The Clock That Ran Slow

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-9
• Bedtime Stories

There was a clock in a hallway that ran four minutes slow, and had done for as long as anyone could remember.

Everybody in that house knew it. It was not a problem. If you wanted to know the real time you looked at the clock and added four minutes, and everybody did this without thinking about it, including the children, who had learned it before they learned to read.

The visitor

An uncle came to stay for a week and it drove him to distraction.

"Why do you not fix it?"

"It is not broken," said the grandmother. "It is four minutes slow. That is a different thing."

"It is the same thing."

"A broken clock tells you nothing," she said. "This one tells you the time. It just tells it to you four minutes ago."

The uncle took it down on the third day and opened the back of it and adjusted something, and put it up again, and stood there looking pleased.

The week after

Everything went slightly wrong for about a week.

People were early for things by four minutes, which does not sound like much and is enough to be standing outside a shop before it opens. The children got to school four minutes early and had to wait at the gate. The milk was collected before it arrived twice.

Nobody could quite work out why, because they all knew the clock had been corrected, and they were all still adding four minutes without noticing they were doing it.

The grandmother

She let it run for the whole week and said nothing.

Then on the Sunday she took the clock down, opened the back, and put it four minutes slow again.

The uncle watched her do it.

"You cannot be serious."

"You were right and the clock was wrong," she said. "But everybody in this house had already worked around it, years ago, and the working around was the thing that was actually keeping time. You fixed the clock and broke the household."

She hung it back up.

"Nobody minds a thing being slightly wrong," she said, "as long as it is wrong in exactly the same way every day."

Afterwards

It ran four minutes slow for another eleven years.

When the grandmother died the family sold the house, and the clock went to a cousin, and the first thing he did when he got it home was open the back and correct it, because he did not know.

And that was fine, because in his house nobody was adding anything.