Antique Dealers Value Village Hall Radiator Above Village Hall

The crowd turned away from the tables at about half past ten, which for an antiques fair is roughly the equivalent of a riot. Thirty or so dealers, all of whom had arrived with velvet-lined cases and the specific walk of people who already know what they are looking for, abandoned a run of Edwardian silver and formed a loose semicircle around the radiator on the long wall of the village hall. It had begun making a noise. The noise was described by one man present as unmistakably Victorian, and by his wife as the boiler.

What followed was the most serious hour the hall has hosted since the flood meeting. A dealer in the clock trade knelt and listened to the pipework with his ear flat against the paint. Somebody produced a jeweller's loupe and examined a bracket. A woman with a table of brooches said the knocking had a rhythm to it, and that the rhythm was in no catalogue she had ever read, and she has read all of them twice. By eleven o'clock the room had reached the conclusion that the radiator is worth considerably more than the building bolted to it, which raises the awkward question of what the rest of us are standing in.

Nobody bid.

"I have handled things older than this country and I have never heard one of them clear its throat," said an invented dealer the Herald spoke to by the tea urn, which is the only kind of dealer this newspaper is permitted to have. He said he would not buy it, could not insure it, and had on balance grown rather fond of it. The radiator remains firmly not for sale, and the hall is warm in the way a hall is warm when the heating is a cast-iron antique with opinions.

So go and look at it, and at everything else, because the antiques fair is at Haddenham Village Hall on Saturday 25 October, the tables are full, the dealers are friendly, and the oldest item in the room is bolted to the wall and still working.