Antiques collectors are always a bit out of synch with the world. You can spot us a mile off. We in turn see you lot coming through our ancient eyeholes. Some elegant young thing will waltz in here, looking to accessorize. I’ll show her a nice cigarette holder from the Twenties or a crocodile skin handbag that went unclaimed from a doctor’s surgery in the Forties. She won’t know what I’m talking about and she’ll look at me the way she’ll look at that scuffed Georgian tea chest I have in the corner. “This is nineteen seventy-nine,” one of them said to me once, as if that was supposed to mean something. “It’ll be nineteen seventy-eight soon,” I replied, something of an obscure antique dealers’ joke which went straight over her head of course. I pride myself that I can always tell exactly who you are and what you’ll say as soon as you make my bell tinkle, but there was one time I was completely wrong. It was a situation I’ll never fully understand and it began on a hot afternoon thirty years ago.
The confusion in question pulled up in an Edwardian motor vehicle. Not the first time I’d seen one arrive through that window but this was the first time I’d heard one screech to a halt. Awful colour it was too, yellow like a banana, and the gentleman driver, back when I thought he was a gentleman, had on a velveteen jacket the colour of sprouts. Nearly took the bell off its bracket as he strode in, big silvery crash helmet of hair. And tall he was, all indignant with hawk nose and flinty features. "Drama queen!" thought I, as he walked right up to me, his beak in mine. Wore knee length boots, like a stormtrooper. That unsettled me a bit, as I had him down as one of my own and had no reason to think otherwise as he commenced his rant.
“I want my screwdriver,” was how it began. It was a peculiar opening line, but I knew what he was after straight off. He had the something-for-nothing carp of a dealer at large. I explained calmly that Nigel Block’s tool shop was right across the street if he cared to pop in.
He snorted, repeated the line, said something about how I didn’t have the right, in my own shop mind, before striding over to the window and pointing between the tea set and the Gracie Fields 33.
“Oh you mean the tin opener,” I said. I had no idea what it was because I’d been given several conflicting opinions. My mate Harry Watts had found it during a house clearance in Bounds Green. It was wedged in the back crevice of a settee and he only found it because he thought he’d dropped his fag in there. Curious thing it was, long and metallic, with a pointed section at the end, a bit like a mounted bullet. It had the strange look of something that was both ornate and timeless. I’d taken it to several people I trusted and even one I didn’t trust, Malcolm Broom of Broom & Sons. He thought it was a late Victorian tin opener, which was the stupidest explanation I’d ever heard. Naturally in lieu of a decent story it was the one I went for.
“Tin opener, steaming great balderdash,” said the jackbooted visitor. Then he made a grab for the implement in question, a manoeuvre I was all too familiar with from day to day dealings.
If you can stop a six year old nabbing a stuffed badger you can stop anything. I immediately picked up the ivory back scratcher said to belong to the eighth Tsar of Russia and scraped the back of his hand. He yelped, shaking his appendage and stomping from foot to foot. Right little sissy he was, I’d never seen a reaction like it.
“My good man,” he blustered, clearly wrestling with the massive, tiger-shaped slab of egomania inside him. “This is my screwdriver and I demand you return it to me forthwith.”
“Building a bungalow are you?” I took a step forward with the scratcher aloft and he gave me a baleful look. “Now listen chum, I get all sorts in here poncing about looking for something on the never never, and I want you to know, I clocked your number right off. Who sent you, was it Broom?”
“Broom? What are you talking about, Broom?” he splutters.
“Nice try you velveteen prat,” says I. “If you think I simply hand out stock to whatever berk chooses to shimmy through that door then you’ve been misinformed to a colossal degree.”
With that I started urging him towards the door, the small but nimble ivory hand brandished at him like the fingers of the Devil himself. As his spine hit the glass I says: “Now get in your canary mobile and whistle!”, before slamming the door. My heart filled with pride. What a brilliant afternoon! If only more of my ilk had that kind of attitude. I felt as if I’d locked muskets with a true combatant! Of course I knew this fella with the green coat would be back, and sure enough that night I heard a creaking on the floorboards that could only have been created by a transgressor – either that or the mice were putting on a few pounds. You should have seen his face as I switched on the Edwardian table lamp and levelled my blunderbuss at him. Eyeballs about to pop out of his head. Who did he think he was, Raffles? Frozen in that ridiculous cat burglar stance. He looked like a giraffe with a bee up its rear.
“Is that loaded?” he asked quietly.
“I think it was last used on an elephant,” I replied, enjoying the moment. I mean this bloke with the beak, he was a real dose of fresh air. It’s not every day a dealer goes to these lengths to secure an item you know! “Now why don’t you take a seat there,” I added. “You can tell me all about why you’re risking your neck trying to get your hands on my tin opener.”
“My dear chap it is far from a tin opener.” My fellow gladiator perched himself on the edge of a chest which I was claiming George Formby once used to ship his ukeleles to Canada.
“Well why don’t you tell me what you think it is then.” I was highly intrigued by this point, resting the blunderbuss on the desk, but with the business end pointing at him so he knew the game was still on.
“I simply don’t have the time to explain what it is.” And with that he reached into his pocket. I went for the gun, but it turned out he was going for a thick bundle of pound notes which he began counting out on his thigh. Funny the way he was squinting at them. The way he looked he was either short sighted or he didn’t have a clue what they were worth.
“That’s a ten bob note Captain Rum,” I said to what he initially offered. Then he holds out a wad of around fifty quid. “I think you’ll find that’s a very generous offer,” he says, casual as you like.
I had to say I was very disappointed. “Is that it?” I says.
“You want more?” says he, his eyebrows elevating themselves to an abnormal height.
“No, I mean is that it for us then? Is that all you’ve got in you after all this trouble? Don’t you want to put up more of a fight?”
With that the man stood. This was more like it. I thought he might have an Arabian sword or something tucked in his britches, that he’d take out and swish around a bit. That would have been exciting. But nothing so exotic. No, he was just holding all the money out like any other sad shopper. Proffering a soggy offer with limp notes. “I think you’ll find there’s two hundred pounds in that bundle. More than adequate,” he says.
“You don’t understand how this works do you sport?” I picked up the buss and pointed it at him. “You up your game from fifty to two hundred in a blink and you think I’m just gonna bite your hand off? I have to say I’m very disappointed.” So with that I directed
him to the exit with the implied threat of having his nose blown off. He made another lunge for the front window on his way out but there was no way he was getting his hands on that tin opener now.
He paused in the doorway. The street light caught the whitening curls in his hair and then his eyes twinkled in the shadows, almost like there was a little switch he could flick to turn them on.
“If I tell you what that object really is, will you consider selling it back to me?” he says.
Well I couldn’t turn an invitation like that down. Another bout of conjecture couldn’t hurt, and I could always stick the explanation next to the opener on a little card if it was a goodie. “You’ve got two minutes,” I says.
What he came out with stays with me to this day. I’d never seen a dealer like him and I’d never heard a bloke like him neither. Turned out it wasn’t a tin opener (quelle surprise surprise) it was a screwdriver. But not just any old screwdriver. A screwdriver from another planet no less! He offered to demonstrate it but I knew the longer I kept his mitts off the merchandise the more spiel I could get and consequently the higher the price. He told me he’d mislaid it in the Fifties. A gang of criminals were up to no good and this airy fairy drink of water was investigating them. “Who are you then, the antiques police?” I asked.
“Yes in a way,” he replied. Then without missing a beat he explained that the gang had stumbled upon the frozen bodies of a Neanderthal tribe near Kew Gardens. They’d thawed them out and were training them as bank robbers and getaway drivers. “Of course,” says I. “I mean it all makes perfect sense when you put it like that.” According to this extraordinary character telling tales in front of me he’d managed to track them down, but in the skirmish he’d mislaid his screwdriver. Because that’s how you take on the might of the London underworld isn’t it? Armed with a single screwdriver... and a foreign one to boot!
What he said next capped it all off nicely – that he’d spent the last six weeks tracing his tool! Quite how you’d arrive from the nineteen-fifties to this here parish of nineteen seventy-nine in eight weeks is anyone’s punt. I’d heard enough and bid him goodnight with a stern twitch of the blunderbuss.
I had hoped he’d come back you know. Things certainly seemed duller after he went. Then one chilly afternoon a young lady entered the shop. Slip of a thing she was, lovely as a Claris Clift vase. Naturally I treated her with complete disdain. I knew she was out of her element here, that she was after something of inestimable cultural value to pin to her Marks & Spencers’ lapel...
But she didn’t want that. She’d been drawn to the tin opener of all things. Asked me to take it out and show it to her. The young lady in question, Jo her name was... well I’d never seen such interest in the trade from a pretty young thing like that. Told me her uncle had owned a tin opener just like it. Call me a sentimental old fool but I let her have it for two quid.
It was only when I saw her cross the street and get into a battered-looking army jeep that I clocked him. Peering out from the back seat and waving before the military sped him away. Wily old coot. That truly was the last time I saw him. Though I do think about him from time to time, with his twinkly optics and his funny stories. In a strange sort of way he always seems to be there. Him and his network of nefarious friends from the government. The Screwdriver Set as I came to call them. There was that loud fella in the colourful coat who sold me that weird sink plunger. No use to man or beast in the end. As I threw it in the skip I wondered if he
was in league with that hoodwinker in the long boots. Then there was that shortarse Scotsman with the panama hat who flogged me the signed photo of Mrs Mallaprop that turned out to be a fake. Was I being paranoid, or did his peepers possess a certain sparkle...?
On top of all that I don’t even own a tin opener! I find the concept too galling. Even after all this time I can’t access a can of soup. I’m off to the shops now to buy one I think – time to put the past behind me. I’ll break with tradition and get the cheapest, nastiest one possible. It’s like the chap in the long scarf who sold me the shop said – “Antiques are all well and good, but at the end of the day the people who buy them are a load of old tat.”
