The Error World (16 page)

He kept his stamps in a humidity-controlled cabinet in the coolest part of the house, which fortunately also happened to be his study. Or maybe he just designed things that way: he would happily endure sweltering summer nights in bed in the back room, so long as his stamps were cool and safe. But would they be safe even in the study?

I slept in the same room as his stamps for more than a month one summer when I was eighteen, and how Heinz's nerves held out I'll never understand. Of course the stamp cabinet was permanently locked (this wasn't really about trust; it was about common sense, and every collector would have done the same). But I still could have spilled something over the cabinet, or knocked into it, or created so much friction when masturbating beneath the sheets that the whole room would have caught fire. Heinz slept in the next room, or probably didn't; I'm sure he was up every night with his ear to the wall, listening for potential disaster.

Because of its particular history, Israel only began issuing stamps in its name 148 years after Britain. This created philatelic problems. Every Jew wanted those first stamps, philatelist or not, and many non-Jewish collectors wanted them too. What they lacked in beauty they made up for in symbolism. The first stamps were issued on 16 May 1948, two days after the proclamation of the state, but they had been printed secretly in the weeks before, in the last days of the British mandate; they do not bear the name Israel, but Doar Ivri (Hebrew Post). There was a similar nervousness about their design. They depicted ancient coins, from the three-pruta half-shekel from
AD
70 showing a palm tree and fruit, to the 1,000-pruta silver shekel from
AD
69 showing a ceremonial goblet. Each denomination was printed in one dull colour only, orange, green, red or brown, and they had stubby perforations; nothing really to get the heart pounding.

Hundreds queued up on a Sunday morning to buy the stamps, and for the most part supply kept up with demand. The problem for the collector was, what was one actually collecting? New issues were fine, but if everyone had them, what could set your own collection apart? Where was the specialisation and pride and prospect of jealousy? With no rarity, these were merely historical souvenirs. But then something changed. The stamps were originally issued with 'tabs', white perforated pieces of paper attached to the stamp at the foot or side, and the tabs contained written information about the origin of the stamp or details of the illustration. On the first issue, the tabs carried a Hebrew translation of the inscriptions on the coins. On an issue later in the year there was information about Jewish festivals.

At the beginning, most collectors thought the tabs unwieldy and superfluous, and stripped them away before placing the stamps in their albums. Quite a large mistake. Some collectors argued that the tabs were integral to the design, and within a few years their views were accepted by all. If you had kept them attached you were already sitting on something quite valuable; and if you hadn't you cursed yourself. Heinz had kept the tabs. A man with a wooden leg knew the value of completeness. All he had to do now was keep them from sticking to his acid-free pages as the thermometer bubbled.

All the stamps Heinz sent to me in London had tabs; unfortunately he only started sending them over in the early 1970s, by which time no one removed them, and stamps with tabs were worth only face value. To me, they were worth less than face value. I never collected Israel, but by the time the regular packets of mint issues and first-day covers started coming over by airmail every two months I was too frightened to tell him. I felt I couldn't concentrate on more than one country, and I was barely able to keep up with the GB output, such was the ceaseless appearance of stamps celebrating roses and cyclists and prison reformers. The other problem was, I found the Israeli stamps boring. Rather than David Gentleman and other elegant designers, they had designers called O. Wallish and F. Krausz, and they were seldom blessed with visits from a muse. Many stamps seemed to rely on things that were originally big—paintings, buildings—that were then made smaller and smaller the way people did when photocopiers first came out. They weren't designed, they were miniaturised. Also, how many bird stamps can one country produce? You couldn't fault the free-spirited hope suggested by these flapping creatures, and they were certainly preferable to something celebrating the latest tank movements, but I found them flat and clumsy. The packages came through from Heinz and immediately disappeared into a box. I thanked him for them whenever I saw him, but I should have told him, as delicately as possible, to save his money.

I was going to tell him when he came to London in the early 1980s. It was a lovely day in early summer, and we thought perhaps a trip to the zoo. Heinz didn't really like domesticated animals, especially pets, particularly chickens. He never ate chicken, not even kosher chicken, and chicken in Israel is very popular. So obviously this became a standing joke before almost every meal.

'What are we eating today, Eva?' I'd only ask this when Heinz wasn't around. My aunt's eyes lit up with glee.

'Chicken!'

It never got any more or less funny. We couldn't actually say 'chicken' in his presence, because even the word would sometimes tip him over the edge (he did have a sense of humour, but not when it came to this). I never learnt why, assuming it must have been an early bloody experience. But animals in cages he quite enjoyed, especially monkeys. London Zoo had long abandoned its Chimps' Tea Party, but there was still plenty of bum-scratching and nit-picking and mindless screeching to be had in the monkey enclosure, so we made our way there via the scenic route from Primrose Hill.

This was not a complex journey. You didn't need satnav to walk over a hill and into the zoo entrance on the other side, but somehow I got confused with the Inner and Outer Circle, and went in the wrong direction. We were almost at Parkway in Camden Town when the first unhappy sounds began to emerge from his trousers.

Heinz didn't say anything, and at first I thought it might have been his shoes.

'Is everything all right?' I asked

'Fine.'

'Want to sit down?'

We did sit down for a bit on a bench, and I apologised for getting lost. But then we had to go on. There were no cabs. There were no mobile phones to call cabs. So we turned around, and the noise started up again, much louder than before. It now had an industrial air. I don't think it hurt him, but it didn't sound comfortable. We walked on, to the consternation of passers-by. The noise grew. This was at a time when there were still street traders outside the zoo—men with giant balloons, men who would place a slender loris on a child's shoulder and take photos with menaces—so perhaps people thought that Heinz was a new addition to the clan ('Roll up! See the Israeli with noisy trousers!'). But no one gave us money, and my embarrassment grew. For a long while it seemed we were doomed forever to walk the earth and never find peace. We didn't enter the zoo, but found a taxi at its entrance, and we were both sweating heavily as we climbed in. As we drove home, Heinz joked that he wanted to kick me with his false leg, but by now it was sounding like the Six Day War and the cabbie would have dived for cover.

Heinz and Eva died within a few years of each other, when I was in my thirties. I don't know what happened to his stamps. I assume he had given someone the keys to his cabinet when he had the chance, but perhaps not. Perhaps his son, once an army captain, had to break the wooden door open with a tool.

But I know what happened to the stamps he had sent me. There were two shoeboxes of them, predominantly first-day covers, all of them with tabs. I didn't know how valuable they were until I placed them on eBay in October 2006. I offered them as a job lot. 'Israel: Complete fdcs 1972–1983 and some mint sets.' I described what they were, the ceaseless parade of national pride. There were five bidders. The winning one, Henry3336, lived in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Along with his stamps I sent Henry a brief outline of their origin, but I didn't mention the zoo story. I put the £81.25 towards a night in a hotel in Oxford with my girlfriend.

A stage version of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
one of my favourite childhood films, opened at the London Palladium on 19 March 2002, my forty-second birthday, and to mark the occasion I took a train to Dundee to visit my first Technicolor sweetheart. Heather Ripley, who played Jemima Potts, was seven when the film opened in December 1968, and I was eight, and I saw no reason why she wasn't the girl for me. Thirty-five years later I went to find out if this was still true.

She was now forty-one. She opened the door of her terraced house near where she grew up in Broughty Ferry, on the outskirts of Dundee, overlooking the Tay. 'Hello Simon,' she said. 'I do hope you're not going to write horrible things about me.' She spoke with a strong Scottish accent but timid voice. In the front room there were many dramatic examples of what she called drift art, assemblages of wood and other debris that had come ashore to be made into mirrors and picture frames. This was one of her many interests, along with peace campaigning, website design and getting back to acting.

She told me she was an only child in a fairly affluent family. Her father and grandfather ran an ophthalmic optician's business in Dundee, and they spent summers in France and winters skiing. Her mother got a job as a wardrobe mistress at Dundee Rep, and Heather used to go after school to watch the rehearsals. 'I remember Macbeth in particular,' she said. 'My father made the head for the ending and stuck it on a pole at the bottom of my bed.'

She enjoyed hanging round the theatre, and one day fate intervened. The play
Roar Like a Dove
was one week from its opening when the young girl in the cast fell ill, and Heather took her place. The thing she remembers best was a scene in which she was given a glass of Coke, not something she was allowed at home. A talent scout saw one performance and sent a note to casting agents with the news that she was a confident performer who might be suitable for other things, one of which turned out to be a film currently casting in London.

Based on the book by Ian Fleming,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
was a junior James Bond with songs. The star car had all the gadgets: wings, inflatable rafts, rotating blades. There was a mad inventor, some German spies, prim love interest with a woman called Truly Scrumptious, and a grandpa who once shot an elephant in his pyjamas. It also had the most terrifying of nightmares, a Nazified childcatcher with a leery smile and the most crooked finger in movie history.

As a comic counterbalance, Dick Van Dyke reprised his famous English accent four years after
Mary Poppins,
and there were a few great set pieces—in a sweet factory (marauding dogs, James Robertson Justice) and a fairground (Arthur Mullard, Barbara Windsor). It also had two apple-cheeked children, Jemima and Jeremy Potts, who sang like doves and had perfect manners. No young boy worth his Corgi car would fail to fall for Jemima with her white pinafore and toothy smile. (Personally, I had just recovered from a phase of being jealous of Jack Wild in
Oliver
!)

Six months before filming began, Heather and her family went to London for a screen test. 'They thought I was perfect for the part, apart from the accent,' she remembered. 'But they said that wasn't a problem as they'd get rid of it. I thought that sounded a bit ominous. What did they mean? Brain surgery?'

The filming, at Pinewood and in France and Germany, took more than a year. The flying sequence was particularly exciting, filmed with the car high up on a tilting pole, and Dick Van Dyke was the source of endless japes. 'I didn't know for years that he was an alcoholic then.'

Her life changed when the film was released. 'My most vivid memory was of the photographers hanging out in the playground trying to get pictures of me. I found that really disturbing. And then my entire family was hassled. My father had had an affair while we were away. They were terrified of a huge scandal.'

Her schoolfriends would sing 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' at her.

'In a nice way or a horrid way?' I asked

'It's not really possible to sing "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in a nice way.'

My own life changed for the better when the film and its merchandise were released. It was the beginning of a passion not just for Jemima/Heather, but also for metal and plastic souvenirs on which she and her family and their car were portrayed. For me, this was the birth of tack, something I would later detest when my children reached Disney age. I had the lunchbox, the poster, the soundtrack, the sweets. These days it all seems a bit girly, but at the time I felt only a pride in ownership. I told Heather that I still had the Corgi model with the extending wings and the bejewelled headlights. I explained that I had lost all four of the tiny plastic figures, but had recently bought them on eBay. I feared they might have been replicas. I think she felt a little uncomfortable with the way this conversation was turning, as if I was about to bring out a scrapbook containing photos of her in the shower, and pictures of every man she ever met, with their eyes blacked in with Biro. Sensing her unease, I edged the talk away from my Corgi/Dinky collection of TV/film-related cars towards her post-Chitty years.