The Error World by Simon Garfield Read Free Book Online Page B

mother struggling with cancer, I find a new reason for my interest in collecting. Postage stamps offer one way in which we may order a world of chaos, and they have the power to bring a dependable meaning to a life. Owning a piece of history—however common, however rare—may even create a fleeting purpose in this world. I don't like it when people just call them pieces of paper.

Imaginings

    The first book I can remember reading was a large illustrated animal alphabet—A for Antelope, B for Baboon. E was probably Elephant, Z was Zebra. But X? I think the book said it was for a Fox viewed from behind. It is linked in my mind with Hilaire Belloc's cautionary verses, which often involved the misbehaving being eaten, and with T. S. Eliot's
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats,
especially Gus the Theatre Cat. These were probably read to me by my mother. I don't think my father read to me at all. Then there were Aesop's Fables, also about animals, and, almost inevitably for a boy of German descent, Struwelpeter, that ultimate shock-haired frightener with bleeding fingers. It was a very moral list: if you did this tempting but terrible deed, it was certain that far more terrible things would happen. It was not a literary world of guilt; it was one of retribution.
    My other favourites, the Famous Five and Billy Bunter, held different fears. The dappled summer orchards where the Five resided when they weren't solving mysteries seemed to me an unusually threatening place. The lack of adults made me wonder what had happened to them, and how they would cope on their own. What would they do for money and hot food when the weather turned? I was unsettled by their all-over sunniness, and I knew that within the fields they trampled there would be things waiting to sting you. About that time, at the age of six or seven, on a lonely summer camp in Somerset I ripped my knee on barbed wire climbing over a gate. My hairless leg streamed with blood, and a white scar remains after numerous scabbings and peelings and eatings of the gritty congeal of blood, new skin and iodine. My compensation was extra white bread with strawberry jam. Billy Bunter wasn't so lucky. His mishaps usually ended in a clobbering by bullies and cries of 'yarooh!', which was 'hooray' in reverse. And such was the ending of
Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius,
the first book I ever read about stamps.
    First published in 1952, when a boy's stamp dreams were big, it was among the first of Frank Richards's Bunter novels. I quite liked Bunter and his greed and laziness, and the fact that, whichever book you happened to be reading, his long-anticipated postal order still hadn't turned up. The arrival of his postal order would solve everything—debt, hunger, inequality—much like the arrival of Bono does today. I also liked the heaving sexual possibilities suggested by Bessie Bunter. *
    Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius
tells the preposterous and compelling tale of the theft, several times within a couple of weeks, of one of the rarest stamps in the world. The plot is not just unbelievable to philatelists, but also to Bunterists. Long before I knew anything about stamps I understood that anything valuable—and in this story the Blue Mauritius is valued at £2,000—has to be kept securely in great condition. I knew how much my father valued the ornaments in the sitting room by how tightly I had to sit on my hands. So it would not do to carry a rare stamp carelessly around damp woodlands surrounding Greyfriars school, and it definitely wouldn't be worth £2,000 if it had been jammed for days inside Billy Bunter's pocket-watch.
    But of course this was schoolboy fiction, and I lapped it up. The tale begins regularly enough, with Bunter puffing his way towards school, almost certainly late for 'roll', but two very brief chapters later we are ensconced in caper. The Fat Owl has lost his way and fallen asleep in the woods, and is woken by the desperate