There was a story, but it was lost. Maybe that was how curiosities worked. They weren’t made of gold or made for kings or emperors, so perhaps they slipped free of their stories more easily. A skull snuffbox in the coat of a Victorian gentleman, his pocket rubbing the teeth flat, the man rubbed away as well now, no sign of him. A box made for a musician’s skull that might never have had one in it. A piece of battlefield metalwork, meant to distract, kill time, more than to commemorate.

‘The only one for which I have some idea of the history is on the shelf below,’ George told me as he put the matchbox case back.

He lifted out a human figure, a standing man, seven or eight centimetres tall. The man was dressed in a colour that had once been white, where the paint hadn’t chipped off to reveal bare grey metal. There were flecks of red at his wrists and throat. His boots were black and his sheathed sword was bent in next to his leg.

‘It might look like a toy soldier,’ George said, ‘but I’m told it’s not. I had toy soldiers too, as a child, as every boy does, but this was always kept separate. It’s a family thing of my mother’s – an ancestor, apparently. An ancient uncle of some kind who fought Napoleon. At least that’s what she told me. But he should have been Irish – my mother was Irish – and I showed it to an old RAF friend who’s now a military historian, and it’s not British at all. The uniform’s not right. So, for whom did my ancestor fight in the Napoleonic Wars? Or is it just an old toy soldier after all? With those questions unresolved, it earns a place among the curiosities.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t Irish.’ I stood the soldier up on my hand. Most of his head had been rubbed bare, but there was paint in a lighter grey between the dull metal waves of his hair. ‘I’ve never seen a grey-haired toy soldier before, so maybe it is of a real person. Take a look there. His hair’s grey.’

I held it up and George’s forehead furrowed with the effort to see it properly. ‘Yes, I think you might be right. It’s almost identical to the lead, isn’t it? Well spotted.’

‘I had a Dutch ancestor at Waterloo.’ I had remembered something my grandparents had told me. ‘The oldest person at my christening was my great-great-aunt Anne, and the oldest person at her christening in 1880 fought at Waterloo as a teenager, and he was Dutch. He was my great-great-grandmother’s brother, or something like that.’

‘Oh, really?’ He leaned back as if he was taking a fresh look at me. ‘Waterloo? Well, perhaps my chap’s Dutch too. Perhaps your many-greats uncle fought right beside mine.’