Page 102 of Hope and Happiness in Bluebell Wood
I reach into the corner of the table and retrieve a flat circular piece of metal. It’s a bit battered, but when I blow the remaining seed away it’s immediately clear what it is.
‘It’s a coin!’ Robin and I say at the same time.
‘It’s not like the fifty pence you found before, though, is it?’ Robin asks, looking eagerly at the coin in my hand.
‘No, this looks much older.’ I pick the coin up in my fingertips and examine it in the sunlight. ‘We’ll have to look it up when we get inside and see if we can date it.’
We finish feeding the birds and head inside.
When we’ve washed our hands and run the coin under the tap to try to clean it up a little, we place it on a piece of kitchen towel and I find my phone so we can try to date the coin together.
‘It’s not a modern coin,’ I tell Robin as I open Google and search for ‘old coins’. ‘Because it doesn’t have a recent monarch’s head on it.’
‘What’s a monarch?’ Robin asks, wandering over to the window to watch the few birds that have already come down to feed on the new food.
‘A king or a queen,’ I tell him, as listings of websites promising to date my coin load on to the home page. ‘Our modern money has the Queen’s head on it. Before our current Queen it was her father, and when she’s not here any more all our money will have her son’s face.’
‘There’s a blue tit on the peanuts,’ Robin says, already seeming to lose interest in the coin in favour of the birds. ‘He’s upside down!’ he cries excitedly.
I do my best to try to read about dating old coins on the website I’ve chosen, in between talking to Robin about the various birds that are arriving in the garden.
‘I think it might be Roman!’ I say excitedly, as a photo of a coin that looks very similar to our coin appears on my screen.
‘Which one?’ Robin says, still transfixed by the bird table.
‘No, I mean the coin. I think it’s Roman. It’s pretty worn away, but the head looks just like the one in this photo. It says on the website it’s the Emperor Claudius. Wow, how amazing is that? I wonder why it was on the bird table.’
‘Why are the pigeons trying to piggy back with each other?’ Robin asks innocently. ‘I don’t think the one underneath likes it much, it keeps flying away.’
‘They’re just playing,’ I say quickly.
Robin doesn’t seem all that interested in the coin, so I leave it on the table, and decide I’ll do some more research later.
‘What have you seen so far?’ I ask him as I come across to the window. ‘Has your friend the robin been yet?’
We spend a lovely day together. We watch the birds, play a couple of board games that I’d discovered in one of Evelyn’s cupboards, and then after lunch we take Merlin for a walk.
‘I’ve had the best day,’ Robin says later, sleepily from the sofa.
‘I’m glad you have,’ I call from the kitchen.
It’s five thirty and I know it won’t be long before Linnet and Lonan return. Lonan has taken Linnet down to London on the train to have lunch and see a matinee of a West End show. She’d texted a little while ago to say they were on a train that gets in just after six o’clock and depending on traffic they’d be back about twenty minutes after that, so I’m just getting us both a glass of juice and a biscuit before it’s time for Robin to go.
I carry the glasses and biscuits on a tray back into the sitting room, half expecting I might find Robin has nodded off, but to my surprise he’s up and standing in front of the mantelpiece.
‘What are all these?’ he asks, staring at the strange line-up of things I have displayed there.
‘They’re all the things the birds have left for me on the table,’ I say, putting the tray down on the table.
‘Why is my fifty pence up there?’ Robin demands. ‘I paid for my bear with that. It should have gone to the school.’
‘Don’t worry, I put a different fifty pence in the takings that day,’ I tell him. ‘After I met you, I wanted to keep your coin because it was special to me.’
Robin lifts his coin down from the mantelpiece. ‘Britannana,’ he says, looking at it.
‘What?’
‘Britan-nana,’ he says adamantly. ‘On this side of the coin.’
