This is for you to read, Savarin, you are the one who is going to have to make explanations to your wife, children and grandchildren, and after all we’re only talking of a matter of seventy-six quid or so.

I am the one who listened to the old folk when I was a child; and if you ask anyone who has known me for any length of time, they will tell you that my memory is rather better than most. The tale I wish to relate does not begin, “Once upon a time” because it began in 1860.

Hannah Cancio was born on the second of July in 1860 in the small port town of Ferrol in Galicia, Spain. She was of Galician descent and spoke Galician, an old language related to Portuguese as her native tongue, and like her fellow countrymen to this day she did not consider herself to be a Spaniard.

She married at the age of sixteen but her husband turned out to be a drinker and a wife beater. When she was twenty she met Angus McLeod, a Scottish sailor, and fell in love with him. He took her aboard and the ship’s captain, who was not aware that she was a married woman, bigamously married them at sea and took her back with her new husband to their port of origin, Oban.

Her second marriage was a good one; she had eight children and outlived them all, but even then her English was not good, although her Gaelic was. One of her grandsons had been baptised Charles John Geoffrey. Of his nine siblings he was the smallest at six feet one inch, even his one sister Zolanna was three inches taller than he the runt of the litter, but his frame shewed the effects of rickets as a child.

There is much to tell of his life, not least of his running away from home to emigrate to Nova Scotia in his teens and becoming a Canadian citizen. He later joined the fleet air arm during the second World War and met Ellen in England whom he subsequently married. After his marriage he became a British citizen again and the couple settled in Ellen’s home town, Shrewsbury in county Salop, Shropshire.

On the tenth of August in nineteen thirty-three Ellen gave birth to their only child, Jacqueline. Jacqueline met Douglas, a island Scot born on Unst, who had been brought up in county Durham, whom she married. In December nineteen fifty-one when three months pregnant with her first child Jacqueline was given by Hannah a 1900 half sovereign, a huge sum of money in those days.

Hannah said “It is for the baby.”

I have never heard her referred to as anything other than ‘Spanish Hannah’ because by the time I was born there was another Hannah in the family, Irish Hannah. Spanish Hannah’s great-great grandson was born on the second of May nineteen fifty-two, and she died at the age of ninety-seven in nineteen fifty-seven when he was five years old.

I am that great-great grandson and I have a single sure memory of being kissed by Spanish Hannah; I have other memories of what are probably of her but I can’t be sure because they could be of Irish Hannah who was also a great-great grandmother of mine.

I have had that half sovereign for over sixty years now and for the last forty of them have wondered what to do with it. At current values it is worth about seventy six quid, but I can drink more than that on a good night, surely its history has to be worth more than a drink. All of my own children have all written me off and truth to tell it’s mutual, I’ve more than a dozen grandchildren I’ve never seen, but it occurs to me that since the coin was given to Jacqueline, “For the baby,” perhaps it makes sense to give the coin to your wife Jacqueline, “For the baby.” For though not kin to me I am married to her mother's sister.

Jacqueline is the female form of Jacob. You may get a laugh out of knowing that the name is Biblical in origin and means “the usurper”, which is someone who takes what is not rightfully theirs. Google “Jacob and Esau” for further explanation, but perhaps you may wish to settle for a quiet life and not explain that to Jacqueline.