In my school days at the age of about 12, I was very keen on horology and the difficulty was to find clocks and watches to work on and learn from, and jumble sales were a good source of clocks. I mean for a few pence literally you could get a clock that nobody wanted because they couldn't afford to have it repaired or even find anyone to repair it, so that was very useful. And then again, I discovered that there were an enormous number of empty houses in London. You never see an empty house now, but in those days you could reckon that certainly one in every 10 houses was empty and nobody bothered to lock them up. These people just moved out and left them. They were renting these houses you see, they didn't care about it, they just upped sticks and left. And so I would go into these houses and search around and I would find clocks and watches, gramophones... mechanical gramophones.
And so I gathered all these and took them back home and could work on them, and one day I found this American clock hanging on the wall. It was about two feet tall, hanging against the wall with a cart leaf winding spring at the bottom. And, I believe, they are now regarded as quite valuable American antiques, but to me in those days it was just another American clock and it looked pretty cheap compared with European things. Quality is the thing, you know, you soon learn if you associate with watches and small mechanics. Well, I was very pleased with the clock and it took it home and repaired it. The spring was broken and so I managed to heat up the end and bend it round and join it in again. And whenever I had anything interesting and useful, my father would take it away from me and keep it for himself. And he took my clock and he banged a nail in the wall and hung the clock up so that I couldn't reach it. And we were all having tea one day, standing round our table having tea, and the clock exploded. A spring broke, blew the clock all over the room. So there you are you see, that's what you get for stealing another man's clock.
