Source A: The clock in the square

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

I had expected the clock to be repaired before the town’s summer fair. For years, it had stood above the square with its hands fixed at ten past three. I thought of it as a familiar landmark: useful for giving directions, and easy to ignore once you had arrived.

On the first morning of the work, I watched a clockmaker remove the face. Behind it, the hands were held in place by a small, rusted pin. The clockmaker turned it between her fingers. “It stopped because one part could not move,” she said. I had imagined a grand failure. The cause looked almost too small to matter.

People paused to watch. One man said the clock had been right more often than his watch. A child asked whether it would start straight away. I found myself wanting to promise that it would. Instead, I watched the clockmaker clean the pin and test it carefully. The patience of the work seemed out of proportion to the size of the fault.

When the face went back into place, the hands began to move. A few people clapped. I did too, though I knew the clock had not been made new. Its marks and faded paint remained. What had changed was that I had stopped seeing it as just a useful object. The repair had made me notice the care hidden behind something I had taken for granted.

Source B: The clock, once more

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

When the council announced that the clock in the square would be repaired, I worried that the work would turn it into a polished decoration. The chipped paint and stalled hands were part of what it had become. I did not want a perfect clock that looked as if it had arrived yesterday.

I went to see the repair for myself. The clockmaker removed the face and showed a group of us the pin that had jammed the mechanism. It was a simple thing, but the rest of the work was not simple at all. She cleaned each part, checked its movement and fitted it back with care. No one hurried her, even when passers-by asked when the clock would be working again.

I had assumed that restoring the clock meant wiping away the years. But the clockmaker left the faded paint untouched and kept the small dents around the frame. When the hands moved again, the clock looked much as it had before. That was what reassured me. The repair had not erased its history; it had made the old object useful again.

I still do not think a working clock can tell us what the square means to everyone. But now, when I cross it, I look up. The clock is no longer merely a relic to protect or a machine to fix. It can be both a record of time passed and part of the town’s ordinary day.