Cuckoo Clock

 You can listen to me reading this on Australian national radio here

Cuckoo clocks in general are one of the things I particularly dislike.  Their kitchiness, their smug swissness, their phoniness.  So when Graham, my husband,  saw the cuckoo clock shop in Berry and said he’d like one, I said –no way, if it comes into the house I go out and all those sorts of things.

I think my loathing goes back to my English childhood and the regular visits to my grandfather who lived in the Cotswold Hills.  These visits were always horrible   I realize now that he probably had obsessive compulsive disorder.  He used to seal his woollen socks in preserving jars in the summer to keep the moths out. He married a younger woman after my grandmother’s suicide and I was taught to call her Aunty Josephine.  She had never had children but whenever I visited she had a good go at parenting me.  She gave me thorough and rather intrusive baths and interrogated me on the ways of my bohemian and admittedly somewhat haphazard widowed mother.  Somehow the cuckoo clock meant all these things to me –a saccharine sweet face but with nasty leaden pine cones hanging from chain underneath.  An interminable tick and a pokey little beaky thing. that came out , no matter what , on the hour.

But in a moment of I don’t know what – remorse at being mean – sentimental fondness, or simply having no idea whatever to get Graham for his birthday I visited the cuckoo clock shop myself.  They were expensive, they weren’t, for the most part genuine, now being battery powered with hollow plastic pine cones on the bottom of the winding

chains instead of the leaden globs at my grandfathers place.  And some of them did new things.  I bought one that played a tinny German waltz after the cuckoo came out.  That’ll teach him, I thought darkly

I did insist that the clock be  kept in Graham’s’s study above the garage at the bottom of our garden.  Not in the house.  I even offered to tell him the secret of how to disable the German waltz function but he said in for a penny in for a pound - or something like that

Actually I found to my surprise that I grew to like hearing the distant cuckoo as I hung up the washing or repotted the bromeliads.  I thought how nice it was to have the hours marked in this way especially since I’ve never got used to my digital watch which, if I’m not careful, tells me how many steps I’ve walked instead of the time.  I think it’s a shame that public clocks don’t chime any more.  It used to be good to hear the hour and think of all the others round about hearing it too and making their decisions about what to do next.  Even the faint tinkle of the waltzes has come to please rather than bother me.  I smile when I think that my disgusting present ha turned out so nice after all.

Now a new cuckoo clock thing has just begun to happen.

 I look after my small grandson on Wednesdays.  He’s just beginning to talk and I showed him the cuckoo clock one day and we watched it do its stuff.  Now whenever he comes barrelling in he demands ‘cuckoo clock” and I usually say “Later” because it is the wrong part of the hour.  But when he hits it right we go together to the top of the garage and sit on the stairs under the clock together.  “Cuckoo clock?” he queries. ”Soon”  I say and we sit quietly together “Cuckoo clock?”  Three more minutes.  Somehow we chat our way through that long stretch of time and then there is a lovely creaking and grumbling and out comes a tiny white bird with wings outstretched.  Jack’s mouth opens and his eyes grow round. “Cuckoo” and then a little faint echo “Cuckoo”   Over and over, nine ten eleven times.- in and out it goes and then snaps shut.  He laughs for joy.   And then the tune starts. I hold him and we sway on the stairs together.  At the end he’s quite happy “All gone cuckoo clock” he says and off we go.

When I make marmalade, which I sometimes do, I remember Grandpa and the darkness of his bottled socks and Aunty Josephine suspecting my mother of god knows what .  I think of the cousin clock on the other side of the world, probably even now brooding in someone’s hallway and I feel gleeful.   I am here in Australia under another sun .   I am free, I think.

But I wonder - is that really true.?   Will the pattern go on repeating itself anyway?  I wonder what Jack’s cuckoo clock will be like.  Technology is bound to have made a few changes.  Maybe the bird will be able to come out to sing and  fly round the room before popping back through its trapdoor.

And maybe from wherever I am then I will hear Jack, now bushy browed with grey curls telling his children about their great grandmother.   And perhaps he’ll say 

“ She used to look after me on Wednesdays when my mother went to her  Pilates. She taught me to call her Julia.   She was very nice but I realize now that she was actually a bit mad.  Bipolar disorder probably..  As soon as I came in the door she would whisk me down the garden   Do you know she’d make me sit for hours on the  garage steps waiting for the cuckoo clock to sing and afterwards she’d make me dance this crazy dance with her.  But she loved me very much.”

And that at least is true!