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the Reverse Gadroon.
    Drummer used to be an apprentice silversmith at Gurrard’s in the Haymarket. Now he’s the last of the line. I first realized who this old duffer was in a pub about a year ago, and just couldn’t believe my luck. I might have missed it if I’d been casually gazing the other way. Through the barroom fug I saw this pair of crooked old hands take a benthalfpenny from the Shove-Ha’penny board and straighten it against the brass pub-rail with a flick of a metal ashtray. Mesmerized, before I knew what I was doing I’d pushed through the mob in a second and collared the old scruff, and demanded, ‘Can you do that trick again?’ Everybody laughed, thinking me sloshed.
    ‘Aye, son,’ he’d smiled. We were in people’s way trying to reach the bar. He took the coin and tapped once, bending it literally like paper. Then straightened it perfectly flat again with another tap on the rail. And all the time he looked at me, smiling.
    I’d cleared my throat, daring the question. ‘Have you ever heard of a Reverse Gadroon?’
    His amusement lit with interest at the reverence in my voice. ‘I’ve done it, son. Now and then,’ he said, by which he meant for half a century.
    And that was it. There and then I’d started learning from him, twice a week in my homemade forge. I even began exercises trying to strengthen my arms and shoulders, with dismal results.
    It sounds easy. You take a tray of solid silver and hold it by the bottom edge over a patterned tool held in a vice. The idea is to hammer the silver’s perfect upper surface over the die, thereby impressing the die’s design. Then you move the tray a fraction, and hammer again. Do this all the way round, using even blows every time. If you’ve held it right, judged every single blow to perfection, struck with the massive hammer at exactly the right spot and with the same force, if you’ve turned the silver exactly the same distance for every blow and never stopped until the whole piece is finished, and if you are possessed of Olympian strength, endless stamina and unerring judgement, then you’ve done a Reverse Gadroon. But make a fractional error, pause a split second or weaken, and you’veruined the whole solid chunk of precious silver. Nowadays machines do it all, without the slightest risk of a human error – or human love – creeping in. It’s called progress.
    Drummer’s the last living original silversmith. I don’t mind his eccentricities, that he’s been made redundant by the onward rush of mechanization. I don’t mind that for the past twenty years he’s lived in a shack down on the estuary giving donkey-rides for a living. To me Drummer’s a great man, a genius. But when he’s gone, God forbid, I’m determined there’ll still be somebody to pass on his priceless skill of the Reverse Gadroon.
    Me.
    Only at this particular moment I’d made another balls-up. Drummer gazed at me, puffing.
    ‘Not so good, son, is it?’
    ‘No,’ I said miserably. The last time he told me off like this I felt suicidal, except living’s hard enough as it is. I practise on thin steel sheet, cut in ovals. To take the weight I’d rigged up a wooden grip on a counterpoised cord. Old Drummer screwed his eyes at it.
    ‘Look, son,’ he said at last. ‘Pretty soon you’ll have the strength. After that it’ll just be practice, direction and power.’
    That sounded hopeful. ‘And then I’ll do a proper silver pattern?’
    ‘No, son.’ He rummaged for more tobacco. ‘You’re a divvie, son. Stick to your trade.’
    ‘Sooner or later I’ll do a Reverse Gadroon,’ I said doggedly.
    ‘You’re too immersed in antiques, lad. A new hammered silver’s not antique. That’s why you’ll never do it, never in a million years.’
    I ticked off on my fingers, narked at the old duck egg.‘Strength, Drummer. Practice. Direction. Level power,’ I snapped. ‘You said yourself I’ll soon—’
    ‘Give it up, son. Germoline could do