, as if it had simply been waiting for someone to listen.