The Error World (28 page)

He said there was a distinction to be drawn between the UK and the rest of the world. 'In Europe it's always been a well-respected pastime, whereas in the UK it has always been the shoddy mac brigade. The problem is, in the UK the items are getting so expensive. They are realising their true value, but soon it will move into the echelons where just the basic items will cost £10,000, £15,000, £20,000. It's becoming a little bit more like the art world.'

As Watson spoke I thought suddenly of Maria Sharapova. The Russian tennis player was nineteen, and when she appeared at Wimbledon as a former champion in 2006 she was asked what she did when she wasn't on the circuit. She liked to collect stamps, she said, and the press room perked up. In most interviews these young players said that they liked to hang out at the mall and be just like other teenagers, and everyone yawned because (a) they would
never
be just like other teenagers, and (b) if they ever went to the mall it was usually by special arrangement, at a time when other teenagers were not admitted. But now Sharapova was doing something that famous teenagers hardly ever did, go to the post office to buy commemoratives.

'I've collected stamps since I was nine or ten years old,' she said. How many did she have? 'I've so many, millions. I've stamps passed down from my mum's grandmother. They're that old they're almost rusty! The coolest thing is finding an excuse to go to the post office and do something different. It's exciting. Not too many people do it. It's a cool collection I have. I know the whole process of how to remove stamps and dry them, but now I get catalogues from around the world and I get my mum to order them. I look at them and enjoy them. It's a nice distraction away from tennis.'

Sharapova was clearly a freak, but her enthusiasm was encouraging. Richard Watkins said there weren't many like her in his auction rooms. In fact, there were very few collectors under fifty. Certainly this was true of the auction Spink had held at the big Washington convention—mostly elderly men with shiny temples.

'I've heard a lot of theories as to why people collect,' Watkins continued, 'and the most popular one now is that collectors have to own, they have to gather, they have to have this stuff. Someone associated it with an unhappy childhood. If you felt unloved as a child you could at least get these items together and love them and cherish them.'

I told him that I had a very loved childhood.

'Well, I did. I have an interest in diecast aircraft. They're worth quite a few quid, some of them. They're toys really. But I have a space problem. And I collect postcards and postal history from Barnet, Whetstone, Potters Bar and Welwyn.'

Watkins had collected stamps since he was twelve, and a year later he was working part-time in a stamp shop. 'If I won the lottery I'd be an absolute mug for Empire stamps of Victoria, with a specialisation in certain areas. Once it's in you it's in you. I know people who would starve for a week in order to buy a stamp. Or people who, every time I see them, they're still wearing the same pair of trousers and shirt. And try selling a catalogue subscription to those people—collectors don't want a catalogue subscription, they want to spend all their money on stamps.'

I then produced my album of errors, and I think he was fairly impressed. 'Mmm,' he said, 'there's some nice things here.' He turned the page, 'Yes, very nice.' At the end, he said, 'There's no question, it's better than I had expected. Some very nice things.' But should I sell to Spink or to a dealer, specifically Brandon?

'If you know what's it worth and what you paid for it and what you want for it, then you could certainly sell it lock, stock and barrel. Dealers can pay good prices. Of course, we'd love to have it, but I can't guarantee what you'll get for it at auction. We do very well with errors, but it's not our ultimate strength. But in an auction you have to make it interesting for people. You can't put the reserve price on too high, because you won't sell it, it will put people off. If you sell it to a dealer and you're happy with the offer, you may very well have got more at auction but you'll never know.' Earlier he had told me, 'Brandon knows what he's doing.'

As Watkins looked through the album, I said that on my way here I felt slightly heartbroken to be selling them at all. 'It happens,' Watkins said. 'I'm like a surgeon most of the time. I'm dealing with people who have been collecting for sixty years sometimes, and it's like cutting their arms off. They just don't want to let them go. But you know, the Three Ds.'

Here they came again.

'Divorce, debt and death.'

Before I had gone to Spink, I had taken the album to my marriage guidance counsellor.

My marriage had stalled long before my affair. We didn't row, we didn't throw things at each other—perhaps that was the problem. We stopped communicating emotionally. We ran out of projects.

We were married in August 1987, we had our first child within a year, our second two years later. We were reliant on each other for different things, solving problems as we went, finding new projects—first our love, then our house, then bringing up our children—until we ran out of projects and the problem became ourselves. For a long while our two boys became the great and loved ambition in our lives, and when they grew increasingly independent in their mid-teens I began to look around for new things—new ways to tell stories in my work, new ways to spend my earnings, new obsessions. My wife was the same. Her work went in new directions. My interests were mostly practical, hers increasingly spiritual. She was not interested in used postage.

My new girlfriend was never a great one for stamps either—I'm not sure that I could ever be attracted to any woman who was. But she was one for letters, and I treasure her writing. I never corresponded much with my wife; we were together all the time, so what was the point? In the last few years, we weren't very romantic like that, which is such a cause of sadness. But girlfriends are something else, and my affair has produced so much passion on so much paper. The stamps remain on the envelopes.

We had come to marriage guidance not to save our marriage but to save our souls. We wanted to understand what had happened and do our best for our children and our future. There was a bit of shouting during the sessions, and some crying, but we made good progress. In fact, I felt that everything was going smoothly until the marriage guidance counsellor had done such a good job in delving into my past that I became convinced that I had gone out with her when I was about ten. One classic requirement for successful therapy is that the therapist must remain a blank canvas. This means that you don't find out anything about the person you're paying £50 to each week. I once asked her, at the end of a particularly traumatic session, where she was going on her holiday, and she explained why she wasn't keen to tell me. Or she would tell me, but it wasn't generally done. I might think, perhaps, that if she said the Maldives she was charging me too much for the sessions.

She said Italy and Portugal.

So I certainly wasn't allowed to ask about her marital status or her marital happiness, or her age, or whether or not she had children, or whether she had ever had an affair, or how she had dealt with desire. Fair enough. But then I began to wonder whether Jenny—that was her name—her real name, I was sure, was the Jenny who was also my first-ever girlfriend, the strict Catholic girl from Gospel Oak whom I had spent many weekends with wearing a maroon velvet jacket and thinking I was It.

When I told Jenny of my intention to sell my errors, she did what she invariably did best in these situations: delved for deeper meaning. She made the connection between my stamps and my missing family, and she saw that their sale (the selling of my mistakes) might signify a new start for me. But what were my own errors? I did not consider the affair that broke up my marriage to be a mistake, although I regret the terrible hurt and upheaval it caused. I fell in love and I felt helpless, whisked away from normal life to blissful insanity. Occasionally I thought that my greatest error had been revealing the affair to my wife in the first place. But I hated the continual lies, and I couldn't have lived with myself.

At least there were no further romantic revelations at marriage guidance. On further questioning it turned out that Jenny was not my long-lost first love, to which the only response I could offer was 'phew'.

***

Brandon took me to lunch in Linda's soft-top Merc. I asked how they had met, and he said that he was in Sotheby's one day doing some viewing, and Linda, then an exchange student, also happened to be looking around, and it went from there. Brandon, who was divorced, said that he and Linda might get married soon, 'for tax reasons'. I told him that after years of living together my wife and I got married for tax reasons too. 'It's the best reason,' Brandon said.

Over our meal he said that he still gets the same buzz from stamps that he always did. 'The price is secondary for me—the first thing I say when I look at a nice item is, "Oh, isn't that gorgeous ... a rare postmark ... a special block.'"

The Blue Mauritius came up in our conversation, and he sighed, as if recalling a former lover. 'Ah, one of the aristocrats of philately ... Seeing one of those as a small boy would be like seeing God.' I remembered seeing one myself as a small boy, albeit in a Billy Bunter book. But now I wasn't rooting for Bunter any more, but for the cad Sir Hilton Popper.

Brandon said that following the death of Sir Gawaine Baillie, his main client was Russian. We talked about other things I might collect if I stopped collecting errors. Sea Horses, I thought, but he said, 'Sea Horses can be incredibly expensive these days. I still reckon you should try British North America, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, beautiful stamps. If I was an investor with £100,000 I'd rather put it in early BNA than I would in early GB. There's more potential. You look at a Penny Black, a nice one will cost you £200. But a Threepenny Beaver of Canada, ten, no twenty times rarer, will cost you less than £200. But you like GB, so ... I can sort you out with a nice high-value collection of a lot of things. I can sort you out with a nice £5 orange for £4,000. Used. With a certificate.'

I asked him about the best error he had ever found. He didn't think long. Twenty years ago he bought a rubbish collection for a few pounds, including a lot of Penny Reds in an old tobacco tin. His son had only just started taking an interest in stamps. 'They were in my office, and one evening I was going to go to bed, and Mark said, "Can I go through all those stamps?"

'So I go upstairs, have a bath, and I'm lying on my bed when there's a knock on the door.

'He says, "Dad, I've found a Penny Red with no lettering in one corner.'"

Theoretically this was the 'B-blank, Plate 77', a famously rare error.

'I thought, "No, he's having me on." But then I realised, "Hang on, he wouldn't know about that..."

'So I got out of bed and said, "Show it to me."

'And sure enough he had found a B-blank, which in those days was worth £3,000–£4,000. In a rubbish tin of nothing. I wouldn't have even opened the tin. I would have just sold it on for a few pounds. So they are out there. I sold one recently to another dealer for £13,500. I bet today if I had a tin of Penny Reds Mark wouldn't even look, but in those days he was keen.'

After lunch I sold him my stamps.

He wrote me a cheque for £42,500. We haggled over the last £500, and when he agreed in his actorly way to pay it ('Oh all right then, but I'll hardly be able to eat next week') I knew that he had done remarkably well out of the deal. But I had got back what I paid for them and a little more—I had done particularly well out of the missing Post Office Towers, bought for £2,000, sold for twice that—and I could now afford to pay mortgages, credit card bills, maintenance and university fees. I might even be able to buy a new car.

I was already beginning to miss my stamps when I drove home with Brandon's cheque. I thought about how much larger the cheque could have been had I hung on to them for five years more. But I needed the money now, because of another unreasoning passion in my life.

I felt a little cleaner as I arrived back at my rented flat. I no longer had secrets or something to hide away in a cupboard. But I also no longer had my beautiful, delicate, irreplaceable stamps.

I was in the front of the queue at the bank with my paying-in book the following morning. The bank clerk asked me if I had plans for the money, and would I like to speak to an adviser. 'Oh no,' I said. 'It's not for me, it's for my divorce.'

I didn't sell absolutely everything. I sold all my expensive items, all my great errors. But I kept my core collection of GB from 1953 to 2006, the normal stamps without imperfection that are worth about £2,500 in total. I kept my box of oddments—first-day covers, presentation packs, blocks of fours from various issues—worth about £300. I kept my earliest Gay Venture album with my glued-in stamps, worth less than £1. And I kept four first-day covers from Heinz, all with animals, to remind me of our trip to the zoo.

And I had some cheap fakes. These were famous stamps in their own right—the so-called Maryland Forgeries of which very little is known except for the American state in which they were printed. These consisted of all the famous GB missing colour errors—the Tower, the missing Minis, the Red Cross missing red—but they wouldn't have fooled a ten year old. The perforations were too stubby, the colour was weak, the paper felt thin and looked far too white. Also, they cost about £3 each from a respectable dealer, who sold them as a novelty item with 'forgery' printed on the back.

The day after I sold my stamps I spoke to Melanie Kilim again about her unusual fear of the Post Office Tower. Then I walked to the postbox at the end of my road and sent her a Maryland Forgery of the Tower stamp with the missing olive-green. I hoped that, for the first time in her life, she would enjoy the stamp without reservations. In fact, the opposite occurred. She wanted to know the answer to a question that, more calmly expressed, might have been a Zen riddle: if the tower wasn't on the stamp, 'Then where the hell was it?' She said that the stamp gave her palpitations.