Eight Minutes He Gave Back

The stallholder shook the watch and it ticked. That was enough for me. Forty dollars, cash, and I walked back across the Sunday market car park feeling like a man who had got one over on time itself. By the time I reached the car it had stopped. I held it to my ear like a seashell. Nothing.

I found a repairer in a lane off Karangahape Road, in a shop so narrow I took it for a cupboard the first time I walked past. He had a loupe screwed into one eye and the patient slump of a man who has seen every kind of foolishness arrive in a paper bag. I told him about the market and the shaking. He nodded. He knew the genre.

"Silver case," he said. "Scottish, I'd guess. Mid century." He meant the century before last.

He eased the back open with a tool like a tiny butter knife, and two discs of paper slid out onto his velvet mat, one stuck to the other at the edge.

Watch papers. I'd never heard of them. Watchmakers used to tuck these small rounds of paper inside the case to keep the dust out, and to make sure you remembered whose shop to bring it back to. The front was printed with the maker's name. The back was for pencil: dates, cleanings, repairs.

The top one said "J. Lowrie, Watchmaker, Princes Street, Dunedin." On the back, in soft grey pencil: "Cleaned. Put on 8 min for the Govt. 2 Nov 1868. Kitchen stays. J.L."

The one underneath was the same shop, the pencil a little firmer. "Put back 8 min. Her clock is right. 1870. J.L."

I paid for a clean and carried the two papers home in an envelope like they were tickets to something.

* * *

Here's the bit that's true.

Before 1868, every town in New Zealand ran on its own time, read off the sun. Invercargill and Napier were thirty four minutes apart, which made sending a telegram up the country a small act of faith in arithmetic. In January that year the Postmaster-General told every telegraph office to open and close by Wellington time. People called it telegraph time, and plenty of them did not enjoy being told the hour by Wellington.

So the government asked its scientist, James Hector, to sort it out. He picked the meridian at 172 degrees 30 minutes east, a line that runs just west of Christchurch. That put New Zealand Mean Time exactly eleven and a half hours ahead of Greenwich. At noon on Monday 2 November 1868, the clocks wired to Wellington by telegraph struck twelve together, and New Zealand became the first country to adopt one standard time for the whole place. (We gave it up for twelve hours ahead in 1946, but that's another envelope.)

The maths is kind to a beginner. A clock shifts four minutes for every degree of longitude. Dunedin sits near 170 degrees 30 minutes east, two degrees west of Hector's line, so its clocks had to jump forward about eight minutes.

Eight minutes. Exactly what the watchmaker wrote.

* * *

Two pencil lines is all I have. Everything from here is me filling the gaps, and I'll own that.

I picture Jamie Lowrie at noon on that Monday, up a ladder in his Princes Street shop, moving every clock forward. The big regulator on the wall. The three watches in the window. His own silver one last, with a little flourish nobody saw. He's proud. He has joined something larger than Dunedin.

He gets home and finds Ishbel at the bench, flour to the elbows, and the kitchen clock exactly where it was.

"The sun has not been told," she says.

She bakes by that clock, and the bread has always come out right. The scones go in when the light through the back window reaches the edge of the table, and the clock has always agreed with the light. She isn't being difficult. She's being accurate about something else.

So for two years they live in one house on two times. He eats his lunch eight minutes before he's hungry. The kettle runs on hers; the shop runs on his. He's early for everything in Dunedin except his own dinner. She's never late, unless you ask the watch in his pocket.

I imagine small skirmishes. A loaf checked too soon. A kettle left to shriek while two people argue about whose fault it is. And the odd loneliness of being right, on time and alone in a hallway, waiting for someone who is also right.

* * *

I showed the papers to Mr. Mummu, my neighbour, over chai at his kitchen table. His notebook titled "Urgent" lay open by the sugar. It said "milk".

"Eight minutes," he said, holding the papers to the window. "Amateur. Ours was ten. Twenty years."

His kitchen clock ran ten minutes fast on purpose, "so we are never late". Everyone in the house quietly took ten off in their heads. The clock said ten to nine and they all knew it was twenty to. Nobody ever discussed it.

Then a visiting nephew changed the battery, noticed the clock was fast, and helpfully set it right. For a whole week Mummu and his partner kept subtracting and turned up ten minutes late to everything, including a dentist who had already called the next name twice.

"He fixed a machine that was never broken," Mummu said, and topped up my cup. "A clock is an agreement before it is a machine. Ours only worked because everyone was in on it."

* * *

That stayed with me on the walk home.

I'd read the second note as a man giving up. I don't anymore. Jamie tried being modern and correct, on the same time as the telegraph and the government and every post office from Bluff to Napier. Then, two years in, he moved his own watch back so it matched the clock above his wife's bench. "Her clock is right." I think he meant it the way you'd say it about a friend who has been patient with you.

Precision is a fine thing. I'd still pick the person in the kitchen.

The repairer rang on Thursday to say the watch was running sweetly. I picked it up, paid more than I'd paid for the watch, and took it home. That evening I set it eight minutes behind my phone and left it on the windowsill, where the afternoon sun comes in at an angle and lands on the face.

It ticks there now, a little out of step with the rest of the house, keeping Ishbel's time.