Brindle’s Hardware, by Walter Aspinall

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Mr Brindle did not sell things; he dispensed them, like a chemist with a dangerous prescription. When I asked for a pocket knife, he lowered his spectacles, studied me over the top of them for a full minute and then turned to the wall of tiny wooden drawers behind him, each one labelled in his own copperplate hand.

‘A knife,’ he announced to the empty shop, ‘is a tool, not a toy. Tools are respected in this establishment.’

He laid three knives on a square of green baize, side by side, their blades exactly parallel. Then he lectured me on each. The first was Sheffield steel, ‘honest as a bishop’. The second was foreign and would ‘snap like a Christmas cracker’. The third he would not discuss at all, because it had been sent in error and was going back on Monday. His brown overall was buttoned to the neck, and his pencil sat behind his ear like a soldier on guard.

I chose the Sheffield knife. Mr Brindle wrapped it in brown paper, folded the corners as sharply as a hospital bed and tied the string in a bow that nobody would ever untie neatly. When I counted out my pennies, he held each one up to the gaslight, as if I might be a forger.

‘Use it wisely,’ he said, and rang the till with a flourish, as though he had just concluded the sale of a battleship.

What impressions does the writer create of Mr Brindle?

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.