He closed the lid, took the box from me and returned it to its spot.

‘It’s not all skulls in here though. Don’t want you thinking that.’ He picked up a small metal box from the second shelf. ‘This one is a skull-free zone and has a monetary value of precisely nothing at all.’

The metal was in fact a case wrapped around an old matchbox and decorated, with a design punched into it. The border had swirls and zigzags and the middle of the design was a shield with ‘YPRES’ written on the band that ran across it diagonally. The side part was decorated to look like the spine of a book and the back had a design that looked like leaves, with a brass button set in the middle.

‘Well, it’s a matchbox holder,’ I said. It was lighter than the skull, a lighter or thinner metal. ‘I don’t know what Y, P, R, E, S means though.’

He said something that sounded like ‘eepruh’ and then explained it was the name of a place in Flanders. ‘You can understand why the British troops got into the habit of calling it “Wipers”. First World War. The war to end all wars that failed to do so. One of our chaps made this in the trenches. At least I assume it was one of ours. Might not have been, though the letters do look English. They spent a lot of time sitting around and waiting, so they’d make things. From shell casings and other scraps. This one’s from a bully beef tin or a mess tin. A mess tin, I think.’

I took a closer look. The shield wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, the straight lines not perfectly straight, though they were close to it. There were sharp triangular marks, like miniature cuneiform script, along with tiny curved gouges and stippling around the letters. It had taken at least two different tools. A knife? A nail? I could picture the soldier, sitting on a crate in his trench, photographs from home pinned nearby, tapping away at this piece of tin, patiently adding one minute mark after another. Focusing, focusing, deep in this small moment away from the war all around. Tap, tap, tap drifting from the trench across the smashed landscape like a message, a code. Perhaps he traded the case for some cigarettes. Perhaps he brought it home. Perhaps he was dead the next day and it came back to England in someone else’s pocket.

‘Do you know whose it was?’

‘No.’ George frowned, as if more thought might let him work it out. ‘Sadly. It was among my aunt’s things. She might have been able to answer that. Perhaps a solider brought it back to impress her. I can’t think of any family connection to Ypres.’