Anselm Vey wound the clocks of Harrow on Fridays. There were eleven of them: the town hall, the station, the church, the school and seven others that nobody could name after the war had ended. He wound them in the same order, with the same brass key, and took exactly two hours. Then he went home for his lunch.
Nobody had asked him to begin. Nobody, in forty years, had asked him to stop. The council paid him a small sum that it described, in the accounts, as "sundry".
It was said in Harrow that Anselm's clocks were never quite right. The station clock was a minute fast. The church clock, with an old man's dignity, was always two minutes slow. People set their watches by it anyway. A town, Anselm once told a child, does not need the correct time. It needs the same time, together.
In his sixty-ninth winter, he did not appear. On Friday morning, the town hall clock stopped at ten past nine. By noon the church bell was silent, and the schoolchildren, who had never been late, were confused to find that nothing was early either.
It took them until Monday to understand what they had lost. A woman came to the station and asked the porter what time it was. The porter looked at the clock, then at his own watch, then at her. "I don't know," he said. "It's the first time I've said that."
Anselm's apprentice, a girl of fourteen, had the key by the following Friday. She wound the clocks in the same order. She did not, however, correct the minute at the station. "Leave it," she told the porter. "It's the town's."
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.