The Error World (26 page)

Some years earlier, the Penny Black had used its 'cement' to keep it attached to envelopes. Removing it was rather easy, as it wasn't very sticky and its application was thin. One reason for the rapidly inflated price of the Penny Black to collectors, apart from the fact that it was the first in the catalogue and every collector had to have one, was because so many of them never made it to their destinations, dropping off in transit—mail-coaches, mailbags, sorting depots—and swept away a few days later. The adhesive dried out and cracked easily, it tasted foul, and its varying colour—from off-white to light brown—hinted at the inconsistency of its manufacture. The adhesive, known as 'British gum', was applied by hand with a brush. It was made from potato and wheat starch heated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and after a few years the recipe was enhanced by bovine gelatin and two coats were applied. Not long after the appearance of the Penny Black, the story arose that licking the gum gave you cancer of the tongue, and in 1852 a Select Committee felt obliged to scotch the rumour by listing its ingredients, whereupon Charles Dickens wrote an essay in
Household Words
entitled 'The Great British Gum Secret'. From 1847 gum arabic—the sap of acacia trees grown in the Sudan and Nigeria—was sometimes used as a substitute, and applied to the stamp before printing, which often resulted in the stamps being printed on the gummed side, and thus failing to stick at all.

Before the cats and dogs appeared in 2001, the popular adhesive was polyvinyl alcohol gum, a chemical formulation coated by machine, often with an additional anti-bacterial agent. This pleased vegetarians, who could now lick without remorse. When I was young, my mother would discourage the licking of stamps the way she would discourage the eating of the cone part of ice-cream cones: just too much human dirt. I never had cause to lick many stamps in succession, and when I helped my parents with their party invitations or charity mailings I learnt how to dip my fingers into a small glass dish of water and then wet the stamps. I longed for one of those dampened sponge rings they had in post offices, but they were probably limited to industrial use. Whenever my maternal grandmother kissed me pungently on the cheek, which happened much too often (she would kiss me, but also have a small handkerchief ready to wipe it off, as if she were spraying and cleaning a vanity mirror), my mother would always say, 'You could lick a whole book of Green Shield Stamps with that!' Irreversibly dry in all other ducts and crevices, she generated enough saliva to cool Mount Etna.

Up until December 2005, I had never, as far as I can remember, been kissed passionately on my neck. But when it finally happened I felt my world ignite and fall apart at once, and I began an affair with a woman from my past, and my marriage of eighteen years dissolved. Within a year many things that I had never had to think about before came into focus. I had to find a new place to live, a new car, a whole new way of life. I had to forge new relationships with my children and friends. And I had to sell my stamps.

When I first met Richard Ashton and he mentioned the Three Ds—death, debt, divorce—that kept the auction houses going, I didn't think that any of them would apply to me for quite a while. But a few months later two of them had become a reality, and there I was with my errors, totalling up.

Several times during this period I looked at my stamps in a new way. I began to question again why I collect at all. What was the thread that tied my love of stamps and Costello and Tube maps and Chelsea badges? Perhaps it was a birth defect, or a disease acquired when young. I had been keeping myself well by fulfilling a physiological need, much as my youngest son Jake injected insulin for his diabetes. There is no use asking, 'Why me?'; a gene mutates and you just have to get on with it. There was little evidence of a genetic inheritance from my parents, but sometimes it just skips a generation: my maternal grandfather, a dentist, collected teeth and dental impressions (all dentists did this to some extent, but he went beyond, taking them home and displaying them to guests after dinner in glass cases).

Jean Baudrillard has observed that 'what you really collect is always yourself', and sometimes this makes vague sense to me—these were the things I loved, and I wanted to surround myself with them. And sometimes Baudrillard's comment explains the whole story—afraid of losing things, I wanted to hold everything close, to say 'this is mine, this rare thing. You will not take it from me until I see fit.' It had much to do with safety and security, which also explains the great importance I placed on protection and albums and cabinets.

At ground level we are all collectors. We satisfy our thirsts and hungers in literal ways—the shopping lists add to our food stores, our wardrobes house this season's collections. When we travel we gather passport stamps and photographs and stories. At work we collect contacts and experience. Freud classified three collections beyond his antiquities: his case histories, his dream texts and analyses, his Jewish anecdotes laden with world-weary lessons and wisdom. If we maintain a diary or a blog we want to remember or be remembered, and we offer up a collection of events and opinions that record diversity.

In 2006, during a sort-out necessitated by my divorce, I came across some boxes of photographs and documents that justified all my basest instincts as a collector, and confirmed the value of hoarding as well. I had seen most of the items in the boxes before: photographs in albums and loose, stretching back to my great-grandparents in Hamburg. There were photographs of my parents when they were babies in absurd white ruffled blouses supplied by the photographer, an image of my father in his army uniform, a photo of my mother, on her first day at school, carrying a cardboard cone of sweets almost as big as her. There's one of me in a pram being pushed by my brother. My first dog Gus, a holiday in Torquay with my mother and brother and my mother's arm over my shoulder, an outing to Cambridge, playing in the garden with a beach-ball—all the usual moving things, ordinary compared to what I uncovered next. These were documents from Germany, banking and employment papers, my parents' school reports, naturalisation papers, my mother's CV when she was working at a museum in Palestine, my father's army commendations and speeches on legal affairs.

And then there was one thing I couldn't remember seeing before. It is written on ten sides of thin white card, each the size of a piece of Wonderloaf. This is my mother's death diary, written by her home nurse during her last weeks with breast cancer from October to December 1979. It begins with a brief five-year medical history, a list of drugs taken, and a bit about me at the LSE at the age of nineteen ('...seldom home during the daytime, but is usually home in the evenings and is able to help prepare Mum some supper if she isn't feeling up to getting herself some').

It's an account of slow decline, and I'm not quite sure who it was written for; perhaps it was for another nurse taking over; perhaps it was for me. It was too painful to consider at the time, and I must have just put it in a document album and hoped I could look at it in years to come.

Friday, 26th October 1979: Over the worst of the high temperature. However, still feeling weak and unable to stay up for more than a few minutes.

Monday, 29th October: Cooked her own lunch today. Got up + dressed as friends calling in late afternoon.

Friday, 2nd November: Bathed, dressed, had lunch and went to have hair cut and set. Intends ringing GP as new batch of prednisolone is not enteric coated like the last. Not sure if it matters!

Wednesday, 7th November: Had arranged for friend to take her into Selfridges to try and buy a suitable wig. However, had to put this off as she felt she just couldn't make it.

Sunday, 23rd December: Decided to be up and about a bit. Mixed some matzo balls at the table in bedroom, then came downstairs and sat at stove and cooked them ... Could hardly make it up the stairs again (had Simon and I on either side of her).

She died at the Middlesex Hospital six days later.

The more I considered my parents, the more I was able to acknowledge that stamps were compensating for something. The period of greatest involvement and expenditure on errors coincided with the strongest feelings of grief over the loss of my family. It was a somewhat delayed bereavement, but I understand that a delay of twenty-five years is not uncommon. My sessions at marriage guidance, at which we discussed the break-up of my present family, brought events into focus.

The sessions also made me think about something I rarely confronted. Or rather, someone. About eighteen months before she died, my mother went into remission. There seemed to be hope of a full recovery, the chemotherapy drugs pulling her through against the odds. She started making long-term plans again, and travelling to Israel to meet a man she had been friendly with for a while. My brother and I couldn't have been more delighted or surprised.

My brother Jonathan had recently qualified as a doctor, and was training to be a surgeon. In 1978, I was eighteen and he was twenty-three, and although the age gap was still considerable, his work at the Royal Free Hospital in Belsize Park meant that he still lived at home and we saw a good deal of each other. He had a girlfriend called Jenny, also a medic, and their relationship was getting serious, and sometimes she stayed the night. I can't remember anything of our conversations, but he did help me with my A levels and my university applications. We played ping-pong on a makeshift table in his room, which was much larger than mine and had a lovely view of the garden, and we exchanged favourite records and cassettes. He was impressed that I had championed 'Jilted John' by Jilted John several weeks before it became a hit. And we both loved
All Mod Cons
by The Jam.

Three days after Christmas, which we barely celebrated, Jonathan returned from the hospital with a cold. He went to bed early, by himself. The next morning, I remember my mother calling him from the landing, but there was no reply. She knocked on the door and called again, but still nothing. This was not like him to sleep so long. The door was locked. My mother began to panic, and I didn't know what to think. I can't remember how his door was broken down. My mother found him dead, in bed.

The next week is a blank. I remember going to the funeral, and I've been told that one morning I came down to breakfast to find my mother sitting at the table with a knife in her hands. She was repeating two words: 'Why Jonathan? Why Jonathan? Why Jonathan?'

And after that I think she gave up, and her cancer took hold once more.

How did I react to my brother's death? Not well, and not badly. In the main, I blocked it out as best I could. Since then I have thought about Jonathan often, but I still find it difficult to talk about him. He died of viral pneumonia, which is usually only fatal in the very young or very old. It may be that his immune system was depleted by another infection he picked up at the hospital. In the past I have thought that he might have committed suicide, and I considered his locked door, but this thought has never made much sense to me.

He was a gentle, generous and loving young man, and very gifted. Had he lived, he would have saved a lot of lives. I suppose I coped with his death by writing a book about AIDS fifteen years later, a book partly concerned with medicine but principally with young men dying. And I coped with it by falling deeper into my passions.

My first serious relationship with a girl broke up around this time, and then university beckoned, and Elvis Costello, and other relationships, and a shot at student journalism. The one constant was stamps. Everything else in turmoil and flux, but the mail didn't let you down. New issues every few weeks, squirrelled away upstairs, and new discoveries at the dealers' windows. You can really bury your head in an album.

Some things stay the same. I began to lose interest in stamps when I was twenty, about a year after my mother died. The world was just too full of other things and new emotions, and I had learnt to distrust old alliances. I felt that stamps belonged only to my family childhood. Now I was an adult on my own, and I had come to deal with my bereavements by believing that there was no point dwelling on the past. Along with so much else, stamps were nothing but the past.

It was during a later period in my life, when things weren't going so well at home, that stamps again became all-consuming. Now it was our marriage that was dying. I once had ISAs and Tessas, but once those were spent on a new kitchen I decided to spend spare money on stamps instead. I was providing for my own family, but I also felt good about spending some of my earnings on my hobby, even though the sums involved—hundreds, occasionally thousands, on a stamp or block—were far greater than anything I would have spent a decade before. At one auction I spent just over £4,000 on several items, something I couldn't possibly admit to when I got home, no matter how excited I was. I went upstairs, looked at my new stamps, and put them away in my errors album, which I kept at the base of a built-in wardrobe in my office (a converted loft, initially an au pair's room).

Then I thought about what had just happened. A catalogue had arrived containing one man's stamps. But before that: a man had died and his widow had decided to sell his collection, something he had spent a great many hours with, something he may have cared about almost as much as life itself, if for no other reason than it gave his life order and meaning; this was probably something his wife couldn't understand no matter how much she tried or loved him. And before that: another man had a comparable passion, and had treasured and protected some nice items for the collectors who came next. It was a virtuous circle.

When I had failed to buy my favourite stamp error at the Baillie sale, it was only money that had robbed me of my chance to own something I wanted, but I felt downcast. But after a while the memory of disappointment fades. Losing a stamp at an auction does not send you off with a shrug to another hobby. Instead, it sends you deeper into stamps, consistently in search of satisfaction.