The Clocktower

The three-faced clocktower stands at the corner of Dockside Road. Surrounded by factories and workshops, few open, many gone. She resembles her surroundings now.

Although the clockfaces looking east, west, and south remained, the machinery inside didn’t. A square building 20 feet by 20 wide and over 60 foot high, its sides are grimy brick with the doorway to the south. It was boarded up but some planks are gone and gaps have formed. It’s where drunks and druggies congregate for warmth, shelter and company. We all want the same things no matter what our life’s station and more fortunate people lived in less grand surroundings than the clocktower.

Apart from the doorway and a couple of cracked glass panes in the top corners of the building, where the stairs ascended into the tower proper, it was remarkably free of damage, unlike the other buildings nearby.

The corrugated iron fence surrounding the scrapyard opposite resembled a bad youth arts project but the grand old lady of the docks remained relatively unblemished. Her reputation defying circumstance and age. It’s telling as in this town respect is not given freely. It’s earned. An invisible currency understood by all.

The clocktower began in arrears. It had three faces because the north side faced the steel river. Where the majority of the men worked in the yards, buzzing like drones inside their dark metal hives. The yard bosses, men who would not spend a penny more than necessary, threw pounds at that clocktower. It was both their sentinel and their mark. They made sure that the men concentrated on one thing only, and that wasn’t the time. The men looked and bricks looked back.

The bosses, the men, and the yards have gone but the three-faced clocktower remains. A headstone for more than men.