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.
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 stuff
ed 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 one
s 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.
The Error World Page 3
