My Father Hid Gold Coins in a Biscuit Tin, and I Spent a Winter Learning What to Do With Them

The biscuit tin was in the back of my father's wardrobe, under a folded army blanket that smelled of mothballs and the seventies. I found it three weeks after we buried him, on the kind of grey Highveld afternoon where the whole house feels like it is holding its breath.

What a quiet man leaves behind

My dad was a fitter and turner who never once in his life mentioned investments. He clipped coupons. He reused teabags. When my mother wanted a new geyser he made the old one last another two years out of pure principle. So when I peeled back the lid of that tin and found eleven gold coins wrapped individually in squares of chamois cloth, I actually laughed out loud, alone in his empty bedroom, because it was so completely unlike the man I thought I knew and so completely like him at the same time.

They were Krugerrands. I recognised the springbok on the back before I recognised anything else. Some were older, the gold gone a deep warm colour with handling. A couple looked as though they had never left their little cloth pouches. There was no note, no letter, no explanation. Just eleven coins and a lifetime of unspoken carefulness sitting in a tin that once held Romany Creams.

The temptation to just get rid of them

I will be honest about where my head went first, because grief does strange things to your judgement. My sister and I had a funeral to pay for, an estate to wind up, and a lawyer's letter that used the word executor as though we were supposed to know what that meant. The easy thing, the thing a tired man wants to do, is to make the awkward object disappear and turn it into something useful like money in a bank account.

I very nearly did exactly that. I looked up a couple of shops near the taxi rank in town, the kind with a hand-painted sign that says they buy gold, and I got as far as putting the tin on the passenger seat one morning. Then I stopped at a robot on Louis Botha Avenue, looked at the tin, and thought about how my father would have felt about me carrying eleven coins into the first shop I found without knowing the first thing about what they were worth. He would not have said anything. He would just have looked at me over his glasses. That look got me to turn the car around.

Educating myself before I did anything

So instead of selling, I spent an evening at the kitchen table with a cup of rooibos and my phone, and I gave myself a proper lesson. I had assumed a gold coin had a fixed price, like a loaf of bread. It does not. I learned that the value tracks the international gold price, which moves every single day, sometimes by a lot, and that this gets translated into rands through the exchange rate, which also wobbles about like a toddler on a scooter.

I found a page that walked through how to check the Krugerrand price in rands on any given day, and for the first time the whole thing stopped feeling like a mystery and started feeling like something I could actually understand. A one ounce coin was worth roughly the gold price of that day, adjusted for the rand, and then a buyer would offer a bit under that to make their margin. Simple, once someone explained it plainly. Terrifying, if you walk in blind.

I also learned the thing that genuinely worried me. Because these coins move with a live market, the difference between a fair offer and a poor one can be several thousand rand per coin, and multiply that by eleven and you are talking about real money. Money my father had saved one careful decision at a time.

Slowing down and asking better questions

My sister, who is the sensible one, made me promise not to be in a hurry. She was right. We were not desperate. The funeral was paid. The rush I felt was grief pretending to be practicality.

So I read a longer guide on how to actually Sell Krugerrands in South Africa, the sort of thing that lays out what documents you need, how a reputable buyer weighs and tests the coins in front of you, and why you should always get more than one quote on the same day so you are comparing like with like. It sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious to me at all three weeks after my father died, when I could barely remember to eat lunch.

The most useful thing I took from all of it was a kind of checklist for my own nerves. Know roughly what the coins are worth before I walk in. Get the offer while the coins never leave my sight. Never feel pressured to decide on the spot. And treat anyone who rushes me, or who is vague about how they arrived at their number, as a reason to walk out rather than a reason to hurry.

The morning I actually did it

In the end I did not sell all of them. My sister and I decided to keep three, one each for us and one to give to my daughter when she turns twenty-one, because there is something about holding a coin your grandfather quietly saved that no bank balance can replace. The other eight we sold, together, on a Tuesday morning when the gold price happened to be having a good week.

I checked the value that morning before we left the house. I knew, near enough, what a fair figure looked like. We got two quotes. The second was better than the first by an amount that would have paid for a decent second-hand car, which tells you everything about why you should never take the first number you hear. The man who bought them was calm and thorough, weighed each coin, and explained his offer without being asked. That transparency, more than anything, was what let me sign.

What my father actually left me

I have thought a lot about why he did it. Eleven coins, no note, hidden under an army blanket. I do not think he was being secretive to be difficult. I think he came from a generation that trusted a thing you could hold in your hand more than a promise on a screen, and I think, in his undemonstrative way, he wanted to leave his children something solid.

What he left me was not really the gold. It was the lesson I had to teach myself in order to handle the gold responsibly. Slow down. Understand the thing before you trade it away. Respect the work that went into it. Do not let grief, or hurry, or a friendly hand-painted sign, talk you out of doing your homework.

The tin is empty now. I kept it. It sits on my shelf next to the three coins we held back, and every so often I lift the lid just to remember the man who filled it, one careful, silent decision at a time.