How the Queen and flying coal made my mystery present unforgettable

The perfect gift is one that lingers in your mind for ever, reminding you in bleak evening of generosity and love

It was Christmas morning 1965, and I was nine years old. Through the wall of 108 Barnsley Road I could hear Mr Page next door playing God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen on his piano, and Mrs Page joining in in her sweet chapel alto. Later, once I'd opened all my presents, I would have to go to them and our other neighbors, Mr and Mrs Marsden and  Mr and Mrs White, with their wrapped-up tins of biscuits. In the afternoon, in a kind of quid pro quo, Mrs White would come over and watch the Queen's speech, and that year something would happen that seemed apposite and oddly poetic.

There had been an awkward moment when my older brother, who had wanted a horse for Christmas and had received what my dad called a "two-wheeled horse", stood and looked at the bike with the tinsel on the bell with a variety of teenage disbelief that bordered on tremulous tears, but now he was riding it round the back garden in his porkpie hat.

There was one last present for me to open from my mother and dad, and it felt like it would be the best, which is why I'd saved it until the end. It was big and rectangular and heavy, and I really wanted to hang on to the moment before the great unveiling. Next door, Mr and Mrs Page were giving us White Christmas, and a wrong note hung in the air. I tore the paper open. There was what screenwriters call a beat, and I felt like my brother had when he didn't get a horse.

It was a set of three hardboard rectangles. There were holes spread across each rectangle in a geometric fashion, like squares on a chessboard, except they were round, and each of the holes had a circular piece of black felt in it. They almost looked like two-dimensional egg boxes. If I'd known what conceptual art was I'd have called it a piece of conceptual art. I must have looked crestfallen. I was bowed down with the deflation that comes after huge anticipation.

"Don't you know what they are?" my dad said. I shook my head. "Can't you guess?" my mother said. I held the rectangles like they were homemade wings. I put them on the floor and sat on them. I tried to make a tiny house of them, but the felt circles kept falling out. I had no idea at all what they could possibly be. "We're not going to tell you," my dad said, wickedly. "You've got to work it out for yourself." I slouched off to read my Oor Wullie annual.

After dinner I still couldn't fathom what they were. I asked my dad again as he washed up in the new pinny he'd got as a present from Auntie Mabel and Uncle Les, but he smiled and tapped the side of his nose. Mrs White knocked on the door and bustled in ready for the Queen's speech. She perched on the settee and said what she always said, "It's cold, Mr McMillan; I'm cold," and my dad went to the coalhouse and came back with a brimming bucket of heat.

What is a gift, anyway? I think the perfect gift is something that lingers in your mind for ever, reminding you in bleak evenings of ideas of generosity and continuity and love. Mrs White sat there like an owl. My dad swung the bucket, perhaps a little too hard, and the handle came off; lumps of coal described an arc in the air and landed on Mrs White just as the Queen opened her mouth to speak. She looked briefly like a faceworker coming off the day shift at Houghton main pit. That's Mrs White, not the Queen. My mother and dad fluttered round her like moths, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that my dad was trying not to laugh.

Mrs White got up to go home, wiping her face, smearing coal dust. My dad's shoulders were shaking and my mother was staring grimly into space. As she passed me, Mrs White looked me in the eye and said: "I hope you liked those boards for your coin collection; your dad said he thought you'd be really keen on them." So that's what they were: objects to keep my coins in for as long as my junior numismatist craze lasted. I felt relieved and, yes happy.

Mrs White and my mother and dad and Houghton main pit are all long gone, as are the boards for my coins, but the memory is the gift: the moment of the flying coal, the young lad holding the hardboard, the black-and-white Queen staring hard at me, opening her lips.