Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

Peter Dickinson's Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera is a story for 8 year olds about a famous old clock, the man who mends it and the eighty-three mice living inside it.

What happens

The Branton Town Hall Clock stopped last year, for the first time in ninety-nine years. It's the sort of clock people cross the world to photograph, with lambs and shepherds and Lady Winter dancing out on the quarter hour while Old Father Time comes after them with a scythe.

Only one man can put it right. His granddad built it in 1893, the town decided it wasn't what they'd asked for and refused to pay, and the old man walked off with the plans.

So his grandson comes to Branton at last. And while he's inside Lady Summer, greasing her pivots, he finds a mouse's nest.

It's the tidiest nest he's ever seen. Swept floor. Stores of birdseed and raisins kept in old plastic film pots. And the mother doesn't bolt. She stares up at him, and you can see right into her eyes.

Clock Mice, he calls them. They're as bright as people, they talk in pictures rather than squeaks, and they live inside the hollow carved figures.

The whole book is him telling you about it in his own order, which isn't quite the right order. He stops for a First Essay on Mice, then one on clocks, then cats, bells and people. And who'd read a book that opens with a First Essay on Mice? His publishers asked him exactly that, and he's still a bit cross about it.

He interrupts himself. He owns up when he's made a bit up. (He calls the three mouse families the Hickorys, the Dickorys and the Docks, and apologises for that too.)

It's funny and wandering and very English, more about wondering than adventuring. Your reader needs to like a storyteller who takes the scenic route.

One thing to flag. The town hall cat gets hold of a young mouse and breaks both his front legs, and the clockmaker splints them with matchsticks. It isn't gruesome, but the mouse is in pain on the page, and a child who minds about animals will feel it.

What to read next

For another small creature with something remarkable about it, A Mouse Called Wolf is in the library too. Dick King-Smith's mouse lives under a grand piano, turns out to be able to sing, and only the lady of the house can hear him.