The Error World (2 page)

When I was a boy I collected every stamp I could find, but it didn't take me long to realise how fruitless this was. It was like trying to visit every page on the Internet. After a while I began to specialise. I first narrowed it down to Great Britain. Then Queen Elizabeth II. And then Great Britain
QE
2 errors. Not that I could actually afford any errors, for these were the rarest and most expensive stamps of all. But I became unusually interested in them. When I was younger I could reel off a list of the most famous errors better than I could recite 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. For example:

– The 1961 2½d Post Office Savings stamp missing black and the 3d of the same set missing orange-brown

– The 1961 European Postal Conference 2d missing orange and the 10d missing pale green

– The 1962 National Productivity Year 3d and is 3d, both missing light blue (the Queen's head)

– The 6d Paris Postal Conference Centenary missing green

– The 3d 1963 Red Cross Centenary Congress missing red

Well over half of all issues before decimalisation in 1971 had something glaringly wrong with them. There were huge white areas where things should have been but weren't. Icons that the stamps commemorated, such as the Red Cross, were absent, thus making a mockery of the event. Even a schoolboy couldn't make many mistakes with stamps like these, and even a person with no interest in stamps could see the appeal. Tens of millions printed and sold, but on a very few examples the printing machine had run out of ink, or a paper fold had caused the colour to be printed on the gummed side. Accordingly, stamps with errors will always be more sought after, and dramatically more expensive, than stamps that are perfect. This feature alone makes stamp collecting an exceptional and perverse hobby. No one wants a Picasso with missing bistre. A misshapen Ming vase? A 1930s Mercedes without headlights? There are some coins with errors, and some rare vinyl records with misprints on the labels, but they do not form the cornerstone of a collecting hobby, and they do not make men bankrupt.

I don't think I mentioned the Post Office Tower error to my father in 1968. It cost several pounds. Several pounds for a stamp! You could send an elephant first class for that. My father would have been intrigued by the idea that imperfection equalled added value but he would also have doubted it (a chipped glass or an unreliable wristwatch were just things to be endured until you could afford something better). How was he to know that there would never be more than thirty of these stamps? How could he have known that a stamp worth three pence at the post office counter, and a few pounds from a dealer in 1968, would be sold at auction in 2007 for £2,100?

The first big error appeared on a stamp in 1852, an engraving glitch that caused the word 'Petimus' (trans.: 'We give and ask in return') on the British Guiana one cent and four cent to be issued as 'Patimus' ('We suffer in return')—and ever since they have been among the most sought-after items. Or unavailable, and tantalisingly so. Studying these rare stamps in my school-days I learnt a bit about history, particularly my country's fondness for immortalising events where grey men met in huge halls, and I learnt a bit about colour. I knew what bistre was, and agate, and could distinguish new blue from dull blue. But what I really learnt about was inflation. The 1966 Technology 6d issue, for example, which should have contained three Mini cars and a Jaguar, but instead had only the Jaguar against a bright orange background, was on sale in 1967 at the Globe Stamp Co. in William IV Street, just off the Strand, for £95. A year later it was £130. At that point the precise quantities of the error stamp were unknown, but today it is thought there are just eighteen mint copies. In an auction in March 2005 a collector bought one for £6,110.

Of course, I would have loved to have owned this stamp, just as I would have loved all the others. But my favourite was five years older. In 1961, the Seventh Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference was held in Westminster. There were two stamps issued. The 6d value was a horizontal rectangle with a purple background and gold overlay of the roof-beams of Westminster Hall, and then there was the is 3d vertical stamp. This had a racing-green background, and was split into two halves: on the top was a picture of the Queen printed in dull blue, and beneath it was an engraving of the Palace of Westminster and a mace and sceptre. On the error, there was no Queen. Simple: a white box on a green stamp. In the late 1960s, when I first became aware of it, it was the most beautiful small object I had ever seen, and remains so for me today.

Then, for about twenty years, I forgot about stamps. Or rather, I neglected to collect them. First came exams and university, then work, then marriage and children, a mortgage. But when I was in my early forties, my interest ignited again. I can't pinpoint the cause—perhaps it was an article in the newspapers or a browse online—but my enthusiasm returned and with it just enough disposable cash to pursue the stamps I could never afford in my childhood. Within a few weeks I was visiting dealers and buying magazines, fantasising. I wanted the same thing now as then—stamps with errors on them. I still dreamed of being that London schoolboy who, in 1965, wandered into a post office for the new set of stamps marking the centenary of the International Telecommunication Union, saw that the is 6d value was missing pink, and bought as many as he could afford, which was twenty mint copies. I knew that would never happen to me. But maybe now I could buy that error from the dealer he sold them to.

It took me a while to tell anyone of my revived passion. I could only admit it to people I could really trust, people who would not think any less of me. My children thought stamp collecting both strange and perverse, and inevitably used that same phrase they employ to describe anyone over twenty-five in trainers and into rap music: 'Sad.' My wife tolerated my obsession but seldom expressed interest. Her questions were invariably focused on one thing. I wanted her to say, 'Tell me about the history, the beauty, the rarity! Tell me about
that
one!' but mostly she said, 'How much was it?'

My answer was usually the same. 'Not much, really.' But of course it was a lot—the equivalent of a weekend away, or a beautiful painting, or a year's theatre tickets. And the one thought I always had during these exchanges was, 'If only I'd bought it when I was a boy.'

I still have my first stamp album, with about three hundred stamps amassed between 1966 and the start of 1973. From 1973 there was a gap of one year before I started collecting again in a new album. What caused the gap, and what happened in 1973? I came of age, and my father died. And I made a very bad investment.

To give up collecting at the beginning of 1973, if only for a while, was not a good idea, for one reason: bar-mitzvah presents. Along with a ridiculous number of suitcases and many copies of
Who's Who in the Old Testament
and
The Joy of Yiddish
(these are real titles, and very popular choices for people who don't buy many books, like
Schott's Almanac
today), I received a fair bit of money from people who knew I couldn't possibly want another suitcase or book. I should have spent it on stamps, but I didn't. Stamps were good value in 1973, but of course they always appear good value looking back. I counted up the cheques on the morning after my party at the Esso Motor Hotel near Watford, and I had about £1,200. Some of this went on Premium Bonds, and the rest went in the bank. I think I was allowed one special gift, something I wouldn't normally receive because it wasn't considered practical or informative. This is likely to have been the Peter Bonetti goalkeeping ensemble.

With £1,200 I could have bought a couple of fine errors, perhaps a block of the 1966 Technology issue with missing Jaguars. People who knew about stamps would have placed an order with their dealer straight away. For example, when the collector Thomas Keay Tapling was at school in the mid-1870s, an indulgent family member gave him £500 for Christmas, this at a time when £500 could secure a very fine house. But he didn't buy a fine house, he bought fine stamps. He received advice from one of London's leading philatelists, and the stamps formed the cornerstone of the brilliant collection that now resides at the British Library. A few months before he had received the £500 he had turned down the purchase of a rare Canadian stamp for $10, judging it too expensive, and he would never forget the lesson: buy when you can, or forever regret it.

By 1973 I had taken my father's advice: £60 for a stamp with an error was an awful lot to pay, and how could I be sure it would appreciate? That doubt, of course, was an error in itself. But a big word in my family at this time—and I imagine many families where the parents met during the age of austerity—was 'fritter'. The key to spending money wisely was to buy something that would be useful and last, something with assured value. Stamps did not fall into this category.

I didn't object to this wisdom; I embraced it. I received a school prize in 1973, the only one I ever won, and the prize was a book token to spend at the High Hill Bookshop in Hampstead (killed by Waterstones; now a Gap). I could have spent it on things I was actually interested in—the
Morecambe and Wise Jokebook,
a Sherlock Holmes—but that would have been frittering. I chose a hardback called
The Jews in the Roman World,
which I have yet to open, let alone read. It was presented to me on speech day by the mountaineer Chris Bonnington, an old boy, and as he shook my hand and handed me the book he looked at me inquisitively.

My father died eight months after my bar mitzvah and five months after my school prize. He had suffered a small heart attack some years before, and was going along nicely with a new exercise regime and a changed diet. The strangest ingredient of this was his special salt, which came in a tall blue-and-white plastic bottle and was apparently low in cholesterol. He took this with him everywhere, partly because he liked salt with everything, and would even put it on his peanut butter lest SunPat had forgotten, and also because it became a talisman. Have salt, will survive.

We didn't have much processed food then. My mother enjoyed preparing dinner parties, and she was good at it. Her guides were Graham Kerr (the dishy 'Galloping Gourmet' who used to drink as he cooked long before Keith Floyd got the knack), and Robert Carrier's
Great Dishes of the World.
These recipes specialised in aspic and cholesterol, and my mother was in her element in the decade of quiche Lorraine, tournedos Rossini and zabaglione. If any food could be put inside another food—beef Wellington, salmon en croûte—then it became doubly desirable. But there was a limit to her adventurousness; she never much liked the scent of garlic that was wafting through other London homes, and the chancer from the north who came round on his bike with shallots and garlic around his neck soon learnt not to bother at our house. The only commercial tradesmen my mother welcomed were the knife sharpener and the delivery boy from a shop called Panzer's, which specialised not in tanks, but in goodness from the old country—marzipan, pickles, stock cubes, sausages, sauerkraut. We were long past the age of austerity and Marguerite Patten's mock desserts, but she still ran a cautious kitchen. She kept leftovers until it was no longer possible to remember the original meal from which they derived, and she peeled and boiled everything until it hung by its last fibre; one more scalding minute in those pans, and her carrots would have just been orange water. My mother's signature dishes were usually things that rolled: beef olives, matzo balls and rum babas. But we all judged every meal delicious, and only once can I remember acute drama and hunger and tears, the day our lazy basset hound Gus—who had never leapt up to anything in his life—leapt up to steal an entire cooling leg of lamb.

But fake salt came from a different kitchen, the encroaching world of edible chemicals. As the 1970s drew on, everything that could be made false, was. Pleather, fake fur, the wood-finish around our television—all sold not as a replacement but an improvement. This all sat comfortably with my father's false back teeth and the soft top on his 1971 Triumph Vitesse, his mid-life-crisis car. He bought this just before his real mid-life crisis, something awful and mysterious that happened at the office one day and hung over him and our family for months. In fact, he may never have recovered from it.

My father was a solicitor at one of the oldest and most Jewish city firms: Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan Sc Vandyk. My grandfather Leopold had paid for him to be taken on by Harry Louis Nathan (later Lord Nathan) in 1936, and his Articles of Clerkship reveal his true name: Herbert Sidney Garfunkel. He was born in Hamburg in 1919, and moved to England at Easter 1934. His parents, of banking stock, remained in Germany until 1939, but there was no mistaking the direction of the country after Hitler's ascendancy in 1933. (My mother, born in Wesermunde in 1925, also left Germany in 1934, moving with her parents and sister to Jerusalem.)

My father became a pupil at the Perse School, Cambridge, excelling at most things apart from sport. He was a lance-corporal in the Officer Training Corps, and held the same post when he joined the Durham Light Infantry in 1940. Towards the end of the war he was working for the Americans in the Press Censorship Department of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and the Certificate of Merit he received at war's end is the earliest official document I have containing his anglicised name: Herbert Garfield. If it hadn't been for Hitler, I would have been Simon Garfunkel.