The Error World (6 page)

The first book I can remember reading was a large illustrated animal alphabet—A for Antelope, B for Baboon. E was probably Elephant, Z was Zebra. But X? I think the book said it was for a Fox viewed from behind. It is linked in my mind with Hilaire Belloc's cautionary verses, which often involved the misbehaving being eaten, and with T. S. Eliot's
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats,
especially Gus the Theatre Cat. These were probably read to me by my mother. I don't think my father read to me at all. Then there were Aesop's Fables, also about animals, and, almost inevitably for a boy of German descent, Struwelpeter, that ultimate shock-haired frightener with bleeding fingers. It was a very moral list: if you did this tempting but terrible deed, it was certain that far more terrible things would happen. It was not a literary world of guilt; it was one of retribution.

My other favourites, the Famous Five and Billy Bunter, held different fears. The dappled summer orchards where the Five resided when they weren't solving mysteries seemed to me an unusually threatening place. The lack of adults made me wonder what had happened to them, and how they would cope on their own. What would they do for money and hot food when the weather turned? I was unsettled by their all-over sunniness, and I knew that within the fields they trampled there would be things waiting to sting you. About that time, at the age of six or seven, on a lonely summer camp in Somerset I ripped my knee on barbed wire climbing over a gate. My hairless leg streamed with blood, and a white scar remains after numerous scabbings and peelings and eatings of the gritty congeal of blood, new skin and iodine. My compensation was extra white bread with strawberry jam. Billy Bunter wasn't so lucky. His mishaps usually ended in a clobbering by bullies and cries of 'yarooh!', which was 'hooray' in reverse. And such was the ending of
Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius,
the first book I ever read about stamps.

First published in 1952, when a boy's stamp dreams were big, it was among the first of Frank Richards's Bunter novels. I quite liked Bunter and his greed and laziness, and the fact that, whichever book you happened to be reading, his long-anticipated postal order still hadn't turned up. The arrival of his postal order would solve everything—debt, hunger, inequality—much like the arrival of Bono does today. I also liked the heaving sexual possibilities suggested by Bessie Bunter.
^*

Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius
tells the preposterous and compelling tale of the theft, several times within a couple of weeks, of one of the rarest stamps in the world. The plot is not just unbelievable to philatelists, but also to Bunterists. Long before I knew anything about stamps I understood that anything valuable—and in this story the Blue Mauritius is valued at £2,000—has to be kept securely in great condition. I knew how much my father valued the ornaments in the sitting room by how tightly I had to sit on my hands. So it would not do to carry a rare stamp carelessly around damp woodlands surrounding Greyfriars school, and it definitely wouldn't be worth £2,000 if it had been jammed for days inside Billy Bunter's pocket-watch.

But of course this was schoolboy fiction, and I lapped it up. The tale begins regularly enough, with Bunter puffing his way towards school, almost certainly late for 'roll', but two very brief chapters later we are ensconced in caper. The Fat Owl has lost his way and fallen asleep in the woods, and is woken by the desperate shouts of Sir Hilton Popper, the local baronet. Sir Hilton is still wearing his pyjamas under his coat, and is in pursuit of a man who has stolen his Blue Mauritius in the small hours. This stamp cost him £500 in his youth, and was now the 'exhibition piece' of his collection, or at least it was until some bounder made off with it. Bunter manages to collide with the thief in the dark of the woods, and Sir Hilton gets his stamp back. But is he grateful? No, he is not. He chastises Bunter for trespassing.

A while later, with Virgil homework complete, Bunter is once again in a thicket with his five chums. And there again is Sir Hilton Popper, and they can just make out an income tax demand in his pocket and a scowl on his face. Sir Hilton, 'a gentleman whose estate was covered by mortgages almost as thickly as by oaks and beeches', owed the Revenue much money, and had taken to talking to himself as he worked out the solution. 'How is a man to meet such demands?' he wonders. 'Last year I had to sell a farm! The year before to let my house to a bounder. This year I must sell the stamp.'

Bunter and his friends are not philatelists, but when Sir Hilton removes the Blue Mauritius from his pocket-book, 'They realised ... that it was something special and precious in the postage-stamp line. They were able to discern that it was blue in colour, and that it showed a profile of Queen Victoria. They also caught the words "Two Pence".' Frank Richards was probably no philatelist either, or he would not have had Sir Hilton pick up his stamp between finger and thumb rather than tweezers, and certainly not directly after a lamb supper. Almost inevitably, it isn't long before the stamp is stolen again.

I would follow these exploits lying on my bed. My bedroom had a good-sized desk for homework and model-making, a row of shelves by the door with young novels and Guinness fact books, a pinboard by a window with Chelsea posters detached from
Goal,
and a view that looked into a wide leafy street and sideways towards our elderly spinster neighbours. My bed had a built-in storage unit along one side in which I kept the things that were dearest to me—Grundig radio and cassette player, magazines, a bear, my small stamp album. I was relieved to sleep here every night rather than the boarding school dorms of my fiction. (At one point my shelves also held the Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson, and one of these,
Finn Family Moomintroll,
carried the impossibly sad woe of the Hemulen. The Hemulen moped around at the start of the book because he had completed his stamp collection and now had nothing to do. 'There isn't a stamp or an error that I haven't collected. Not one.' It dawned on Moomintroll what a tragedy this was. 'I think I'm beginning to understand ... You aren't a collector any more, only an owner, and that isn't nearly so much fun.')

By a satisfyingly improbable sequence of events, Bunter again finds the Blue Mauritius for Popper at the end of the book, and Popper rewards him with a beating for not finding it sooner. Six weeks later, Bunter is again waiting anxiously for the postman in
Billy Bunter's Beanfeast.

The story of the stamp went on. The next time I encountered it, it was in an American crime thriller and I was in London's Finchley Road. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, the corner shop next to Frognal railway station was a valuable source of soft-core pornography, and many boys at University College School would call in there on the way to or from the playing fields. Storage was no problem: you can bury a lot of things in a dank Puma holdall and the external bat sleeve of a cricket bag. It was the usual fare—
Club International, Men Only, Health & Efficiency
at the last resort—and we passed them around the pavilion with a nonchalance we would later use on teenage girls in our gangs at Golders Green and Hampstead: we are only vaguely interested, we shrugged, when we were all very interested indeed. Inevitably, we ran on to rugby and cricket pitches exhausted. It was also that phase at an all-boys school when we were as interested in each other as in the magazines.

The shop in the Finchley Road had two sections, the section at the front which had nothing anyone was interested in, and the damp section at the back, beyond a sticky plastic rainbow curtain. We were so underage, but the owner was obliging and understood. With school friends that curtain was no barrier at all, and we'd swan through on a mission. Most of the magazines had been previously owned and dispensed with, and they had an earthy smell. Occasionally there would be a cache of Americans
—Hustler, Twink, Superjugs
—none of them hard-core, but somehow more exotic, more unreachable. The further away the women in these magazines were, the safer I felt. And in the American magazines there would occasionally be men with huge drooping penises, perhaps photographed after the act, an act perhaps appearing in another magazine yet to make it to NW3.

There were rarely any women I actually fancied in either the American or British mags, and of course I would have been profoundly nervous of any real-life encounters. The Readers' Wives, all old enough to be my mother, were particularly unattractive and overgrown, and taught me something subliminal about the dangers of bad lighting. Georgie from Berkhamsted likes to party. Pamela from Northholt likes to join her. But where were these places, and where were these parties? One of our number, a boy called Steve who had sprouted early and claimed to have learnt to drive in a field, also claimed to have done it with a girl in a phone booth on holiday, and the rest of us were both suspicious and jealous.

His story never changed. It was 'delustful', he said often, 'very delustful'. I'm not sure I have ever heard anyone use this word since. 'And cramped,' I should have said. Instead, I thought about what could have gone where, and whether she sat on the metal phonebook shelf, and how cold that could have been.

'Mary was gorgeous,' Steve said. 'Long blonde hair ... nipples like cherries.' He was, almost certainly, describing a film he may have read about, probably starring Mary Millington or the impossibly sized Chesty Morgan. The nearest I got to a real mythical girl was by calling the numbers in the back of the magazines. There would be many promises: many 'lessons', some 'punishment', all of it 'strict'. I thought I had suffered enough of that at school, but I was enticed by pictures of blondes with their hair back and their mouths open, and so I phoned them. I think I knew I was being ripped off with my very first call. One could never actually reach Bernadette or whoever, not because she was still running from her catechism tutorial to be with me, but because she was completely imagined by, I imagine, an unusually fat man from Essex. I would get a certain way each time. 'Very shortly you will be put through to Bernadette, who is panting to meet you,' informed a soft female voice. 'But first...' But first there was some nonsense about holding the line while a technical problem was solved, and then there was a delay while a new phoneline was advertised with the promise of triple-X fare, and then Bernadette would be along any minute now, and then there was a recorded tape of someone calling me a big boy until the line went dead. It was so convincing, and my hopes so high, that I must have called at least three times before I realised that this was a technical fault that was more complex than first thought. And then because Bernadette wasn't available, I would try Susan or Carole.

I had no idea how much these calls would cost my parents, but we lived in that blissful era before bills came itemised. I would call when they were out in the evenings and I was being looked after by my brother. I wouldn't tell him what I was doing, but he would have understood; I later found a small but neatly arranged pile of magazines at the bottom of his bedroom cupboard. They were
Parades
,
^*
cost 8p at the dawn of decimalisation, and I have them in my dubiously titled 'rare publications' box along with first copies of
Whizzer and Chips,
the
Face
and the
Independent
(there are none of my own 'glamour' magazines in there, as these were recycled into the eager school pool or thrown away on Hampstead Heath with shame).

A few weeks went by, and then an unexpectedly large phone bill arrived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and my parents may have put this down to an increase in the price of their calls to their relatives in Israel. For the next few weeks my family in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would wonder why things had gone silent our end, unaware that I had been financing someone's white-shagpiled mansion in Basildon.

In the Finchley Road, there was another conundrum: how to enter the back of the shop by myself. As part of a gang, the plastic curtains were all swish swish swish behind us. (
Swish:
wasn't that another magazine of the period? Caning?) But by yourself, the eyes of the owner were upon you, as were the eyes of everyone walking in the street towards Swiss Cottage or Golders Green. It looked almost like a regular bookshop from the outside, even though few of the books in the window had actually been published in the last decade. There were a lot of sporting and show-business autobiographies, a lot of almanacs. But as you emerged from the shop with something new in brown paper in the holdall, everyone passing knew you hadn't bought
Swingin' Dors
by Diana Dors. The gulf between the regular books, laid out like meat products in a 1970s Moscow supermarket, and the innards of the Swish was so vast that even Hannibal would have thought twice. The owner had no problem with a teenager indulging in the Swish; indeed we were his best customers. But his attempt to put a young, lone, uniformed blusher at his ease only made things worse.

'Good afternoon, Sir.'

I had only been called 'Sir' in gentleman's outfitters and in stamp shops. In fact, the similarity between buying porn and buying stamps was only just becoming clear. The slight seediness, especially in the early 1970s; the feeling that, at all times, you were being conned; the impression that there was always something better that you weren't allowed to see; the unshakeable belief that no matter how long you looked, you would never be satisfied.

'Is there anything I can help you with?'

This was in the front, legit part of the shop. I always said I was just browsing, which was true, but how many times can you flick through
Hunt for Goals
by Roger Hunt? I was, of course, always looking towards the Swish, and the shop owner knew it. I think I only made my solo way through there twice, and the rest of the time I just dawdled. One day the legitimate shelves bore a new cache of crime thrillers. These were probably by James Hadley Chase, Erie Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler and Ngaio Marsh. But I was taken by the work of Vernon Warren, and one book in particular:
The Blue Mauritius.