I never really knew when I was little that my father was an incredibly unique and skilled watchmaker. I know that there were always people with frowning brows and sad eyes knocking at our door with watches in their hands and my father's warm, friendly smile that said "trust me" would reassure them that he would fix their precious watches or clocks.
I know too, that they came from far and wide on a recommendation from a friend or family. I often heard them saying: "I drove two hours on my friend Jimmy's recommendation because no one has been able to fix my watch and he said if anyone could you could."
Dedicated to his craft as a watchmaker, he loved working on watches the most. Clocks were not his favorite. His biggest dislike was for cuckoo clocks and the glass dome mantel clocks. He disliked their mechanisms but he always got them to work. I, on the other hand, loved it when someone brought one of those black forest German cuckoo clocks to be fixed. We didn't have one and for a week or two after it was fixed it would hang on a special hook on the kitchen wall and I got to pull the chains of the heavy black pine-cone shaped weights to keep them ticking and "cuckooing".
Living in the home of a watchmaker can make the dead of night quite noisy. Well some would say noisy, others would say musical. The many clocks would tick tock and chime or gong on the hour and half hour and often some were not quite to the minute so that they would not all go at once but some would end as another started and others would delay their announcements by a minute or two or three.
Most often though, it was the arrival of a new clock on the mantelpiece or wall for testing after being repaired that would be the discord in the night. Its sound would penetrate the realm of sleep and awaken me and I would count the chimes or the gongs as the hours ticked away. I was often able to tell my father that a clock was losing or gaining time by their chiming not coinciding with our own "spot on" timepieces.
The positive aspect of having so many clocks around was that I learned to tell the time long, long before I learned the ABC. My best teacher was the roman numerical clock encased in a long wooden box with a huge round brass pendulum that swung rhythmically left to right on the wall in our kitchen. I also loved climbing up on the kitchen dresser to swing open the clock's glass door and insert the large brass key into the two holes in its face to wind it up.
The most enjoyable part of my father being a watchmaker was when I was allowed to sit on a stool beside his workbench and either watch him at work or be given an old junk clock to "fix". I would talk and ask questions and he would answer while clenching the black eye loupe between his eyebrow and cheekbone and focusing on the intricate and tiny parts in the watch he was working on.
With steady fingers he would unscrew the tiny screws and remove the parts with a very sharp-nosed tweezers and study them for a few minutes before either dumping them into a fine meshed cage that got lowered into a bottle of cleaning solution in a machine or throwing them out if they were damaged. If a part had to be replaced and it usually was the mainspring, he would take a new part from a little capsule that looked like a clear pill capsule which was kept in a tagged compartment in a wooden box or from a small 2"x 2" envelope with the part number on it. Sometimes he would drop the part and it would jump and shoot over the workbench surface onto the floor and we could spend upwards of an hour on all fours looking for it.
That was fun for me. Like a treasure hunt and I loved to be the one to find the lost part. One time the part fell into one of the turned up cuffs of my father's gray flannels and it was my mother who suggested, after exhausting all possibilities, that he search in there.
Another fun activity was the hour long train trip I took with my father to Johannesburg every two months to replenish watch parts from a jewelry store. I would get to ride on the train with its green leather seats and walk in the big city from the Johannesburg Station down the long never ending Rissik Street to the corner of Eloff and Commissioner Streets and we always stopped off along the way at a café for a coke float.
As these long forgotten memories of a watchmaker and father who passed on forty years ago, return, it reminds me that sometimes it’s the simplest things and moments that we share with our children or the people we love that can be a joy at the time of their happening and also years later when remembered.
It also all ties in with my previous article "As A Mom Speak Up" where I advocate children having free time to learn by doing things with one or the other parent. Every moment spent with children is a learning encounter and when that encounter is laced with love, it is a precious one, a lifetime one.
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[Pamela McMonagle];)
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