Source A: The clock in the square

An original non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At six minutes past four, the clock struck once. I looked up from the square, startled. For eleven years it had shown the same time: twelve minutes past three. I had assumed it was simply too old to be worth repairing.

On Saturday mornings, four volunteers had been climbing the narrow stairs inside the tower. From the pavement, their work looked almost comically small: a lamp in a high window, a hand passing a spanner, then nothing. But week after week they returned. They carried up boxes of tools, cups of tea and, once, a tin of biscuits that rattled on every step. Their slow procession made the tower seem less like a monument than a workplace.

The clock had not stopped all at once. Its hands had begun to lag, then disagree. One face showed a different time from the other three. The volunteers took photographs, compared notes and tested each adjustment. When a hand moved too far, they brought it back. Their patience was not the dramatic kind celebrated in speeches; it was a pencil mark, a measured turn, a decision to climb the stairs again.

I met them on the morning they were due to start the clock. They were not smiling for a photograph. One volunteer was checking a list; another stood below the mechanism, listening. The oldest member of the group kept his hands in his pockets. “It ought to tell the time,” he said, as if this were a modest ambition.

At four, nothing happened. A few people in the square began to drift away. Then came the single strike, thin but unmistakable. The volunteers looked at one another, and the oldest man laughed. For a moment, the sound seemed to belong to all of us.

Later, I learned that the clock would need regular attention, and that the volunteers had not agreed on every repair. One had wanted to replace more of its old parts; another had argued that they should keep as much as possible. The clock was working, but it was not finished. I had mistaken its stillness for uselessness. Now I wonder whether a working clock is a completed one, or simply a promise that someone will climb those stairs again.