The Error World (30 page)

And when I thought about my father I also wondered what he would have made of my adventures with stamps. Perhaps in time he would have appreciated my lifelong interest, and seen them as more than postage. He would have seen their value rise, and observed what could be learnt about the world from philately. I considered whether he would have got on with Brandon, and I imagined he would; they both liked order and efficiency, and they delighted in a sense of propriety.

I also thought about how my life had become entwined with postal life. My brother had worked at the Royal Free Hospital, and both my children were born there—its outer wall bears a Blue Plaque proclaiming that Rowland Hill lived here in his latter years until his death in 1879; for half of my life I walked through Rowland Hill Street on my way to Belsize Park Tube station. More recently, I have lived in a house in St Ives, Cornwall, called the Old Post Office Garage, a converted building that once sheltered Royal Mail delivery vans and still has a GPO wicker basket under the stairs where we keep beach gear.

And there was another Rowland Hill address that came to mean something unexpected. In January 2007 I received an email from a man called John Fulljames, the Artistic Director of The Opera Group. He was directing a new opera called
The Shops
for a touring production later in the year, the highlight of which was a few days at the Linbury Theatre, the studio theatre of the Royal Opera House. He had read a piece I had written about my love of stamps, and wondered whether I would write the programme notes for the opera, anything on the theme of collecting, obsession and consumerism, the big themes of
The Shops.
I said I would, especially if I could attend rehearsals and come to a performance. I wrote the piece, and in early July made my way to the Jerwood Space rehearsal room in Southwark. From Southwark Tube station I passed the Rowland Hill estate, but there was a better surprise when I arrived.

'You know you're in it?' John Fulljames told me.

'In what?'

'Obliquely, you're in the opera. Your name.'

I had read the libretto before I wrote my programme notes, but I must have read it at speed. In the rehearsals they ran through the following passage, sung by a police officer called Oliver to a judge (the policeman is reading out a list of stamps allegedly stolen by the opera's anti-hero).

Oliver:
The Belk Medal, eighty, phosphor-treated paper. Distant Galaxies, twenty,
tête-bêche
pair. Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death of La Bruyère, commemorative stamp, retouched. The Garfield Tower, forty, embossed printing, single copy. The Postal Service in Greenland, Then and Now, fifteen, thirty, fifty, steel plate engraving, watermark.

Never mind the Postal Service in Greenland, my name was finally on a stamp, albeit a fictional one. John Fulljames told me it was a direct reference to my love of the Post Office Tower error, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude. In fact, I was still blushing when I left the rehearsal room.
The Garfield Tower; forty, embossed printing, single copy.
And then I thought, 'Imagine
singing
that...'

Before I made a decision on the car, Brandon took me for lunch again at the Squires Holt. It was getting on for Christmas, and every table was decked with crackers and booked for parties. But Brandon came here often—in fact, it was the third time we had been in together—and a table was made up especially for him, the way they used to do for Sammy Davis Jr in Las Vegas clubs.

We talked a little about his divorce. I told him that my own divorce proceedings are under way and that it's been an amicable split, a credit to our marriage guidance counsellor. We talk about my children, seventeen and nineteen as I turn forty-eight, and how well they have handled the split, and how much I love them, and how glad I am that we are still very close. And how they still believed stamp collecting to be a hobby of enduring sadness. My affair had broken up after fourteen months and I was now with someone new. I think of this whole period as the most exciting time of my life, as well as the most damaging.

On the way in Linda's Merc he had told me about something very special he wanted to show me when we got back to his house. He made me promise that he would only show it to me on the understanding that officially I hadn't seen it. I couldn't eat my Christmas pudding fast enough.

When we got back, I sat in his office while he went to another room. I heard him clicking the wheels on the safe. 'Now you remember what we said,' he said.

'That I hadn't seen it.'

'Exactly. As far as you're concerned, this doesn't exist.'

Then he produced a small brown envelope with a stiffened back, and took from it a transparent sheath. Inside the envelope was one of the rarest and most famous philatelic items in the world. It was unique. Its whereabouts had been unknown for about a quarter of a century, and here it was on the outskirts of Guildford. He took down from his shelf a couple of hardback books describing the item; each devoted an entire page to its photograph. 'I've already sold it on,' he told me. 'I'll be delivering it by hand next week.'

I had a close look at it, and I felt privileged to hold it. It had an aura. I had met famous film stars who had a similar glow. It was a worldwide philatelic object of lust. I felt sure that even people who weren't that keen on stamps would be entranced by it. It was a perfect specimen, something far greater in one's own hands than one could possibly detect from even the best reproductions. I asked Brandon whether he would be sad to part with it.

'Not really, he said. 'It has been a childhood dream just to see it, and to have owned it for a while is a dream come true. To be honest, it will be a relief. It is worth much much more than this house. In forty years it is by far the most expensive item I have ever handled, by a huge margin.'

I didn't buy the car.

The 1966 GB stamp with the missing Jaguar cost £8,000, and the real thing with leather and heated seats cost half that. But the fuel consumption would have been ridiculous, and then there was the parking, the risk, the absurdity of my driving a gentleman's slab like that ... but mostly I didn't buy it because I had convinced myself I didn't need it, an adult purchasing decision that had never really bothered me before. The car didn't have a scratch on it, but that didn't make it desirable. Obviously, I had always liked wrecked beauty and spoilt, fragile things. I had been offered something that may be without error, apart from the error of my buying it in the first place.

And when I drove back in my Saab, my neck stiffening with every gear change, I wondered whether I would ever see Brandon again. I had finished with the car business. I had no need to buy stamps from him in the future. But over lunch, with most of my errors in his safe, we had talked about the possibility of building a nice little British Victorian collection, starting at the beginning with the Penny Black and the Twopenny Blue, and going all the way through the reign. It would be an expensive endeavour, but a rewarding one. I'd learn a lot of history, and I'd value the quest.

'You would need some guidance,' Brandon said to me, 'but it could be a good investment.'

I told him I'd think about it. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a wonderful idea.

Thank you to everyone who helped me with this book. I am particularly grateful to Ian Jack for commissioning the story for
Granta
that got this whole thing moving. I would also like to thank all those who gave up their time to talk to me about my family, about collecting, and about stamps.

As always, Julian Loose at Faber and Pat Kavanagh have been my most faithful supporters.

And finally to Ben, Jake, Diane, Annie and Justine, who saw me through.

* And what I would have liked even more, if only I'd known about it, was the fact that Frank Richards was not the author's real name, and that Charles Hamilton (for that's who he was) had other aliases too, and that together all these
noms de plume
wrote a book about every six weeks. This is not much of an exaggeration. As himself, Hamilton wrote almost thirty novels between 1908 and 1940—titles such as
Chums of the South Seas
and
Rivals of Treasure Island.
He wrote one book as Michael Blake, one as Prosper Howard, two as Owen Conquest, five as Winston Cardew, twelve as Ralph Redway, around thirty as Martin Clifford, and almost eighty as Frank Richards. At one point he changed sex to Hilda Richards for the Bessie Bunter volumes. You certainly wouldn't want to be organising his launch parties. In 1930 he published eight titles, and in 1946, a year of strict austerity, there were ten. After his death in 1961, at the age of eighty-five, he somehow managed to publish from beyond the grave. And then there were his plays and lyrics, including the songs 'What's the Matter with England?' and 'Tell Me, What Is Love?'
It is not clear why he had so many names. What is clear is that Charles Hamilton's oeuvre is highly collectable en masse, especially the French translations. First editions of some of his books never became second editions, which render them particularly sought after. My Bunter collection, which was the first collection of anything I ever owned, once had pristine covers, and in the collecting world condition is everything. But then they were thrown away or lost, and the only one that remains is the one about stamps.

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* You could quite feasibly get away with buying a copy of
Parade
without shame, and read it going home on a quiet bus, learning why Joe Mercer 'Wouldn't Take a Back Seat' and taking up the offer to 'Win a Set of Tools'. There may even have been people who genuinely bought the magazine for the articles, the way people claimed to buy
Playboy
for Norman Mailer.
Parade,
of course, did not have Norman Mailer. It had Owen Summers on Crime ('From This Phone Box a Killer Called') and John Stanley on Motoring ('Watch It—Wankel Power Is Coming'). Every issue contained three or four spreads of naked women, thank God.

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* The most recent and accessible is
Blue Mauritius
by Helen Morgan, Atlantic Books, 2006.

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*
The Romance of the Postage Stamp
, Jonathan Cape, 1962.

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* A regular joke at auction houses is that it is always smart to collect Zanzibar, because as the auction catalogues are arranged in alphabetical order, everyone would have spent their money or gone to sleep by the time Zanzibar came around.

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* I once heard the wife of a friend of mine proclaim, as if there were no loftier calling, 'I collect Emma Bridgewater!' A bright and often spotty brand of pottery ware for the breakfast table and beyond, EB could occasionally be seen in
Elle Decoration
but never in
World of Interiors.
I suppose one can indeed collect things from the kitchen department at John Lewis, and after hearing of her quest for EB, I chastised myself for feeling elitist. If this woman derives pleasure from collecting EB, then why should I feel anything but delight for her? (The reason is: because she collects Emma Bridgewater.)

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* With a friend I collected a ticket from every station on the Tube system, in the days when they were either hard cardboard or softer yellow card with a brown magnetic strip on the bottom. Many of these were gathered by asking the man at Golders Green station to delve into his wooden bin and give us used tickets, but the elusive ones could only be obtained by going to the station in question and buying them. Cockfosters and Southgate were both hard to get. We arranged the tickets on a large piece of card in the same shape as they appear on the map, and I think we sent it into
Blue Peter
in anticipation. It came back with nothing. It then went into my friend's garden shed, and after a few years his mother threw it away.

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* Quoted in 'Mille e Tre: Freud and Collecting by John Forrester', in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds),
The Cultures of Collecting,
Reaktion Books, 1994.

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* Harrison & Sons Ltd is not the oldest stamp-printing firm, but in the UK it has been the most productive. In the sixteenth century, Richard Harrison was a Freeman of 'the mystery and art of printing', and the firm that carried his name held the virtual monopoly in British stamp-printing from 1934 to the 1980s. At one stage it was printing stamps for more than a hundred countries. It was bought by DLR in 1997 (later De La Rue Security Print).

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* A disgruntled illustrator, recently handed his notice of dismissal, added a few unusual touches to the design of a gay summer picnic scene that were not spotted until the tins appeared on the shelves (or so the story goes). Another highlight of this work was a jam-jar labelled 'shit'.

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* The most surprising thing about the adverts for SmartStamp was the small print. This contained details of a special offer—try SmartStamp free for three months and if you don't love it you'll get your money back. Beneath this it stated: 'SmartStamp, Royal Mail, the Cruciform and the colour red are registered trade marks of Royal Mail Group pic.' It owned the colour red: no wonder its monopoly was taken away.

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* Kasmin told me: 'I don't expect anyone just to walk in off the street and buy it. And it's very difficult to know how to price it: £6,000 is a rounded figure because for a long time it's been the equivalent of $10,000. The proprietors [in the picture] were friends of Hockney's family. It's just a schoolboy work; you can't say it's a great work. It's mostly enjoyable in the light of what he later became.'

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* Gillie retired, and when he left his shop for the last time he took his plates with him.

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