The Error World (3 page)

He qualified as a solicitor in 1947, and he was a partner by the time of my birth in 1960. Four years later we moved from East Finchley to a large house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and we remained a happy and secure family enjoying middle-class comforts in a confident country. It is not altogether trite to suggest that in the 1960s you could measure the state of a country from its postage stamps. Certainly this is how I learnt much of my history, and it was how Britain wanted to be seen: proud of its past, secure in the present, sure of its future. Battles, Democracy, Heritage, Christmas and always Royalty—these were the regulars, augmented by Science and Technology, Sport and Art. This was my miniaturised encyclopaedia: by learning the background to the Joseph Lister centenary, the building of the Forth Road Bridge and the Emmeline Pankhurst commemoration I would begin to grasp a little of our history. Because new stamps were always an event in those days, their photo in the papers would always be accompanied by a summary of what they were commemorating, and my dad liked to read them out: 'Joseph Rowntree, the confectionery maker and philanthropist, was born in York 130 years ago. Joseph Lister, who developed antiseptic and sterilisation, was born in Essex 140 years ago'—and thus began my journalistic instinct for the meaningful anniversary. These British stamps of the 1960s, always my main interest with errors or not, have never been surpassed, the perfect balance between design and subject matter. There was such a clear order to them, and I remember counting the weeks and days to the next issue. I queued up with my mother and brother at the post office in Market Place, the quaint shopping strip that couldn't bear to think of itself as part of the North Circular, and we were in the company of many other boys and older collectors. Some had brought small stock albums to carry their purchases home flat behind glassine strips. Some had labels to place softly on the corners of first day covers, special envelopes supplied to carry the new stamps with a postmark from the first day of issue.

The stamps were one thing, the buying process another, and adding them to your album at home another still, and I soon came to learn that stamp collecting was rich in rhythms and protocol, and it was this that soon became addictive, the deep comfort of ritual. Looking at them now, they carry a still beauty and clarity: stamps marking the first flight of Concorde and the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, stamps commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the 700th anniversary of Simon de Montfort's Parliament, stamps depicting British birds and wild flowers and famous ships. I've mentioned that I thought this was my history, and in an immediate sense it was. But it was never my family's heritage. My parents never collected stamps, and if they had collected Germany when they were young they would have long abandoned their hobby.

England had welcomed my parents with opportunity, and they took every opportunity themselves to embrace English culture. They loved the stately homes and the old universities, my father loved the rigmaroles and privileges of the legal system, and in the summer of 1966 my mother went mad for Geoff Hurst. Jack Rosenthal couldn't have written it better: England v. Germany in the final, my mother allergic to football for her entire forty-one years, but then suddenly they kicked off at Wembley and she was screaming at the television as the goals went in. Mother 4, Nazis 2. And then a few days later we were at the post office before it opened for the England Winners stamp. I think she bought a whole sheet and used it as regular postage, her own victory lap with Bobby Moore every time she licked one.

As the 1960s progressed I became a more serious collector, and the more I thought of myself as a committed philatelist, the more eager I became for some acknowledgement of my commitment. But as I edged towards my teens I was also growing aware that collecting stamps was not the sort of thing that would bring instant approval from girls. It would not even bring instant approval from boys, and, at a less civilised institution than University College School in Hampstead, philately might have resulted in a beating. The first time I entered my school's annual philatelic competition (which, for the winner, meant a prize on Speech Day, enabling some people in the hall—perhaps my parents—to believe the prize had something to do with academic merit rather than just steaming things off old envelopes), I was not at all surprised to find that the other entrants were the sort of boys I looked down on—the friendless, the ungainly. I didn't envy their lives, just their stamps: one boy, also called Simon, had a small collection of George V 'Sea Horses', high-denomination stamps that, although postally used, were probably worth a hundred pounds. I think he had been left them in a will, something that as far as I knew would never happen to me. For the school competition one year I put together a fairly elaborate story surrounding the Wild Flowers set of 1967, describing each of the flowers in turn and where they grew. I think I listed some varieties I had seen in magazines, such as 'missing campion bloom'. The other Simon mounted his Sea Horses on clean album pages, labelled them 'George V Sea Horses, 1913, 2s 6d, 5s, 10s and £1', and won. I think the teacher who judged, probably a collector himself, thought the other Simon's stamps worthy of space in his own collection, whereas my flowers he probably had as full sheets, ordinary and phosphor (the phosphor was an innovation to aid automatic sorting).

It would have been unusual for me not to have thought for a minute about stealing the other Simon's stamps. Not because I wanted them, but because I wanted him to be unhappy. The thought quickly passed: I'd be found out, I'd be expelled, I'd still feel unsatisfied. It was at this point that I came to terms with one of the great universal collecting truths: no matter what you had in your collection, it wasn't enough. You could collect all the Queen Elizabeth issues, but there would always be new ones every few weeks, and a gnawing feeling that there were some rare shades or misperforations you didn't yet have, and what about going back to the Georges and Edward VIII and sixty-one years of Victoria? And could you really call yourself a collector if you didn't have something or everything from the Cape of Good Hope and the British Commonwealth? In this way stamps taught me about setting boundaries and limiting one's ambitions—about life, really—but unfortunately this knowledge didn't quell the overriding desire to obtain more stamps.

At school we all put our acquisitions in albums by licking tiny translucent 'hinges' and sticking one bit on the stamp and the other on a page, a process known as mounting, something which instantly reduced the value of mint items by about two-thirds. Not that value was ever the thing. I never collected with an eye on investment, because nothing I could afford cost more than the price of the stamps over the counter. I probably entertained the hope that when I was older the worth of my collection might be able to buy me a car, but I think I knew in my heart that the moment I bought the Battle of Hastings strip, the very first in my collection in 1966, it would probably be worth about the same for years to come, or much less if you separated each of the six stamps from the six-stamp strip, which I did. And then again less when I mounted them, and then less still when I only bought the strip of 46 stamps and the 6d value, and not the is 3d key stamp because it seemed too expensive. I know now that 14,865,204 of the ordinary 4d Hastings stamps were sold, and 2,643,660 of the phosphor printing, which means that after almost forty years, these stamps are worth about the same as I paid for them, and I can't even use them for postage.

Occasionally I would buy cellophaned packs from WH Smith that bulged in the middle. These cost a few shillings, and promised to contain stamps with a catalogue value of £5 or £10, which told even an eight year old that catalogue values were not things to rely on. Some packs came with plastic tweezers and a plastic magnifying glass, so that a beginner could pretend to be a pro, much like a child could play with a fake plastic driving wheel in the back of an Austin Allegro. But it was laughable to imagine that the magnifying glass would actually discover anything interesting in that pack of cheap stamps, and the tweezers were redundant too, as you could have handled the stamps with treacle on your fingers and not reduced their value further. The best stamps were ones that came free on envelopes through the letterbox. Franking machines were not yet in every office; secretaries were dispatched to buy two hundred stamps at a time, and even the most official mail had a colourful corner. These would be steamed off with a kettle or placed in warm water, and then dried on newspaper, and they filled a lot of album space.

Once, I sent away for something advertised in the back of a comic called 'approvals', a fateful snare. The idea of approvals was that you sent away for stamps 'on approval' and only once you had received and 'approved' them did you send back a postal order or cheque as payment. In theory, I suppose, you could have approved some stamps and kept them and rejected others and sent them back, haggling with the dealer about how much was owed; or that at least may have been the implication in the
Dandy, Look & Learn
and
Treasure.
But when I sent away for my approvals I had no idea what the concept meant—only that the prospect of receiving expensive-looking stamps with no outlay was appealing.

A free Penny Black was sometimes offered just for sending away, yours to keep whatever you decide. It wasn't clear, at this initial stage, that the Penny Black would have one or no margins, be heavily obliterated, and definitely ruined in other ways. This would be worth hardly anything compared with a three-or four-margined example. (In the days before perforations, the margin showed where it had been cut from the sheet, and the postmaster doing the cutting had no concern for posterity. Which explains why a used strip of six Penny Blacks with excellent margins recently sold at a specialist auction house in Holborn for £90,000.) The advertisement would also have a panel to select your special interests: GB, Commonwealth, Rest of World. And there was a box to confirm that you were over sixteen, or that you had your parents' consent. Tick!

A week or so later, some beautiful stamps would arrive in a stiffened envelope. At least, they looked beautiful. I didn't know this at the time, but they were stamps that had already been sent and rejected by many other collectors, examined by eyes more knowledgeable than mine, and with more sophisticated watermark detectors. Some of them were good but common. Other were less common but probably flawed in minor ways—a short perforation, a thin, a crease. But they looked fine to me at the age of ten or eleven, and I kept the lot. The information sheet that accompanied the stamps—from Empire Services, Congleton, Cheshire, with the come-on lines 'As you inspect these grand stamps and marvel at the low prices we are sure that you will agree that they will make your collection the envy and admiration of your friends'; and the instructions—to 'Take your time. Look through the whole selection several times before deciding, read the fascinating descriptions and carefully take out the stamps you purchase'; and the baffling but key detail, 'Enclosed on 14 days' Approval'—went straight in the bin.

The boys' magazines were full of similar allures for the young collector. One could, for instance, buy something substandard called the Universal Stamp Outfit. This cost 12s 6d, and contained mainly useless and cheap items, but there were ten of them: Bounty stamp album, stamp finder, landfinder, full-size nickel-plated steel tweezers, magnifier (two-inch handle, almost unbreakable), watermark tray, 1,000 hinges, 'How to organize a stamp club', wallet with strip pockets, is pack Grand Mixture.

One month after my approvals arrived, there was a follow-up letter. 'We are delighted you have chosen to accept the full card of stamps. The total is £3 15s.' My father sent a cheque, and stopped my pocket money for a while. I think the stamps are now worth about 75p.

Not long after his first heart scare, my father faced another crisis. One of his clients had objected to the way he had handled his case. He may have considered some of my father's advice unwise, or he may have just objected to his fees, but he decided to take the case to the Law Society, and my father faced an extended period of agony under the shadow of suspicion before matters were resolved. He may have taken an enforced holiday during the investigation; I certainly remember the aura of ruin over us, although I'm sure this was exaggerated. The early 1970s was still a time when professional shame could be as final as death; it wasn't something easily finessed away by publicists, or something you could 'use' as celebrities do today. As far as I knew, and I have had many confirmations since, his reputation was immaculate. He was a gentleman in all his dealings, never underhand, always scrupulous. The case eventually went away—either dropped or won by my father—and normal life resumed. But the saga almost certainly affected his heart.

Almost all the memories I have of my father are loving. The only painful one is being hit on by backside with a slipper when I misbehaved. In his eyes I misbehaved often—I think I was always too loud for him, too keen to kick balls inside the house—but I don't think I was beaten more than five times. He really did say 'this hurts me more than it hurts you', but that was just his guilt speaking. My mother hated it when he whacked me, and I think she asked him not to, but it was clearly how he had been brought up, and he thought it had worked well enough for him. What really worked for me was avoiding being hit again by concealing things. Once, when I had broken a small garage window one morning during the school holidays, my mother colluded.

'What can we do?' I asked, fighting back tears.

'You could run away!' she said. But instead she called a glazier, paid him in cash, and the putty was still hardening when my dad drove past it to the end of the garage that evening.

I remember his fondness for cigars, especially during long sessions on the lavatory on Sundays with the papers. I can see myself reading my homework to him in his study on Sunday evenings. I remember him being vaguely disappointed with some of my school reports, and occasionally saying, 'Is this what I spend all that money on?' But he was also very kind and loving. Because I was born when he was forty-one, we didn't have many of the traditional bonding mechanisms. He didn't like music apart from classical ('Really, is that a boy or a girl?'). He didn't like sports apart from golf. We didn't play football in our garden or on Hampstead Heath extension. He did take me to my first Chelsea game, and I recall a midweek evening encounter with Spurs, walking up the steps of the old West Stand at Stamford Bridge to the lush turf and that great/foul smell of cigarettes and burgers and damp coats, and sensing that he was nervous. It wasn't the fear of violence, which was a particular feature of Chelsea games in the early 1970s, it was more of a class thing. I'm not sure my father had been called 'mate' since he left the army. Football was not yet a middle-class pursuit, even in the seated section; this was no place for a Jewish professional from Hamburg, not with the Nuremberg-style arm movements and all that talk of Yids.