July 24, 2002

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  My maternal grandparents met in Palestine. He was a policeman there at the time it was still a British colony. She was a Polish Jewess who had gone out to stay with her aunt in Jerusalem. One day her aunt's home was burgled and the police were called. My grandfather arrived to take the report but spent more time looking at the young girl in the background than listening to her aunt's story, by all accounts. At any rate, he later returned to ask her out and that was that.
  
  Having decided to marry, they travelled to Poland in January 1939 to meet her parents, who gave their blessing. My grandfather was given a gold Omega watch by his future father in law as a wedding present. It is inscribed "To Bob, from Father, Krakow 1939". They returned to Palestine and were married. In September of that year, of course, the Germans invaded Poland....Sadly not a single member of my Grandmother's family survived the war. The watch he had been given became a treasured heirloom and memento of my grandmother's Polish life, since everything else had been lost.
  
  After the war, they moved to Cyprus, where they lived for the next 25 years. My mother grew up there and spoke Greek before she spoke English, she says.
  
  One day my grandfather went out for a ride in the Troodos mountains. Along the way a snake crossed his path, causing his horse to rear up in fright and my grandfather was thrown off. Luckily, he wasn't hurt and was able to remount and continue on his way. Some time later he looked down at his wrist to check the time and realised that his watch, THE watch, was missing. He realised that it must have come off when he had fallen. Desperately, he retraced his route and searched and searched but to no avail. The watch was gone. Both he and my grandmother were devastated by the loss; it was, after all, the only link to her past.
  
  Still, they reported the loss to the local police, knowing it was futile but hoping against hope that somebody might find the watch and hand it in. In their hearts they knew it was gone. The chances of anyone finding a watch in the mountains were slim, to say the least.....
  
  However....one morning TEN YEARS LATER my grandmother received a telephone call....
  "Hello, this is Constable Nikarios from the police station. Er...I'm looking at a report that you made 10 years ago about a missing watch..."
  "Yes?" (You can imagine how drawn out and incredulous that one word must have been..)
  "Well, we recently arrested a certain individual and found, among a number of apparently stolen articles, a watch that seems to resemble that which you reported missing all those years ago. I wonder if you'd mind coming down to the station to identify it?"
  
  So they did and of course, it was. How it came to be in the thief's possession we'll never know, but after 10 years, the watch came home to its rightful owners. And when my grandfather died in 1985, the watch was passed on to me. I'm wearing it now, this beautiful, sixty odd year old watch that even to this day has a dent from when it fell from my grandfather's wrist in the mountains of Cyprus; this beautiful old watch that was given to him by my great grandfather, less than a year before he and the rest of his family were to be murdered....This wonderful watch that came from Switzerland to Poland to Palestine and from there to Cyprus before going on to England and finally here to Japan...
  
  Remember the watch story in Pulp Fiction? The one which Christopher Walken tells to the young Butch? It's the same kind of thing. A watch can have a history and a story attached to it ; a piece of time as much as a timepiece....
  
  Do you have a watch story to share?
  
  

  • 8:43 am
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