The Error World (4 page)

To make up for these shortcomings, he had a habit of taking my brother Jonathan and me on holiday in August by ourselves. One year it was him, the next it was me. The only one that sticks is a very wet week in Bournemouth. It rained incessantly for seven days, and we ran between taxis and cinemas and the pier and our hotel, and once I found an antique shop which sold old stamp magazines. I spent hours studying obsolete prices and rare items. I had bought my Gay Venture album, and spent afternoons putting things in. 'Yes, a Gay Venture indeed to every enthusiast,' the frontispiece proclaimed. 'For there is no more enthralling and exciting hobby than stamp collecting...' I believed this. '... The only one that can interest you whatever type of person you are.' I'm not sure what my dad was doing while I was reading this and mounting. He was probably reading and working on his caseload. 'And if the pictures themselves ever begin to bore (which we doubt), then the search for completion, the chasing of scarce and hard-to-find items, and the study of the stamps themselves as fascinating miniature pieces of printing carry on the interest.' Fatal words.

That was also the year of the muddy rock festival. Not Glastonbury but Reading, grown bearded men turned into reeking brown sculptures suffering from trenchfoot. My father, who had seen real trenchfoot and would never pay for it, thought the world had gone totally mad, but I just cut out the pictures from the newspapers, put them in a scrapbook, and called it my school project.

When he went golfing he sometimes took me along as a weedy caddy. The joke in his foursome was that I always knew the ideal club for the particular shot at hand, but this was usually after he had whispered in my ear '2 wood' or '9 iron'. I would then accidentally pull out a 3 wood or an 8 iron, and he would sometimes believe I had overruled him. I was happy to tag along as his friends talked work or politics or Israel (Jews welcome here in Hertfordshire, or at least tolerated, unlike our local golf club in Highgate). There was usually a Heart ice-cream at the end of it as I joined my mother at the clubhouse pool.

We did play board games together, and with some success. The usual things—Monopoly, Scrabble, Buckaroo (obviously my dad didn't play Buckaroo) and Cluedo, which baffled my mother so much that on one occasion she actually shouted out, 'I did it!' Our favourite was What Am I Bid?, an auction game. The Hamlet cigar adverts were at their peak in the late 1960s, and in one of them a man was at an auction, scratched his nose at the wrong time, and ended up walking home with a stuffed bear as an orchestra played 'Air on a G-String'. We hummed that throughout What Am I Bid?, a simple quest to amass a more valuable collection of antiques than your opponents. This was achieved by bidding on items of furniture (a Chippendale chair, a Sheraton bureau bookcase), porcelain (a Meissen dog), silver (Queen Anne teapot) or something oriental (a Tang period pottery horse). An auctioneer, who was usually my father, would place a picture card on the supplied auction stand, and I, my brother and my mother would bid for it in a desire to complete a category set. The auctioneer ended the auction with a commanding drop of his gavel, and the winning bidder would then discover from the back of the card whether they had won a 'good' example (worth £2,000 in the case of the Meissen dog), a 'poor' one (worth £500), or a fake (£40). There was also a Rarity card in each of the categories, described in the rules as 'an item so rare that it has not been recognised and so miscatalogued'. When one player had obtained three good objects in any one category they could end the game by declaring themselves 'a collector', the ultimate accolade. It was a game I often won, and I think my father helped me by letting me know by a wink or hint when an item he was offering was a fake. In the time when the game wasn't in play, the gavel would have a life outside the box, often used to hammer in nails and kill ants.

We also played a lot of Collect: A Great New Stamp Collecting Game (made by Stanley Gibbons in 1972). This too was a game of risk and uncertainty—did you want to swap a card in your hand, each denoting a stamp from a certain country or theme, for another of unknown category in a desire to build up a better collection? The winner would be the first to build a set of ten stamps in any one group—GB, USA, Animals or Famous People—but if you went for the Rare set you only needed five. One went around a board having good or bad experiences—'Lose two stamps', 'Special transaction'. The stamp cards had a little information about each issue, designed, I imagine, specifically to appeal to a young mind with an insatiable appetite for facts: 'This is one of a set of six stamps depicting British Wild Flowers, issued in 1967. The design, by the Rev. W. Keble Martin, author of "The Concise British Flora in Colour"...the square-rigged, 16th-century galleon, formidable man-o'-war or merchantman, was of Spanish origin.'

I still have the game, and I am struck by how all the instructions describe the players as 'he', and how three drawings of a dark-haired round-faced boy seemingly spellbound by the game look like me. It is also clear that the game was a propaganda exercise for Stanley Gibbons: 'Stamp collecting is a fascinating hobby that has captured people's imagination from the first,' the game's instructions begin. There is information about the formation of Stanley Gibbons in Portsmouth, and how to avoid falling prey to less reputable dealers with fakes. There is also the line that no doubt drew me in more than any other. 'On some recent British stamps where the Queen's head is reduced in size to form a small part of the design, examples are occasionally found with the head missing. Needless to say, these command a higher market price than the normally printed stamps of the same issue.'

And there was another reason why the stamp world was calling to me. The box and instructions feature an enlargement of the Penny Black, with the letters in each bottom corner denoting'S for Stanley and G for Gibbons. But I took the initials to be mine.

The only thing my father collected was cigar labels. Or rather he slipped them off each weekend for me, and I flattened them out and placed them in a stamp stockbook. I probably had about a hundred different types with the pictures of Cuban heroes and emblems on them, but then the collection foundered when my dad found a cigar he really
liked.
The boxes they came in were useful for storing stamps that had yet to be mounted or swapped.

The low cholesterol salt didn't save him, naturally. And neither did the disappearance of the plump Montecristo No. zs and H. Upmanns, replaced by slim panatellas and Hamlets. Less smoke, same addiction, same awful outcome give or take a few months. Not that I knew there were only to be a few months, no more than he did. And if we both knew there were only a few months, what would we have talked about? Nothing of great value, I imagine. I didn't really understand that having one small heart attack meant that a large one was usually a matter of time. But what do you do with something terrible waiting in the wings? You certainly don't usher it in, and you can never say goodbye in advance.

On 26 November 1973, a damp Monday six weeks after the Yom Kippur War, twelve days after the royal wedding, two days before the Christmas stamps appeared, with my father aged fifty-four, I got home from school and probably did the usual things: a bit of homework, a bit of
Nationwide.
Almost certainly I listened to my Grundig—
The Navy Lark
perhaps,
The Clitheroe Kid,
John Peel playing 'Cindy Incidentally'. And then the following morning I was aware of hushed panic, and my mother not herself, and being told dad wasn't well and I should get off to school as usual, packed lunch, Golders Green to Hampstead Tube, sweets on the way. The usual day at school. And then home to be greeted at the back door by Jonathan, eighteen.

'Dad died.'

I remember saying, 'What?', and was aware that what I said then would be of significance. It wasn't really a question, it was more 'He can't of.'

'This morning. It was sudden.'

I think I said, 'Oh no.' I entered the kitchen, and the world of Jewishness surrounded me like foam in a cavity wall. There was already some food there, supplied by a friend; it was probably traditional 'mourning food', something sweet. Soon other people began appearing, and wished me 'a long life' (trad, Jewish) and said that at least he hadn't suffered much (trad, humane), and already there were details of the funeral the next day or the day after (again traditional Jewish—the swiftest burial possible allowing for Sabbath and other obstacles).

My mother was sitting on our beige velour sofa in the lounge, sobbing with her back to me as I entered. I put my arms around her from behind and she started sobbing more. Eva, my mother's sister, was flying in from Israel. The front door was open even though it was cold outside ... people on the phone ... a rabbi being contacted ... arrangements.

They had married in June 1952. They had known each other in Germany as children, and were very distantly related cousins (before their marriage they had sought advice as to whether their union would present any problems at childbirth, and they were assured not). As my father entered the British army my mother entered the 'Department of Antiquities' in Jerusalem as a trainee archivist, and she qualified not long after the declaration of Israeli Independence in 1948. A few years later she flew in to London for a wedding reception, and my father—who she hadn't seen for at least a decade—picked her up at the arrivals lounge. She looked like Audrey Hepburn, and I imagine they fell in love on the drive into town. They were engaged and married within a few months.

There were condolences, for me and for her. Hers took the form of a great many friends offering all sorts of support—financial, legal, shopping, cooking. She would never be short of advice or love and—in the future—suitors. My father's death was something from which she would never recover, but initially I didn't feel so bad about it. It was just something that happened to people, and I think I found it quite interesting. This was clearly a removed emotion, a way of coping, a profound isolation. It was also something slightly journalistic; to figure out what was going on I remained heartbreakingly outside the reality. Even at the age of thirteen, I wondered if I wasn't using the situation. I was intimately involved in the grimmest of stories, but a story nonetheless. The work I liked doing most involved getting as close as possible to a story over a number of months in an attempt to get to the bottom of it. But you never do.

My main condolences came in the form of the letters sent to my mother. Most of these began, 'It was with deepest sympathy and great shock that we heard the news about your great loss.' They always went on (and who hasn't written the same?) 'Words cannot convey/words alone are insufficient to/I cannot possibly sum up...' But they still wrote, because that's what one does; even in the age of text and email, we still write letters of condolence. Inevitably the best ones arrived last, from furthest away. Switzerland, France, Israel, Canada, United States and Africa, all stamped. I tore off the corners of the envelopes with my mother's permission, and began to steam them. The biggest haul I ever had.

Later I learnt that my father had died alone. My mother had called the doctor, and the doctor had thought that my father needed medicine. He felt unwell in the night, felt worse in the morning, but it wasn't anything terrible yet. His heart was sounding all right, presumably. So the doctor departed, my mother went to the chemist in Market Place or maybe Golders Green with the prescription, and by the time she returned it was all over. My father had suffered a fatal heart attack. She had been spared the final paroxysm, and in the grief that followed we considered whether this was all for the best.

My mother may have begun to die at about this time as well. Her cancer was diagnosed in hospital in 1974, but she had self-diagnosed it at least two years before. It was the classic thing of the age: I'm sure she knew what the lump meant, but she lived in fear of the mastectomy and the fall-out. Better, perhaps, to ignore it, not to worry everyone, perhaps it will stabilise. But in the dark, for certain, the truth was always there: it would never go away, it would only spread. She didn't tell me about it as I grew up and it grew harder. I'm sure if she had told my father he would have hastened her to hospital. It spread for two years, until its size, or the fear, or advice from others, compelled her to go to the experts.

Of course this was in the days before routine scans and
Woman's Hour
Specials, the days where the patient felt themselves at fault, and with limited hope of survival after diagnosis. The blunt treatments—surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the slash, burn and poison with which we have become sickeningly and unwillingly familiar—had improved markedly since my mother was young, but the prognosis of two or three friends had shown her how they sometimes delayed, seldom stabilised, never reversed. In the mid-1970s, ICI was just bringing tamoxifen to market, and, following her mastectomy, my mother was an early trialist.

We stayed on in the big house after my father died, and my mother cared for her two sons and went to work as an assistant at an old-age home near Kenwood in north London. Jonathan and my father's friends helped her with the task of family administration—the bills, the insurance, the taxes, all that upsetting maelstrom from which she had remained insulated—and she became stronger and independent. The cancer retreated for a while.

Her regular check-ups were held at the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, central London, some two hundred yards from the Post Office Tower. This was also the place I was born. From her consulting room you could see the restaurant revolve, though it had ceased to be open to the public since a bomb, probably planted by the Angry Brigade, exploded in a women's toilet in 1971. Following one consultation in the summer of 1976 we did what we always did—a trip to the Boulevard Restaurant in Wigmore Street for what they called an 'open' smoked salmon sandwich, in other words not a sandwich at all—and then we did something unusual: we did the Strand.