“I never finished school. I got expelled when I was 16,” Grandad said casually as he cracked the shell of an egg with a jagged bread knife. A single, disappointing yolk slid out, not the twin yolks he had said we might find.

I stared at him, breakfast suddenly forgotten. It was shocking news from a retired primary school teacher who had spent yesterday afternoon trying to get me to learn my times tables, to no avail.

“What did you do?” I asked, in awe.

“I climbed over the wall to go and see a film.”

At nine years old, and obsessed with James Bond, I was horrified to learn that school masters and mistresses could ban you from going to the cinema. I half-expected Grandad to tell me next that he had spent his Sundays being hung, drawn and quartered.

Outraged on his behalf, I said, “That’s horrible. Why did you go to a school like that?”

“My mother wanted me to become a priest, so I was sent to the seminary when I was 13.”

It seemed bizarre to me that a man who had sired a dynasty of seven children, fourteen grandchildren and, eventually, three great-grandchildren had narrowly escaped consigning his bloodline to oblivion.

He continued, “We had to wear dark suits and take cold showers, and we could only go home during the summer holidays. We weren’t allowed to talk to girls. ” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “We could play table football though.”

I knew that my grandparents were religious and that my parents were not, but up until now the most I had seen of this was the decade of the rosary Grandad had fashioned out of conkers, slung across the entrance of his shed, forcing the door to be permanently ajar – a souvenir from a country I had never visited.

Returning to the bowl, he tried to show me how to ease the egg shell halves apart so as to tease out the yolks that would form our breakfast. In my stubbornness, I picked up the egg and cracked it against the side of the bowl like I had seen other adults do.

It smashed, spilling its contents everywhere, coating the fridge door and the floor in dandelion-yellow slime.

I burst into tears and fled the kitchen, finding refuge in the grotto behind the living room sofa. Like my grandfather before me, I had committed a great sin and would now be expelled, possibly from his house, maybe from his life, forever in disgrace.

A few minutes later he came to find me. His response was so very like him, and so very unlike that of his school masters.

He pushed the bowl towards me. I waited for a reprimand.

“The next egg had two yolks. Isn’t that exciting? You must be good luck. We wouldn’t have got them if the other one didn’t break.”

I looked into the bowl. Instead of the usual singular pool of quivering yellow, there were two tiny round balls, neat and perfect as twin suns, enshrined in translucent syrup.

I stopped crying and smiled. All was forgiven.