Mr Yamamoto’s Clock And Other Timepieces

A personal essay, refreshed

Greetings readers and subscribers. Wishing you Easter weekend greetings. The post on How to Interview has been postponed until next week.

Image from Canva

Around 30 years ago a Japanese gentleman gave me a bright pink quartz alarm clock. His name was Mr Yamamoto and he and his wife ran a ryokan; a Japanese guest-house in Yuzawa Prefecture, a ski district outside Tokyo. I had travelled to Japan to report on its troubled economy. Mr Yamamoto was part of that report; an unofficial spokesman for people who preferred the gentle, traditional Japanese way of life.

Several years later, I received a call from the producer who worked with me in Japan. Mr Yamamoto was about to visit Sydney and he wanted to meet me again. I arranged for a Japanese student to interpret for us and Mr Yamamoto, the student and I met in the foyer of his hotel behind the sails of the Sydney Opera House. Before we parted that day, Mr Yamamoto gave me the clock.

I was embarrassed by the gift at first as I hadn’t thought to bring him anything. But it humbly and quickly won my heart. I took it with me everywhere during a decade as a foreign correspondent. First the clock came with me to China, then back to Sydney, to the Middle East, to London and then back to Sydney again plus all the little mini-breaks in between. It was a well-travelled clock. I don’t remember changing the battery very often, although I must have done. The thing is, the clock kept going and going and going. I had it when I was single and still had it after I became a mother. At some stage, the second hand stopped, but it didn’t matter. It was my reliable companion. I worked out that I owned that pink clock for eighteen years.

Now, you should know that my parents had a thing for clocks. Fine clocks. When my brothers and I were young, Mum and Dad bought an ornate chiming clock manufactured by the Queen’s jeweller. It had to be hand-carried on the plane from London to Hong Kong where we lived. Despite its excellent birthright, it gave my parents considerable trouble over the years and yet, Mum and Dad loved that clock. It’s still at Dad’s place. It is still ticking although it chooses its own time to chime. That quirk was and still is mysteriously unfixable.

My Mum, Bea, had always been a collector. The pejorative term would be ‘hoarder’, although she did collect antiques; tiny teapots and snuff bottles beside the stacks of old magazines, piled high in leaning towers. Mum went through the war years. She didn’t have many possessions as a child. Maybe she was making up for it later in life? As she got on in years, she frequently brought out watches and clocks from her collection of broken things and offered them to me “just in case someone can repair it”. I shook my head firmly. No thank-you. I was very satisfied with Mr Yamamoto’s clock.

She kept these clocks despite lifelong superstitions. You see, she was mixed-race - part Chinese - and she was brought up to believe that if you give someone a clock, it’s like wishing them an early departure. I wonder why she accepted gifts of clocks and watches when she considered them unlucky (and they certainly didn’t tarnish her longevity as she lived to 99)? Knives were similarly problematic (cutting relationships), but a gift of a knife was easily solved with giving a coin along with it. I’m not sure if that superstition is Chinese too, but it was definitely part of Mum’s archive.

Bea, short for Beatrice, was late for everything. As a young newspaper journalist she had editors demanding copy as they stood behind her, drumming their heels. She wore her wrist-watch deliberately set to run on BMT, Beatrice Mean Time, which was fifteen minutes ahead of the actual time. That buffer was never enough. In fact when my brothers and I were kids she often told us that we didn’t have to rush because her watch was fast.

As Bea got older, her sense of time got worse. By this stage she was in her nineties. It was hard to know whether her lost sense of time was intentional disregard or part of a slide into dementia that we thought was ‘just ageing’. Sometimes Mum would get to bed at dawn after cleaning the kitchen (again). She needed an alarm clock to wake her for the evening meal.

Perhaps Mum was conscious that her time was limited, as most of us discover eventually. The clock is always ticking. At any stage, time is a companion, a burden, or the chimes strike at odd moments.

One day in 2013, Mr Yamamoto’s clock fell off a shelf and broke. My husband who can usually fix things couldn’t get my clock to work again. I held onto the body for many months, occasionally giving it a shake, placing it back on the shelf, hoping for a miracle. It had definitely ticked its final tock.

On Facebook, people suggested I get it repaired or find a replacement. No luck.

Sayonara, old friend.

My plaintive Facebook post in 2013. It’s now my only image of Mr Yamamoto’s clock ©Jane Hutcheon

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I pulled this piece of writing out a couple of days ago. It’s been eleven years since I first wrote it. I have not heard from Mr Yamamoto in more than two decades. Mum has died now. I have inherited many of her belongings including her bag of broken watches and clocks. And while I eventually disposed of Mr Yamamoto’s clock, I still can’t let go of Mums.

They are pieces of love.

Aren’t old things heavy?

Frozen in time that I can never get back.