After her parents' divorce, Heather moved with her mother to a small village south of Dublin where her future stepfather managed a stately home. She took her stepfather's surname, and shunned any further involvement in the child-star business. Domestically, life wasn't like the movies at all. Or rather it wasn't like most movies, but it was a bit like Chitty: money was short, and her earnings from the film were held in trust until she was eighteen. After ten years of the money being invested, Heather told me she thought it was still only worth about £7,000.
She moved back to Dundee at fourteen and drifted down to London at the height of punk. She worked in hotels, failed to get acting work, and came back to Scotland to join the family eye business. In her early thirties she moved with her two young children to Findhorn, the alternative spiritual community in northern Scotland. There they were visited by one of the founders of Earth First, who brought videos of the anti-logging campaigns in Australia.
Soon she became a campaigner herself, first against road-building on the site of a prehistoric burial chamber on the northern line of the Callanish standing stones in Lewis, and then against the Newbury bypass. You can't escape the irony: the woman who once sang in the back of that beautiful thirsty car did 'as much sabotage as possible'. Her children joined in, cutting fences at night and generally making as much of a nuisance of themselves as they could. She said it was great.
By the time I met her, her campaigning was limited to weekends and emails (she sent me one after just giving money to 'an Irish Zen Buddhist monk who works with death-row prisoners in the States—he's eating out of dumpsters, awaiting heart surgery—got badly beaten up by police at a Free Mumia Abu-Jamal demo').
Her other main interest was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She was happy to receive an invitation to the musical at the Palladium, even if she did have to ask for it. She is no longer disturbed by her peculiar fame, and increasingly uses her birth name again, not least at fan conventions where she signs photos for £15. She is keen to write a book about her experiences, possibly with Adrian Hall, the boy who played Jeremy, now a drama teacher. 'If there's money to be made, why not?'
After several hours in her charming company—a chat at her house as her labradors played at her feet, a lavish Indian meal during which she sought out the most expensive item on the menu, every minute ticking by without me having the courage to tell her how much I fancied her then (no good way of saying it: if I fancied her then would she take this to mean I didn't fancy her now? Or would it suggest that I was coming on to her?)—I sent her an email asking what she hoped for her children and herself in the next ten years. She answered: 'World peace, justice and equal rights.' I thought: What a terrible cliché. But then I realised that this was just what she would have said as a seven year old, and who else did I know who had retained such pure dreams?
It was a long journey home. I had plenty of time to consider why I couldn't tell her how she was the subject of my fantasies almost forty years before. What is it that stops us saying these words? I promised myself that in future I would tell people how much I liked them now or in the past. It wasn't yet time for my loss-of-youth crisis, but I had begun to value things I had previously taken for granted. These were the obvious things: friends, comforts, securities.
And so when the chance came to meet Tasveer Shemza a few years later I was determined to tell her exactly how I felt.
Tasveer and I were six when our lives crossed. It was June 1966, the World Cup finals not yet under way. I was watching television, either a Monday or Thursday at five-ish, Blue Peter. John Noakes and Valerie Singleton—only two presenters then, outnumbered by their pets—were about to announce who had won the competition to design Britain's first Christmas stamps. I had just begun collecting, and I had the largest possible Caran d'Ache pack upstairs in my room, so I was sure I was in with a very good chance.
I had sent in a picture of a sort of snowman. There were about four and a half thousand entries in the competition, and probably four thousand of these were either snowmen or reindeer, but mine was unique. It was a drawing of a Snowqueen—a normal snowman with buttons for the bottom half, but in place of the smaller lump of snow on the top with the eyes and carrot-nose, I had stuck the Queen's head. It was a sensation, and quite possibly treasonable. I had sketched the Queen's profile from earlier stamps, painted it silver, and off it went to BBC Television Centre with a wave of certainty about it. And now it was judgement day, and I was ready for glory. A Snowqueen.
Tony Benn, the Postmaster-General, had launched the competition a few weeks before, one of his last jobs before joining the Cabinet as Minister of Technology. The PMG, as the job was known, did not have absolute power to decide on stamp issues—this was the responsibility of an uncomfortable triumvirate composed of the Queen, the PMG and the Post Office Stamp Advisory Committee, the last as crusty and sensitive as a knee scab—but Benn set about the task as if he did. Most of his predecessors in the post had been content to sit it out until something more exciting came along, and for the likes of Neville Chamberlain, Clement Attlee and John Stonehouse something did. The job had begun at the start of the sixteenth century when the King appointed Sir Brian Tuke to take responsibility for the security and topicality of his letters (the prototype for Next Day Special Delivery) and 460 years later it was subsumed within various departmental portfolios after the Post Office Act of 1969. But while Tony Benn was there, from 1964 to 1966, he made quite a noise, and his biggest bang came in 1965 when he tried to remove the Queen's head.
This wasn't a republican thing, he claimed, it was an artistic one, a desire to free up more space for creative expression. Benn, who was not a philatelist, had become friends with the graphic artist David Gentleman, the designer of several commemorative stamps of the early 1960s, and with Benn's encouragement Gentleman had come up with designs for stamps that incorporated the phrase 'UK Postage' in place of the Queen.
In his diary, Benn describes a trip to Buckingham Palace to discuss the issue. Part of his forty-minute audience was spent on his knees as he passed the Queen enlargements of stamps commemorating the Battle of Britain. The Queen, who has no need for stamps on her own letters, apparently perused them with interest. Benn mentioned that it was widely perceived that no stamps could be submitted to her if they did not contain her portrait, and he wondered aloud if this was something she was aware of (and wondered to himself if it could be changed). Benn said that the inclusion of her portrait, which had occupied between half and a quarter of commemorative issues (and almost the whole stamp on definitive—i.e. plain—ones), meant that the country's top miniaturist designers were terribly restricted in their output. Benn had just established a Fellowship in Minuscule Design to encourage more stamp art, and he had visions of stamps celebrating not only the Seventh Parliamentary Conference, but everything that was good in Britain: composers, landscapes, painters, architecture, birds and flowers. 'The Queen was clearly embarrassed and indicated that she had no personal feeling about it at all,' Benn recalled. 'I said I knew she wouldn't...'
Benn left the Palace elated; he had won a great victory for philately and British exports. 'Am now convinced that if you went to the Queen to get her consent to abolish the honours list altogether', Benn recorded later that day with great relish, 'she would nod and say she'd never been keen on it herself and felt sure the time had come to put an end to it. Of course when you do that you have to be terribly charming and nice, and I tried as hard as I could to do a little Disraeli on her with all the charm I could muster.'
Alas, he should have done the big Disraeli. The establishment wheels ground out their disapproval of his white-hot designs, and in the weeks that followed he received discouraging clues that his optimism was misjudged. When he asked to see the instructions sent to prospective illustrators of the stamps to mark the opening of the Post Office Tower, he found that no changes had been made to the wording at all. It still read, 'The Queen's head must be a dominant feature of the designs.' Then he received bad news fro
m the Queen's private secretary and Harold Wilson. The Queen's head would have to stay, although it could be reduced to a cameo silhouette rather than a line-drawing, and thus become a less distracting and obtrusive part of the image. According to Benn, Wilson had his own theory about the volte-face: 'She is a nice woman,' Wilson told him, 'and you absolutely charmed her into saying yes when she didn't really mean it.' Wilson then went off to one of his regular audiences with the Queen, a meeting that lasted for an hour and quarter. Ten minutes were spent on the Rhodesian crisis, and one hour and five minutes on stamps.
Away from philately, this was quite a time to be PMG. Benn ushered in the system of all-number phone numbers, as opposed to MEA 3111 (for Meadway) or Ham 9797 (Hampstead). He also had meetings about extended sorting codes: the first—WCI—to direct an item to a region, the next—4DJ—to define the smaller area within that region. But mostly he was occupied with stamps.
In April 1966, Benn received a phone call from Devon. A man told him he had tried unsuccessfully to send out thirty important bills, but he was unable to get the required 3d stamps. He therefore bought 6d stamps instead, cut them in half, and was now asking Benn to authorise their passage through the postal service. Benn said he should have stuck the whole 6d stamp on them, and written to him for a refund. A while later, Benn found out that this man was in fact a stamp dealer, and rather than thirty bills to post he had cut up 300 stamps, and then presumably sent 600 letters to himself. The dealer claimed they were now worth £15 each. Benn concluded that he ought to be prosecuted. On an earlier occasion, in October 1965, Benn held his regular MP's surgery in Bristol. The usual stuff: a woman who had fallen in the street and was thinking about compensation; a man worried about how rising rail charges would affect his ladder business; and a stamp collector whose first-day cover had been ruined in the post.
I met Tony Benn in 2004, and he told me that his tenure as Postmaster-General had been one of his happiest times in government. He was proud of his achievements in liberating stamps from the rather fusty, official things they had been into the colourful and free-spirited items they became. I asked him about the Post Office Tower, which had gone up during his time as PMG. He told me about the opening, which had been attended not only by Harold Wilson but also by Sir Billy Butlin, who ran the revolving restaurant at the top. He told me about accompanying the Queen up to it a few weeks later. And then he mentioned the revolving restaurant again, and what a shame it was that it was no longer open to the public, and no longer still revolving. 'It was as much a part of sixties London as...' (my mind raced: a Labour government? The Grosvenor Square riots? The LSE protests?) '...the mini-skirt,' he said.
By the beginning of 1966 Tony Benn and the Stamp Advisory Committee had decided that Great Britain should have special stamps for Christmas 1966, and if these were a success, the issue would be repeated every year. I can't remember exactly what he said when he launched the Blue Peter competition, or whether he had been asked to leave his pipe in his pocket while addressing the young, but I can remember the excitement of the announcement. I—and of course Val and John and Tony were always addressing me directly—could make something that would be sent all over the world. There was probably an age limit, and I qualified. Millions of copies of my stamp would be printed, and my name would be on it (alone among PMGs, Tony Benn had insisted that the artists get full credit on their work). Simon Garfield. Perhaps even Simon Frank Garfield, or just S. F. Garfield, and in this way I would join the pantheon: David Gentleman, Faith Jacques, Michael and Sylvia Goaman and Clive Abbott, the designer of the Post Office Tower stamps, stretching eventually all the way back to Henry Corbould, William Wyon and the Penny Black. By the summer of 1966 Blue Peter had taught me many things: how to clean Big Ben, the story of Thor Heyerdahl and his raft Kon-Tiki, how an appeal to collect 60,000 second-hand paperbacks bought one inshore lifeboat, and how to make fruit cream crunch (cardiac pudding, featuring tinned mandarins, crushed digestives and a Giza-size pyramid of whipped cream topped off with silver confectioner's balls). The show had also informed me there was indeed an animal beginning with the letter X, the Xoloitzcuintli dog, currently trading as the Mexican Hairless. John and Valerie ran through the Christmas stamp rules. Entries did not have to be stamp-size, for they would be scaled down, but they did have to be 3.3 by 6 inches for an oblong stamp, 5.9 by 3.4 inches for an upright stamp. The designs had to illustrate either a festive or religious theme. There could be no lettering on the designs. Up to five colours could be used, but no dark colours please. Space should be left for the Queen's head and denomination, to be added at a later stage by the Post Office. And the entry had to be accompanied by a note from a head teacher saying that the design was the child's unaided work. Entries in by 20 June.
The rules were exacting but the possibilities limitless. After a great many programmes in which the presenters told the young viewer precisely what to do (which is why most parents favoured the show; it had nailed the concept of contained fun; adventure with discipline) I found the freedom to do whatever I wanted extremely daunting, almost stultifying. But one great idea was all I needed. I don't think I did many sketches or roughs of my stamp; I was perfectly content with my rule-busting brainwave of sticking the Queen's profile on a traditional wintry image—a snowman's body—and leaving it at that. I think my mother thought it was an exceptional concept and helped me with the submission envelope and teacher's note, and from there it was just a case of waiting for the big news a few weeks later. But weeks passed, and still no news.
The judges were my heroes: Abbott, Gentleman, the Goamans and four others, but they took until October to decide. They chose a boy called James Berry, age six, from Beckenham in Kent, who had drawn a picture of an ordinary snowman with a red scarf and a pink hat. And a girl, also six, from Stafford in Staffordshire, who had painted the head of a king with rosy cheeks and a colourful crown. Her name was Tasveer Shemza, and she had won the greatest prize. Both Tasveer and James got £20 and a gold Blue Peter badge. But Tasveer's stamp had been selected as the key 3d issue, while James's design was on the is 6d. This meant that less than 11 million of James's stamp would be printed, but there would be 174 million of Tasveer's. It also meant that at the age of six Tasveer had become, from her family home in Stafford, Staffordshire, the bestselling British artist of all time. It was, quite simply, a miracle to me, and of course I felt madly jealous. But when Tasveer appeared on screen in a red and blue top similar to the colours on her stamp, I also felt that she was cute before that word was common, and I liked the way she held her brown toy koala bear for security. I had a bear just like that, almost certainly from the shop in London Zoo. Her stamp appeared on 1 December 1966, and it was vibrant, a king with jewels in his crown on a red background, with an embossed gold-foil profile of the Queen's head—victory for Tony Benn—which the unscrupulous soon discovered could be removed with chemicals or an iron. Within days of issue, many thousands were being circulated to dealers and at stamp fairs without the Queen's head, but as ironing would also remove the imprint of the embossing, the fakes were easy to spot. There were about 170 genuine missing-gold errors resulting from a printing glitch at Harrison & Sons factory in High Wycombe, but soon a far more available error emerged. At the foot of some stamps the initial 'T' for Tasveer had disappeared, leaving only her surname. This was probably caused by a speck of dirt covering the letter on the printing roller, and although it was not a spectacular error, it was an unusual one for a British stamp. It was also the first and only error that I actually received through the post.
It is difficult to convey just how exceptional this is—the equivalent for the error collector of finding a Renoir in a junk shop, although rather less valuable. To find that you had an error in your collection that you didn't have to buy above face value would only occur once in a collector's lifetime. Indeed, it has never occurred for me again. Unfortunately, it turned out (and very quickly) that there was one of these errors on almost every sheet of eighty stamps. Six rows do
wn, two stamps in, and there it was, or rather wasn't: the infamous missing 'T'. One had a one-in-eighty chance of getting it, which, given the amount of mail sent using the 3d stamp, meant that the odds were very favourable. Many of these errors went unnoticed for eight weeks, and were thus thrown away or sent back to Blue Peter as part of its used stamp charity appeal, but then the February edition of Gibbons Stamp Monthly appeared. The column entitled 'Through the Magnifying Glass' reported 'shoals' of letters identifying the error, but the very first was reported by telephone—such was the urgency—by a certain K. Labbett, who just happened to be my kindergarten teacher.
The error went unnoticed by John Noakes. When Tasveer's victory was written up in the Blue Peter book of 1967, Noakes was pictured looking over the shoulder of a young checker called Jenny at the High Wycombe printing press. She had a large sheet of eighty stamps on the table in front of her, but it was also a high sheet, as beneath it there were fifty other sheets just the same. Behind her, in what looked like an airless and charmless room crammed with heavy metal furniture and very bored personnel, were three other women doing just the same. What were they thinking of as they checked more than two million sheets? According to Noakes, they were flicking through at the same speed as a bank cashier counts banknotes. 'But they weren't counting. They were checking.' They were checking, Noakes explained, because 'a fault in a stamp is what all collectors dream of. It could convert a 3d stamp into something worth thousands of pounds.' At one point during the Blue Peter visit, Jenny pulled a sheet to one side, the reject pile. It took Noakes about five minutes to spot what was wrong with it, and then he found it: a slight misalignment of perforations. Noakes told viewers that the faster Jenny flicked, the easier it was for her to find an error, something which seemed to make good sense at the time but now something I don't quite understand. At any rate, Jenny and all of her colleagues missed the missing 'T' flaw on every sheet they looked at, which gave the error collector enormous hope for the future.
The Error World Page 13
