Locked in time

We don’t have many heirlooms, just one or two bits passed down over the years. One of them is a long-cased clock, a grandmother clock according to my mother who said it was left to her by aunt Lily and aunt Jesse, only it wasn’t quite like that. After the last aunt had died, the house was stripped bare of furnishings by relatives who pounced like vultures. Mum was late on the scene and the clock was about the only thing left.

The sister aunts who lived together but never married, were separately headmistresses of two junior schools in Thornhill, near Dewsbury, better known now for another school that featured in a TV series called Educating Yorkshire (a snippet here on Gogglebox - watch and weep - or see Musharaf's story in full here).

I don’t know the aunts’ last name. In fact when mum spoke of them she ran their names into each other so that it came out as “Aunt Lillianjesse”. For a while I thought it was one person.

I was fond of the clock’s Westminster chimes but I was still in short pants when the clock stopped and it just stood there, silent and unrepaired for years. Not long after we married, mum gave us the clock and we had it repaired. Then, after moving south, it stopped again and that’s how it’s been for years. Yesterday I moved it to make way for the Christmas tree and it started up on its own, transporting me straight back to my childhood.

I tried to open the case to look at the pendulum and to wind it up but the key broke in the lock. We’ve fished out all our old keys (above) but none of them fits. The clock’s still working although it’s telling the wrong time and it seems to be running fast. The lock isn’t complicated but I haven’t succeeded in picking it. In fact I’ve never managed to pick a lock. When you see people doing it in films it always looks so easy.