The Chime at St Michael's

Original text written for Revision Library.

Nadia pressed her palm against the cool stone and looked up. The tower stretched so high above her that her neck began to ache before she reached the top. According to her teacher, the clock inside was older than the school itself, older even than the row of chestnut trees along the church path.

"It hasn't always told the right time," said Mr Adeyemi, unlocking the small wooden door at the base of the tower. "For nearly forty years, it ran eleven minutes fast. Nobody noticed until a clockmaker from Hertford came to clean it and found the fault."

Nadia followed the rest of her class up the spiral staircase, counting the steps under her breath. Seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four. The stairwell smelled of dust and cold stone, and every few steps a narrow window let in a blade of grey light. By the time she reached the bell chamber, her legs were trembling, but the view made her forget the climb entirely. Rooftops spread out below like a patchwork quilt, and in the distance she could see the silver thread of a river winding towards the fields.

"This mechanism," said Mr Adeyemi, pointing to a tangle of brass gears behind a glass panel, "is called the movement. Every gear has to turn at exactly the right speed, or the whole clock falls out of step." He explained that the largest wheel, the one that drove the hour hand, took precisely twelve hours to complete a single turn. A smaller wheel beside it spun much faster, ticking the seconds away in a rhythm so steady that generations of townspeople had set their own watches by it.

Nadia thought about that for a moment. It seemed strange that something made of metal, with no mind of its own, could be trusted more than most people she knew. She asked Mr Adeyemi how the clockmakers had first worked out how to build something so precise, without any of the tools that engineers used today.

"Patience," he said, smiling. "And a great deal of careful counting. Some of these old towers took a whole year to build, and the clockmaker often spent longer than that perfecting the mechanism alone."

As the class prepared to leave, the tower gave a deep, resonant chime that seemed to shake the stone beneath their feet. Nadia counted the strikes. Four o'clock exactly. She smiled, thinking of the clockmaker from Hertford who had once climbed these same stairs to fix eleven stolen minutes, and of all the townspeople below who had never known their clock was wrong until somebody finally looked closely enough to notice.