But urgency — despite his words — was not something that showed much in my grandfather’s face. Understandably. For endowed with a theoretically infinite stock of time, what cause did he have for urgency? I have spoken of my elders’ miserly and watchful looks. But this miserliness was not the miserliness of restless and rapacious greed; it was the contented, vacant miserliness of the miser who sits happily on a vast hoard of money which he has no intention of spending. And the watchfulness was not a sentry-like alertness; it was more the smug superciliousness of a man who knows he occupies a unique vantage point. In fact it is true to say, the longer my forefathers lived, the less animated they became. The more they immersed themselves in their obsession with time, the more they sank in their actions into mechanical and unvarying routine, tick-tocking their lives out like the miraculous instrument that enabled them to do so.
They did not want excitement, these Methuselahs, they dreamt no dreams. Nothing characterises more my life with my grandfather than the memory of countless monotonous evenings in the house he had at Highgate — evenings in which my guardian (that man who was born before Waterloo) would sit after dinner, intent, so it would seem, on nothing other than the process of his own digestion, while my grandmother would batten herself down in some inoffensive wifely task — darning socks, sewing buttons — and the silence, the heavy, aching silence (how the memory of certain silences can weigh upon you), would be punctuated only — by the tick of clocks.
Once I dared to break this silence, to challenge this laden oppression of Time. I was a healthy, well-fed boy of thirteen. At such an age — who can deny it? — there is freshness. The moments slip by and you do not stop to count them. It was a summer evening and Highgate had, in those days, a verdant, even pastoral air. My grandfather was expounding (picture a boy of thirteen, a man of a hundred and twenty) upon his only subject when I interrupted him to ask: “But isn’t it best when we forget time?”
I am sure that with these ingenuous words there rose in me — only to hold brief sway — the spirit of my rebellious, and dead, father. I was not aware of the depths of my heresy. My grandfather’s face took on the look of those fathers who are in the habit of removing their belts and applying them to their sons’ hides. He did not remove his belt. Instead, I received the lashings of a terrible diatribe upon the folly of a world — of which my words were a very motto — which dared to believe that Time could take care of itself; followed by an invocation of the toils of my ancestors; followed, inevitably, by a calling down upon my head of the sins of my father. As I cringed before all this I acknowledged the indissoluble, if irrational, link between age and authority. Youth must bow to age. This was the god-like fury of one hundred and twenty years beating down on me and I had no choice but to prostrate myself. And yet, simultaneously — as the fugitive summer twilight still flickered from the garden — I pondered on the awesome loneliness of being my grandfather’s age — the loneliness (can you conceive it?) of having no contemporaries. And I took stock of the fact that seldom, if ever, had I seen my grandfather — this man of guarded and scrupulous mien — roused by such passion. Only once, indeed, did I see him so roused again — that day of his death, when, despite my efforts to dissuade him, he strode out into the gathering storm.
The sins of my father? What was my father’s sin but to seek some other means of outwitting Time than that held out to him? The means of adventure, of hazard and daring, the means of a short life but a full, a memorable one. Was he really impelled by motives so different from those of his own father and his father’s father?
Perhaps every third generation is a misfit. Born in 1895, my father would have become the third beneficiary of the Great Watch. From the earliest age, like every true Krepski male-child, he was reared on the staple diet of clocks and chronometry. But, even as a boy, he showed distinct and sometimes hysterical signs of not wishing to assume the family mantle. Grandfather Feliks has told me that he sometimes feared that little Stefan actually plotted to steal the Watch (which he ought to have regarded as the Gift of Gifts) in order to smash it or hide it or simply hurl it away somewhere. My grandfather consequently kept it always on his person and even wore it about his neck, on a locked chain at night — which cannot have aided his sleep.
These were times of great anguish. Stefan was growing up into one of those psychopathic children who wish to wreak merciless destruction on all that their fathers hold dearest. His revolt, unprecedented in the family annals, may seem inexplicable. But I think I understand it. When Feliks was born, his own father Stanislaw was forty: an unexceptional state of affairs. When Stefan grew out of mindless infancy, his father was approaching his first hundred. Who can say how a ten year old reacts to a centenarian father?
And what was Stefan’s final solution to paternal oppression? It was a well-tried one, even a hackneyed one, but one never attempted before in our family from land-locked Lublin. At the age of fifteen, in 1910, he ran away to sea, to the beckoning embraces of risk, fortune, fame — or oblivion. It was thought that no more would be seen of him. But this intrepid father of mine, not content with his runaway defiance or with braving the rough world he had pitched himself into, returned, after three years, for the pleasure of staring fixedly into my grandfather’s face. He was then a youth of eighteen. But three years’ voyaging — to Shanghai, Yokohama, Valparaiso …—had toughened his skin and packed into his young frame more resourcefulness than my hundred-year-old grandfather had ever known, bent over his cogs and pendula.
My grandfather realised that he faced a man. That weather-beaten stare was a match for his hundred nominal years. The result of this sailor’s return was a reconciliation, a rare balance between father and son — enhanced rather than marred by the fact that only a month or so afterwards Stefan took up with a woman of dubious character — the widow of a music-hall manager (perhaps it is significant that she was twelve years older than my father) — got her with child and married her. Thus I arrived on the scene.
My grandfather showed remarkable forbearance. He even stooped for a while to taste the transitory delights of variety artists and buxom singers. It seemed that he would not object — whether it was fitting or not — to Stefan and his lineage partaking of the Watch. It was even possible that Stefan — the only Krepski not to have done so in the way that fish take to swimming and birds to flight — might come round at last to the trade of clock-making.
But all this was not to be. In 1914—the year of my birth — Stefan once more took to the sea, this time in the service of his country (for he was the first Krepski to be born on British soil). Once more there were heated confrontations, but my grandfather could not prevail. Perhaps he knew that even without the pretext of war Stefan would have sooner or later felt stirred again by the life of daring and adventure. Feliks, at last swallowing his anger and disappointment before the parting warrior, held out the prospect of the Watch as a father to a son, even if he could not hold it out as a master clockmaker to a faithful apprentice. Perhaps Stefan might indeed have returned in 1918, a salty hero, ready to settle down and receive its benison. Perhaps he too might have lived to a ripe one hundred, and another hundred more — were it not for the German shell which sent him and the rest of his gallant ship’s crew to the bottom at the battle of Jutland.
So it was that I, who knew so intimately my grandfather whose own memories stretched back to Napoleonic times, and would doubtless have known — were it not for that fool of an omnibus driver — my great-grandfather, born while America was still a British colony, have no memories of my father at all. For when the great guns were booming at Jutland and my father’s ship was raising its churning propellors to the sky, I was asleep in my cot in Bethnal Green, watched over by my equally unwitting mother. She was to die too, but six months later, of a mixture of grief and influenza. And I passed, at the age of two, into my grandfather’s hands, and so into the ghostly hands of my venerable ancestors. From merest infancy I was destined to be a clockmaker, one of the solemn priesthood of Time, and whenever I erred in my noviceship, as on that beguiling evening in Highgate, to have set before me the warning example of my father — dead (though his name lives in glory — you will see it on the memorial at Chatham, the only Krepski amongst all those Jones and Wilsons) at the laughable age of twenty-one.