End of The Line

This charming clock has ticked its way through so many of my memories, and then, yesterday, I brought it home to continue its steady ticking on my desk. Now it represents the end of a chapter of family life, and for me the realisation that I am the last of that particular line of the family. The old family name has gone.

When I first knew the clock it was in my uncle and aunt's home, a place of so many entertaining evenings, a place of great hospitality and warm glowing fires. In my early years I began to realise that a few glasses of beautiful coloured liquid brought about a change in adult behaviour. My father became entertaining as he and his brother ad libbed variations on the psalms, and after a while my mother stopped being disapproving and joined in the laughter. Even better, my musically gifted uncle would scoot around the room, playing a variety of key-board instruments, square piano, piano, dulcitone while singing from his collection of Victorian sheet music.

Now that my parents are dead I can confess that, as a young child, I used to fantasise that this aunt and uncle were my real parents. They had no children of their own. They went all over the place on a motorbike. They went off to France and wandered around where the fancy took them. I used to imagine that one day they might buy a small side-car and take me too.
As it was, my parents acquired a small side-car and attached it to their tandem (this was 1940s England with no petrol, but also with hardly any traffic). But the tandem never held the same sort of glamour as a motor bike, especially after my parents took a gateway at the wrong angle and sheared me off in my little side-car. I was left sitting there at the side of the road for what seemed like quite a time before they realised. Later I also realised that if I'd been attached to the motorbike neither I nor the side-car would have lived to tell the tale.

My uncle and aunt represented fun and freedom and great joy in life. My mother used to say, darkly, " Of course they can be like that. They haven't any children."
Later, too much later, I knew them as real people rather than iconic figures, and realised that not having children came at a cost of regret.

With the clock came a collection of family documents, going back several generations. I have to think carefully.....do I want to know? I have known enough about.some aspects of my parents' families to think it is better to leave well alone. But yesterday I was given names and dates on yellowing paper, accounts of hostility over financial matters, disputes about legacies, births and deaths and marriages, second marriages for great-grandparents - and who is this Clarissa who keeps cropping up?
My inclination is to let it go, and if my sons want to find out more, then it is too perilously easy to do so.

Surprisingly, the clock sat down on my desk and started ticking away the moment I put its pendulum back. I had expected to have to spend  some time fiddling about with coins under its marble feet to get the 'tick' and the 'tock ' thoroughly even.
Even more surprising and gratifying its glass dome also travelled safely.